Fantasy Magazine Issue 15, June 2008

Table of Contents

The Lodger at Wintertide by E. Catherine Tobler (fiction) His One True Bride by Darja Malcolm-Clarke (fiction) Sorrowbird by Sean Markey (fiction) Marrying the Sun by Rachel Swirsky (fiction)

Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky Author Spotlight: Darja Malcolm-Clarke

About the Editor

© 2008 Fantasy Magazine www.fantasy-magazine.com The Lodger at Wintertide

E. Catherine Tobler

Sibley set dinner in front of the nursery children, beef stew and thick slices of bread from which they could pluck the carrots and soft middles respectively. Naughty children, she signed to them as she took her seat at the head of the table and spread her napkin over her lap. A chorus of waving hands answered her, fingers rippling in silent laughter. What will Silversack think when he arrives to carrots instead of cookies? The kitchen door banged open and Sibley alone turned toward the sound, looking at the widow Nek who entered on a gust of cool wind. Her cheeks were flushed with color, snow melting against her temples. Sibley smiled at the woman who had raised her, but Nek was in no mood for niceties. The lodger is here, in his room, Nek signed. Sibley pushed back from the table, turning over the salt cellar. Her napkin fell to the floor where the ginger cat pounced upon it. Joni dipped her licked fingers into the spilled salt before she righted the cellar. Locked himself in! Nek signed while she paced, the abrupt turn of her body placing gaps within her dialogue, but Sibley understood well enough. Silversack was here and rather than go straight to the town square as he had done for the past seven years he had taken to Sibley’s parson’s room, where he normally lodged and– –locked! My candles are going to waste. Nek’s hands cut sharp angles through the air. She normally spoke with reserve, her hands rounded and slow, but tonight she could not disguise her anger. Sibley pictured the town square illuminated with a year’s worth of golden beeswax candles, each made by the widow, waiting for Silversack. When Sibley signed to Nek, she was mindful of the children who watched the scene with widened eyes, having abandoned both stew and bread, even the soft buttered middles. I will speak with him, Sibley signed. If something was wrong, she would try to fix it. She couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing the children, of their seasonal hopes written in careful letters, bound with ribbons and set into the letter-carrier’s basket, going unacknowledged. For the first time in the seven years of his coming, Sibley had sent her own wish, as heartfelt as any the children had written. Joni pulled on Sibley’s sleeve. Has Silversack come? Her small hands moved more precisely than they ever had and Sibley smiled. After months of long therapy Joni could now make herself understood, despite the broken fingers she had suffered a year ago. Last wintertide, Silversack brought her a game of cords and ribbons, which helped strengthen her fingers as well. No, Sibley signed carefully. Just an old friend. Would Silversack lodge here? She wriggled her fingers in laughter against Joni’s cheeks. Eat your carrots and he may yet come. Entrusting the children to Nek, Sibley left the kitchen, drawing her coat from the peg beside the door before stepping into the snowy night. She pulled the coat on and looked down the length of the long covered porch. What had changed that Silversack would seek solace rather than those who gathered to see him? He would know they were waiting. Every year, the town looked forward to his arrival at the turn of wintertide, when the days were once again more bright than dark. Sibley knocked on the door and when there came no answer, feared that he had gone when no one was looking. He went to the great cities when he was not in their company, places of sound and spoken conversation. He had told them of such places, but Sibley could only imagine them. She tried the doorknob. It didn’t move and she felt a great relief. He was still inside then–unless he had tried the window. Sibley peered around the corner of the house to check the window. “Miss Tellan?” She straightened and managed a smile for Silversack who stood in the doorway of the parson’s room. Tall, his hair damp from snow, he still wore his gray coat, but it was unbuttoned, red scarf in a tangle at his throat. The children had knit him the scarf, each taking a turn, each producing a length of wool unlike the one before it. He wore it every year. I thought– “You thought I went out the window,” he said. He didn’t return Sibley’s smile. His face was more stern than Sibley could ever remember seeing it. His eyes, the color of toasted nuts, appeared even darker tonight. Sibley blushed. I’ve known many children who prefer windows to doors when it comes to leaving a room. Not that you’re a child by any means– She felt absurd and gratitude flooded her when Silversack stilled her hands by covering them with his own. He was warm and smelled like the fire beyond the door. “Come inside,” he said. It was a simple room, with a narrow bed, a small table with chair, a chest of drawers. Sibley let it to travelers throughout the year for enough coin to ensure the children had a surprise or two during their time with her. The town elders would pay her for Silversack’s time when he left; no one ever suggested that he pay–they were all too fearful that he and his sack would not return the following year. This was the first year Sibley shared that fear. He sat on the bed and clasped his hands before him. Sibley longed to hear him speak again. When he had first arrived, lost in a storm, the idea that a speaking people existed astonished her. His voice was a miracle, a sound she had only dreamed before. The cities were full of such people, he told her. Sibley could not believe it, even though Nek had mentioned the distant cities to her. Visitors to the village were rare, but it always seemed to Sibley that none of them spoke. None before Silversack. That first day, Sibley made him speak until he begged off, said his voice was tired, but the next day he’d sung a song for her, and the day after, and the day after. Silver– “My name is Camden Druce,” he said. “Not Silversack.” The tone in his voice made Sibley withdraw. In her years of knowing him, she had learned how his voice had tones, as the river had tones; quick and merry or slow and grim. He was the half-frozen river now, hard and strange. “I never wanted to be that–never meant it.” Sibley went to the table with its chair and sat. His sack sat in the center of the table, drawn shut, packed with less than it had held in years prior. The idea that it could possibly contain Sibley’s own wintertide wish abandoned her. It was folly all along, she decided. How foolish she had been to wish for such a thing, to speak the way Silversack– The way Camden Druce did. His sack did not hold a voice for her, nor picture books for Laci, nor glass marbles for Toma. “It was your letter, Sibley.” She looked across the room at him, his face a dance of shadow and light from the fire. He peeled his coat off and left it on the bed, to join Sibley at the table. He loosened the bag strings and pulled the mouth of it wide. He dumped the insides out, scattering clothing, letters, small bottles, and loose coins over the table. No wishes. He picked up one letter. Sibley recognized the paper as her own, handmade by Nek when her hands didn’t bother her. Sibley didn’t want to hear Camden’s voice shape the words she had written, didn’t want the absurdity of her wish spoken aloud in this room or any other. She lunged across the table, catching the edge of the page. It ripped as Camden pulled backward. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve memorized it,” he said, and still spread the torn and wrinkled page upon the table. “It was this letter that proved to me I couldn’t do this any more.” His blunt fingers smoothed the page down. “Gifting children with toys is one thing, but to give a young woman a voice is something I cannot do. I never meant to give you that hope.” Sibley closed her eyes, feeling a great breath leave her. When Camden’s warm hand covered hers, she kept her eyes shut for a moment longer, wanting to believe as a child might that this was all a dream, a terrible one at that, and that soon she would wake. She would find Silversack with the children in the square, gifting them with kindness, lifting little Tola in his arms to dance. When at last she did look at him, he looked older and more tired than she had ever remembered; as old and tired as she felt tonight, cold seeping into her bones as it never had before. Sibley withdrew her hand so she could sign. A foolish wish. “Never that.” Camden shook his head. The end of his scarf slipped loose with the motion, tumbling to the table where it covered Sibley’s written words. “It came from your heart and I knew I couldn’t lie to you–you of all people. I am not anything special, Sibley. You have taken me in believing it to be true, but I’m just a man. A traveling man who one year amused some children and thought to do it again the next.” Camden took her hand in his and pressed it against his chest. There, Sibley felt the warmth of him, and the pounding of his heart, much as any man’s, steady and true. “I have something to ask of you this year,” he said. Sibley had no idea what she might give him, but nodded. “You seek a voice, but I seek the silence of this place. I would like to live here, Sibley, among you and your people.” What made him seek their silence, she wondered. Was it the thing that made him shelter within these walls when he would normally be celebrating with all the town in the square? The elders would never turn this man away, she knew. They would never say no to someone who had given them all so much. Sibley stood, feeling the keen need to leave this room. It was too warm and Camden was too strange by half. The heart of a man perhaps, but not the man she had known these past years. I will speak with them, of course, she signed and Camden smiled. “Thank you, Sibley.” He said it and signed it at the same time. It did Sibley good to see his hands make the familiar motion. Sibley left and stood for a long time outside the closed door. She twisted her thin coat in her hands and stared ahead of her. Why would a man who could speak in such beautiful tones wish the silence of her people? Sibley watched the snow softly falling and heard the distant whicker of a horse, and could make no sense of the request. Still, she had to tell them. Sibley returned to the kitchen, to find that Nek had somehow convinced the children to eat their carrots. The children applauded themselves and pointed with great enthusiasm at Mit’s mouth, open and full of half-chewed carrots. Sibley shook her head. Mit closed his mouth and continued to chew. Shall we walk to the square? Nek asked Sibley. Sibley shook her head and said nothing. The meal was slow and when finished, Sibley bundled the children in their boots and coats. Not even gloves could hide the excitement of their hands, flying in a rapid conversation that Sibley didn’t fully grasp. She shooed them out the door as their parents arrived to collect them and promised she would be there soon. Nek caught Sibley by the arm and pulled her back inside when the last child had gone. You have sent them to an empty square, haven’t you? Sibley made an attempt to walk past and begin clearing the table, but Nek sidestepped in front of her. Not empty. But no Silversack. You tell me–what has happened? Is he unwell? Dodging her foster mother’s questions would only prolong the agony of the truth. Sibley shook her head. His name is not Silversack and there are no gifts. His name is Camden Druce and he wishes to live with us. Sibley paused before adding, I must speak with Elder Bret. Nek’s shoulders slumped and she took a step backward. Sibley caught her before she tumbled into the dinner dishes.

