Nightmare Magazine, Issue 69 (June 2018)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 69, June 2018

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: June 2018

FICTION Leviathan Sings to Me in the Deep Nibedita Sen Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre Seth Fried Red Rain Adam-Troy Castro The Anatomist’s Mnemonic Priya Sharma

NONFICTION The H Word: Body Horror---What’s Really under Your Skin? Lucy Taylor Media Review: June 2018 Adam-Troy Castro

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Nibedita Sen Adam-Troy Castro

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue sixty-nine of Nightmare. We have original fiction from Nibedita Sen (“Leviathan Sings to Me in the Deep”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Red Rain”), along with reprints by Seth Fried (“Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre”) and Priya Sharma (“The Anatomist’s Mnemonic”). Lucy Taylor discusses body horror in the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word.” Plus we have author spotlights with our authors, and a review of box office monster The Quiet Place.

Awards News The Shirley Jackson Awards finalists have been announced, and we’re pleased to see that “You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe (from Nightmare, March 2017) is a finalist; we’re likewise pleased to see that “The West Topeka Triangle” by Jeremiah Tolbert (from Lightspeed, January 2017) is among the finalists. Huge congrats to Jeremiah and Kathleen, and to all of the other finalists. The winners will be announced on July 15 at Readercon 29, in Quincy, Massachusettes. To learn more, and to see the complete list of finalists, visit shirleyjacksonawards.org. The Locus Award finalists have also been announced, and we’re very pleased to see that Lightspeed is among the finalists for Best Magazine, and yours truly is a finalist for Best Editor! In related news, my anthology Cosmic Powers is a finalist for Best Anthology, and Tobias S. Buckell’s story from Cosmic Powers, “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” (also reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2018), is a finalist for Best Short Story. Thanks so much to all who voted for the above— it’s an honor to be nominated. The winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend, June 22-24, in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, and to see the full list of finalists, visit locusmag.com. Finalists for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award have been announced, and Tobias S. Buckell’s aforementioned “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” is also a finalist for this award, as is Violet Allen’s “Infinite Love Engine” (Lightspeed + Cosmic Powers, April 2017). Congrats to Toby and Violet for this honor, and to all of the other finalists as well. To see a complete list of the finalists, visit eugiefoster.com/eugieaward. The Caine Prize for African Writing announced its finalists for the 2018 award, and we’re pleased to see that Wole Talabi’s “Wednesday’s Story,” from the May 2016 issue of Lightspeed is among the contenders for this year’s prize. To see the full lists of finalists, or learn more about the award, visit caineprize.com. Congrats to Wole and all of the other nominees!

John Joseph Adams Books News for June 2018 Here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in 2018: On April 17, we published Bryan Camp’s The City of Lost Fortunes, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. Here’s what people have been saying about the book:

“A deft and expansive fantasy imbued with real magic and wild plot turns.” —Kelly Link, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble

“A phantasmagoric murder mystery that wails, chants, laments, and changes shape as audaciously as the mythical beings populating its narrative. [. . .] The engaging style, facility with folklore, and, above all, impassioned love for the city its characters call home keeps you enraptured by the book’s most chilling and outrageous plot twists.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“There isn’t a dull page as Jude determines who his real friends are. Anne Rice fans will enjoy this fresh view of supernatural life in New Orleans, while fans of Kim Harrison’s urban fantasy will have a new author to watch.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Camp’s fantasy reads like jazz, with multiple chaotic- seeming threads of deities, mortals, and destiny playing in harmony. This game of souls and fate is full of snarky dialogue, taut suspense, and characters whose glitter hides sharp fangs. [. . .] Any reader who likes fantasy with a dash of the bizarre will enjoy this trip to the Crescent City.” — Publishers Weekly

“Take a walk down wild card shark streets into a world of gods, lost souls, murder, and deep, dark magic. You might not come back from The City of Lost Fortunes, but you’ll enjoy the trip.” —Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series

“In The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp delivers a high- octane tale of myth and magic, serving up the best of Neil Gaiman and Richard Kadrey. Here is New Orleans in all its gritty, grudging glory, the haunt of sinners and saints, gods and mischief-makers. Once you pay a visit, you won’t want to leave!” —Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After

“Bryan Camp’s debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes is like a blessed stay in a city both distinctly familiar and wonderfully strange, with an old friend who knows just the right spots to take you to–not too touristy, and imbued with the weight of history and myth, populated by local characters you’ll never forget. You’ll leave sated with the sights and sounds of a New Orleans that is not quite the real city, but breathes like the real thing, a beautiful mimicry in prose that becomes its own version of reality in a way only a good story —or magic—can. You won’t regret the visit.” —Indra Das, author of The Devourers

On June 19, we’ll publish Todd McAulty’s The Robots of Gotham, a debut novel about a future where the world is on the brink of total subjugation by machine intelligences when a man stumbles on a sinister conspiracy to exterminate humanity and a group of human and machine misfits who might just be able to prevent it. You can read an excerpt in this month’s ebook edition of Lightspeed. Meanwhile, here’s what some early readers are saying about this one:

“Extrapolates a scary AI-overrun 2083 that’s only a few steps removed from today’s reality. This massive and impressive novel [. . .] maintains breathless momentum throughout. Readers will hope for more tales of this sinister future and eagerly pick up on hints that Barry and his companions may continue their exploits.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Robots of Gotham is a thrilling ride through a nuanced, post-singularity world populated by a frightening and fascinating array of smart machines. Read this and you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: The world belongs to robots, we’re just living in it.” —Daniel H. Wilson, bestselling author of Robopocalypse and The Clockwork Dynasty

“An epic novel of man vs. machine, full of action, political intrigue, and unexpected twists. Todd McAulty has given us a fresh, compelling take on life during a robot apocalypse.” — Jeff Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Blame

“Todd McAulty has done the incredible. Delivered a rich and credible near-future world, where Thought Machines control, well, almost everything (and are themselves astonishingly diverse and cool), and used all this to create the most human SF story I’ve read in a very long time. I love everything about Robots of Gotham. I want more, McAulty. MORE!” —Julie E. Czerneda, author of The Clan Chronicles

“When the robot apocalypse comes, I hope it’s this much fun. Like The Martian and Ready Player One, Robots of Gotham is set in a high-tech near-future where something has gone terribly wrong, and it’s navigated by a hero who’s quirky, resourceful, and as likable as they come. Read it for the rock’em-sock’em-robot action—read it for the deft world- building with its detailed taxonomy of intelligent machines— read it for the sobering parallels to modern-day issues and threats. Or just read it because it’s a helluva good ride.” — Sharon Shinn, author of the Elemental Blessings series

“The Robots of Gotham is a crackling good adventure, stuffed with cool action sequences. It also features serious and intriguing speculation about the potential of Artificial Intelligence, for good and bad. And it’s an engaging read, with absorbing characters, and, of course, lots and lots of nifty robots.” —Rich Horton, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

Further out in 2018, we’ll have The Wild Dead—Carrie Vaughn’s sequel to Bannerless—in July; Gene Doucette’s The Spaceship Next Door in September, Dale Bailey’s In the Night Wood in October; and then Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Want and Ruin in November. We’ll provide more details about those as the publication dates draw nearer, but as always if you want more information about these or any other John Joseph Adams Books titles, just visit johnjosephadamsbooks.com. That’s all the JJA Books news for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the issue!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two- time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION Leviathan Sings to Me in the Deep Nibedita Sen | 5402 words

3 Harvest: Arcon Glass came to dinner in my cabin tonight. A rarity; he has declined all previous invitations on pretext of work. Over dessert, First Mate Law asked him if the Guild of Natural Philosophers’ purpose in sponsoring this voyage is to research a solution to the overfishing of the whale-routes. Law has been my First Mate for a decade now and I bear the man a great affection, but he has a dockhand’s lack of tact for all that he wears an officer’s badge. Glass did not seem offended by the directness of the question, and answered that it was exactly as we had surmised. He proclaimed that his work will not only make overfishing a thing of the past, but change the very shape of the industry. I regret to say the officers concealed smiles at this; a ludicrous statement coming from a man so small with his unkempt hair and the constant smell of camphor on his hands. Glass was undeterred and raised his glass at me next. Master Bodkin, he said, is it not traditional for the ship’s captain to keep a journal? The Guild would have a certain interest in such a narrative, which your distinguished career and long years of experience would imbue with flavour that numbers and charts wholly lack. He intimated that if I should seek to publish my memoirs after retirement, he would certainly recommend it to the Guild’s attention. In truth, the keeping of the captain’s journal has grown wearisome in my old age, and where in my youth I set pen to paper with relish, I must now struggle to summon enthusiasm for the task. This is my first entry, and we are a month into the voyage already. I cannot deny that the thought of publishing some form of memoir has occurred to me before. I have ample material from my thirty years at sea—such things I have seen!—and on this, my last voyage before retirement, it weighs heavy on me to think of my posterity, for I have never married nor sired children. A man must have a mind not only to what he does in life but what he will leave behind. I will consider Glass’ words. • • • •

31 Harvest: Our first whale—a pleasant surprise; we are only two months into the voyage and this route is overfished. At two p.m. the lookout raised a cow with calf drifting windward three miles away. I launched three boats and directed them to scatter a half-mile under sail to reduce noise. When the cow rose to surface, the harpooners fired cold irons into the soft flesh of her blubber-sides and she expelled a great mass of blood and foam from her spout. The boatheaders let out the smoking lines and made them fast as she dived again, but one man was caught around the thigh by the line, instantly shattering the bone, and pulled into the sea. When she resurfaced, our men followed her on the tow-lines and boatheader Breckt drove his long lance into her heart and then again into her lungs. The creature then entered the death-throes that we call the flurry, for even once the heart has burst it takes time for the blood to cease gushing and flowing through a body so massive. A whaler’s life is beset by danger, but this is the most perilous stage of all; as the dying animal will beat and thrash the water in a fearful agony during which the crew must hold fast to the tow-lines and gave her distance so as not to be sucked down into the churning of the whirlpool she makes. When at last she turned fin out and floated on her side, a boat returned to the Herman and procured a hawser to secure to her flukes. We secured her to starboard with chains. Myself and others let down the cutting tackle and went over the side on breast-ropes. The cooper had already whet the long-handled spades and mincing knives with which we began to carve the blubber into strips. The wind thereafter increasing to a strong gale; we were obliged to cease for the night. I estimate the cow whale to be fifty feet long and twenty-eight round, and judge she will provide twenty to twenty-five barrels of oil. (NB: reconsider description of the hunt. Do not wish to distress readers with undue violence, but also think it imperative to educate them on the true and arduous nature of a whaler’s life.) The calf was seen drifting some distance from the ship until it grew dark. First Mate Law believes he hears it uttering low crying noises in the manner that whales do, but I think it just as likely that he is hearing only the swirl of water, or perhaps the grinding of broken ice against the hull. Crewman Jonas, who went over the side caught in the smoking line, was not found. Have scattered an offering to the waves in his name and his widow will receive his cut of the proceeds from the cow whale. We lie to and drop anchor for the night.

• • • •

1 Rivers: The crew continues to strip the blubber. All day the cooper has been building barrels to receive the rendered oil. Observed Glass step among the blood and flecks of flesh on deck with some trepidation and expressions of disgust, a handkerchief over his nose. He is a university man after all, and not accustomed to the rigours of a sailor’s life, though I must profess some surprise—I had thought the Philosophers routinely engage in dissection, the handling of viscera and other such business as would strengthen their stomachs. But then, the stench of the rendering oil is enough to give even a scientist pause. I am hardened to it now, but I well remember how it shrivelled the hairs in my nostrils in my early days at sea. How the blubber-room glowed red with the fires of the try-works and the oil seemed to form a coating on your tongue, tiny white flakes rubbing off the folds of your skin. Such a peculiar little man, Glass is. He wears glasses of such great magnification that they make the sides of his face appear pinched, and he walks with mincing steps that put one in mind of the herons that patrol the mud-flats by the port. He has laid claim to the sac of the special organ in the whale’s head once the oil within is harvested, and he stood around on deck in an agony all day for the fear that our crew would puncture the sac in the removal of that oil. Was obliged to take him aside and explain with some sternness that the blubber must be flensed before we can sever the skull and turn it downwards so men may descend into the cavity. He responded by returning belowdecks in a great temper, and I was shortly faced by Ship’s Surgeon Tennet Baum complaining yet again that Glass had made further encroachments on their shared workspace. Am not without sympathy for Baum, who has been with the Herman five years, but we have had good fortune to be largely free of ague or more than minor injuries for him to treat thus far and so he can hardly claim his duties are being interfered with. (NB: Possibly excise meditations on Glass. Will not do well to reflect poorly on one of their number if I am to seek publication with the Guild.) Whale calf sighted again. The foremast hand on lookout claims it was gradually approaching the ship until a number of small sharks were drawn to the blood and fastened onto the edges of the carcass still submerged in the water. Crew beat the sharks off with spades and the calf has retreated to a distance of approximately fifteen metres where it continues to drift. Strong winds from the S.E. Choppy sea. We continue to lie to.