***

Elder Bret’s soft, fat hands fluttered in the air with his laughter when Sibley brought him Camden’s request, thick fingers cutting through the dust and sun streaked air that filled his office.No one will believe he is not Silversack, Bret signed. They will come to whatever house he takes and make wishes of him. Bret shuffled through a drawer filled with papers and withdrew a sheaf. He slapped it on the desk and dust swirled upward. Here, the Lun place, he can occupy that. You will take him? See him settled? You do it so well.Camden was no child in need of a nurse, but Sibley still agreed. Of course.Demand no moneys, Sibley. Silver–that is, Mr. Druce, is quite welcome to the place, for as long as he so wishes, may the Luns lightly rest.Sibley left the stuffy office for the cool morning. The town spread below her in every direction, coated in snow which glimmered in the morning’s sun. From the end of the elder’s path, she could see the Lun house, isolated in a stand of snowy fir trees. Camden would be alone up there, so if it was silence he sought, he would have a good portion of it. On returning home, she found a small gathering of people on her porch, each one of them quite curious as to what the elders meant to do with this man, this gift-giver, who wanted to settle among them. Sibley waved for silence. Leave him be, she signed and tried to push her way through, but they would not let her pass. Sibley, we have only ever taken one other person in– Sibley bristled at Habon’s reminder, but Ayl’s hand on Sibley’s arm calmed her. Sibley was but a child, what could we have done, leave her in the ravine? Ayl asked. –he is so unlike us– Everything will change. Has he explained his reasons, Sibley? Why would such a man stay here? We do not want him here! Is he guilty of a crime? The last had never occurred to Sibley and she couldn’t allow herself to believe it now, not after having seen Camden’s face. What upset them, Sibley wondered; was it the idea of a speaker living among them, or that they had lost an icon to the children? The children would learn that Silversack was a ordinary man, and life would no longer be so magical. As much as she wanted to tell them that life would not change, there was no denying that it always did. He has been given the Lun place, Sibley signed, and would no doubt appreciate time to settle in before you overwhelm him with requests– Goss took offense at Sibley’s words. We would do no such– His wife nudged him. You know you would, Goss. Sibley left them to their bickering, stepping into the house and closing the door behind her. Nek was seated by the fire in the kitchen, Camden handing her a spool of thread for her darning. Sibley watched them from the doorway, hidden in shadows, listening to Camden’s smooth voice as he told Nek how pleased he was at the prospect of settling here. Nek said nothing, her hands filled with mending, but her brow was narrowed, angry. “Sibley. Did you speak with Elder Bret?” Camden signed and spoke both, allowing Nek access to their conversation. Sibley nodded. He has granted your request, Camden. I am to take you to your new house. “Shall we go now?” Camden picked up Sibley’s coat and hand, and cast a glance over his shoulder. Nek had not moved from the fireside, nor did she set her mending aside to greet Sibley. “I’m not certain Nek wants me here.” He signed even this, but garnered no reaction from Nek. Nek is cross with you, Sibley allowed as they made their way through the town toward the Lun house. You cost her a good many candles. “Easily compensated,” Camden said. She works an entire year on those candles. “Another reason to let the charade die,” Camden said. “I never intended for anyone to go out of their way.” And we never intended to become so attached. Sibley nodded to those they passed. Everyone seemed to watch them as they made their way, the adults more than the children. She breathed a little easier by the time they reached the Lun house and was able to close the door on those few who had deigned to follow them so far. Sibley didn’t know what to do with Camden now. See him settled, Bret had said, but Camden knew their town already. He knew where the market was, and no doubt knew how to make his own bed up. He was no child in need of a caretaker such as herself. The Lun house was filled with furniture, draped with cloths to save them from dust. Camden pulled one of these free to reveal a cabinet filled with pottery dishes. “What happened to them?” Their carriage overturned and they were thrown down the hillside. They could not summon help–could not call out. Sibley frowned. Elder Bret found them a week or so later. “Ah, Sibley, that’s terrible. Have they any family left?” That was the end of them. Sibley opened Camden’s sack and withdrew what little clothing he had brought. Everything looked like it had been hastily gathered. Did you leave in a hurry?

***

He explained it like this.Camden lived a simple life, one without complication or worry. He was born of good parents and maintained a respectable position (that of apprentice to a master painter) in the busy city of Goldleaf until one day his path chanced to cross that of a woman so beautiful, he would have given anything to possess her. Here, Sibley could not help but roll her eyes, for what woman likes to hear such a thing, when it has never been said of herself?Camden needed to possess the woman, without understanding why. He had lived a quiet and happy life until his path crossed Rhona’s. This crossing involved caged birds and a gun, and on this Camden would say little. During her time in his city, Rhona had no time for him; he was a much younger man, he told Sibley, and knew little of women. He could not understand why she refused his every offer.He learned that Rhona did not live in Goldleaf, but in Silverwood, a city Camden had long heard of, but had never visited. He longed to see Silverwood, and set out so that he might understand the woman through her city. Silverwood was idyllic, perched on the edge of the land, its coastlines and rivers dropping away in cliffs that plummeted to the crashing sea. The city enchanted Camden. He lost himself in its streets, its people; the city awakened a voice inside of him and said “write these words, paint these skies,” and he did. Camden almost forgot entirely about Rhona–Such is the way of a young, wandering man, Sibley signed and Camden shushed her. –until once again their paths crossed. So had Silverwood changed him, browning his skin, strengthening his hands, putting thoughts other than beautiful women into his head, Rhona now took interest and welcomed him into her home where she said “paint these lips.” Rhona thus became patron and lover both, but as the seasons turned, Camden felt the tug of his home, and he left Silverwood and Rhona and everything he had learned of them both. Headed straight home and spent a winter there, until once more spring’s warming breezes called to him and made him crave the touch of salt water on his skin. He gathered his supplies and a small paper heart that he had painted for Rhona, golden and so bright it seemed a fragment of the sun itself. Once more, Camden set himself upon the well-worn road between the towns, but winter was not yet done; it was false spring who led him far from home. He was forced into the deep forest where a young woman found him and guided him into her village. It was a village he had heard stories of, the place his parents told him the silent folk left the cities for. Even now they continued to go, seeking the silence of their own kind. Camden gifted her with the painted heart and this young woman’s face brightened so that Camden didn’t mind losing Rhona’s present. Something in this girl spoke to him, something he was at a loss to explain to Rhona once he reached her. Year after year, Camden left Goldleaf before wintertide, to make his way to the village, and learned the silent conversation the people made with their hands. He had no idea the impact he had on the inhabitants until he received a letter from a young woman, asking him to gift her with a voice.

*** But that isn’t the full story, Sibley said after tossing aside another of the cloths they had folded. She didn’t want to hear more about her letter. You mean to stay in the village now. What has become of Rhona?“That was the end of her. Not dead, but now a part of my past. I could not explain this place to her, and even if I could, she would never understand.”Sibley was sure she understood. Camden would one day leave this place as he had left Goldleaf, and Silverwood. For whatever reason, whatever thing that tugged at him, he would be as transitory as he ever had been in her life.This saddened her, as much as losing Silversack had. Sibley had thought, over the course of her work with the children, that letting go came easily to her. When the children were grown and no longer needed her care, she sent them into the world, to the public school where they would learn everything she could not teach them. She said goodbye as easily as she breathed. But she did not want to say goodbye to Camden, not when they were only coming to know each other.Still, she rose now and signed, I will leave you to settle in–you know the market and how to make your bed?Camden smiled at that, balling a dusty cloth against his chest. “I do. Thank you, Sibley.” She nodded and crossed to the door and as she reached for the knob, Camden cleared his throat. Sibley looked back at him. Sibley. He signed the name, his left hand curving into a cup while his right hand balanced it. It was the first thing she had ever taught him to sign. It made Sibley’s breath catch unevenly in her throat. Sign my name. Sibley signed his name, her flat right hand covering the stone of her left. Camden. How similar a motion, she thought. If he meant to say more, he left it unspoken now. He turned to his cleaning and Sibley slipped out the door, into the graying afternoon.

***

They spent their afternoons together when Sibley’s schedule with the children permitted her to. The children often wished to spend time with him, though Joni remained half scared of Camden, telling Sibley she didn’t know what to make of him; how could Silversack also be this man?Sibley and Camden would often walk through the woods, picking wildflowers which Sibley would braid into garlands. On these walks, she usually saw the children hiding behind trees. Sibley did not rouse them from their secret places; she let them watch, hoping to show them that Camden and Silversack were one and the same, both kind men with gifts to offer.Without their knowing it, he began to gift the children daily: a special smile, a swing in strong arms for the bravest among them, small portraits of themselves and their world. Once, Joni briefly threaded her fingers through Camden’s and they walked four paces together before she fled.Sibley saw herself in these children, stalking Camden as though he were an animal, something unknown to them and possibly dangerous, for she often watched him without his knowing. As Camden had once fallen in love with the city of Silverwood, so now he seemed to love Sibley’s village. She watched him from the shelter of trees as he sketched a stand of trees, and later added paint to them. Camden liked to spend long hours on the riverbank attempting to tame the wild water onto his canvas.Once, left alone in Camden’s kitchen, Sibley found a collection of small bottles which contained slight amounts of liquid. Being certain she was alone, she sipped one which caused her throat to tingle and burn. It was after this that she woke the next morning, hearing a hum in her throat.Camden had sent for many large canvasses from Goldleaf, and they arrived one afternoon, the mail carrier unloading each carefully from his cart and placing them on the covered porch. Each was packed in planks of smooth wood. Sibley didn’t want to see Camden’s work; didn’t want to know him any more than she already did. Someday he would leave, she reminded herself. He was a lodger, transient. As he had left Rhona and Silverwood, someday he would leave this village, too. But Camden worked the wood boxes open with a small hammer, prying the nails loose to toss them into a small pot. Sibley chewed on her bottom lip, jumping as Camden pulled the first side of wood away. She found herself looking at a foreign, yet familiar sky, a clear blue she had never before seen. The sky seemed fragile, framed on one edge with fluttering, silvered leaves, until it solidified across the clouded horizon, in shades of gold and orange. What were the words that would describe how Sibley felt at the sight of this image? She did not know them in any language, could not even say them with her hands. “Sunrise in Silverwood,” Camden said. “What do you think?” He stepped back to look at it, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sibley?” Sibley turned from Camden and his art and fled the porch. She ran into the firs that covered the property, cresting a small hill that overlooked the river. Ice still clung to the banks, the water having carved a sure path down the middle. “Sibley?” She heard Camden come through the trees behind her, boughs whispering as he stepped into the small clearing. He lay a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Are you all right?” She turned, her hands angry in the air between them. Why could you not bring me a voice? Why? She pushed him away from her, slapping his hands back when he tried to hold her. Sibley felt the tears and she turned before Camden could see them. She fled up the riverbank, through thickening trees, until she could run no more. She fell to the damp ground, curled her hands into the ground, and heard the ragged sobs that poured from her mouth. She pressed her hands over her face and heard a low moan. She saw no animal in the trees and heard this moan again and took it for her own. She rocked, back and forth, training the moan into a hum, feeling the vibration of her throat under her dirty fingers.

*** She explained it like this.It was something she had done as a child, a half-remembered game. If she closed her eyes, she could feel the jostling motion of the carriage and heard laughter.If she turned to her left, she would see Father there, with his hair gleaming in the sunlight, fingers poised to tickle her. Sibley would fall into Mother’s lap and her father would tickle until she shrieked with laughter and begged him to stop. Begged with her voice and not her hands. Late at night, she would curl under the blankets and hum to herself, and feel the strange motion her throat made when she did it. Other times, she would lay with her head on Brother’s stomach, and his head on their Sister’s, and Sister would laugh, and Brother would laugh, and Sibley would laugh. And it was a sound that was all too fleeting, because when they all died in a tumbling carriage–all except Sibley who was found some days later–there was nothing more to laugh about.

***

“Drink this.”Camden offered the tall glass of bubby liquid to Sibley, green like the tall, blowing grasses in Goss’s field. Sibley took it and sipped, and found it sweet, like berries. It tasted like the liquid in Camden’s small bottles.”This will give you a voice,” Camden said.Sibley choked and spat and Camden pounded on her back. She wiped her mouth dry and stared at him, signing then with her wet hand.What do you mean? You said you could not– He lifted a small bottle, one Sibley recognized from his shelf. “You are convinced I can give you a voice. Drink it.” Sibley drank. She took a glass of the brew every time they were together, and if her schedule did not allow it, she found a small bottle of the potion waiting outside her door at the end of her day. It wasn’t what she expected–but then she didn’t know what she had expected when she asked Camden to give her a voice. How did one give a voice? Winter slipped into spring and spring into summer and still Sibley had no voice. Maybe it could not be gifted. She would often catch herself humming as she worked and the children would press their fingers against her throat to feel the vibrations there. They would laugh with their hands, waving and silent, so silent Sibley could not stand it, for she had begun to remember real laughter. She tried to make this sound as she walked alone up the riverbank, through the firs and a rain that had fallen off to a gentle mist, but could not. She closed her eyes and remembered the laughter in the carriage–and the shriek of the horses as they rounded a blind curve and encountered two more horses. Tangled, shrieking– Sibley opened her eyes to a real shriek. The river before her was storm-swollen, angry and lashing, and Camden flailed within the riot. He tumbled over once and twice, struggling to make his way to the shore. As he made progress, the water slapped him back and over and under, until he hit a downed tree, and went under once and for all. “Camden!” Sibley stumbled down the bank and leapt into the waters, letting them carry her toward the tree and Camden. She grabbed the tree and the water sucked her under, swirling and blinding. But amid the chaos, Sibley found Camden’s paint-stained hand, and she dragged him toward the tree. She wrapped his arms around her, and her own arms around the trunk, and together they held on until they could carefully make their way to the bank. Camden? Sibley turned him on his side. He spluttered water, but was breathing, and somehow smiling. “I was painting,” he said, “and the bank gave way.” He closed his eyes and rested his head on the muddy ground. “The bank gave way.” Stupid to be out in this weather! she chided. “You’re one to talk,” Camden said with a laugh. His muddy hand fumbled with hers. “You spoke, Sibley.” Sibley twisted away, angry with him; angry that he could have been so easily swept away. Stop it– “Sibley–” Camden. “Don’t sign.” He clasped her hands within his own. “Speak to me, with your mouth.” Sibley shook her head, resisting his hold. She turned out of his arms, took two steps away, and slipped on the muddy bank. Camden gently set her upright. “You spoke my name.” Sibley wanted to cry or scream–and scream she did, lifting a voice she had never heard into the trees around them. “Beautiful,” Camden said when she had finished. “Cam-den,” she whispered. He smoothed his muddy hand over her already muddy cheek. “Yes?” Her throat was raw, in need of some of Camden’s drink. Instead, he softly placed his mouth against hers, sending a jolt through her. Your potion worked, she signed against his chest. “Is that what it was?” he asked softly. He brushed the strands of hair from her temple and heck, down her back in a muddy trail. “W-what else?” she asked.