• • • •

2 Rivers: Have completed stripping carcass of cow. Sixty pounds of belly and fluke meat is being salted, and the cook will prepare the fatty meat of the tail for the officers tonight. The belly meat is considered a great delicacy among the lords and ladies onshore, for it is finely marbled. The fluke meat is leaner, but smokes well and makes good jerky. When seared and rare, it is a rich and flavourful meat, tasting strongly of fish, more gamey than beef. Twenty-eight barrels of body oil—as I had estimated—and twelve of the special head oil. Found several chunks of ambergris in the animal’s guts as the crew sorted through the offal; a great prize and nearly as dear as the head oil. The crew are in high spirits as this will raise their cut when we return to port. Have awarded everyone an extra ration of rum and the cook will prepare the animal’s brains tonight to serve with the ship’s biscuit. Glass has his spermaceti sac, so he informs me it is called, and a damned fuss it was to secure it for him. He would not trust the crew to extract it without puncture, and so of course must needs have it carved still encased in meat; a chunk that took three men to carry down to his workspace for him. Visited him today to see what the devil he was doing and he has admittedly done a skilful job of scraping away the meat to leave only the intact sac, which in its empty state resembles nothing so much as a deflated animal bladder of monstrous size, large enough for a man to stand in and pull up to his chest. The material is tough and fibrous and has a yellow-white colour now that Glass has boiled it and treated it with divers chemicals. He shows no interest in the actual head oil which is well for it is the dearest and most costly portion of the whale.

• • • •

7 Rivers: Troubled night. Heard whalesong through the portholes before sleep and thereafter continued to hear it in my dreams. It is hardly unusual to hear whalesong in these waters, but this was of an uncanny and resonant nature; deep elongated beats that that seemed to vibrate in my marrow and bone. Now and then a higher chirrup would flutter through the water, leaving ripples in its wake. The water plays tricks with the sound, of course, as do the timbers of the ship, magnifying and displacing the echoes, but if I were not too wise to credit it, I would have said the wailing came from within the hull. Crew speculating about sound as well. Overheard some say it is the whale calf, which is patently ridiculous, for the animal is too small to produce sound of such volume and resonance. Deliberately omitted mention of it from this log in previous entry for hopes that matter would resolve itself, but sailors are superstitious men and the animal has been following the ship. While it cannot have caused the sounds during the night, it cannot be denied that it has been uttering crying noises at intervals during the day and the crew are being made uneasy by its pursuit. Glass remarked offhand the other day that the calf is of a size and it is early enough in the breeding season that the animal was likely still suckling; if so the problem should indeed resolve itself before long. • • • •

9 Rivers: Ill day. Sighted whale drifting N.E. and launched boats but creature did not resurface in vicinity of ship and though the boats circled for an hour we lost track of it. To make matters worse, boatheader Breckt has killed the whale calf. He fired his harpoon into its heart without provocation as the boats returned to the ship and discovered that the animal had drawn close to the hull while we laid to. Being greatly emaciated and weakened, the calf expired at once and did not struggle. Breckt claims its crying alerted the whale to their presence and lost them their prey but I think it more likely that he was in ill-temper over the failure of the hunt and acted in spite. Unsurprisingly, Glass took this opportunity to appear on deck in transports of great excitation and demand the oil sac from this animal as well, which means we must now go through the trouble of lowering the cutting tackle and butchering and scouring the deck after for a meagre quantity of immature oil. The crew are divided; some are relieved to be rid of the calf, but it is considered ill-luck to kill an immature whale—a superstition born out of practicality, of course, as killing whales that have yet to breed only harms the fishing stock. I am not given to superstitious beliefs like the crew, but Breckt’s action has caused me no small deal of vexation. Have ordered that his cut be docked.

• • • •

15 Rivers: Source of whalesong from few nights ago discovered: Glass. Is he madman or genius? I cannot tell. From stands and wires he has suspended the oil organ taken from the cow whale, which he has pumped with a mixture of glycerine and wax esters till it is full and heavy as a gravid belly. The mixture, he explains to me, is of the same density and reactivity as the raw oil, but does not crystallize on contact with air as the raw oil does. He seemed surprised that I was aware what wax esters were. Was compelled to inform him with asperity that I may be a Navy man but I am not a dockhand who can scarcely sign his name; I have learned my chemistry and geometry in the Officer’s Academy. Indeed, I had a fondness for natural philosophy in my youth and like to think that if I had not found my way into a life at sea, I would have been a University man myself. Glass seemed suitably impressed and had the good manners to apologize. North of this organ he has placed a preserved section of the dense mass of tissue that lies beneath the oil organ; sailors call it the junk, for it provides no oil and has no use. His research, he explained to me, concerns itself with the spermaceti organ’s role in producing the unearthly noises that whales issue forth. He proceeded to demonstrate by connecting a number of wires and waxed cotton threads to the sac and tissue, then setting up a number of small drums at various angles to both. From his tools he produced a small instrument that he pressed against the soft swollen side of the wax and glycerine-filled organ and blew on—and lo, a low note echoed and swelled to great size and shivered off all corners of the room in a manner that rose the hairs on my arms. Glass explains that whales make sounds deep in their skulls and those sounds are then magnified as they are transmitted through the oil organ and bounced back and forth off the dense mass of junk tissue, magnifying further in the process until they issue from the creature’s jaws. Change the angle of the sound and the quality is entirely altered. With fine-tuning he believes he will be able to accurately reproduce a range of whale sounds. Have never seen Glass like this. His hands shake and his hair stands on end. He bounds to and fro across the room, adjusts this wire and tightens that drum. He has a sea-chest full of records of whalesong the Guild has been collecting for years. I came belowdecks with a mind to chastise him for unnerving the crew with his nocturnal music but left unable to utter a word of rebuke. I do not yet see how this research will solve overfishing, but I carried that one note that filled the room up into the sea air on deck with me and it shivered in the dark spaces of my mind until I laid my head down on my pillow that night. • • • •

28 Rivers: Strong breeze from N.N.E. Choppy seas. Temperature dropping; have instructed crewmen to be alert for ice forming on deck. Sighted seals on ice and in water. Glass’ experiments continue. True to his word, he is now issuing forth a veritable orchestra of different sounds that uncannily mimic the creatures’ calls, though stronger and more prodigious in volume. Visited his workspace again and he has automated a number of his piped instruments with clever mechanisms so they will play scales without needing his fingers on the stops. He plays all day now, sometimes loud enough to startle the lookouts nearly out of their perches, sometimes so soft that the hull fills with the music as if with water. The crew are uneasy, but it is poor Baum who appears to be driven half out of his mind by the noise. His quarters adjoin Glass’ and therefore also their shared workspace—shared, I say, though Baum seems to have surrendered it entirely to Glass’ whims. Baum begs that I allow him to change quarters and move into Crewman Jonas’ vacated bunk which is of course impossible if only because the crew would consider it entirely bad luck to give over a dead man’s bunk. Furthermore, for a Ship’s Surgeon to bunk with the ordinary crewmen would be a breach of the unspoken code of rules and decorum that governs a ship at sea. Baum does not understand, but I who have been a sailor thirty years know the importance of observing certain boundaries on-board ship. All the more important for that we are far from land and civilized society, and besides, to send him to the other end of the ship would put him altogether out of immediate reach of the convenience of the captain and the senior officers such as myself and Law. Have instructed him to use earplugs.

• • • •

5 Winds: Glass continues to make all manner of whale noise down below on his array of pipes and oil and drums. Have contemplated ordering him to stop, but in truth I am loathe to descend belowdecks and be in proximity of his work for too great a period of time. Have never before considered the singing of whales to be unpleasant to listen to; have even found it melodious on occasion, like to lull one to sleep. The music Glass makes is not unpleasant either, and yet listening to it from close quarters causes a great pressure and dizziness to swell in my skull. When last I looked on his contraption, he had cleverly sewed the oil sac from the whale calf onto that from the cow so the smaller organ protruded from the side of the larger like a growth. It enhances the magnification power of the music, he says, and so now mother and child sing to each other in the dark.

• • • •

9 Winds: Two more sightings that came to naught as the whales outstripped the boats and did not resurface within harpoon-shot. First Mate Law tells me there is renewed muttering and resentment directed at Breckt for his killing of the calf. It is not uncommon to go this long without a second catch, especially a mere three months into the voyage, but this means we must push further north to less overfished waters and risk being caught in the ice if we cannot return in time, and the crew is sensitive to this increased risk. A poor showing for my final voyage it would be too, to be forced by encroaching ice to return in defeat with barely enough oil to cover our costs. An ignominious end to a thirty-year career! Law further confides that Glass is real target of their irritation, both for what they consider his unnatural work with the flesh of dead things and the more practical consideration of his music-making interfering with their sleep. But Glass is locked away from them, of course, both by virtue of his position and because he bars himself in his workroom, and so they turn on Breckt instead. Snow squalls and fog. Crack developed in the forward foretopmast crosstree after squalls and had to have new one made. Number of injuries; lookout fell from crow’s nest after snow made top-gallant mast slippery and broke both legs. Baum thinks he will not live. Minor outbreak of dysentery from spoiled molasses. We continue to see large ice floes but no more seals, which is unusual, for they are more numerous in these latitudes.

• • • •

20 Winds: Glass came to my cabin again tonight with phonograph records and bottle of pear brandy. We drank while he played for us a number of the recordings of whale noises that the Guild has collected. The records are scratchy and poor, but he pointed out to me how the bull whale’s cry is deeper than the cow’s. The mating cry, here, he said, and played what sounded like a foghorn, though richer and deeper. This is the cry when they sense danger, he said, and played a sharp series of whistles and a wailing that hurt the ears. He says the Guild believes the animals have the intelligence to communicate: here is ice, this water is warm, sharks ahead, a ship on the horizon. I can scarcely credit that the animals could have such intelligence, let alone their own tongue to speak in, but Glass says the evidence does not lie. I have underestimated him. He speaks of inventions the Guild is building; harpoon guns with bombs on the ends that explode in a whale’s heart, mechanical cutting-tackle that lowers and folds itself. He speaks of great machines like to the one he is building that will pipe whalesong into the water, and furthermore, let us choose what we are saying to the leviathans. Imagine, he says, never again a bull whale that rams a ship and brings it down. Imagine a call that draws the whales trustingly to the ship for us to drive the harpoons into their hearts. Imagine never again long voyages that take men away from their families for years and cost the Crown thousands; imagine comfortable journeys into warm waters only a league out to sea, for the whales shall come to us instead. Imagine whale hatcheries established in those warm waters so we can breed them and our stock never again grow thin. We finished the bottle and he continued to speak. Baleen for buggy whips and corset stays, he says, spermaceti in candles, ointments, wool combs, tanning, oil turned into soaps and used to power machinery, ambergris making perfumes. What a mighty industry we have built—and now all in peril for we were too efficient, we fished too well and too much and the whales grow thin. And yet, he says, we have barely dipped a toe in the waters of the great sea. He described to me the Guild’s studies of old whale bones found on northern islands, of fossil records in chalk cliffs, of the severed limbs of giant squids washed up on northern beaches with whale tooth marks on them. There are leviathans to the north in deep waters, he says, past Whaler’s Bay and the ice floes where ships rarely go. We rejoice when a great whale yields fifty barrels of oil. Imagine if you will, a whale that yields 200. Even 300! A whale whose baleen could clothe an entire city’s women and put wheels on an entire city’s carriages. The ambergris such a leviathan could provide. Push north, he says. Do not stop to take on supplies at Whaler’s Bay —the delay will prevent us from going too far before the ice forces us to turn back. Keep going. If we keep going, we can push further than any ship has done before, and my singing machine will do the rest. They will write our names in the history books, he says. James Bodkin and Arcon Glass, who hunted the first leviathan and changed the very shape of our mighty industry. Imagine. Imagine.

• • • •

3 Snow: The crew do not understand, of course. How could they? They think only in terms of rum and shore-leave, they live only from one cut to the next. A man must consider what he leaves behind. They will thank me someday. Must confess disappointment in Law and the other officers. Had thought they at least might appreciate the import of what it is we are doing here. Law at least should have more trust in me after our long association. Have I not acquitted my duty as captain admirably in the past? Can he not understand that if the overfishing is not solved, we whalers shall be a dying breed, soon to go extinct? The slow march of science cannot be stopped, and Glass is not the only visionary in the Philosopher’s Guild. Some ship and some scientist will make the machine a reality, if not us, so why should it not be us, when we are so close? Who better equipped than we to make history?

• • • •

12 Snow: We are well north of Whaler’s Bay now. Steaming and carrying sail as necessary. Ice floes. Grey skies and still water. Snow this past week. A peculiar occurrence that I am at loss to explain last week as well; lookout summoned men to deck to say that the water around ship seemed darker than was natural. Examined it over bow and indeed it seemed dark, as if great masses of ink had been spilled in the water. This dark water extended some five metres from bow and likewise from stern. Lookout says it takes the shape of a rough oval most of the time but occasionally shifts shape as if it tilts on some unseen axis, and sometimes briefly disappears. More strange was the fact that it appeared to move with us as we sailed. Perhaps a shadow from a cloud above. The weather has been poor.