***

He explained it like this.The Tellan family headed to Goldleaf, from the seaside city of Silverwood, having important business in that far city, and Father decided to take the scenic route through the woods. They even ventured to the silent village Father had heard tales about since his own childhood, to see the beautiful handcrafted buildings. Once, all people took such care, Father said, and wanted his children to remember.But as the carriage rounded a curve, the driver did not see another carriage in time, the Lun carriage, as it were. The horses tangled, and they spooked. The horses pulled both carriages into the steep ravine, and though Father cried for help, none came. He was too injured to climb out, and the other man, though alive after the fall, did not call out. Why didn’t he call, Father wondered. The man made intricate motions with his hands that Father could not understand. Perhaps this was how the people of the village spoke, was his second to last thought. His last thought was oh my littlest daughter has lived and how she cries.

***

That’s not–“Not how it happened?” Camden slung mud from his fingers and wiped them down his wet trousers. “Nek told me they found you in a ravine, and she told me too that you cried. Nek says you never made another sound. They cleaned you up, and Nek took you for her own.”Sibley squeezed her eyes shut. Nek’s own family died of a fever. Her husband and infant son, both taken in a month’s time. “She taught you to sign.” Camden came up beside Sibley and gently touched her shoulder. “I saw you when you looked at my painting. Some part of you remembers that sky.” She looked back at Camden, unable to deny his words, nor the fact that she was different from the people of the village. “The people here cannot hear, Sibley. I remember you, even from my first year. You responded to sound when I saw no others who did. You would react to my voice, when the others would not.” I cannot remember living anywhere else, she signed and sank to sit on the muddy bank. Camden lowered himself to sit beside her. “Nek said you were quite young. As little as Mit now.” Four or five winters old, then, she thought. Sibley worried the wet hem of her skirt between her fingers. He is so unlike us. Everything will change. The villager’s words cluttered Sibley’s thoughts. Tell no one of this. Sibley gathered her skirts to stand. She walked away from the river, from Camden, and he let her go.

***

Sibley distanced herself from Camden. He tried his best to fit into the village and the life there; he took to signing rather than speaking. Sibley missed his voice; she missed her own, though so briefly heard.She longed to speak, yet did not. The villagers were right. Everything would change. The life Sibley had led would come to an end. Nek questioned Sibley; what had happened, you no longer see Camden, something is wrong, but Sibley would admit to nothing. She made her days as normal as they could be, caring for the children before their parents came to collect them, making certain the house was in order and that the mending was kept up with.She took to hunting Camden again, seeking glimpses of him near the riverbank. He no longer painted; he would sit watching the water, often with a child in his lap, and sign stories about the world he had come from.A life without cares, he signed to Joni, who had slowly accepted that Silversack would not be coming back. I never lived. Until I came here.Camden loves Sibley. Joni signed the phrase, her hands perfectly fluid yet blurring in Sibley’s vision as she turned away.As the days grew shorter and the leaves departed the trees, Sibley witnessed another change to the village; she saw Camden’s house tucked in the firs, smooth planks of wood that had once protected his artwork now covering the windows. Time for him to wander already? Sibley felt her stomach drop and she ran for her house, clutching her basket of vegetables, spilling only a few. “Nek!” she cried and then remembered Nek could not hear. Nek sat at the fire, working on the basket of mending. The ginger cat pounced on a strand of thread as Sibley rounded her and placed the vegetable basket aside. “W-where is Cam-den?” Sibley spoke the words aloud even as she signed them. The color seemed to drain from Nek’s face. Nek said nothing; she clutched the mending against her chest. Sibley saw Camden’s stack of canvasses stacked neatly beside the fireplace, faces turned to the wall. “He was here,” she said and signed. “Tell me where he’s gone.” Nek shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. She dropped the mending to sign I knew his coming would make you speak, make you leave! Sibley crouched before the only mother she could remember. Tears gleamed on Nek’s wrinkled cheeks, bright in the firelight. Mother. Nek’s gray hair shivered around her face with the shaking of her head. Do you know how I dreaded wintertide? Hated every time you sat down with the children to write their letters. Every year, knowing you might remember to speak when he came. I watched you with him, now and then. Sibley, my child. Sibley recalled the moment she realized, as a small child, that Nek could not hear the sounds around them. Did not know the call of the birds as the sun touched the tops of the trees, or the burble of the river as it slid over rocks. Sibley asked why; why didn’t Nek know these things, and Nek said that they were for a child to know, not an old woman. After years of study, Nek could read Camden’s lips, but she could not hear the voice Sibley had come to cherish. Sibley wished Nek could. Wished, too, that Nek could hear the sound of her own hands in Sibley’s mind; the flutter of spring leaves, the scamper of mice in underbrush. Do you know the road from this place? Only so far as the curve where you were found. Nek sniffled and Sibley fished a handkerchief from her pocket. Camden tells me stories of it. It runs in both directions–it comes and it goes. She winked at Nek. So see, I can come back, Sibley signed. I will come back– but now, I need to follow Camden. He has gone to Silverwood, and you never followed anyone, Nek signed and withdrew a small envelope from her mending basket. Go your own way, child. Sibley opened the envelope to read: if I had your voice, you have had my heart. Sibley moved as only the young can move, swiftly and with ease. She gathered what she needed to, kissed Nek’s cheek, and didn’t worry what the next morning would mean, when the children came and she was not there. Nek would be there; Nek would explain. (She would explain like this: that Sibley had found the thing she looked for every wintertide–her true voice carried in a slim bottle next to a man’s ribs. And better yet, the courage to use it. Nek would say that Silversack too had found what he dreamed of, what kept him on the road these many years: the young woman who stole into his dreams even when he slept with Rhona in Silverwood; guided him out of the stormy woods and into a place of warmth.) Sibley hurried down the village road, and didn’t even pause on the easternmost edge; she kept going, and seemed to know her way, even though her feet had never touched this path. She ran until she gasped for breath, until she noticed a shadowed figure ahead of her, perched atop a boulder. The tail of a red scarf lifted on the breeze. “Cam-den!” His head lifted, turned. He slipped off the boulder, balancing his sack upon his shoulder. Sibley tossed the aged paper heart toward him. She and the heart tumbled into Camden’s hands as the first snow of the season began to fall. E. Catherine Tobler climbed mountains in her youth, in a bright yellow coat, with shoes that were red, yellow, and blue, and made her feel like a clown. She endured. Writing, she decided, is not that much different. Her website can be found at ecatherine.com. His One True Bride

Darja Malcolm-Clarke

“I wish to speak with you on this path and there will be no end to my speaking. You will not be able to do otherwise than listen because I have bound you fast.” —the Holy Spirit to Blessed Angela of Foligno

***

Day of the Smothered Bride

Light came into me again today. I was at worship singing with the other vestal dedicants when it happened —the warmth of it fell over me like a cloak in the chill of the shrine. Others near me in the benches began to whisper. I stopped singing because twice before that had doused the light. This time it brightened. It flickered like a flame and shone outward more and more as the song went on. The other dedicants were making such a commotion that I was afraid Vesta Natali would notice—or worse, the curate at the head of the host would. A girl behind me whispered in my ear, “Margetta, we’re going to tell the Vesta.” I turned around to face her. “No, you can’t,” I said. “Please.” “Leave her alone,” said Eleni beside me. “That’s the light of the Harper,” said the girl. “It’s our duty to tell. He must be seeking a new Bride.” “No, you’re wrong,” said Charis behind her, loud, much too loud. Nearly a vesta herself, she had the elaborate braids afforded the oldest caste of dedicants. “That’s no holy Bride-light. Look at how it sputters and then flames up again. It’s like the witch-globes from the swamp.” The song was drawing to an end, but the girls nearby had abandoned singing altogether, and were whispering and peering at me. As were the boys across the aisle. “Or—I know,” continued Charis, “maybe you’re not pious enough for the Harper. Maybe you’re corrupting the light with an unclean heart.” “Maybe it’s not the Harper’s Bride-light at all,” said the first girl. “It could be something pretending to be the Harper. Something terrible, something masked as Him. Just look at her.” “Don’t listen to them,” said Eleni, putting her hand on mine. “I’ve heard of sometimes how the light comes, but it’s not a Bride-light. I bet that’s what this is.” I didn’t really believe it, but appreciated her saying so just the same. But now the song was done, and the commotion was drawing the stares of the rest of the host. The curate was making his way to the dais, his long silk robes trailing past the first row. Any moment he would notice the disturbance and look down the aisle. “Get down—hide,” said Eleni, so I ducked on the floor, then crawled under the bench. There I stayed. All the while, my light waned and wavered like a witchlight, but it did not dissipate. As the curate went through his address, Eleni reached down and took my hand. She didn’t let go till the end, when my light finally extinguished.

***

Day of the Flayed Bride—Piscuary 1

It is the month named for the time the Harper stood on the banks of the Severen strumming His lyre, giving the Homily of the Fruit and the Flies to passers-by on their way to market. Hearing the homily, the fish in the river leapt onto shore and landed at His feet. They flopped and stared and writhed and died, just to better hear His words for a few rapturous, air-smothered moments. It’s said that the aroma of roses wafted off the dead fish for weeks after that, until one day they simply vanished. I was walking by the river today on my way to the market, thinking about the Homily of the Fruit and the Flies—when suddenly I could hear His voice delivering it. I wasn’t merely remembering Vesta Natali reciting it, droning on in the tones of a mule in labor. No, I heard Him speaking the words low and sweet, His voice like wind-stirred chimes. The waters lapped at the banks of the river. And the witchlight was upon me again. Then He was just there, standing in the grasses preaching, looking at me. I went to Him and fell down at His feet and became like one of those fishes that leapt out of the river, flopping and staring and writhing. The air began to smother the life from me. I could feel myself beginning to die. But now I have woken—woken in my bed smelling of fish and fruit rotted in the summer sun. That is what they flung at me on the riverbank when they saw me flopping about, shrouded in the queer light. They don’t believe I am to be a Bride, but say I am impious or cursed. I don’t know what to think. I wonder what would be more terrible: for folk to decide I must be expelled from the city, or for the Harper to visit me again. ***

Day of the Third Bludgeoned Bride

This morning the Harper’s Bride was found dead in her anchorhold. So this day next year will have a new name. They will not say, though, what that name will be. Vesta Natali announced that there will be no public funeral and that her body will not be placed, as in centuries prior, at the door of the anchorhold to greet the new Bride. Brides die doubly, they say. The first time is when the chosen one is married to Him, and He cleanses her by separating her out from her body. He puts her ghost back in again, newly impervious to the pollution of flesh. It is the greatest honor any would-be vesta may have. The Bride dies a second time in a final rite of purification. It is an honor to be chosen, to dwell in the darkness of the anchorhold, to hear His endless harping and His orations, to live in constant communion with Him. That is why the Brides are remembered by their deaths. I cannot imagine why the officials are refusing the usual rites; why they keep the Bride out of sight. There can be no bad death for a Bride. Still, I do wonder—in dying, did she felt anything like what I did on the Severen’s banks?