• • • •

Glass has brought his contraption up on deck now. The great oil-filled organs shine a pale and terrible rose colour in the poor sun. He pumps bellows to direct air into his pipes, and one sonorous note after another shudders across the ship and into the sea. It is loud but it is not harsh, it is gently in your blood and pulsing with your heart. More often than not it leaves me with a terrible thirst for a draught of cold, cold water. At first it made the gulls startle and shriek, but now they give us a wide berth. The mad pace of his work is taking its toll on Glass, too. What little hair he had is falling out and his colour is grey and sickly. He hunches over his machine, his balding dome bent low. Breckt is gone. His bunk was found empty. Law shouts and hounds the crew for answers but they have none to give, save their belief that he jumped during the night. Law believes they lie to cover up their own crime, but I cannot fault Breckt if he indeed gave into his desire to part that cold water with hands and feet and feel it grow warm as it rose up his face and neck to envelop him. To joyfully expel the breath from his lungs and sink. I cannot explain this to Law, he is grown cold and unfriendly and I sense in his eyes a great judgement when he looks on me. He believes I neglect my duty to ship and crew by forcing us north. No matter. It is the nature of great deeds that they must be performed alone and with little gratitude at the time, earning only misunderstanding and resistance from short-sighted folk. He, too, will thank me some day. Glass’ music is a comfort to me in these trying times. It puts me in mind of when I was a young sailor, lying awake in my bunk and listening to whale-music echo through the hull. I can say now what I could not then: it was beautiful, that music, and aye, gentle too. How beautifully they sang, those gentle giants of the deep. Was it possible that they were speaking to each other all this time? What did they say, and did they cry for the ones they lost?

• • • •

The new year has come and gone at some point. I do not know when. The dark water was seen again today. Crew dropped sound to test the depth but the string broke and the weight could not be retrieved; it must have rotted in the damp. Law will take readings of our coordinates for us. We are further north now than any ship before us, and must record how far we have gone. They will write our names in the history books. We sail through ice-cliffs of stark white and blue. The water is black as can be, though the shadow that sometimes travels with us is somehow blacker yet. Today we emerged briefly from the broken ice and saw for a time the black sea stretching as far as the eye could see. I feel the chill wind skinning my cheeks and hear the silence where the gulls once were, and in the face of that white horizon and that black water, I feel Glass’ science shrink to something very small indeed. The sun shining off the ice is so bright and painful that it wounds my eyes. I have retreated to my cabin to rest.

• • • •

More crewmen gone during the night. The lookout with the broken legs passed in his sleep with a smile on his face. They found Baum locked in his cabin. He had flensed the skin and fat from his left arm with a knife held in his right. Law tells me this through my cabin door. He pounds on it. Curses me. Demands I unlock the door, but I must concentrate on holding this pen. Sometimes I can write and then sometimes my fingers are a fluke and my head grows so heavy that the great weight of my skull pulls it down to rest on the desk. Forgive me, old friend, I cannot answer you yet. I must write this while I can. A man must consider what he leaves behind. Crashes, gunshots and shouts from above. I hear Glass scream. What have you done, Law? And why did I not do it sooner? There was silence for a while afterward. But not for long. Within minutes, the music began again. It came not from the deck this time, but from the water beneath and around the hull and it was louder, so much louder than any Glass had made before.

• • • •

Went up to the deck today for the first time in a week. There is a strange wind in the ragged sails that pushes us on. I saw Glass and Law in the sea, the foam rushing over their grey backs. Other shapes of the crew crowding and singing in the black waters as well, keeping pace with the ship. Thought I heard Breckt wail—cannot understand him yet, but I will be able to soon, very soon. The dark shape beneath, in the water—I know what it is now. So simple, how did I not see? It is an eye. It is her eye, and it watches me, benevolent and gentle and wise. I will go to her as soon as I finish writing—a thought crosses my mind, briefly troubling, and I must pen it while I can. It is a thought of changing seasons and the migration south to warmer waters to breed. Of the whale ships we shall meet, who shall not know us, for we shall be unable to speak. I must pen this while I can. Soon I shall be unable to do anything—but sing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nibedita Sen is a queer Bengali writer from India whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anathema, Nightmare and Fireside. A graduate of Clarion West 2015 and SIUC’s MFA program, she enjoys the company of puns and potatoes, and consumes copious amounts of coffee and videogames. Her pastimes include helping to edit Glittership, an LGBTQ SFF podcast, and destroying speculative fiction as part of the Queer Asian SFFH Illuminati. Find her on Twitter at @her_nibsen.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre Seth Fried | 4751 words

Last year, the people in charge of the picnic blew us up. Every year it gets worse. That is, more people die. The Frost Mountain Picnic has always been a matter of uncertainty in our town, and the massacre is the worst part. Even the people whose picnic blankets were not laid out directly upon the bomb line were knocked unconscious by the airborne limbs of their neighbors, or at least had the black earth at the foot of Frost Mountain driven under their eyelids and fingernails and up into their sinuses. The apple dumpling carts and cotton candy stands and guess-your-weight booths that were not obliterated in the initial blasts leaned slowly into the new-formed craters, each settling with a limp, hollow crumple. The few people along the bomb line who survived the blast were at the very least blown into the trees. The year before that, the boom of the polka band had obscured the scattered reports of far-off rifles. A grown man about to bite a caramel apple suddenly spun around wildly, as if propelled by the thin spray of blood from his neck. An old woman, holding her stomach, stumbled into a group of laughing teenagers. Someone fell forward into his funnel cake, and all day long we walked around as if we weren’t aware of what was happening. One year, the muskets of the Revolutionary War Reenactment Society were somehow packed with live ammunition. Another year, all the children who played in the picnic’s Bouncy Castle died of radiation poisoning. Yet another year, it was discovered halfway through the picnic that a third of the port-a-potties contained poisonous snakes. The year we were offered free hot air balloon rides, none of the balloons that left— containing people laughing and waving from the baskets, snapping pictures as they ascended—ever returned. Nevertheless, every year we still turn out in the hundreds to the quaint river quay in our marina district to await the boats that will take us to Frost Mountain. In a hilltop parking lot, we apply sunscreen to the noses of our children. We rifle through large canvas carryalls, taking inventory of fruit snacks, extra jelly sandals, Band-Aids, and juice boxes, trying to anticipate our children’s inevitable needs and restlessness in the twenty minutes that they will have to wait for the boats to be readied. Anxious to claim our place in line, we head down the hill in a rush toward the massive white boats aloft in the water. We wait in a long, roped queue that doubles back on itself countless times before reaching the loading platform with its blue vinyl awning. Once it’s time to depart, the line will move forward, leading us to the platform, where the deckhands will divide us up evenly between the various boats. From there, we will be moved up river, to the north of our city, where Frost Mountain looms. From the decks, we will eventually see a lush, green field interrupted by brightly colored tents and flashing carnival rides, the whole scene contained by the incredible height of Frost Mountain, reaching into the sky with its cold, blue splendor. The sight of the picnic at the foot of Frost Mountain is so appealing that most of us will, once again, convince ourselves that this year will be different, that all we have in store for us is a day full of leisure and amusements—but sooner or later, one of the rides will collapse, or a truck of propane will explode near one of the food tents, killing dozens.

• • • •

Of course, every year more people say they won’t come. Every year, there are town meetings during which we all condemn the Frost Mountain Picnic. We meet in the empty tennis courts of the Constituent Metro Park where we vow to forsake the free bags of peanuts, the free baked butternut squashes, the free beer, the free tractor rides and firework expositions. We grow red in the face, swearing our eternal alignment against all the various committees, public offices, and obscure private interests in charge of organizing the picnic. Every year, there are more people at the meetings who are walking on crutches and wearing eye patches from the injuries they sustained the previous year. Every year, there are more people holding up pictures of dead loved ones and beating their chests. Every year, there are more people getting angry, interrupting one another, and asking the gathered crowd if they might be allowed to speak first. Every year, loyalty oaths are signed. Every year, pledges to abstain from the Frost Mountain Picnic are given and received freely and every single year, without exception, everyone ends up going to the picnic anyway. Often, the people who are the most vocally opposed to the picnic are also the most eager to get there, the people most likely to cut in line for the boats, the people most disdainful toward the half-dozen zealots picketing in the parking lot.

• • • •

Waiting in line for the boats, our children rub their chins in the dirt and push their foreheads against our feet. They roll around on the ground and shout obscenities, then run in circles, screaming nonsense, while we play with the car keys in our pockets and gawk passively at the massive boats. Typically, we don’t allow our children to misbehave in this way. However, we do our best to understand. Their faces are in pain. Our children’s cheeks begin to ache as they wait in line for the boats, and continue to ache until their faces are painted at the Frost Mountain Picnic. We’ve come to understand that all children are born with phantom cat whiskers. All children are born with phantom dog faces. All children are born with phantom American flag foreheads, rainbow- patterned jawbones and deep, curving pirate scars, the absence of which haunts them throughout their youth. We understand that all children are born with searing and trivial images hidden in their faces, the absence of which causes them a great deal of discomfort. It is a pain that only the brush of a face painter can alleviate, each stroke revealing the cryptic pictures in our children’s faces. Any good parent knows this.

• • • •

Ten years ago, the massacre came in the form of twenty-five silverback gorillas set loose at the height of the picnic. Among the fatalities, a young girl by the name of Louise Morris was torn to pieces. Perhaps it was Louise’s performance as Mary in the Christmas pageant of the preceding winter, or perhaps it was the grim look on the faces of the three silverback gorillas that tugged her arms and legs in opposite directions, or perhaps it was just that she was so much prettier and more well-behaved than the other children who were killed that day—but whatever the case, Louise Morris’s death had a profound impact on the community. That year, the town meetings grew into full-blown rallies. Louise Morris’s picture ran on the front page of local newspapers every day for a month. We wore yellow ribbons to church and a local novelty shop began selling Remember Louise T-shirts, which were quickly fashionable. Under extreme pressure from the city council, the local zoo was forced to rid itself of its prized gorilla family, Gigi, Taffy and their newborn baby Jo-Jo, who were sold to the St. Louis Zoo, Calgary Zoo, and Cleveland Zoo, respectively. The school board added a three-day weekend to the district calendar in memoriam of Louise and successfully carried out a protest campaign against a school two districts away, demanding that they change their mascot from the Brightonville Gorillas to the Brightonville Lightning Bolts. Without any formal action from the school board, the opposition to teaching evolution in public schools began to enjoy a sudden, regional popularity. Without any written mandate, with only the collective moral outcry of the community to guide them, teachers slowly began removing from their classrooms the laminated posters that pictured our supposed, all-too-gorilla-like ancestors as they lumbered their way across the primordial landscape. The community’s reaction to Louise’s death was so strong that, in time, it was hard to keep track of all the changes it had engendered. It was difficult to know where one change ended and another began. Perhaps it was our hatred of gorillas that eventually gave way to our distrust of large men with bad posture, which led to the impeachment of Mayor Castlebach. Perhaps our general fear of distant countries, the forests of which were either known or suspected to support gorilla populations, had more to do with the deportation of those four Kenyan exchange students than any of us cared to admit. With all the changes connected to Louise’s death, there were many ins and outs, many complexities and half-attitudes, which made it difficult to calculate. In fact, the only thing that seemed at all the same was the Frost Mountain Picnic.

• • • •

When the public meetings die down, we begin to see advertisements for next year’s picnic. Naturally, the initial reaction is always more outrage. But after the advertisements persist for months and months, after we see them on more billboards and on the sides of buses, after we hear the radio jingles and watch the fluff pieces about the impending picnic on the local news, our attitudes invariably begin to soften. Though no one ever comes out and says it, the collective assumption seems to be that if the picnic can be advertised with so little reservation, then the problems surrounding it must have been solved. If such a pleasant jingle can be written for it, if the news anchor can discuss it with the meteorologist so vapidly, the picnic must be harmless. Our oaths against the impending picnic become difficult to maintain. Through the sheer optimism of those advertisements, the unfortunate events of the previous year are exorcized. Those few citizens holding onto their anger are inevitably viewed as people who refuse to move on, people who thrive on discord. When they canvas neighborhoods and approach others on the streets with brochures containing facts about previous massacres, they are called conspiracy theorists and cranks. They’re accused of remembering events creatively, of cherry-picking facts in order to accommodate their paranoid fantasies. Or else, it might be said of them that they have some valid points, which would bear consideration, if only their methods weren’t so obnoxious, if only they didn’t insist on holding up signs at street corners and putting fliers under our windshield wipers, if only they didn’t look so self- righteous and affirmed in their opinions. Ultimately, the only thing that these dissenters ever manage to convince us is that to not attend the picnic is to exist outside of what is normal.