***

All Hallowed Brides Day

Before dawn, Vesta Natali fetched me from my bed; I had been called to the curate’s chamber before an assembly of tall-hatted officials. In the chill air I was interrogated—about my light, about the incident on the riverbank. They asked if I knew anything about the Bride’s death. The stink of fear was on all of them. I answered their questions as well as I could, wondering what would happen to me if they found me a liar, or accused me of causing the Bride’s death. They left me in a cloister while they convened, the stone walls so thick all I could hear was my own breathing. When they called me back into their chamber, I could feel the stone of the floor creep up through my slippers into my legs, holding me in place as they made their announcement: they decided He has chosen me; they decided that in seven weeks’ time, I will forfeit my life to be His new Bride. I will marry the Harper. When they pronounced this, I did not know what to feel, so I was glad, and wept.

***

When we were small and had not yet been taken up by the Harporians, Eleni and I would go to see the new Bride—that’s what she was then, new. Her anchorhold, what would be mine hence, was built into the side of the shrine. There was a high window inside so that she could hear the curate’s orations, and there was a window outside where the townsfolk would leave her food. We went to that outside window once and called her. Bride, Bride, we said, but she did not come, and there was no movement in the thick shadows of the hold. Where could she have gone, said Eleni. The Harper must have taken her ghost to walk and sing in the celestial orchards, I said. Her body is lying in there somewhere, still as a corpse. Then the Bride sprung into the window. She had been hiding against the wall listening to us, and she frightened us now making terrible noises with a strange expression contorting her face. Around her head was a halo of ragged, tormented hair and scraps of her wedding gown hung in gray tatters over her like cobwebs in dim corners. She moved back and forth erratically and sang, if it could be called singing. She looked as though she was in some torment of mind, but we knew she was in ecstasy, the only one in all the world in constant communion with the Harper. Her singing, they said, was the attempt of the body to mimic the songs sung in the celestial orchards. As the Bride stood at the window making her terrible sounds, Eleni grabbed my hand and tore me away from the anchorhold. We ran back into the streets where we could not hear her anymore. The sounds might have been the Bride’s body trying to mimic the celestial songs, but to my ears it sounded like her calling, calling, calling us to come back to her.

Day of the Bride Scored a Thousandfold with Oyster Shells

In my room I woke. I found scabs covered my entire body, even my eyelids. I could barely open my eyes to see what had happened. Someone knocked on the door. I heard Eleni call my name, but I could not move my mouth to reply. It grew dark again, or I wasn’t able to see anymore. The scabs began to bleed out, soaking my nightdress and seeping into the sheets. There was a strange odor, but I was not myself and could not place it. Someone opened the door and came in. “You’re going to make us both late,” said Charis, “if you don’t hur— Oh,” she said, exhaling as if she had been struck in the stomach. She brought others. They gathered in my room in silence. Vesta Natali declared, “It’s a sign of the Harper’s blessing,” but she sounded fearful, and I wondered if anyone believed her. “Should we move her to the anchorhold?” said another woman. A man spoke. “Would it be right to take a girl to her bridal chamber unwed? No.” I recognized the curate’s voice, thin and tight as string. “No. She must stay here till the rites are complete.” They left me, and I lay wondering if this or suffocating on the riverbank like a deranged fish would be more like living as the Harper’s Bride in the anchorhold. Once I would have wondered if He would tell me the Homily of the Fruit and the Flies whenever I wished. Now I could not bear to think of it. Then there was the bleating of sheep, and I saw brilliant light through closed eyelids, and He was there with me. He was standing over the bed saying, “My new Bride, my new Bride. All those who have come before you have been but temporary Brides until the time that I found you. When at last we can be together, I will grant you a great gift.” I felt His lips press to my forehead. At that moment, the grip on my flesh released, and I felt the scabs fall off. “I can scarcely bear to wait for the time we will be together,” He said and was gone. It was dark again. I felt like I was drowning, choking on air. In a dream, I heard pounding on a distant door and Eleni calling me. When I woke, Vesta Natali was there at my bedside, tending my body with damp cloths. All the scabs lay around me like shed fish scales. I lifted a cloth and saw that my skin looked as new as an infant’s. Vesta Natali put a fresh sheet on the bed, rolling me from side to side to get it under me. After I had lain in the dark for some time, clean and new and alone, I decided I should go to the evening worship to prevent more whisperings than surely already passed through myriad lips. I dressed, then opened the chamber door and found Eleni waiting for me, hunched over on the floor. “Margetta, are you alright?” she said, leaping to her feet. “What happened to you?” She embraced me. I was glad to see her. “I don’t know,” I said, “I had scabs like all my flesh was a wound, and I bled and bled.” I did not want to talk about the Harper. We walked with the others towards the shrine and I noticed that everyone was dressed for the morning meal. I continued with the rest of them anyway. Everyone nearby me was hushed and regarded me with timid glances. I wondered what day it was. “You’ve not heard about what happened at the Severen near the market yesterday,” said Eleni, dark braids swinging as we walked. “Hundreds of fish leapt out of the waters and onto the bank and died.” “That’s curious,” I said. “They were dead, great waves of them, the moment they landed on the bank. They were dry as bones, like they had been lying in the sun for a week. Like they had been drained of blood and everything else.” “Very curious,” I said, and noticed an odd look in Eleni’s eye. She had stopped walking. “What’s the matter?” I said. “I’ve been waiting outside your door. Margetta, I smelled something peculiar coming from your chamber last night,” she said. “And early this morning I saw Vesta Natali take sheets from your room. She had them rolled up tight, and another blanket over them besides. But she must have been hasty because a sheet corner was trailing behind her. It looked strange, so I followed her to the wash room. When she put the sheets into the vat, it wasn’t blood on the sheet but a yellow oily stain the size of a girl and more. “And then I realized—what I smelled coming from your chamber last night was the smell of dead fish.”

***

I told Eleni that I intended to find out what had happened to the old bride. “What is He doing?” I said. “First my Bride-light is all wrong. Then what happened by the river. Now the scabs and the fish.” She clutched my hand and bit her lip, saying nothing. What was there to say, beyond that something was terribly amiss?“Maybe if we find out what happened to the old Bride,” I said. “Maybe that will help us understand.” The next morning there was a knock at my door. It was Eleni—Eleni, who always knew what to do before she knew what to say. She had spied on Vesta Natali conversing with Charis and overheard where the old Bride’s body was being kept. So under the shroud of night Eleni and I snuck from our rooms to the curate’s cloister to look for her. There, hidden under mounds of carefully piled rugs and ratty tapestries, covered with a cerecloth on a stone bier, we found the old Bride. She no longer had a body, exactly. There were pieces of limbs, and what had once been the torso. And her head. I heard myself cry, how could this be a cleansing, how could this be a cleansing, how? Eleni kept saying my name as she wept. Then she threw a tapestry over it all. She pulled me out of the room and shut the door behind us. It was the second time she had me take leave of that Bride. The fact of such deaths has been written out before us, clear and familiar as the days of the year. It wasn’t until I looked death in the face that I decided I would die only once—that I’d rather die impure than suffer a cleansing at His hand.