• • • •

Waiting in line for the boats, we wear our Remember Louise T-shirts. We stand in line and busily anticipate the free corndogs, the free ice cream cones, and the free party hats. Our children bark and grab at the passing legs of the deckhands as they move through the line in their crisp uniforms. Pale-blue pants neatly pressed, matching ties tucked into short-sleeve button-downs, the men acknowledge our children with exaggerated smiles. A deckhand drops to one knee and places his flat, white cap on a child’s head. When the child screams, takes off the cap, and tries to tear it in half, the deckhand begins to laugh, as if the child has just said something delightful. The charm of the deckhands is made all the more unbelievable by our children’s outrageous behavior. Desperate to have their faces painted, our children writhe on the ground and moan after the deckhands as they make their way to the loading platform. Once they reach their place beneath the awning, the deckhands occasionally look back at the long line and flash those same exaggerated smiles. They wave excitedly, a gesture that sends our children into a revitalized frenzy. On various occasions, it has been suggested that perhaps the trouble with our children’s faces is only that we indulge them in it, that perhaps what they feel is not actually a physical discomfort, but an emotional discomfort similar to that of any child whose whims might be occasionally frustrated. It has been suggested that perhaps, as a rule, it may be better to do without face painting or, for that matter, anything that would cause them to act so wildly in its absence. It has been suggested that perhaps it would give our children more character if we were to let them suffer under the burden of the hidden images in their faces, forcing them to bring those images out gradually through the development of personal interests and pleasant dispositions, rather than having them only crudely painted on. Though, in the end, it’s difficult for any of us to see it that way. After all, when the children wear their painted faces to school the next day, already smudged and fading, none of us wants our children to be the ones whose faces are bare. None of us wants our children to be the ones excluded or ridiculed. As good parents, we want our children to be successful, even if only in the most superficial way, as such small successes, we hope, might eventually lead to deeper, more meaningful ones. None of us wants our children to be accused of something arbitrary and most likely untrue due to the lack of some item of social significance. None of us has the confidence in our children to endure that type of thing. None of us wants our children to become outcasts. None of us wants our children to become criminals or perverts. None of us wants our children to begin smoking marijuana or masturbating excessively. None of us wants our children to become homeless or adopt strange fetishes, driving away perfectly good mates who simply don’t want to be peed on or tied down or have cigarettes put out on their backsides. None of us wants our children to begin hanging around public parks in order to steal people’s dogs for some dark, unimaginable purpose. None of us wants our children to wait around outside churches after morning mass in black trench coats in order to flash the departing congregation their bruised, over-sexed genitals, genitals which were once tiny and adorable to us, genitals which we had once tucked lovingly into cloth diapers. None of us wants our children dispersing crowds of elderly churchgoers with their newly-wretched privates, sending those churchgoers screaming, groaning in disgust, fumbling with the keys to their Cadillacs, shielding their eyes in vain. It isn’t a judgment against people who have produced such children. It just isn’t something we would want for our own. Even the parents who are less involved in their children’s well-being are sick of paying the hospital bills when their unpainted children are pushed off the jungle gym or have their heads shoved into their jacket cubbies. Even those parents are sick of their kids getting nicknames like paintless, bare-face, and faggy-faggy-no-paint. Even those parents, for the most part, seem to understand. Though the organizations and public offices in charge of the picnic remain vague and mysterious to us, it should be said that we are never directly denied information. It’s simply a matter of our not knowing the right questions to ask or where to ask them. One year, after twenty young couples were electrocuted to death in the Tunnel of Love, many of us showed up to public and private offices in groups and demanded explanations. But in each instance, we were simply informed by a disinterested clerk that the office in question had nothing to do with the picnic, and so could offer no information. Or else we were told that it had played such a small part that the only document on hand was a form reserving the park site for that particular date or a carbon copy of the event’s temporary liquor license or some other trivial article. When one of us asked where we could obtain more information or which office bore the most responsibility, the clerks offered us only a helpless look, as if to suggest that we were being unreasonable. And, truly, once we began to realize the gigantic apparatus of which each office was apparently only an incredibly small part, we had to admit that we were being unreasonable. It became clear that we were not dealing with an errant official or an ineffective ordinance, but an intersection between local government and private interests so complex that it was as if it was none of our business. At the very most, a clerk referenced some huge, multi-national corporation said to be the primary orchestrator of the picnic. But what could be done with such information? Like that other apparatus, only on a much larger scale, such entities were too big to be properly held accountable for anything. The power of the people in charge of them was so far-reaching that by the time any one of their decisions had run its course, it was like trying to blame them for the weather. Also, because we already sensed ourselves to be a nuisance, we were reminded—a clerk pinching the bridge of his nose, and then replacing his glasses—that the walls of communication were built high around such people, and for good reason. We wandered out of those offices in silence, our anger abated by our own embarrassment. Suddenly, we were afraid that the clerks had mistaken us for more conspiracy theorists and cranks. Mortified, we returned to those offices to apologize.

• • • •

Truth be told, as compelled as each of us is to attend the Frost Mountain Picnic, for our own sake as much as for our children’s, few of us ever really end up enjoying the aspects of the picnic which originally drew us there. The craft tables, the petting zoos, the scores of musicians and wandering performers in their festively colored jerkins. Once obtained, all the much-anticipated amusements tend to seem a little trite. Even a thing as difficult to disapprove of as free food doesn’t usually satisfy any of us as much as we might pretend. The fried ice creams and elephant ears are all inevitably set aside by those of us who find ourselves feeling suddenly queasy, those of us who, while waiting in line for the boats, had only recently bragged of our hunger. On the old, wilting merry-go-round, large groups of us sit with our tongues in our cheeks and almost before the ride starts, we wish for it to be over. Even the ironic enjoyment of a child’s ride seems belabored and fake. On the merry-go-round, we look to our fellow horsemen and strain forward, feigning attempts to pull ahead. Leaning dramatically from our horses, we clap hands, cheer and force out laughter so awkward and shapeless that it makes our throats ache, so high-toned and weak that it makes our eyes water. We understand that the amusements of the Frost Mountain Picnic are supposed to entertain us. We understand that when we talk about the picnic’s amusements with others, we pretend as if they do. Around water coolers and in restaurants, we repeat stories about unfinished tins of caramel corn and slow, creaking rides on the witch’s wheel as if they are deeply cherished memories. In anticipation of the free such and such, and the free such and such, we manage to convince ourselves that we are indeed looking forward to the picnic. In our minds, we falsely attach value to the items that will be given so generously. Or else, we attempt to see our participation as paying homage to something long past and romantic, a matter of heritage.

• • • •

Among the difficulties we face in attempting to extricate ourselves from the Frost Mountain Picnic, a problem which is never fully addressed at the town meetings, is the fact that—just as all those offices throughout the city perform simple tasks for the picnic, but then can claim no real knowledge or responsibility—most of us are involved with the picnic on many different levels, some of which might not even be completely known to us. Any number of local businesses, social clubs, volunteer groups, local radio stations, television stations, and departments of municipal utility are either sponsored or underwritten or provided endowments by those in charge of the Frost Mountain Picnic. If we were to buy a bag of oranges from a local grocer, if we were to drop a quarter into the milk jug of the young boy standing by the automatic doors in his soccer uniform, if we were to listen to the Top Forty radio droning from the store’s speakers, if we were to flip on a light switch in our own home or flush a toilet, we would be contributing in one fashion or another to the Frost Mountain Picnic. Our role is not limited to our attendance, but extends to include our inclination to drink tap water, eat fresh fruit and go to the bathroom. Moreover, even if we could deny ourselves these things, everywhere there are peculiar inconsistencies and non sequiturs, which, taken together, are ominous. Periodic bank errors are reported on our checking statements next to the letters FMP and, every week, strange, superfluous deductions are made from our paychecks by an unknown entity. A Rotary Club, attempting to raise money for childhood leukemia, will later check their records only to find that a majority of the proceeds were somehow accidentally sent to a cotton candy distributor in New Jersey. When the highway patrol calls two weeks before the picnic to ask us if we’d care to donate to the Officers’ Widows Fund, the call, routed through Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Anchorage, appears on our phone bills as a $17 charge. We might volunteer to take part in a committee to discuss the repair of potholes throughout the city only to wind up somehow duped into preparing large mailings in the basements of public buildings, mailings which have nothing to do with potholes, but which include brochures in foreign languages with pictures of families laughing, eating corndogs and playing carnival games next to large, boldly colored words like lustig and glücklich. Several times a year, men in dark blue suits flood the city. Without notice, without any noticeable regularity in their visits, they turn up everywhere. They drive slowly across town in large motorcades of black sedans with tinted windows. Dozens of them stand in line at the post office, mailing identical packages wrapped neatly in brown paper and fixed with small blue address labels. They stand outside office buildings and talk into the sleeves of their suit coats. Large groups of them sit in restaurants amid clouds of hushed laughter and cigarette smoke. The men are mostly older, but well-groomed and tan, with magnificently white teeth and expensive watches. They sit three to a bench in public parks and are seen hunched over surveyor’s levels outside churches and hospitals and elementary schools. The men walk in and out of every imaginable type of building at every imaginable hour for days. Then, with even less warning than their arrival, they disappear. One hardly knows what to do with such subtleties, such phenomena. One hardly knows how to combine them or how to separate them or how to consider them in relation to one another. But whatever their sum or difference, such occurrences tend to intensify the sensation that the Frost Mountain Picnic is, in fact, unavoidable. Though it’s never expressly stated, the general consensus seems to be that there’s nothing we can do which would ever come to any final good, which would ever change the picnic or the massacre or whatever machinations lie beneath either.

• • • • While we ourselves feel powerless to avoid it, many of us often hope that our children might eventually outgrow the picnic. After the town meetings, most of us are already well aware that we will betray our own pledges and loyalty oaths. We leave the meetings, feeling sheepish and impotent. Though, some of us do take the opportunity to stop and talk quietly with one another about the possibility that the next generation might eventually rise up and break the pattern of our complacency. On the way home from the picnic, with the ring of mortar fire still in our ears or the stink of gorillas or gun powder in our noses, we steal glances at our sleeping children in the back seats of our station wagons and minivans. Typically, we are bandaged from some close brush with the massacre, our arms in slings improvised out of our torn and battered Remember Louise T-shirts. Our lips split, our noses bloodied, our palms, sweaty on the steering wheel. We recall the first moments of the massacre, the first explosion, the first gunshot, the first creeping hum of the planes, the earth moving beneath our feet. We watch our children sleeping in the rear-view, moonlight passing over their peaceful faces. Through the unsightly globs of paint, we catch a glimpse of how our children seemed before the picnic endowed them with such an eager, selfish spirit. When it comes time to leave the highway, as we drift slowly toward our exit, we are tempted to jerk the wheel in the other direction and speed off to some distant city, a place untouched by picnics. We know our husbands and wives wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t ask for an explanation, wouldn’t even turn their heads to watch our exit as it passes, but would keep their eyes forward, like ours, a look of exhilaration on their faces. However, these fantasies are as appealing as they are unlikely, and so our hope remains tied into our children. Our children, who took their first steps while waiting in line for the boats, who muttered their first words to the face painters and jugglers, who lost their first teeth in the picnic’s salt water taffy and red-rope licorice. Our children, who, as they grow older, begin to explain the picnic to us as if we don’t understand it. Our children, who have begun to scorn and mock us if we so much as mention Frost Mountain, snap their gum and laugh with their friends, as if our old age and presumed irrelevance threatens the very existence of the picnic.

• • • •

A horn sounds, signaling the line to move forward. No matter how long we wait for the boats, or how eager we might seem, there is always a slight pause between the sounding of the horn and the eventual lurching forward of the crowd. It is a moment in which we recall the year some of the boats sank as they left the picnic, how everyone aboard trusted the surprisingly bulky lifejackets and sank to the bottom of the river like stones. It is a moment of looking from side to side, a moment of coughing and shrugging. On the opposite shore, a small orchestra of men in dark suits begins to play the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica. Assembled under a large carnival tent, the men play expertly, ploddingly. Those whose parts have not yet come stand perfectly still or adjust the dark glasses on the bridge of their noses or speak slowly into the sleeves of their suit coats. The music sounds strange over the noise of the river and weighs heavily in the air. It is a moment of clarity and anxiety, in which we hope that something will deliver us from our sense of obligation toward the picnic, the sense of embarrassment that would proceed from removing our children from the line, evoking tantrums so fierce as to be completely unimaginable. It is a moment in which we wait for some old emotion to well up in us, some passion our forefathers possessed that made them unafraid of change, no matter how radical or how dangerous or—the deckhands gesturing for us to move forward, their faces suddenly angry and impatient—how impossible.