***

Feast of the Harper—Dedication of the Bride-About- To-Be

We were gathered outside for the Harper’s Procession. As in centuries past, the Bride About-To-Be walks near the front of the procession donning her black and red vestments. In these robes, I was like my own ghost hovering over my hewn Bride’s body, a spirit newly dead and awaiting Him in the darkness. On the riverbank where the procession would end, I was to cast off the red and black to reveal the white messaline gown beneath. This would be my garb for the remaining six bridal ceremonies; and some weeks from now, it would be my wedding dress. Today, it would represent the Bride as a ghost delivered back into her body by the grace of His harping. I alone amidst all humanity would not be soiled by flesh, because my spirit would not be tied to my body—only wearing it, like a gown. But this transformation would be realized only as a symbol. I would not remain long enough for it to become the truth of me. We were going to leave by dark of night, Eleni and I, after the dedication when they would be certain of my commitment to the Harper. Eleni had found we could flee undetected later that night through a back door in the refectory after all had gone to bed. She had already assembled a pack for our journey. Where would we go? Not to our families, even if we could remember where to find them—they would have to return us to the Harporians. No, we’d go somewhere far away. The curate walked ahead of me, grotesquely tall with his elaborate white hat. Behind me were the vestas, and, far behind the city officials, the dedicants. The parade began with the Harper’s Psalm, the holiest of all psalms on the holiest of days. The procession moved forward now down the avenue, and I with it. The dedicants, the vestas, and the people gathered in the streets sang the Harper’s song. But I was to remain as silent as a fleshless spirit; I was to float along like the ghost they expected I would become. I heard a moaning like wind blowing through corridors, the bleating of lambs, and wind chimes in my ears all at once. The procession slowed and people turned to me. I could not see for the light in my eyes and His singing in my ears. The sound felt like missing a step walking down stairs. I heard Him say close to my ear: “I cannot wait for you any longer, Bride. We must be together now.” I found the ground beneath me. As I was lifted to my feet by hands unseen, I knew something was wrong. Many people were speaking. “Why did—” “Has He come?” “She must finish the procession, come what may.” Someone was coughing. “What’s happening?” “Bride About-to-Be, you must walk.” The curate was standing over me, his voice pulling me back into awareness. “You must walk so you can enact the Harper returning you to your body.” I expected the witchlight to be upon me, but there was none. I smelled a peculiar smell. The curate scowled. People around me were coughing and moving away. I looked around wildly for Eleni, but the dedicants were far at the back of the procession. People were staring. I glimpsed Vesta Natali as she flinched back into the crowd. A putrefaction had filled the air. He, He had done this. On this, the holiest of days, I smelled of rot. That was when I was sure our god had gone mad. “A curse is upon her.” “The Harper has rejected her. Her heart is wicked. They’ve said so all along.” “Witch!” People—vestas, townspeople—moved back, encircling me, and I stood alone in my black and red. Then something struck my shoulder. A stone rolled over the ground. A man shouted, and another, till it was a rush of shouting, and I was being pummeled with stones. I felt someone grab me by the shoulder and pull me back into the crowd. It was Charis. “Get out of here,” she whispered to me, eyes wide. I did what Eleni would do: I ran. I ran out of the procession and pushed through the crowd along the street. The stench was overwhelming; it frightened many back. But others grabbed at me and tried to hold me. A man seized me, grasping my outer red and black robes. I struggled, withdrew one arm from its sleeve and then the other, and slipped away into the crowd. The grasping hands and faces writ with revulsion blurred into a heaving, recoiling terror as I went. I left the city behind. I ran to the banks of the Severen and passed a place rich with reeds. I thought I might duck into them and hide from Him, because I thought He intended to find me by my stench. But I feared my stench was too strong even for the river. So I followed it towards the only place that I could think of, the only place that could offer protection until I could find Eleni and decide what to do. For how could we have known He would try to get me away from His followers? I followed the river for two miles to the swamp outside town, the swamp as stinking as me. But He was there, waiting for me. “My Bride, you escaped. They reviled you, and you have come. They did not know what they reviled,” He exclaimed, hanging in the open air under high trees. “I could not wait any longer. I have been looking for you since the day I came to this world. When I gaze upon you, all who came before you are vanquished from My memory. None will come after you. I have called you here to make you my last Bride. My True Bride.” “What, what do you mean?” I said. “True Bride, I will tear you from your body indelibly, and you will be my Ghost Queen and rule this world along side Me for eternity. You won’t need a final cleansing: You will be with Me forever.” Slowly the world froze in place. All went white. Nothing moved. The only sound was the blood moving through me and the wind blowing around Him. “‘True Bride,’” I said. “How is it that I have been found worthy of this gift?” I could barely speak. There was no air to breathe. There was no escape. The Harper grinned down at me. The sound of sheep bleating filled my ears as He spoke. “Why, you are pure. Now, lie down so that I can grant my gift and rip you from that flesh.” I backed away, but He skirted up to me again, crowding close, chilling me with His wind. “Harper,” I said, my teeth chattering in fright. “I do not welcome this. I do not want to be your True Bride.” I could not bear to look at Him, so I hid my face in the gown. “Do not be afraid,” He said with the voice of chimes. “I will be the kindest of masters to you.” I could not think what to do. I could not run now. “I saw the old Bride,” I said. “I saw what you did to her.” “The Bride Torn Asunder. Yes. I’d nearly forgotten her.” “How many have you. . .ruined?. . .like that,” I said. “Like that? She was the first.” I was shaking. “That was not what I meant.” “Why, you know the litany of their names, True Bride,” he said, impatient. “Pressed Bride, Drowned Bride, Blood-Let Bride, Impaled Twin Infant Brides. Foolish girl. But soon you will know all my secrets, Ghost Queen.” “Please, I beg you—allow me to live in my corpse like the Brides before me did. If I am pure enough to be your True Bride, can’t I keep my body?” But I guessed what He would say. “I am sorry, Queen,” He said, “You cannot rule this world through human flesh, even if it does not spoil you as it did the others.” As He spoke, I realized hope still hung in tatters around me. I sighed. “If that is how it must be.” I said it as if resigning myself. “If that is my only choice, then I have something to ask. The procession that would allow me to act out this change—it ended too early, and I am without my robes.” I displayed the white dress, my wedding gown. “Have mercy on me—could we enact the change before it happens, so that I may prepare myself?” “I am ready and eager to make you my Bride, child,” He said in a voice like lambs. “I cannot wait much longer.” His light had dimmed and I could see he was slavering at the mouth. “I beg you,” I said, shuddering. “If you could retrieve my robes where I lost them in the procession, we could play at how it will go, and I will be more ready to accept my fate, Bridegroom.” At that He reared up, angrily I thought, but then he whisked away, over the swamp towards the city. I was alone. He would not be gone long. Few places could conceal me with the mark He had put on me. But there was one. I collected reeds near the banks of the river, and fled back to the swamp. I stepped ankle-deep into the slime, and it slid between my toes. I stepped in deeper, and it oozed up around my calves. The stench wafted over me, and I felt ill. I stepped in deeper, and it curled around my thighs. The feeling of illness abated, for the smell was nothing I did not already know. I stepped in deeper, quick, and the swamp embraced me around my shoulders like a friend thought lost. I put the reed to my lips and sunk below the surface. I breathed. The air came thin and foul, but I breathed. I do not know how long I was in the black mire before He returned to find me gone. I could hear the bleat of the sheep and the frantic tinkling of chimes behind His wailing: My Bride, My Bride, where have you gone? The swamp clenched at my throat, at all of me, but I held the reed between my lips and breathed and breathed while His voice echoed over and across the swamp and back again. He must have called for a day and a night. Or perhaps it was a week. I do not know. I became faint without food, and the bog pressing against me, and the air coming thinly through the reed. Fear brought my breath too quick, and my nose and eyes were burning, all my skin was burning. He wailed at the edge of the swamp saying, Why have you forsaken me, my Bride oh my Bride? But I did not rise out of the mire, despite that I felt my life leaving me. Better to die there. When at last He had been silent for a long time, and I hoped He had gone back to the shrine to look for me, I lifted my head. I could not see through the slime, and my eyes were near failing. But I did not see His light. I waited, listening for Him. He was gone. I emerged to the sound of a low thrum. I fell on the bank and found myself lying amid rose petals. Rose petals, and maggots. Flies settled upon me, swarming. One bit me. And another. But as I slapped at them I laughed, I laughed because He had not found me, and I was not dead. The rose petals and the maggots covered everywhere as though they had showered from the sky. They stuck to me. Amidst the scent of roses, the air was abuzz with the hatched maggots He left behind. Still, I laughed. Then Eleni was there at my side.

*** When she had cleaned the swamp from my flesh and eyes and nose, when she had set my life firmly back into my body, when she had drawn me into a rough shelter of branches and enormous leaves—then Eleni told me how she came to be there. She told me she couldn’t find me in the commotion, but someone said he saw me run towards the river. “When I heard that, I went and grabbed the pack back at the shrine. I looked everywhere on the banks,” she said, “and wondered if you’d fallen in and drowned,” she said, and crouched down next to me under the secret shelter. “But I kept going and reached the swamp.” She swatted at a fly. “I waited and waited for you, and looked everywhere. Then the Harper came, calling and wailing for you, and I knew I’d come to the right place. I hid in a dead tree trunk the whole time, for a day and a night and today, till he left. Then, there you were, coming out of the far side of the swamp.” “He’ll come back, you know,” I said. “I know,” said Eleni, drawing a thin blanket from the leather pack. She wrapped it around my shoulders. “And I’ll help you hide.” “His mark on me might be permanent,” I said. “Maybe it’s not. Maybe it will fade over time,” she said. “If it doesn’t, I might not be able to ever leave. Or maybe I’d have to go far, far away where there are no Harporians, and where folk have not heard of the escaped putrid Bride. What if I always stink of the swamp? He. . .He is mad, Eleni.” “I think He was already going mad when He first sought you out,” she said. “The Bride-light was never right.” “I think he must have been mad from the beginning, when he first came here.” Evening was fading. Insects thrummed against the coming dark. “We’ll find a way,” Eleni said at last. “We can stay here, at least till I can travel, and hide from Him if I can,” I said. “I’ll be a Swamp Bride for now. Better that than His Bride, pure or True or otherwise.” I pulled the blanket tighter around me. “And Eleni?—I don’t ever want to hear the Homily of the Fruit and the Flies again.” She laughed, a sound akin to wind chimes that made me smile instead of shudder. “We’ll make sure you never have to. I’ll get some reeds from the river at first light. We’ll make a better shelter. We’re both Swamp Brides now,” she said. Witch-globes rose over the green reach of the swamp wheeling, gyring around each other, their weird green light flickering like flames caressed by a breeze. “Look,” she breathed and drew me out of the shelter. The globes danced towards us slowly and bobbed overhead before returning to swoop and nod over the swamp. “No, no more of His homilies,” she said as we watched them. “No more of the curate’s addresses. We won’t braid our hair anymore, if we don’t want to,” she said. “We’ll forget the names of the days of the year,” I said. Eleni put her hand in mine, and with flies worrying at our flesh and rose petals underfoot, we passed the night there, watching the witchlights dance.

Darja Malcolm-Clarke has fiction appearing in Clarkesworld Magazine (“The Beacon” was long-listed for the BSFA for best short fiction of 2007) and in Ideomancer and forthcoming in Greatest Uncommon Denominator. She attended Clarion West in 2004. She holds master’s degrees in Folklore and in English, and is a Ph.D. candidate studying post-WWII speculative fiction. Her non-fiction appears in the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts and The New Weird anthology. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where there are many thunderstorms, which suits her just fine, and she blogs at ombriel.livejournal.com. She is currently writing a fantasy novel. Sorrowbird

Sean Markey

I. How to Build a Mourning Dove

First, take your husband’s awkward, enthusiastic letters from the night-stand drawer, the ones he wrote on his way from England to India. Take those smooth papers and wad them up tight. Keep your sorrow out of your actions; let the sadness of the letters speak. Use your anger and frustration to ball up the papers, and marvel at the unfairness of your life. Use the hurt of your loss to crumple each piece into one tight, circular shape. These papers represent the body of the bird you will make. Consider what the sorrowbird will mean to you: a living worry stone, a brown-gold dream catcher. Then sigh, and speak to your future bird. I know love; love chases wealth all around the world. Love cuts through jungles and lost cities, searching for starlit blue diamonds and exotic spices. Love writes you less often the farther away it travels, and forgets what it once was. Love loses itself in a foreign place and disappears forever. Love never comes home. But your bird does not hear you, cannot help you yet. After you have the love letters pressed into the rough shape of a bird’s body, set them on the table between a vase of dead poppies and the dragonfly glass. You look at the few remaining black flecks of magic clinging to the otherwise empty glass, and feel a similar emptiness at using your magic for the last time. Next, gather autumn leaves with your wicker basket, and imagine you are picking berries. Your sunset-colored dress, the last gift from your husband, flutters against your ankles in October’s breeze. Brace yourself against the chill and carry on. Pretend that every almond-brown leave you pick up is a blackberry pulled from a thorny vine. Pretend every maroon colored leaf is a ripe red strawberry plucked from its delicate stem. It’s important to keep up this ruse as you carry them inside, where you will cut a thousand slanted lines from edge to center. You will rip them from their berry-patch dreams of tall grass and sunlight, and throw them into the reality where they were abandoned by the only thing they ever loved—the ancient, twisted oak. You will dump their situation on them all at once, like cold water on a sound sleeper. They will remember how they slipped from the branch, and no limbs stretched out to catch them. They will remember floating down to the soft mat of their brothers and sisters, while their color changed and bled away with the season. Imagine their screams as you cut, and force them to remember, but it does not break your heart. Your heart cannot be broken down any further; it is not in pieces, it is a fleeting pile of ruby dust. Cut the leaves as fine as you can with your knife; fine enough, perhaps, to catch the currents of air and take off. Fine enough for flight. Now you need a way to bind these dismal leaves as feathers to the bird’s body. In the attic you will find, among the abandoned artifacts of your old life, silver- white cobwebs strung in all the corners. Squint to see better in the dusk-light, and search for the most ancient, dust laden threads. Pull the cobwebs down and gather them around your fingers like pale cotton candy. Downstairs, you will wrap the sticky web around the paper and attach the leaves. It will not resemble a bird at all, but it doesn’t have to. You will place it in its cage and with magic, change the sad artifacts into a living, breathing sorrowbird. You will not keep your mourning dove in a cold metal cage, but in one made from woven briar vines. Leave your shoes beside the door, and take a walk at dawn, when the thick fog paints the world gray. On your way to the edge of the forest, you check over your shoulder and hope to see your husband, lost for so long, making his way home. Your black and orange dress moves against the still morning when you turn, and as always you see only an empty dirt road stretch to the horizon. You arrive and find a briar thicket among tall brown grass, just before it fades into a sharp carpet of pine needles, pine cones, and fallen leaves. Squat down and ignore the sound your knees make as they pop in unison. Grasp the stems where the thorns are fewest, and with your knife, cut the vines away until you count out ten long pieces. Next, step under the pine-branch canopy and glance at your hands. You weren’t careful enough, and scarlet drops well where you punctured the skin. It doesn’t matter; soon you will weave the briars into a cage, an act which will devastate your hands. Ignore the pain and bend down to collect two handfuls of pine needles from the ground and stuff them in the loose pockets of your dress. Notice the protruding orange-brown needles, and remember the scarecrow you and your husband made for the garden a few months before he disappeared on his way to India. The sudden pain surprises you. How can it hurt this much after so long? You hate how the small memories always feel sharper than the constant loneliness; they haunt you then vanish just long enough for you to forget them, and return when you think you’ve buried them for good. Every aching memory will disappear when you bring your sorrowbird to life. With this hopeful thought in mind, you reach down and snatch the briars up. As you carry the vines home, ignore the tiny thorns that puncture your skin in revenge. They have the same effect as little bees: they stab at you but can only die. With sore hands sporting a hundred pinprick wounds, place the crumpled love letters, leaves, and cobwebs on the cage’s pine-straw bottom. You can almost see your future bird in the rubble: not jagged folded paper, but strong, arching wings, not crisp, fragile leaves, but beautiful, soft feathers, the graceful sweep of the head and neck, the tree-bark-in-golden-sunlight color. You cannot make a sorrowbird in your first year of sadness, or your third, or fifth. You cannot make one until you have exhausted every other avenue of comfort. Everyday, you sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window as if your wish could make things right. Well, if it could, wouldn’t you have made things right ten- thousand times? You would have given up your whole allotment of magic—your mother’s legacy, to make your wish the final word, to see your husband striding down the dirt road. But magic does not work in such ways. Instead you spent the magic as a child spends money, without care and in the moment. You wasted it to make your touch turn things to gold. And after surrounding yourself with cold, uncaring jewels, marble fountains, and soft fabric, you found the riches did not make you forget, did not take away the hurt, and so you used still more magic to take the golden touch from your fingers. You used your magic to conjure phantoms to dance for you. You drew the northern lights in the clear, new- moon sky to dance for you as well, and watched as they displayed the most brilliant color combinations over a city too far south to have ever seen them before. You used your magic up on a hundred other things, and none served to soothe your hurts or take away the pain. Now, as you hold the small jar with three dragonflies etched in white upon the glass, you look at the remaining magic; these black ashes of your last hope, the tiny, dark grains that will bring your sorrowbird to life. Use one fleck on the briar-vine cage to keep it sturdy and evergreen. The leaves will not shrivel, and the thorns will stay sharp. You cannot have your mourning dove flying about the house, unrestrained. Instead, you must keep the bird in its cage, and surround it with the sadness you will bring forth to hang upon the thorns. Place the next fleck in a crevice of the crumpled paper, and hold the bird’s shape in your mind. A mourning dove, you say, my sorrowbird. Lay the next bit of magic beside what will be the bird’s head. You can do nothing more to make this work. If you’ve pursued happiness, only to have never touched it with outstretched fingers, if you satisfied the spell and built your bird with melancholy artifacts, then your bird will stand where the letters and leaves wrapped with cobwebs now lie in a heap. One fleck of magic left. Touch the bottom of the glass with your finger, and come away with a black mark pressed in a space between your curving fingerprint. Run your finger in a line between your eyes, just above your eyebrows. You don’t have a mirror, but you look at the wide black mark on your finger, like charcoal dust, and you know a similar black streak marks your brow, an opening to pull your sorrows from.

II. Melancholy, Sadness, Love

In the following days your routines all change. Where once you paused at the window every time you passed, to see if someone now approached in the seconds between your last glance and this new moment, now you stop beside the briar-vine cage and stand on your toes hoping to see curious bird-eyes staring back. Every time you check, you see leaves wrapped in dusty cobwebs around crumpled paper. You pace around the house and try to distract your worried mind from dwelling on sadness and imagining failure—maybe you didn’t use the magic correctly, or maybe you weren’t sad enough. Instead, you force yourself to think about the familiar questions you’ll never find an answer to: why is love all that matters when you can only love once, when such a love can be taken away? How can it hurt so much? What happened to your husband all those years ago? How can you bring him back, and why did he have to leave you? The questions crash against you like waves, and leave you helpless and disoriented in their wake. On the counter you find the glass with the dragonfly etching. Overwhelmed, you hold the empty jar in your hands, empty as if it had never been filled with the ash-like magic. You just want another try to make your sorrowbird. That’s not how it works, though, and you know it. You have to use the last of your magic; there is only one chance. You feel nothing but bitter fury as you fling the glass across the room, the dragonflies’ last flight. The glass shatters against the wall with a musical crash, and falls to the floor like ringing diamond rain. For a moment you relish the sound of ruin. Then something inside you breaks, and you feel fragile and scattered, because you loved that glass, and you loved your husband, and the sorrow keeps falling on to you, crushing you. Why couldn’t your husband just come home? Why won’t your sorrowbird come and take it all away? You cannot deal with this disappointment any longer, and decide to go to bed. During the long hours when you cannot sleep, you stare at the lemon colored sunshine splashing into your bedroom. This doesn’t feel like giving up, it feels like losing. How, when you tried so hard, can nothing come from your efforts? You give in on the third day, and hunger driven, you trudge to the kitchen. You don’t know what comes next, but you feel too empty to try and rise above the rising despair. Maybe it’s better to drown; to have the anguish forced from you and carried to the surface in tiny air bubbles. You’ll feel nothing at all, as if you’re asleep and dreaming. But even as you contemplate death in a way you never had before, you spread blackberry jam on a muffin to sustain yourself for just a little longer. You look across the room at the briar-vine cage in the same moment you hear a loud, drawn out question. who-ooo? who-who, who? The knife falls from your hand and clatters to the floor, flinging the dark purple jam. The mourning dove looks at you, and in its ethereal voice asks again, who- ooo? who-who? You beam at your gorgeous sorrowbird, and croon to it in nonsense words while the bird eats some seeds from a tin cup on the cage’s bottom. It cracks a seed in half and the shell pieces fall away from its beak. It pauses and looks up at you with perfect, expectant curiosity, and wonders aloud, who-ooo?

***

When the bird’s newness wears off, you still find yourself happy to hear its mournful call, to sit before the briar-vine cage and watch it step in staccato movements. You laugh with long-lost delight when it ruffles its feathers, and sigh through slightly parted lips when it stretches its wings. In all the time since you’ve made your sorrowbird, you have almost, almost forgotten the sadness for which you created it. But in the end, you cannot ignore such profound, haunting sorrow, only give it away. You want to test transferring your sorrow to the bird with a new memory, something easy and fresh, rather than an aged, deep wound. The dragonfly glass. You regret breaking something you’ve had since childhood. You remember the glass fracturing, how it exploded against the wall, the quick change from anger to hurt; that’s the memory you will use. You close your eyes and pinch the magic stained skin above them. Then you take your hand away, as if pulling the center from a slender honeysuckle flower to lick the sweet nectar, as if pulling a parasitic worm from a body, careful not to break it. Your sorrow shimmers and moves like smoke trapped between your fingertips. You move your hand and the sorrow trails behind it, a silver ghost. Your sorrowbird looks up at you, curious but silent. You lay the silver strand across a briar thorn, but when you pull your hand away, the sorrow-thought follows, not attaching itself as you expected. You try again, and again, but it will not stay. On the last try before giving up you prick your finger on a thorn. The pain startles you, and you snatch your hand back. The silver strand stays attached to the thorn with a blood drop anchor. Who-ooo? asks the sorrowbird. It puffs its chest and calls again, who-ooo? You watch as the strand grows brighter, somehow more substantial, and fills the cage like a thin, settling fog. The smoke circles the mourning dove and seeps into its body. The bird has gone still as a wood-colored statue. You look close with your own breath held, and can see it breathing. Another motionless second passes, then the bird looks up at you, and moves about its cage as though nothing had happened. You think about the dragonfly glass, as if tasting the memory. You remember the way the dragonfly and reed etchings felt rough against your fingers, the way the glass always felt winter-cold, even on the hottest summer day. You remember your mother leaving it to you when she died—half filled with tiny black flecks. And when you recall throwing it against the wall; the sadness has disappeared, replaced with a detached curiosity. Broken glass, shattered thing; it carries no weight. You smile down again at your sorrowbird, and prepare to unload all your sadness. ***

Giving your sorrow away happens the same every time: you pull the sadness from your mind in dream-like silver strands, and attach them to a thorn with blood from a pricked finger. The silver turns from an insubstantial wisp to a blanketing fog and seeps into the bird. The bird goes still for minutes afterward, and then resumes its simple life. You’ve given away your small sorrows so far, such as when your anniversary comes and goes each year, or when the azaleas bloom—remembering how your husband would pick a flower and tuck it behind your ear. You’ll never again frown when it rains, and recall the cold delight when a summer storm would catch you both far from home and shelter, and you both lay together in the field until the sun kissed you dry. You’ve given away the impact, but kept the pictures in your mind. You feel lighter with the sorrow removed, but you’ve yet to release the sorrow from your husband’s disappearance, and all the long years you’ve waited and tried to keep hope. You decide that today you will give away the sadness from when your husband left for the last time. You stand before the bird’s cage, and take comfort from its presence. With your eyes closed you breathe in a calmness. You reach out to stroke a smooth briar leaf, and imagine petting the bird. The mourning dove pauses eating, and watches you. You hope it can survive such heavy sorrow. Your husband kisses you on the corner of your lips. I’ll see you soon, he says, I’ll write you along the way. Be well, darling. He kisses your forehead and turns away before your arms can wrap around him again. You watch as he steps up into the carriage, and the horses start off, kicking up dust which tries to cloak your last view of him. He smiles at you as the road bends behind the trees, and waves just as he disappears from your sight. Just one more kiss, one more embrace, one more word whispered before leaving. When you look back on this goodbye, you recognize a cold casualness you don’t remember from when you lived through the memory. You want to scream through the years to your younger self; hold him tighter! Let your lips linger with your kiss; don’t let go ever again. You look at the silver strand between your fingers, and notice it looks heavier, a duller shade than the others. It doesn’t float behind your hand as you reach toward the cage, but drags, as if anchored to your mind. You prick your finger on a thorn and attach the memory to the cage. The fog settles just like before, but this time it looks thicker, more noxious. You blow at the now hazy yellow fog as it fills the cage, but it does not dissipate. You grab your tea saucer from the table and try to fan the fog away to no avail. It swirls like thick cream around the bird. You panic when you can no longer see your mourning dove. The cage has no door, no way for you to free the bird, just the small spaces in between the thorn adorned vines. You try and reach your hand through, but the thorns tear at your arm. You bite your lip and squeeze your eyes shut against the pain, still feeling around for the bird, because you know you have killed it, you know it has left you as well. The pain overwhelms you as it rips your skin in deep, jagged lines. Warm blood flows down your hand, and the fog burns your wounds. You stare at the cage feeling helpless, realizing too late you’ve killed the mourning dove. Just having it around took more sadness away than it ever did when absorbing your sorrows. Something wet touches your foot. You look with disbelief at the blood running down your arm to form a puddle beside your feet. How did the tiny thorns cut so deep? You wrap your arm in a towel, and lay down in the hallway. You wipe your eyes with your undamaged hand, and think maybe you gave too much at once, or maybe you waited too long to make your sorrowbird. Perhaps your caution allowed your sadness to build up too much, and you have ruined your last chance at happiness.