©2009 by Seth Fried. First published in One Story. Reprinted by permission of the author. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Seth Fried is the author of the novel The Municipalists (forthcoming from Penguin Books) and the short story collection The Great Frustration (Soft Skull Press). His stories have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Tin House, One Story, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Vice, and many others. Red Rain Adam-Troy Castro | 3464 words

Have you ever found yourself on a midtown sidewalk on some warm July day when a plummeting body splattered on the pavement, directly in front of you? Close enough to feel the explosive shockwave of hot liquid air, pelting your trousers with meat pellets the size of quarters? Have you ever staggered backward, sodden with gore and spitting out substances you could not stand to identify, half-blinded because some of it got in your eyes, the screams of other pedestrians rising all around you, the smell of blood and shit hitting like a second assault almost as bad as the first, followed by the third that arrives in the form of an epiphany: somebody’s just jumped, yes, somebody’s just jumped, from the roof or some shattered window in the mirrored glass edifice high above you; and that’s a human life on the ground before you, and on you, and if the taste is any indication, in you? Has that ever happened? Have you ever felt an invisible fist tighten around your diaphragm, your stomach rebelling, the sick awareness that you were about to vomit racing the gray awareness that you might faint? Has this ever made your knees go weak and have you ever felt gravity lurch as the gore-sodden ground called to you? Have you had a fraction of a second to register something odd about the corpse, not what little remains of its humanoid form, but the cut of its clothing, which seem odd somehow, in ways you can’t quite catalogue before the next body lands? Did the next one burst open the same way the first one did, prompting everybody around you to a fresh round of gasps and screams and the sensible reaction, among the many hundreds also traversing this avenue on this fine morning, to look up? Have you ever also surrendered to this wholly reasonable impulse and searched the sky for explanation, only to see that it was peppered with dozens of other flailing forms, black as pepper against a sky as blue as any Pacific lagoon? Before you look away, do you have a moment to focus on the one or two of them falling your way and see the terror-struck eyes, their gaping mouths, their flailing limbs? Do you recognize that they are not the corpses they will shortly become, but living people who know what’s happening to them? Does one crumple the hood of a nearby taxi? Does one strike the wire bearing a traffic light, rebound, and hit the ground spinning, shedding parts of itself as it goes? Does a third flatten a woman near you, whose last sight as she peered upward must have been another woman, not unlike herself, whose outstretched arms must have looked like an offer to embrace? Did they all break open on impact, each like a water balloon filled with blood? Did some shatter glass windows at ground level? Have you ever heard the screams of horror coming from every direction, that of people reacting to carnage that did not involve them, suddenly changing character as the people in the street understood that this was not some tragedy they were witnessing but one they were part of? Have you ever staggered through this madness, too stunned to formulate a practical plan for finding shelter from this storm, and felt yourself step into something hot and steaming that swallowed your right shoe as you stepped out, leaving you soaked to the lower calves with blood? Did you feel the world around shudder as some other falling body struck a protrusion of some sort, maybe a flagpole, somewhere above your head, and you became the eye of a storm within the storm as the scarlet fragments rained in a perfect circle around you? Were you then knocked down by some young man fleeing for shelter? Did you mistake the impact for one of the bodies striking you dead center? As you toppled face-first, landing on a street already well-greased with human juice, did you think that this was the last moment of your life? Did you see the young man in question—a skinny guy with a scraggly black beard and sweat-stained t-shirt, likely homeless if the filth was any indication, though everybody in sight was filthy now—struck in the shoulders by a body tumbling with such force that the impact bent him in half? Did you see beyond him other people crawling through the abattoir, their groping hands sweeping whorls on sidewalks turned to bloody finger-painting canvases? Were you trampled again? Did a young woman’s stiletto heel pierce the small of your back as she stumbled over you? Was she then bowled off her feet by another small mob of panicked people with no plan other than getting out of the open? Did the mob crush her against a glass storefront that first wobbled and then shattered, the glittering cascade slicing into all those unlucky enough to be forced into the store window as it went? Did you see the people in the rear of that mob thrashing and clawing and biting those ahead of them in their desperation to get past the dead and crushed and wounded? Did the storm of falling bodies intensify? Did the points of impact take down the members of that mob in groups of three and four at a time, panicking the mob even more, so that the piled humanity at the shattered window was high enough to slide back downward, burying some of the still-living behind them whose only sin was seeking purchase? Was that when the tattoo of bodies striking down grew even louder, like a rainfall that has intensified from drizzle to shower to torrent? Was it now hundreds? Did you now hear a wet thumping drumbeat in every direction? Were you surrounded by breaking glass, rending metal, screams cut off in mid-breath, the shrieks of men and women losing their sanity from the ongoing deluge, and the even more evocative wet sounds that these bags of flesh made as they broke open, splashing every nearby surface? Did you somehow rise, the blood of your wounded back now mingling with the spatter of so many, the agony elevating our tortured, staggering walk into the most difficult effort of your entire life? Did you not know which direction to flee? Did your traumatized gaze find a chubby-faced man in a gray jacket gesturing at you from the doorway of a nearby office building? Did you make your way toward him in most direct route you could manage, even as the intensifying storm dropped more bodies in your path? Did you step on necks, on faces? Did you stumble over boneless legs bent in more ways than legs should be able to bend? Were the bodies piling up into higher ridges and did you sometimes sink into them, not into the spaces between the bodies but into the bodies themselves, the strained skin and flesh giving way like thin ice beneath your weight, to plunge you knee-deep into the already shattered organs beneath? Did your one bare foot go molten with agony the time what shattered beneath your weight was a splintered ribcage, slicing to the bone? And throughout all of this, were you hearing the screams of all the other people caught outside being cut off, being smothered, being hammered to silence, by the screaming holocaust from above? Were you almost blind from the blood stinging your eyes by the time you made it to the door that chubby-faced man had been holding open for you? Did you still feel his hand grab you by the wrist and pull you into a narrow lobby crowded with other refugees moaning and retching and weeping? Did you hear him tell you that you were okay now and think that you had never heard anything so fatuous? Was his face so dotted with red specks that he looked like a victim of pox? Did you take in his greenish pallor and shiny forehead and air of imminent panic and despite his efforts to save you did you hate him a little, for having been lucky enough to be inside during the storm? Did you murmur something incoherent as you pushed your way past him into a lobby greasy with blood, either that tracked-in or that oozing in through the passages to the outside? Did you see men and women and children huddled against the walls, some of them panting, some of them openly sobbing, a few finding solace in one another’s arms, most of them looking like they’d just gone swimming through viscera? Did you hear that crack behind you? Did you whirl at the sound? Did you see a jagged lightning-bolt fissure spreading across the glass of the window, as some body part—not a complete body, but a limb—crashed into it at high speed? Did you realize that the lobby was not a safe haven after all, that what was happening outside would impinge on this space soon enough, and that you needed to penetrate deeper into the building for the protection of its walls to do you any good? Did you shuffle past those who had collapsed immediately upon entry? Did you have to step over a slender stringy-haired girl whose age and features were impossible to discern beneath glistening veneer of blood, who lay on her side between you and the elevator bank, trembling? Were you aware that only a few minutes ago you would have been shocked by her appearance? Or that, seeing how broken she appeared to be, you would have reached out a hand and offered whatever was in your power to help? Were you no longer capable of that instinctive response? Did you hear a thumping drumbeat coming from the elevator bank, a group of six? Did you see that in each case the narrow line between left door and right doors were oozing gore and that puddles were beginning to form outside a couple of them? How long did it take for the epiphany to form, that the storm had penetrated past the roof and invaded the shafts? Did you picture the plummeting bodies landing atop each elevator car, wherever it had last come to rest? Did you picture the cars catching some of what fell, the rest toppling over their sides and plummeting the rest of the way to the bottom of the shaft? Did you do the necessary math and figure how long it would take the bodies to start accumulating at the bottom, like bloody snowfall? Did you consider those that still piled atop each elevator and figure that it would still be no time at all before the cables were all supporting more weight than they’d been designed for? Did you even have any idea what modern elevators did when overloaded, whether those cables would snap, whether the emergency brakes would come into play, or whether the cars would plunge like missiles, smashing into the stacked corpses that had preceded them? Did you turn away, find the nearest stairwell, and start to climb, following the shining and bloody trail of at least one other refugee from the street who had come this way before you? What was it like to climb that stairwell, a towering vertical space whose structural integrity still held for now? Did you enjoy the relative silence, not total, but still a shock of a sort after all the screaming and dying from outside and downstairs? Did you find your tears mingling with the patina of blood on your cheeks? Did you smell everything that had landed on you, the gore, the bile, the shit, the puke? Did you feel your stomach clench again, once again urging the eruption that it had been forced to put off earlier? Did you feel a fresh stabbing pain in your injured foot, with every step? Did the one shoe you’d kept squish with every step, from all the substances it had splashed in? Did you just kick it away after a flight or so, feeling relief, taking odd pleasure in the feel of the cold feel of that staircase, a surface that felt real on a day when nothing did? Did you encounter two women, one a tear-streaked redhead not far into her twenties, the other a gray matron in a pantsuit, supporting each other as they made their way down the stairs? Did they stop, gasping, when they saw you climbing toward them? Did it occur to you that they may have seen in you some version of the horror-movie cliché of some bloody zombie, rising from the depths to eat their brains? Did you see them realize that you were just someone from deeper in the catastrophe that had engulfed you all? Did the young woman stagger in mid-step? Did the older one hold her upright with what seemed a hideous expenditure of will, and did you shake your head, not speaking, but indicating with that gesture that there was no point in descending any farther? Did she glance upward and shake her head, too, establishing that there was also no real point in ascending? Was that when the central well between each half-flight of stairs began to drip scarlet rain, establishing that at some level higher above, the stairwell had also been breached? Did you register the drumbeat echoing downward and understand that you had minutes at most before the stairwells would become cascades, river rapids so powerful that any attempt to ascend to higher floors would be an exercise in wading against a current too powerful to permit any progress in that direction? Did you close your gummy eyes and continue to take the steps one at a time, just as the younger woman’s mind snapped and the stairwell became an echo chamber for shrieking? Did you manage another flight, another five, your injured foot shrieking almost as loudly to your ears, but ignoring it because it was all you could do? Did you feel the walls around you shudder as something nearby dropped a chorus of shrieking people to their deaths, and did you have the presence of mind to know that this must have been one of the elevators, surrendering to the inevitable? Did you stagger at the thunderous and terribly liquid crash a dozen stories below? Did your imagination insist on providing a vivid illustration of all those shattered bodies left beneath that hammer’s blow, pulping even further from that impact? Did you feel a rush of sudden dizziness, perhaps blood loss and perhaps shock, perhaps emotional surfeit, and perhaps just the strain on anybody used to sedentary activities, not used to pushing itself up this many flights of stairs this quickly? Did you feel yourself sway at the next landing, gray spots gathering at the periphery of your vision? Did you gasp and punch the wall and gather your will to stay upright, before ripping open the door to the nearest floor, the twelfth? Did you emerge onto whatever company’s cubicle farm occupied that floor, and did your appearance raise gasps from the workers there, all clustered in the center of the room away from windows that had shattered inward? Were the overhead lights flickering? Did you have the feeling that it would be minutes at most before they failed, and darkness was added to your problems? Did you confirm by the blurred shapes plummeting past those windows, that there had been no lessening of the storm? Was the sky instead black with plunging bodies, all thrashing in doomed attempts to fly? Were there thousands more falling with every instant? Did you feel the need to say something to all these wide-eyed people staring at you, a report from downstairs, a bulletin from the street? Did the words fail to come? Did it strike you that they were unnecessary? Did you stumble further into their midst, see the one sandy-haired guy in the thin tie stand up as if to protest at your intrusion, then think better of it and sit down? Did any of these ridiculously clean creatures from a civilization that pre- dated your condition make further attempts to intercept you? Did you stop before an Asian woman turning to gray who recoiled when you looked at her and seemed relieved when it turned out that all you wanted was directions to a bathroom? Even then, did she just point with trembling hand, because it made no sense for her to speak? Did you then make your way to the little room at the end of a hallway and inside find a mirror that revealed to you a vision of yourself you had never imagined, and wished that you could not see now? Was the gore so thick on your face and on your clothing that it was not red but black, and were there white flecks that could only be bone fragments? Did you not see anybody you knew in that reflection? Did you turn the tap and find to your astonishment that it still provided water? Did you run the stream and splash it over your face, rinsing some of what painted you down the drain? Did you scrub and scrub before realizing that it made no difference, that there was too much for anything but a long shower to make a difference? Did you succeed in finding your old self behind the remnants of everything you’d crawled through? Even as your face was as clean as it was ever going to get, was the reflection that of a stranger? Did the clear hot water streaming from the spigot then sputter and hiccup, only to turn pink and then red, before stopping? Did you consider everything you had still wanted from this life? The people you loved, the dreams you’d held to your breast? Did it then strike you that it was all irrelevant now? Did you emerge from the bathroom no less horrific nor more recognizably human, but with fresh resolve, as you stormed past the office workers whose great fortune in being inside at the start of this cataclysm had only afforded them a few more minutes of safety? Did you find your way blocked by a balding older man, likely a manager, appealing to you for explanation? Did you place the palm of your hand against his chest and urge him aside, and continue toward one of the abandoned glassed-in offices at the outskirts, which had shielded the central cubicles from the direct effects of the storm? Did you ignore the shouts of panic from behind you and open the glass door, entering a rectangular space now as ruined as any battlefield? Did you step over the corpse of the gray-haired man whose office it had been, and approach the one empty frame that had lost its window to multiple impacts, the only one that offered any degree of visibility between the two that were spiderwebbed with cracks and opaque from the blood streaming from higher floors? Did you stand there, on the edge of the bodyfall, breathing deeply as if in appreciation of a refreshing summer shower, taking in the aerial view of the boulevard now so deep in pulped corpses that the accumulation had formed drifts two or three stories high? Did you smell the fires from crashed airplanes? Did you see another jet, drawing a hornet’s-swarm of corpses in its slipstream, disappearing behind the buildings on the other side of the street? Did you wince at the vast eruption of flame? Did you shudder and draw your focus closer, to the bodies falling in great number only a few feet away from where you stood? Was the airspace over the street so thick with them that it seemed conceivable to leap from one to another as they plunged, and in that way, cross the street on their falling backs? Did you see what was written on the faces you were able to glimpse, faces that were similar to humanity but not of it? What did you see on those faces? Was it fear? Resignation? Or apology? Did you peer down at the street you’d escaped? Did you see the mass of fallen bodies, now risen well past the level of the fourth floor, and still rising? Did you perceive that while most individuals in that mass were dead, the whole throbbed as if alive? Did any of the bodies who’d landed face up seem to meet your gaze, before they sank or were buried by those who fell afterward? Did they seem inviting, to you? Did it seem easier to just give in to the inevitable and join them? If so, what did you do next?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The penultimate installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows (Grosset and Dunlap) came out in August 2015. The finale published in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Anatomist’s Mnemonic Priya Sharma | 3501 words

Samuel Wilson’s life wasn’t a search for love at every turn. There’d been girls he’d liked, with whom he’d managed fragile love affairs, but something was always lacking no matter how hard he tried. Something that failed to ignite. Sam knew what it was. He knew that love and objectification weren’t the same but he had a passion for hands. His arousal in every organ, the mind, the skin, the parts he’d once been told were made for sin, depended on the wrists, the palms, the fingertips. Why don’t we ask Sam to the party? I’ve invited Judith. We should introduce them. Women were keen to intervene on his behalf. Your Mother wants you to bring your friend Sam to Sunday lunch. She says he looks like he needs feeding up. Yes, your sister’s also coming. Colleagues, friends, friends’ girlfriends, wives, and mothers were all eager to help him along on a romantic quest. What’s Sam like? No, I don’t fancy him. I only have eyes for you. I’m just curious. He’s such a nice, unassuming guy. I don’t get why he’s single. They were taken with his unconscious charm. He was a millpond of a man. They wanted to see what sort of woman would make him ripple. None guessed the secret so incongruous with the rest of him. The thing he’d denied himself. Sam couldn’t tell them for fear they’d make a tawdry fetish of the fundamentals of his happiness. He couldn’t tell them about the hands.

• • • •

Sam, aged nineteen, had seen a fortune teller. There was a painted caravan on the outskirts of a funfair. He was close enough to childhood to find the fair childish, not old enough to enjoy its novelty with a pang of nostalgia. He wasn’t having fun. His friends were raucous. Boorish. The whirling neon and cheap hotdogs made him feel sick. The quiet caravan seemed like a retreat. He was at the age and stage where he had queries about his life. Later, the classmates he’d arrived with questioned his disappearance, but he deflected them with vagaries and shrugs. It was a formulative experience. The palm reader, twenty years his senior, took him in with a glance that measured his vitality. His every possibility. His diffidence hid his differences from his peers. The ardour and sensitivity overlooked by girls his own age. Imogen (the palmist’s real name) didn’t go in for hoop earrings or headscarves. Her uniform was black and flattering, fit for funerals and seductions. Although her youth was behind her, Imogen was still young enough to want to feel it. They sat on opposite sides of the table. Imogen was fleshy where expected of an older woman, but with slender limbs. She used her hands and wrists to express everything. Sam felt an unexpected thrill, the exact location of which was uncertain, when she leant across the table and seized his waiting hands in hers. He liked how she took charge despite her diminutive size. The way she examined him for clues. She dropped his left hand, having exhausted its information. It lay between them on the table, aching to be held again. Sam watched her pink tongue dart out between plum-painted lips to wet the tip for her forefinger. She traced a damp circle around his palm, her face close so that she could peer into his future. Close enough to feel her breath on his skin. Close enough to see a single silver strand in the darkness of her parting. She announced his hands were the instruments of fate and their message was explicit. “Your heart line’s unusual. It springs from Saturn. It’s a chain pattern. Unforked. You’re a sensual man. You’ll have unique needs. Your line of affection shows a strong attachment, the sort that only happens once in a lifetime. You’ll find true love because of her hands.” Most initiations involve fumbling and misunderstandings, but this wasn’t Imogen’s first time with a first timer. As they lay together in the half light of her caravan, Imogen explained her trade to Sam using their own hands as primers. “Life,” she explained, “is laid out in lines: life, heart, and head. The lines of destiny, affection, and the sun.” She traced each one out, stimulated every nerve. “The whole universe is right here.” She kissed his palms, his mounts of Venus, Mars, Mercury, and the moon. The next lesson was in the significance of fingers, after which she sucked each one in turn. She praised the nails that pinned down his nature, well formed, crescents rising at the base. Sam didn’t care about his own hands. They were whole and functional, fit for purpose. He was more concerned with hers. Imogen had the hands of Aphrodite. Her wrists were fine. Refined. He could encircle them with ease. Her hands touched him everywhere. They moved him. Not love but distilled desire. Eroticism crystallised. Nineteen. A late age for imprinting, but it was testament to Imogen’s hands. The image of them roaming over him. She couldn’t foresee the Pavlovian associations that would occur. Whoever Sam loved would need hands as beautiful as hers.

• • • •

Samuel had met with other hand worshippers. They were the reason for his reticence. He was puzzled by their games. The act of washing up became burlesque as hands were engulfed in suds. A game of Rock, Paper, Scissors was frank porn. They didn’t care about hands the way he did. Hands were mystical, magical, not to be leered at as they went about their daily chores. Hands were delicate and complex. The ultimate Darwinian organ. The sign of a higher being. Opposable thumb above paw and claw. Why shouldn’t they be the localisation of desire? Sam decided, at thirty-two, he couldn’t ignore his needs anymore. He copied the number he’d found onto a pad. It sat by the phone for weeks before he called. “Hello.” “I’m sorry.” He winced at this inauspicious beginning, unsure why he’d apologised. “Are you Beth Hurt? I found your website.” “I am.” She sounded younger than he’d expected. He tried to imagine her face. Her hands. “My name’s Sam Wilson. I wonder if you can help me.” He stalled. In the silence that followed, he was afraid she’d hang up. “Let me tell you a bit about what I do. I’m a medical illustrator. I have an anatomy degree as well as fine arts training. I do medical textbooks, teaching aids, exhibition posters, and company brochures.” He was thankful that Beth Hurt was gracious, trying to put him at ease. “I need a drawing.” “What of?” “A pair of hands. I work in advertising.” This part was true. “I’m applying for a job with a rival agency so I can’t go to my art department.” The last part was a lie. It was for a very different advert. A more personal one. M, 32, single, solvent, sincere, seeks F to share music, books, food, film, and the other fine things in life. Beautiful hands essential. All he needed was an illustration. “Tell me a bit more about what you want.” Sam discussed hand anthropometry. He specified dimensions. Palm to wrist ratio. Finger length. Shape of the nails. The glorious proportions of the flawless hand. “Most of all, they must be beautiful.” “All hands are beautiful,” she mused. “They all tell a story.” Sam didn’t know how to disabuse Beth Hurt of this. The subtleties of the mind, the sense of humour, the face and body were subjective. He had a non-judgemental approach to those and found their variations spectacular. Hands were different. Hands were absolutes. “Beautiful to me then.”

• • • • Sam normally coped with the monotony of motorways by seizing on their differences. The ballet of the cars. The flowers that flourished on the verges. The flash of the central barrier. Graffiti that decorated the bridges overhead. Who blew, who sucked, and other such stuff. He didn’t need to scrutinise the minutiae of the journey now. He had other things on his mind. He turned off at Beth’s junction onto a series of dual carriageways and roundabouts. Then a town. Trees. A school. A row of shops. People queued at a bus stop. Life went on around him unencumbered while he was overcome with hope. Sam couldn’t tell if Beth’s street was on its way up or down. A handsome Georgian terrace past its prime. It exhibited signs of aspiration and neglect. Some of the basement flats paraded rows of geranium in pots while others had old sheets hung at the windows and peeling door paint. He found the right house and examined the bells by the door. Beside Beth’s was a brass plaque that bore her name and nothing else. The voice that answered via the intercom wasn’t hers. It was more melodic, lower in its range. “Come up. Second floor. I’ll leave the door open. Beth’s on the phone.” The communal hall’s flower prints and beige carpet gave no clue as to what waited upstairs. He took the stairs two at a time. The door was ajar. Beth Hurt’s hall was painted matt charcoal. A set of daguerreotypes hung upon one wall, formal portraits that were trapped beneath a silver skin. He liked these antique pictures from the past. Their eyes were alive in a way that eluded modern printing techniques. There were shelves loaded with curios. A set of opera glasses and a peacock fan. Metal syringes shining in their case. A porcelain phrenology head. A nautilus shell. A navy surgeon’s brass bound chest lay open against one wall. Sam read the label by each viscous instrument, designed for hasty amputations. The line drawing in the lid was a pictorial guide to removing a limb. There were clamp-like contraptions, a pair of petit tourniquets, to stem blood loss. An amputation knife, its curved blade designed to sweep around the limb’s flesh and cut right down to bone. The zigzag teeth of the tendon and D-shaped saws looked like something from a joiner’s bag. A door at the end of the corridor opened. It was Beth Hurt. “Sorry to keep you waiting, come through. Did Kate offer you a drink?” “No, but don’t worry. I’m Sam.” He held out a hand. She took it. Firm grip. Warm, soft skin. Her hair was short enough to allow its rightful curl around her face. It was a shade between brown and red. “It’s nice to finally meet you.” Sam felt a tug of something akin to recognition. He suppressed the urge to giggle. He knew from the wide spread of her smile that she did too. There was a softening around her eyes that drew him in. “You’ve come a long way. Let me get you a drink. What would you like?” “Go on then. A coffee would be great.” Beth opened the door and called out. “Kate, kettle’s on. Do you want one?” “Love one,” came the distant reply. Kate. Friend, lover, or just flatmate? It occurred to Sam that Beth had grown suspicious. Did she regret inviting him here instead of somewhere neutral? Had she rung around until she found a chaperone? Sam waited in Beth’s professional space, free to look around. It was a patchwork of diagrams and charts. Line drawings and sketches. Plastic models. Some of the words and pictures made him blush. A painting of a dissected heart hung over her desk. Bloodied meat and gaping valves. A fist of an organ, much misunderstood and mythologized. It was just a pump after all. Sam was examining a set of photos of a dissected brain when Beth retuned carrying a tray. He caught the top note of her scent as she handed him a mug. A citrus smell that energised him. His eyes dropped to her hands. They were too square, too fleshy to reveal a pleasing amount of the sinews beneath. Bitten nails. Ink stained flesh. Palms seamed and furrowed. Creases like bracelets at her wrists. “Would you be more comfortable in another room?” He took a final look at the brain photographs and grinned. “No, it’s only the sight of my own blood that makes me faint, but if I feel funny I’ll let you know.” “Do you think it’s ghoulish?” Sam sipped his coffee as he looked at a watercolour of a dissected leg. “No. Your work’s stunning.” “Would you believe that I wanted to be a children’s illustrator? I used to make up stories and draw pictures to go with them for my sister after our mum died.” It was such a personal disclosure that made him embarrassed that he’d lied to her about his reasons for the commission. Her unguardedness disarmed him. She’d let him into her home. He felt he could tell her anything now that he was here. “So what happened?” “I took a job with a medical publisher because I was strapped for cash. The editor had loved my work on a book he read to his daughter at bedtime. He said it was just the right look.” “What sort of kid’s book was that?” They both laughed. “Once I finished the job I knew I didn’t want to do anything else. Isn’t it strange how you know that you like something, right away?” She laid out the final drawing before him. “Is this what you had in mind?” “It’s brilliant.” He meant it. One hand was partially folded against the other. They were elegant and tapered. Beth had made technical perfection seem informal. “You have real talent.” “Oh no, it’s just about knowing the anatomy. It changes the structure of the work. May I?” The way she took his hands made him dizzy. “The finger bones are called the phalanges. Three to each finger. Two in the thumb.” She touched each one in his little finger and his thumb by way of demonstration. Sam felt the start of gnawing elation. “Fascinating.” He’d been preoccupied with aesthetics, not construction or mechanics, but her words thrilled him. “And these are the metacarpal bones.” Sam swallowed when she ran her finger across his palm. “At one end they form the knuckles and at the other they articulate with the wrist bones, which are my favourites.” “Why?” He relished her pleasure. “They’re interesting. Each one has a different shape and name, but they fit together like a jigsaw.” She made him arch his thumb to reveal two taut lines along his wrist. “This gap is called the anatomical snuffbox.” She pointed to the space between the pair of tendons. “The bone which forms the floor is the scaphoid.” “Scaphoid,” he repeated. “The rest of the wrist bones are the lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate.” She worked her way over the wrist to show him where each bone was. “I like the hamate. It has a hook.” He felt like he was party to the arcane. “How do you remember all that?” Sam wanted her to know he was impressed. “Hard work. And mnemonics. Lots of mnemonics.” “The only mnemonic I know is Richard of York gave battle in vain, for the rainbow.” A spot of colour had appeared high on Beth’s cheeks. It conjured up Beth Hurt in bed, post-coital, flushed and loose limbed. Intuition told him the reason for her flush. “What’s the mnemonic?” “What?” “For the wrist.” “Scared lovers try positions that they can’t handle.” Beth tried to sound unabashed. The physiology of their attraction couldn’t be faked. The symptoms of their chemistry. They were close. Sam’s pupils dilated. It was hard to breathe. His heart no longer functioned as just a pump. His blood was hot. His throat was dry. Beth was a lodestone and he’d been magnetised. Their heads were tilted in sympathy. Lips parted in empathy. He couldn’t. Beth’s hands were lacking. “The picture . . .” He moved away. “It’s perfect.” “I hope you find what you want.” “Pardon?” “Get what you want. The job.” She sounded magnanimous in rejection. Courageous. “I wish you the best of luck.” “I’ll treasure this, no matter what. Not because of its anatomy, but because you’ve pictured exactly what I described.” “I’ve a confession. It was easier than you think.” “What do you mean?” “I had a model.” “A model?” He’d imagined such hands could only be imagined. “Yes, Kate, my sister. Do you want to meet her?”