***

You wake up sprawled on the floor. The sunlight shines into the kitchen window and falls into the hallway in a way it only does at dawn. A whole day and night have passed since you tried to escape your sorrow. The bird! You sit up too fast and your body aches all at once. Your back feels twisted, and you cry out, your knotted muscles protest sleeping on the floor, and you stand up with caution. A few steps toward the kitchen and you notice the trail of blood on the floor. You remember your injured arm, and peak under the blood-crusted towel to find your arm whole and healthy; not even scars remain. You follow the rust-brown trail to the kitchen table where your sorrowbird’s briar-vine cage sits. So much blood: on the floor, the chairs, the table, the counter. You don’t understand, but cannot concern yourself with anything besides the scene inside the cage. With the fog gone, you find the sorrowbird slumped against the briars. Its beak hangs open, and it pants in harsh, ragged breaths. You see feathers scattered over the bottom of the cage; some stick to the dried blood in the cage and on the table. Oh! You reach into the cage, and give no thought to repeating the damage the thorns have done to your arm. Today only small thorns scratch you as you take the mourning dove and pull it back through the vines. It does not try to resist you, it just lays in your hand like a warm, pulsing stone. Its unaware black eyes stare at you, accusing and helpless. You sit on the porch all day and nurse the bird back to health. The poor thing trembles against you in the sun’s purple afterglow. New feathers push through its smooth skin like hopeful shoots peeking from dark, wet earth. They are prickly against your hand. Its eyes now look bright and new, and it has resumed its curious call, who- ooo ooo. The days seem too short. You love nothing more than just holding the bird in your hand, stroking its head where it has kept a few original feathers. You wonder what would happen if you gave the bird your most painful memory, the one where your husband never comes home. You cannot bring yourself to try such a thing. Instead, you smile at the bird’s renewed energy, and take pleasure in how far it has come in so short a time. It struggles harder now, and for longer, to free itself from your hand. You laugh when it stretches its wings and tries to fly; you feel the wind rush past your face, unsettling your hair. The feathers have not yet grown long enough for flight, but soon now and they will. You will see this bird whole again, and you will set it free.

Sean Markey lives in Salt Lake City, where he is pursuing a degree in Elementary Education from Westminster College. You can find him online at semarkey.blogspot.com. Marrying the Sun

Rachel Swirsky

The wedding went well until the bride caught fire. Bridget’s pretty white dress went up in a whoosh, from train-length veil to taffeta skirt to rose-embroidered bodice and Juliet cap with ferronière of pearls. The fabric burned so hot and fast that it went up without igniting Bridget’s skin, leaving her naked, singed, embarrassed, and crying. Of these problems, nudity was easiest to cope with. Bridget pulled the silk drape off the altar and tied it around her chest like a toga. “That is it,” she said. She pried the engagement ring off her finger and threw it at the groom. The grape-sized diamond sparkled as it arced through the air. Gathering up the drape’s hem, Bridget ran back down the aisle. She flung open the double doors, letting in the moonlight, and fled into the night. The groom sighed. He opened his palm and stared down at the glittering diamond, which reflected his fiery nimbus in shades of crimson, ginger, and gold. His best man patted him on the shoulder—cautiously. The bride’s father gave a manly nod of sympathy, but kept his distance. Like his daughter, he was mortal. “Too bad, Helios,” said Apollo. The groom shrugged. “I gave it my best shot. I can’t keep my flame on low all the time. What did the woman want? Sometimes a man’s just got to let himself shine.” Apollo clapped him on the back. “You said it, brother.”

***

Bridget went down to the reception hall. She let the hotel clerk gawk at her knotted drape, and then told him they’d be cancelling.“The hall or the honeymoon suite?” “Both,” said Bridget. The clerk rapped a few keys on the keyboard. “I’m sorry, but we can’t accept cancellations this late. I’ll have the staff take down the decorations in the hall, but we’ll have to charge you.” Bridget felt too drained to argue. “Fine.” She went down the corridor to the reception hall. She at least wanted to see the chocolate fondue fountain and the ice sculptures, even if they were going to waste. Caterers and hotel staff ran back and forth, clearing away cups of fresh summer fruit and floral arrangements of birds of paradise and yellow tulips. Bridget approached the six-tiered cake with the tiny bride figurine standing next to a brass sun. She plucked the bride out of the butter cream frosting. “What was I thinking?” she asked the little painted face. “Don’t we all wish we knew the answer to that question?” Bridget looked up. Her matchmaker, the goddess of childbirth Eileithyia, leaned against the wine bar, tidy in a burgundy pantsuit and three-inch heels. “I heard what happened,” said Eileithyia. “He couldn’t hold it in, even on our wedding day?” “Isn’t that what you wanted? Someone dazzling, someone out of the ordinary, someone who could light a dark room with his smile?” “But being dazzling isn’t just what he is, it’s something he does to other people. He can’t just shine, he has to consume.” Eilethyia sipped her 1998 Chablis. “Good thing you found out before your vows, at least. The pre-nup you signed’s a bitch.”

*** Helios and Apollo settled in at the hotel bar. Floor- length windows overlooked the river where streetlights cast golden ripples on dark water. The scene was twinned in the mirror behind the bar. Apollo improvised a sonnet about the cocktail waitress and got a free drink. Not to be outdone, Helios earned a shower of applause by lighting a vixen’s cigarette from across the room. Helios still wore his tuxedo, untied ascot draped across his chest like a scarf. He spun on his barstool to face his drink. “I thought she was different,” he said. Apollo had stopped to change into dress shirt and slacks, chic and metrosexual. He waved Helios’s point away, marquise cut topaz and agate rings sparkling on his fingers. “They’re all the same. I could have told you that.” “How helpful and droll,” said Helios. “It’s true. It’s the beauty of mortal women. Sure, they’re unique, like snowflakes are unique, but who catches a snowflake to marvel over geodesic ice crystals? That’s missing the point of snowflakes.” “Which is?” “All the power and loveliness of the snow birthing this intricate, astonishing thing that’s gone in an instant.” Apollo winked at the brunette by the piano. “And they melt on your tongue, too.” Helios lifted his index finger, inspiring a tuft of flame on the brunette’s bosom. As she beat it out with her cocktail napkin, Helios shaped the smoke above to spell out the phrase Hot Stuff.The brunette giggled, averting her eyes coquettishly. Helios turned back to his friend. “That’s not why I go with mortal women.” “Pray tell.” “They have a better understanding of things like joy and grief because their lives are difficult. They appreciate what they get. They make you feel real.” “Be honest, you just like having all the power in the relationship.” “That’s not true!” “If you say so.” Helios went on, “I like being with mortal women because of how different we are. Fire and water is more interesting than fire and fire.” “Interesting if you’re fire. Fatal if you’re water.” “Fire and earth, then.” Helios lit a flame in his palm. He shifted its composition so that it burned rose and then gold and then iris. “The problem is, most mortal women don’t get that. They think being with a god is going to make them more than human. They want to be special. They want to be anointed. I thought Bridget was different than that. She was grounded. She knew she was just an ordinary girl. I thought she was happy with who both of us were. But it turns out she wanted me to be just as dishwater dull as she is.” “We should turn them all into laurel trees,” said Apollo, draining his drink. He rose from his barstool and ran his fingers through the loose wheat-colored curls of his Caesar cut. “Come on. If we can’t find any nymphs, let’s at least get us a couple nymphomaniacs.”

***

Bridget remembered the day she realized the world was populated with gods. Really, it was an old suspicion, stemming from playground hierarchies and high school lunchrooms. Some people just seemed more there than others. They gleamed, they glittered. While Bridget and her peers stumbled through adolescence with scrapes and bruises, they floated through life without so much as a detention slip. Wasn’t it something everyone sensed? People watched the godly among them raise waves with a pitchfork, inspire love with an arrow, win track meets in winged sandals. Later they were remembered in a jeweled blur, details fuzzy but gist intact: the dare devil surfer, the counselor who saved my marriage, the kid who could run like nothing you ever saw. But Bridget didn’t really figure it out until she was finishing the fifth year of her Ph.D., tabulating data on a thesis few people outside her field could really understand. Bridget was one of the world’s foremost experts on the sun. Parts of the sun, at least. She studied sunspots, the patches of relative cold that blot the sun’s surface like tears. She spent her hours in the laboratory, calculating the frequency of coronal loops, and checking them against the predicted occurrence of solar flares. “The sun is a romantic metaphor,” she was fond of telling friends over drinks, back when she had friends, and went out for drinks. “These little dark patches are caused by intense magnetic activity. It’s all about attraction and repulsion. It can make the sun burn hot, or blow cold, or eject solar flares so vast they leave traces in Greenland.” Bridget had the kind of mind that thrived on solitude and data, or so she convinced herself in the absence of anything but solitude and data to thrive upon. By the fifth year of her Ph.D., the last of her undergraduate friends had gotten jobs and moved away, not that she had much in common with them any longer anyway. Her father lived in a rental house three states away with two bachelor friends, and while he claimed he wanted updates on Bridget’s life, Bridget heard the flat grieved tone of his voice when he picked up the telephone. Bridget had her mother’s dark, sunken eyes, and hair the hue of corn sheaves. She knew that, to her father, she was one more reminder of her mother’s illness and death. It had been hard on him, being a widower. He dealt with grief by making himself a new life. Bridget was part of the old one. She mostly stayed away. Daily, Bridget woke at dawn. She showered and brushed her teeth and rode her bike onto campus where she grabbed a cup of coffee from a vendor in the student union. She sat in her lab, watching the sun’s arc through the office’s high window that let in baking heat during mid afternoon, until the sun sank and the room grew dark, and then she sat there some more. She rode her bicycle home around two in the morning, and went to bed in her clothes. One afternoon, as Bridget sat in her lab on a day when heavy snow had piled on the campus’s hills, sparkling under a bright but distant sun that lacked the power to melt it, Bridget looked down at her keyboard and realized she couldn’t feel her fingers. They’d been typing for an hour without her conscious command. They felt more like part of the machine than part of her. Red and blue lines criss-crossed the screen, mapping her data. Bridget recognized none of it. She pulled her hands away from the keyboard and fanned her fingers in front of her eyes. Slowly, she began to feel the ache of her cold, unheated office settle in her fingertips. She tried to remember the last time she’d spoken to anyone for more than two sentences. It had been over three weeks. She was twenty-nine years old and she couldn’t fathom why she’d ever thought that mapping sunspots was worth the utter lack of human company. She fled the office early, ignoring the queries of professors and students as she unlocked her bike from the rack outside the building and rode away down the snowy road. When she reached her house, she found an unfamiliar woman standing there, her outfit and coiffure so immaculate that at first Bridget thought she was selling Avon. “I’ve been sent by a secret admirer,” said the woman, introducing herself as Eilethyia. Bridget couldn’t imagine any student or professor, the only two groups of people she interacted with, hiring this elegant woman to make a suit on their behalf. “Oh, yes?” she asked. “Indeed,” said Eilethyia, unruffled. “My client prefers to woo via a mediator, someone who understands human culture better than he does.” “Human culture?” asked Bridget, wondering what prank was being pulled on her. “Tell this admirer, whoever he is, that I don’t go on blind dates.” “It’s not a blind date, exactly,” said Eilethyia. “You’ve met before.” “Who is he?” asked Bridget. A sly smile crossed Eilethyia’s lips. She turned and pointed toward the summit of the noontime sky where the sun blazed through the cold air, dazzling. Somehow, Bridget was unsurprised. “I daresay you’re as enamored of him as he is of you,” said Eilethyia. “That’s probably what he likes about you. Never forget that gods are narcissists. Why do you think we want everyone to worship us?” Bridget laughed, not at the fact of her admirer’s godhood, for that she had already strangely come to accept. She laughed at the frank and unabashed admission of narcissism. At the time, she thought it was a joke.