• • • •

Sam could see the shades of sisterhood on their faces. Kate was at ease amid the depictions of flayed flesh and dismembered limbs. She was an elongated, elegant version of her sibling. Undeniably the better looking of the two, but with paler hair and skin. A less vivid version of Beth. “I thought introductions were in order. Sam, Kate. Kate, Sam.” “Hi.” “Nice to meet you.” Sam searched her smile, this Madonna of the Hands, but all that it revealed was her teeth. “Sam loves the picture. I thought you two should meet.” Kate’s hands were partially covered by the cuffs of her jumper. The fine rib clung to her wrists. Her tapered fingers ended in short nails, painted with a dark polish. It should have tantalised him. Sam thrust out a hand, desperate to connect. As she took it, Sam waited for the jolt of hormones. Instead of a spark, there was just a seeping disappointment as her perfect hand lay in his. “It’s a good job you liked it.” Kate thrust her hands back into her pockets. “Beth’s promised me a modelling fee.” The trio laughed in unison. “I’m going to get another drink.” Beth glanced at him. “Coffee all round?” She went, closing the door behind her with a careful click. “Beth says the drawing’s for a job interview. What’s it for?” “A hand cream campaign. I’m in advertising. What do you do?” “I’ve just finished my degree. I’m a dietitian.” “Your place is great.” “I wish it were mine. I’m just staying here until I can get somewhere.” Sam nodded. Of course it was Beth’s. “Beth’s a diamond. She’s always looked out for me.” It was Beth that Sam was thinking of. There wasn’t enough of Kate, pleasant as she was, to fill the room. Her hands, though fabulous, couldn’t compensate for Beth’s absence. Hands though, they were absolutes.

• • • •

Sam and Beth were bare beneath the sheets. It was her turn to be taught. “Life,” Sam explained, “is laid out in lines: life, heart, and head. The lines of destiny, affection, and the sun.” Each one was traced out. Then there was the significance of fingers. The predictions of nails. Imogen had been exorcised. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. The words Beth had taught him lingered in his mouth. He tried to pass them back to her, tongue to tongue. She was too weak to twist away. Desire drove Sam. He didn’t stop to consider the outrageousness of his demands. The flat was upended by his passions. The kitchen had become an impromptu theatre. The surgical instruments lay on the floor. Kate had been easily overcome. She lay where she’d fallen, in Beth’s studio. Beth, though he’d surprised her, put up a greater fight. Sam kissed the bruise on her face, from the blow that had finally subdued her. It was dirty work. Sam was glad that he’d been right that it was only his own blood that made him feel faint. The cuts he’d made with the amputation knife were ragged. The petit tourniquets were sound and stemmed Beth’s bleeding. He’d not used them on Kate, not from unkindness but because there wasn’t time. Cautery was a more tricky matter. He’d improvised with a knife, heated on the hob until the blade glowed. He touched it to the places on Beth’s bloody stumps that leaked. Sam covered his clumsy suture work with wrappings of scarves. Kate’s hands cooled quickly, despite their new attachment to Beth. It was a fleeting few hours that Sam couldn’t hold onto for long enough. It left him hungry. He put his lips to the perfect palms, to Beth’s mouth. Her lips were pale. She shivered as he covered her body with his. Beth whimpered, limp in the hands of fate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Priya Sharma’s short stories have appeared in venues like Interzone, Black Static and on Tor.com. She’s been reprinted in many “Best of” anthologies, such as Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series. She’s also been included on several Locus’ Recommended Reading Lists. Her story, “Fabulous Beasts” was Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 2016. All the Fabulous Beasts, her debut collection from Undertow Publications, is now available. More about her work can be found at www.priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com and www.facebook.com/AllTheFabulousBeasts/ NONFICTION The H Word: Body Horror---What’s Really under Your Skin? Lucy Taylor | 1186 words

Years ago, while studying Buddhism in college, I came across the Tibetan practice of sky burial, where the corpse is chopped into pieces and left out in the open for the vultures. Monks gather around the remains to meditate upon death, aided by the grisly reality of a human body reduced to it essential components. I found this fascinating. Still do. Bravo to those stalwart monks watching the vultures dip their red beaks into the human goulash. Whether it’s a spectacle I’d want to witness myself, though, is another matter. Like sky burials, body horror in film and literature brings into the open what many of us would prefer remain unseen. Or at least not too closely scrutinized. Featuring graphic violations of the human body, this is a subgenre that’s up close and personal, arguably the most viscerally disturbing type of horror. Few feel indifferent on the subject. Most are either fascinated or repelled. I’ve talked to a few people who find body horror gross and disgusting. What’s seen onscreen or described in print triggers a primal fear. The images may lodge in the brain like a tick, unforgettable in the worst possible way. We like to think our corporeal selves are under our control, but body horror reminds us we’re in deep denial here. The body breathes on its own, blinks its eyes, digests food, and beats its heart without our consent or cooperation. Eventually, it ceases these activities altogether despite our frantic efforts to keep things running. Our minds, generally reliable and useful tools, can be turned to porridge by dementia, Alzheimer’s, or traumatic injury. Body horror puts the nightmare where we fear it most—inside our own or someone else’s skin, where irrational or not, humans do have ingrained expectations. The expectation of symmetry and logical proportions, for example, the expectation that a face will have eyes and a stomach will not, that teeth will never be found inside the ears or armpits, that a tongue will not suddenly protrude from some other orifice. And yet . . . in the world of body horror, we have to consider these possibilities. My introduction to body horror came from Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, in particular “The Body Politic” in volume four, where a pair of hands grows tired of obeying commands and organizes a rebellion, and from Steven King’s unforgettable “Survivor Type,” which remains as vivid in my memory as if I’d been on that island with the wretched Dr. Richard Pine myself. I didn’t know body horror was an actual subgenre at the time, only that stories that focused on three bizarre and often grotesque alterations to the human body appealed to me on some dark level. Later, of course, I discovered a host of other authors who devised inventive and ungodly changes to inflict upon the body, among them, Nancy Collins (“Freak Tent”), Brian Lumley (“Fruiting Bodies”), Edward Lee (“The Bighead”), Ramsey Campbell (“Holes for Faces”), Katherine Dunn (Geek Love), Brian Evenson (The Warren), Bentley Little (The Circle), to name just a few. Among filmmakers, the work of legendary David Cronenberg introduced me to the visceral punch of body horror on the screen; films designed to make the viewer cringe on multiple levels, the gross-out with layers of sub-context. The Fly plays on the human fear of deformation, Shivers deals with a plague of parasites that causes its victims to become sex-mad fiends, and Rabid centers on a horde of zombies unleashed by a bloodthirsty victim of a botched cosmetic surgery. Some onscreen body horror is so outrageous that it verges on dark humor, as when a severed head grows legs and scampers away in John Carpenter’s The Thing or when in Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man we’re confronted with a woman lugging around a fifty pound beard of bees. And then there’s manga artist Junji Ito’s horror manga series Uzumaki (“Spiral”), which manages to be both mesmerizing and stomach-turning as human bodies corkscrew into something resembling a cross section of a chambered Nautilus. As hard as it may be to look, it’s even harder not to. Like carnage on the interstate, body horror catches us in that intersection where fascination and curiosity meet revulsion. Keep reading or take a break? Close your eyes or take in every lurid detail of the desecration? Whether on the page or on film, body horror literally exposes the body’s dreadful secrets. As we read about or watch mutilation, mutation, deformity, infestation, zombification, and the like, we’re forced to confront the reality that what we inhabit is essentially a fragile, vulnerable meat sack sheathed in skin and then gussied up in clothes. It’s that yawning gap between our species’ aspirations to grandeur and what we really are that provides a fertile field for writers and filmmakers. The feminine, for example, provides a wealth of possibilities for body horror: menstruation, lactation, the terrors of childbirth, even suppressed female fury against a misogynistic culture as in Oliver Reed’s The Brood, where mutant rage children produced by a woman’s internalized fury carry out her bloody bidding. Female self-mutilation gets its turn in Marina de Van’s film In My Skin, when protagonist Esther becomes intrigued by her body’s contents after accidentally gashing her leg. As her obsession with what underlies the outer packaging devolves into psychosis, Esther finds more dangerous and inventive ways to harm herself, pursuing an addictive combination of pleasure and shame. She goes past “ordinary” denial into the biological reality of her body and offers the viewer the chance to turn away or regard unflinchingly what she sees. Body horror also toys with its more socially acceptable cousin, desire, which can lead to grotesque attempts to close the gap between one body and another via cannibalism (You’re so cute I want to eat you up) and appropriation of someone else’s body, as when Buffalo Bill crafts clothing from human skin in The Silence of the Lambs. If the benighted Buffalo Bill soothes his inner angst by dressing up in stolen skin, most “normal” humans, in order to stay sane, dissociate the underlying terrors from our experience in day to day life, trying to ignore (until we no longer can) the reality that inhabiting a body is akin to being trapped inside a house infested with parasites, rebellious limbs, demon spawn, and all manner of spookery. It may at times look fetching on the outside, but woe to she or he who dwells within. Love it or hate it, body horror offers the sudden, terrible eruption of the real into our lives. Whether it’s a corpse being devoured by vultures or the self-mutilating Esther in de Van’s film, it forces us to confront our own fragility and impending deaths, to be simultaneously shocked and entertained while still being reassured that the very worst hasn’t happened to us—yet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lucy Taylor is the author of seven novels, including The Safety of Unknown Cities, Left to Die, Eternal Hearts, and Nailed, as well as over a hundred short stories. Most recently her work has appeared in the anthologies Death by Water II, (Independent Legions Press), Edward Bryant’s Spheres of Influence (Charles Anderson Books) and in the Russian horror zine Darker. Upcoming works includes stories in the anthologies Endless Apocalypse (Flame Tree Press), and Tales From the Lake vol. 5 (Chrystal Lake Publications) and a new collection Spree and Other Stories (Independent Legions Press). Her science fiction/horror novelette “Sweetlings” was among those on the Final Ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Long Fiction. Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe NM. Media Review: June 2018 Adam-Troy Castro | 1432 words

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet

A Quiet Place Directed by John Krasinski Produced by Platinum Dunes and Sunday Night April 6, 2017

There are any number of things that could have gone wrong with A Quiet Place, an apocalyptic horror film from writer/director/star John Krasinski. That is the nature of high-wire acts; they are suspenseful to the precise degree at which they tempt catastrophic failure, and this is a high-wire act if there ever was one, a horror movie that weaponizes silence, that renders every sound, down to the most whispery footfall, a potential threat and additional source of tension. From all reports, audiences are watching it in rapt silence. This is unusual enough, in a cinematic landscape where so many theatre patrons think themselves obliged to provide constant commentary, explaining even the simplest plot points to one another (as with the one fellow I recently encountered who made sure the appearance of a freighter was underlined by his observation, “It’s a boat.”). Not here. This is the movie that has made many audiences, nationwide, shut up: hoarding their own inane comments and even their crunchy popcorn, in service of allowing the film to play out undisturbed. The magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated. This is not the silence some movies accomplish with ennui. It is the silence only a damn few achieve by making audiences afraid to disturb what’s happening. It’s a movie about a nuclear family, which means that it relies on our willingness to believe that the protagonists really do have the posited relationships and that they really are bound by the ties of blood; it is a movie that requires an absolute minimum of dialogue, which means that it doesn’t work if the actors can’t express the majority of the feelings via non-verbal communication; and it’s a movie that sketches in the necessary exposition a bit clumsily (via convenient newspaper clippings), but nevertheless uses that method in a record period of time, trusting the audience to pick up the essentials as they go. Finally, it is a movie pitting human beings against literal monsters, which is always death if the audience can’t be made to sign on to transactional acceptance of those monsters for the duration of the story. That is key. As any number of well-meaning films have found out, a badly designed (or insufficiently well-hidden) monster is a direct pathway to guffaws, instead of chills. This is especially critical if, in order to provide a satisfying denouement, you also plan to equip the monsters with a fatal weakness to be unveiled at the eleventh hour. That trick is frequently necessary. But botch it and you botch everything. People are still laughing about the aliens who shrink from water and are vulnerable to baseball bats in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. Up to that point, you had a fairly effective low- key thriller centering on family dynamics. After that, you had an immortal punch line. And yet this movie avoids all those pitfalls. It’s kind of brilliant; tapping into primal fears, the congenital need to hide from things faster and stronger and more pitiless from us, while protecting our own. It doesn’t resonate much deeper than that, in the sense that last year’s Get Out did, but as a riveting creature feature it proves capable of transferring the need for near-silence imposed on its characters, to hoarded breath on the part of its audience. It’s not deep. But by Gad is it heartfelt. It doesn’t wink at us at all. The premise is simple. At some point within the last few months, a “meteor” (that explanation provided by one of those convenient newspaper clippings) delivered unto this planet an infestation of ravenous monsters, armored and vicious and drawn by the slightest sound. Civilization has pretty much fallen, to the point where all radio frequencies have fallen silent. (As with The Walking Dead, the likelihood of that happening in light of the specific capabilities the monsters evidence, versus what we know of actual real-world military capabilities, is best left unexamined; just nod and roll with it.) It is onto this stage that ventures one family, including father, mother, and three children (including one hearing-impaired girl, whose condition has happily equipped them all with knowledge of sign language), raiding an abandoned pharmacy for necessary antibiotics. Something terrible happens right away, and we have an interregnum of many months, after which we rejoin the surviving family members, who are still plugging away, only this time with the Mom (Emily Blunt) in her last month of pregnancy. An early hour shows us how they manage to support their lives in this world with no sound, and then we get one terrible night with an escalating series of crises, leading to the climax. It’s a rather basic and schematic setup for a horror film that works as well as it does because of a number of considerable strengths. Key among them is that first hour or so, establishing the sheer care this family puts into remaining quiet all the time (and what arrangements they have made for the squalling infant, once it arrives.) They dread sound, they have a few minor brushes with trouble, they show that they pretty much have it handled despite a few issues, and the movie takes time establishing all this before overturning their apple-cart. Timing is strong even when the action becomes frenetic, and it needs to be said that even then, none of it is paced at the spastic strobe-light pace of so many modern action movies; the situations are given time to flower, the cliffhangers time to engage our dread. Second would be the sound department. This is a movie that makes economic use of sound by design, but all of it, from the softest gasps to the ominous creak of floorboards, is balanced with sparing use of music and the (eventual) more catastrophic noises that bring danger running. It is throughout a use of sound technology that should (but one fears won’t) be remembered at award-season: atmospheric and frequently terrifying and, throughout, the story’s secret weapon. John Krasinski, who co-wrote A Quiet Place with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, and who also directed and stars, is best known for playing the amiable Jim Halpert for eight years in the U.S. version of the international sitcom The Office. He’s starred in a few other things and he’s directed a couple of other features effectively enough, but his work has tended toward light comedy, and few would have guessed that he had this thing in him, either as director or as performer. As director, he does a superb job of maintaining our spatial orientation, keeping the tension just outside the limits of the frame, hiding the monsters as long as he possibly can and then keeping the pace relentless once it needs to be. As performer, he shows a trait previously rare in his filmography, a capacity for communicating the pain that goes with knowing that one’s loved ones are in danger, and having only limited ability to help them. Emily Blunt, who you had to love in Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow even if you bore no love for the films, anchors much of the middle of the film, during an interval when her character goes through a couple of forms of hell simultaneously. Relative newcomer Millicent Simmonds is, in only her second film, downright perfect as the resentful and angry hearing-impaired daughter. It deserves to be noted here that she actually is deaf and has been since birth. The film should be commended for casting appropriately, but it wouldn’t matter were she not able to hold up her part of the film to the degree that she does. I repeat: perfect. You could call her the movie’s real hero, and you would be right. This is perhaps the best place to note that while I detected no place where the characters were named on screen, they are named in the credits: members of the Abbott family, who just don’t call each other by name, much, as they are the only folks around and they happen to know who they are. And now that I’ve told you they have names, you can now forget that without penalty. You will know who they are too.

Thank you for taking some time to chat about your story. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired “Leviathan Sings to Me in the Deep”?

There are two answers to this, one geekier than the other. The first is that I’ve always been fascinated by whales. Their incomprehensible bulk, their music—particularly their music, which is so serene, and beautiful, and painfully, painfully in contrast to the violence we’ve visited upon them. The second is that I’m obsessed with the videogame series Dishonored, which is set in a world built on a massive whaling industry, with its technology powered by volatile, frosted blue-white canisters of thick whale oil, magical charms carved from whalebone, and an enigmatic god who lives in a void where whales swim among the inky black. I love Dishonored’s meaty, grimy aesthetic to bits, and it was a big influence on this story. . . . Also, one of my favourite YouTubers (bit.ly/1tzyc56) wrote a fansong for the first Dishonored game, with a haunting chorus that goes “Shades of the whales in the painted deeps /Maimed and impaled in their pain they sleep.” The first note of this story chimed in my brain while I was listening to that song, and I think I had it on loop for most of the time I spent writing it. As for my process, it’s changed a lot since Clarion West. I like language that’s evocative and visceral, that’s located in the body, so I try to extract taste and touch and smell and colour for a reader to experience. I’m very much the kind of writer who has to know how the story is going to end before I can begin—of course, the ending I have in mind usually changes by the time I get there, but it’s important to me to work towards some idea of what kind of emotion or idea I want to leave a reader with as they finish. The atmosphere is evocative. I found myself thinking of Moby- Dick and H.P. Lovecraft at different points. What kind of research was required in order to do this story justice?

Oh, my Google search history was a joy while I was writing this—it ranged from “what does whale meat taste like” (there’s a whole Quora page of people weighing in) to “how many barrels of oil does a sperm whale provide” (which led me to discover that my first draft had erroneously tripled the count, thereby accidentally introducing the titular leviathan ten pages earlier than intended!), and even “he’s-at-homes” (which, if you were curious, were plaster dildos the wives of whalers were rumoured to employ during the long months their husbands were away at sea). The deepest rabbit hole I went down was when I discovered a batch of digitized ships logs from vessels—some of them whaling ships, some of them not—from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A lot of these were nigh-illegible to me, not because of handwriting or deterioration, but because they were densely packed with absolutely fascinating jargon—I remember struggling to translate something like “the starboard wildcat refused to take the chain so we had to take the anchor with the devil’s claw” (my best guess is that it has something to do with a windlass). Regardless, the digitized logs were probably the most valuable thing I found in terms of research. They gave me a tone and voice to emulate, period-authentic jargon to make it real, and most importantly a picture of the preoccupations of daily life on a whaling ship—winds, direction, repairs, etc.—so I could shatter that picture when the voyage went terribly off course.

As I read the story, I thought about how technology is often developed and used for violent purposes before consideration is given to how it might be used to benefit society in other ways. Is this a theme you feel strongly about? Does your work tend to explore particular themes?

I think the character of technology is determined by the people who control it. The captain is hungry for fame. Glass is hungry for knowledge, I suppose, but also for recognition, fueled by hubris and a belief that science conquers all. The industry they’re both part of—and by extension, I suppose, capitalism—is always hungry for more; more profit, more money, more returns. So, of course, the technology they implement is meant to feed their hunger, without a thought to those they devour. In the end, they discover that when you try to steal the voices of your victims to turn them against them, you might not have control over what those voices choose to say. The theme of hunger shows up a lot in my work. The other story I have out at this time, in issue two of Anathema Magazine, is about a Bengali foodie who ends up possessed by a hungry ghost—and both it and this story were part of my MFA thesis, which was a collection of short stories centered on hunger and consumption. I’m fascinated by our complicated relationship with food—some of my academic interests are horror cinema and Gothic literature, and food shows up richly in both. Both thrive on rupture and destabilization, on opening the door to let the dark things in the night come in, and it’s no surprise that this often means reminding us how helpless we are when hunger comes knocking, whether our own or someone else’s. Who decides what’s a delicacy and what’s disgusting? How does food intersect with gender, in terms of whose bodies are rendered consumable and whose appetites are catered to? How do we negotiate our own appetites—or harness our own hunger to turn against those who want to consume us whole?

The ending left me satisfied, but with questions of what will happen when the crew of the Herman run into other whale ships. Why did you choose to end the story at this point? What would you like an ideal reader to take away from this story? Well. They’re not going to look like humans by that point. Nor are they going to be able to communicate with their fellow humans, except in whalesong, which we already know whalers aren’t particularly sympathetic to. They are, in fact, going to look exactly like the creatures they once hunted. So . . . I think good horror is as dependent on what you don’t describe as what you do. An incomplete glimpse—like the eye under the water, leaving you struggling to comprehend the whole. A fragment, a shadow, angles that don’t cohere. The unsettling implications, left unsaid. There’s also the fact the story isn’t just in first-person, but quite literally in the form of a journal. It seemed apt to end at the moment the writer of that journal realizes he is about to lose both his ability to write and his human voice. As for what I’d like a reader to take away from this story . . . I hope it will make them think about music, and violence, and ignorance, and empathy, and the pain we’re willing to inflict on others in the pursuit of our own appetites.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this story? What’s next for you?

This story was my very first sale—not my first pro sale, but my first sale, period, and I feel so incredibly lucky to have it be at a market like Nightmare. I’ve had another story come out since I sold this, and I have work forthcoming at Fireside this year. I’ve signed on as Assistant Editor for Glittership (glittership.com), a queer SFF podcast that does absolutely brilliant work. And finally, I just successfully completed my MFA! Where do I go from here? Well, it’s going to depend on how well I navigate the shark-infested waters of the American immigration system— but I certainly plan to keep writing, and hope to start moving beyond short stories and experimenting with interactive fiction as well.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell lives in Washington state with her husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow her on Twitter at @WriterOdell. Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro Sandra Odell | 972 words

“Red Rain” jumps off the page, demanding your attention, pummeling you with every visceral detail that sets the horrifying tone for the rest of the story. Tell us something of the inspiration.

Alas, it is not always possible to track all of the various steps that lead to the birth of a story, and certainly isn’t, here. I can say that this story was a shift from a premise I could not make work to one that I could. In the original iteration, the horrific event was a citywide plague of suicide, and the opening fall of bodies from skyscraper altitudes was the result of people leaping from windows, which would have soon given way to the protagonist stumbling through streets where people were doing away with themselves using a variety of methods. Some version of that scenario might still emerge, someday, but I got steered away by practical, niggling considerations like, “How are people getting through the sealed, impact-resistant glass of modern skyscrapers, in the numbers this image suggests?” Then came the thought, “Isn’t it scarier if the event is even more inexplicable than that, and they’re falling from even higher up?” The supposition I got bogged down in led to the one I ended up using, instead.

The story held elements of Guernica, of recent mass deaths caused by intentional violence, of natural disasters that defy reason and pile the bodies higher. In many respects, the second-person nature of the questioning narrative levels the playing field for the readers, serving as a reminder that this could happen to them, that they are next. Do you feel it is the events themselves or the inevitability they represent that is the true horror of this story?

The events are horrific, obviously, but I think the story’s most horrific aspect is the clear sense that this catastrophe is a world-ending event, still in its earliest stages. Honestly, I could have started the narrative twenty minutes or an hour later, and it would have been even nastier.

While I appreciated the unanswered “why?” of this event, some readers may feel cheated that you didn’t wrap everything up with a neat little bow. What, if anything, do you feel an author owes a reader when crafting a story?

The science fiction genre’s obsession with rational explanations has its place, mostly when the stories are about the nuts and bolts, but this hunger for “why?” sometimes pollutes the reaction to stories where that is just so, so not the point. There have been times, in the past, where stories that left that out were slammed for failing to provide what the author was really under no obligation to provide. I wrote one fantasy “The Thing About Shapes to Come” (bit.ly/2GVQtEC) about an inexplicable event where the focus was on human response to that event, where some anal-retentive readers were so angry that I never explained why the central strange stuff happened (even though the story itself comes out and says, in a paragraph all by itself, that the explanation is unknown to humanity and beside the point), that I was driven to the frustrated public response, “All right! It was radiation from space!” An empty justification that added nothing. If any genre has a history of inexplicable events that exist only to bring extremes of human nature into sharp relief, it’s horror. Night of the Living Dead actually offers a few lines of lame explanation as to why corpses suddenly became ambulatory, but that explanation was a vestigial remnant of the radiation-based horror movies of the 1950s, and was quickly abandoned by the sequels, as well as by the hundreds of iterations the film inspired. You don’t need to know why. It happened. Hugger-mugger about ancient cursed books, and magic amulets, or alien energies, or so on, can be distractions. Finger-waving. What the author owes the reader is what belongs in the story, and not one line more. “Red Rain” is framed in such a way that everyone can see themselves in the story. Where are you in the narrative? Did Adam- Troy Castro make it onto the page in any way?

I’m the seventeenth corpse from the right, buried twenty layers down, near the hot dog stand.

Much of your work is intended for more mature audiences, yet you also penned the wonderful Gustav Gloom novels for middle-grade readers. What would you say the biggest difference is between writing for older vs. younger readers? Are you more mindful of the subject matter or approach?

There’s surprisingly little adjustment involved. Sure, I had to stay away from some nasty elements, but I’m fond of pointing out that the Gustav Gloom series, popularly (and I happily assert, justifiably) praised as a fun romp suitable for eight-year-olds, includes in various forms dark places, otherworldly forces, a serial killer, the murder of a pregnant woman, the kidnapping and imprisonment of children, threats of torture, Lovecraftian planes, and lots and lots of monsters. There are similar horrors in the Oz and Harry Potter series, also deemed suitable for kids. The trick was to know where the line was and go as close to it (and sometimes over), as I could.

Writers are always encouraged to remember self-care, to be mindful of the how often and why they do something. Still, self-care can be indulgent and fun. Do you have a particular indulgence or favorite meal that puts a smile on your face?

Carrots, cats, Words with Friends, pizza, blackjack, being regularly needled by the wife. ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell lives in Washington state with her husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She is a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow her on Twitter at @WriterOdell. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 93 words

Coming up in July, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Alison Littlewood (“Ways to Wake”) and Caspian Gray (“Kylie Land”), along with reprints by Ray Cluley (“Bones of Crow”) and Kelley Armstrong (“A Haunted House of Her Own”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Nightmare and/or Lightspeed. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Drip (d.rip/john-joseph-adams) and a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version If you enjoy Nightmare and Lightspeed and my anthologies, our Patreon and Drip pages are a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon and Drip? There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising. While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Drip and Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed). Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie- publishing tools, we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects. Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Drip or Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Backer or Patron? Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon or Drip, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally. By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You! If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john- joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios Also Edited by John Joseph Adams The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare (and/or Lightspeed), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2 The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.