*** Most gods dabbled with mortals the way most mortals dabbled with self-love. It was entertaining, it was convenient, it was a way of releasing tension when nothing better presented itself. The chief deity himself liked to season his love life by seducing mortal maidens as a white bull or swan. But it was like an hors d’ouvre to a gourmet meal. Once the champagne framboise and lobster bisque had been sampled, he wasted no time in slipping back into his natural godly form to hightail it home for an entrée of duck Martiniquaise with his lady wife. Rarely, a god found mortal love affairs becoming not an aperitif, but something altogether too alluring: a fetish. Apollo denied it was that way with him. He remained aloof and rakish, playing up his persona as the literally eternal bachelor. It worked pretty well for him too, Helios noted, as he watched Apollo cozy up with the tow-headed boy he’d lured over from the piano. The boy wrapped his arms around Apollo’s waist, aiming a nip at the god’s ear. Helios set down his pepper vodka. He left a little flame burning on the surface, evaporating the alcohol. Over his shoulder, the cocktail waitress gingerly cleared her throat. “Would you mind?” Helios looked down at a pudding enflambé. “But of course,” he said, winking, but the reflexive flirtation felt false. His overzealous flare singed the eyebrows of a nearby man in tweed. The waitress rushed over to give him a free drink. The blond kid slipped his tongue between Apollo’s sculpted lips. His giggling drifted on the air with the cigarette smoke. Helios could smell his cologne: sandalwood with a hint of moss. He looked away. Helios hadn’t been with a goddess since his only son, Phaeton, died. At sixteen, the boy had begged to drive Helios’s sun chariot across the sky. Helios pleaded with him to choose any other gift, knowing the boy wouldn’t be able to control his team. But Phaeton was sixteen. Failure was something that happened to other people. At dawn, Helios helped his son into the chariot, and watched as it rose into the sky until Phaeton was only a golden blur in the heavens. Helios felt a strange stirring as he beheld it. He’d never before seen the sun rise from below. Was this what he looked like to mortals every day? A flare of brilliance so intense it stung the eyes? Later, after Phaeton lost control of the team and Zeus brought the boy down with a bolt of lightning so bright it twinned the sun, Helios’s daughters wept so fiercely that Zeus changed them into poplar trees. And so Helios lost them, too. Zeus regarded the rivers of their maidenly tears and froze their mourning into amber, which was how that gem first came into the world. The first time Helios slept in Bridget’s apartment, he begged her to discard all her amber jewelry. He bought her replacements in jade. Helios wasn’t sure what it was about mortal women that salved his grief. Or maybe they didn’t salve it at all. Maybe their appeal was the way their brief earthbound existences—like plants that flowered out of and then decayed back into the ground—rubbed salt and soil into his wounds. Apollo looked over. He and the boy swung their hands together, like children. “Come on, pick someone,” said Apollo. “It’ll make you feel better.” “I suppose.” Helios scanned the bar. His gaze settled on a black woman wearing a gold knit sweater that made her skin glow like a bright penny. She sat with a few girlfriends, chatting. Her laugh sounded like a bell on a winter morning. Helios slipped off his barstool. “Might I interrupt?” he asked. The woman’s friends looked at her to see what she wanted. She gave them a nod. They scooted back their chairs to admit Helios into their circle. “I wonder if I might beg the honor of your company tonight,” he said. Before the woman could reply, he inspired tiny golden flames to dance across her arms. Sparks pirouetted like ballerinas spinning on a stage. Interest sparkled in her mahogany eyes. She wet her lips. Her breathing became shallow and quick. She was dazzled.

***

Bridget had never lacked for romantic attention, but she’d never found herself enthralled by it either. Men, by and large, bored her. She wanted men who possessed a flame of dedication that ignited something unique and all- consuming within themselves. She’d dated a few. There was a world champion chess player, a computer programmer who built elaborate palaces of code, and a volcanologist who explored volcanoes on the verge of eruption. But one by one, she’d discovered their passions to be other than what they seemed: rote compulsion, unconscious ability no more personally meaningful than breathing, self-hatred becoming high risk behavior. Bridget and Helios had their first date on the rim of a molten lava lake, its active vents guttering threateningly with the burble of tension barely contained. Sulfur permeated the air. Eilethyia accompanied them. At first, Bridget chafed at being chauffeured, but when Eilethyia had to talk Helios out of taking Bridget skinny dipping in the lava, Bridget began to understand why the slender goddess had come along. They sat and talked about nothing in particular, their worlds so different that the small talk had a dreamlike air, but the strange disjointed nature of their conversation did not detract from the connection they both felt warming between them, as if they spoke different languages but intuitively understood the same words. The goddess Eilethyia sat nearby as they talked, reclining laconically against a slab of basalt, her face turned discreetly away but wearing a rye and pleased smile. An hour before dawn broke, as pale light gathered in the sky preparing for the moment when Helios would burst over the horizon in his chariot, Helios took Bridget by the hands and led her onto an obsidian outcropping, outside the goddess’s hearing. “I can tell you anything you want to know,” he said, correctly assuming that Bridget’s lust would be inflamed by the promise of knowledge. “What other stars look like, the chemical composition of distant suns, why magnetic fields pulse and sway the way they do. I could take you to visit strange planets and nebulas and pulsars.” “I don’t think I’d survive,” said Bridget. “Then ask me questions, and I’ll bring the answers back to you.” Bridget smiled. The god stood before her with his shoulders thrown back, his feet planted in a strong, wide stance. His hands were hot, his eyes fierce upon her. He had a presence of being in himself like no one that Bridget had ever met before. Throughout her life, she had always felt herself fuzzy and indeterminate, collecting knowledge against the specter of her death like a squirrel assembling nuts before hibernation. Here was someone who flared, and burned, and was. Bridget thought back on that first interlude as she stood in the bathroom of Eilethyia’s hotel room, exchanging her improvised drape for one of the goddess’s dresses. The dress was loose, gray linen, the only thing in Eilethyia’s wardrobe that came close to Bridget’s size. Bridget had never been overweight, but the goddess was long and narrow as a stroke of calligraphy. “Do you need help?” called Eilethyia through the door. Bridget looked up at the blotted tears beneath her eyes that showed in her reflection. She dabbed them quickly away and steeled herself with anger. He burned, but unthinkingly, more like a fire than a man. She had made the right choice. Bridget slipped out of the bathroom. The goddess stood nearby, watching. “Thanks for letting me borrow this,” said Bridget. “I couldn’t face going up to the suite for my luggage.” “Does your family know where you are?” asked Eilethyia. “I called my father and told him to go home. I don’t want to see him now.” “There’s no other mortal to comfort you? Sisters? Friends?” “I’m an only child,” said Bridget. “Isolation is an old habit.” Eilethyia nodded, businesslike but not unkind, diamond studs flashing at her ears. “We should get something to eat.” Bridget raised her eyebrows. “At this time of night?” “I know a good Greek place not far from here.” Bridget followed Eilethyia though the city’s winding intersections. Drunk people swarmed in and out of the pubs lining the river. The air smelled of the contrast between crisp wind and stale beer. They entered an alley and Eilethyia led Bridget up a narrow, metal flight of stairs. Bridget winced as the goddess knocked on someone’s door. “It’s so late,” Bridget began. Eilethyia raised a silencing hand. Bridget held her tongue. Soon enough, a heavyset woman in a long white nightdress opened the door. A man dressed in slacks and a cotton undershirt stood behind her, sleepless circles beneath his eyes. Both looked unsurprised by the intrusion. “Come upstairs,” said the woman, her voice flat. “What did you do to them?” Bridget whispered to the goddess as they were escorted through a narrow, tiled parlor. “Nothing,” said Eilethyia. She gestured down a shadowed hallway. Bridget saw the small white shapes of pajama-clad children peering around the corner. “They know me here,” said the goddess. The woman led them up another flight of stairs. They came out in a roof garden where several ironwork tables sat among potted ferns. The man started to hand them menus, but Eilethyia waved him away and ordered for them both. The man bowed his head and retreated. Eilethyia leaned back in her chair. “So, what do you plan to do now?” “I don’t know,” Bridget admitted. “I can’t continue with my thesis. . .spending so much time with him every day would be. . .maybe I’ll go to work in a lab for awhile. . .” “I meant in regard to your erstwhile fiancé.” Bridget sighed. “It’s not like I can avoid seeing him.” She glanced up at the sky where a sliver of moon sliced the dark. “At least we won’t have to talk.” “Will you want another god to replace him?” “Absolutely not!” Bridget surprised herself with her vehemence. She shifted in her seat, smoothing wrinkles out of the linen dress. “Looking back, there was always something. . .strange about our relationship. The way he saw me was. . .” “Like an old man looking at a young girl?” offered Eilethyia. “Sort of. . .” “A celebrity admiring his most ardent fan?” “Something like that.” Eilethyia gave a short sharp nod. “It’s always been my theory that gods who fixate on mortals are. . .what’s the word I’m looking for?” She tapped one crimson nail against the table. “Unnatural, perhaps? Not that there’s anything wrong with unnatural. Natural childbirth is painful and often fatal. Unnatural can be good.” “Unnatural?” repeated Bridget, skeptically. “How do I put this? They’re like humans who want to make love with beasts.” Bridget flinched. “Don’t take it like that. It’s a difference in kind, not scale.” The man arrived with their food, a plate full of meat wrapped in grape leaves for the goddess, and squares of lamb on rice for Bridget. “You could have told me all this before you matched me with Helios,” said Bridget, accusingly. “Why did you let me get engaged to someone you thought was mentally diseased?” “Ah. Well.” Delicately, Eilethyia chewed a leaf from the side of her fork. “I haven’t told you what I think is wrong with mortals who want to be with gods.” Bridget pricked with shame. She hated the thought of others seeing wrongness in her. She worked hard to conceal her flaws. Eilethyia sipped her wine calmly. “Mortals and gods are always seeing in each other what they themselves lack. Divinity, mundanity, exaltation, pain.” She set down her glass and fixed Bridget with a frank stare. “If you want my advice, you have two options. Take my card, and when you’ve had time to recover, I’ll pair you with another god. Or, if you want to grow, if you want to become a better, more whole person, then find the spark of divinity within yourself and search for a mortal to share it with.” Goosebumps prickled along Bridget’s arms. She felt bruised and earthen and drained. “It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it? You don’t have relations with gods or mortals, do you?” “No,” said Eilethyia. The goddess glanced over toward a corner of the roof where children’s toys lay scattered among the potted plants. “I’m too familiar with where it all leads,” she said, and Bridget saw her smile was sad.

***

Helios escorted the woman, whose name turned out to be Jody, to a nocturnal street fair sprawling in the city’s main square. Her friends tagged along. He entertained them by challenging the fire eater to a contest which ended when Helios devoured a flaming meteor and then sent it rocketing back into space. Helios selected a mortal man for each of Jody’s friends, haloing them with a light touch of flame to make them seem more attractive. One by one, her friends peeled away. Soon Helios and Jody were alone. “Would you join me in my hotel room?” he asked. By the time they reached the elevator, Jody’s hands were all over him, stroking his hips, unbuttoning his shirt. Her breath on his neck felt damp and hot as a humid afternoon. When the elevator clanged Helios’s floor, they backed out, entwined, stumbling through the corridor. Helios unclasped Jody’s bra. She unzipped his fly. He had to clasp her hands to hold them still long enough so that he could work the key that admitted them into the honeymoon suite. When they got inside, they found themselves looking at the tow-headed boy from the bar. He sat astride Apollo in the gigantic bathtub. Sprays of bubbles from the jets obscured what was going on beneath the water. “What is he doing here?” demanded the boy. “Isn’t this your room?” “My friend here just got left at the altar,” said Apollo. “I didn’t think he’d be needing the room.” Helios turned to Jody. “My apologies.” “I don’t mind,” said Jody. She traced her finger down Helios’s chest. “It’s actually kind of a turn-on.” Leaving Apollo and his mortal in the bathroom, Helios and Jody moved to the bed. Jody’s skin felt smooth and sweet as flower petals. Her close-cropped natural hair covered her head like delicious brown moss. Helios ran his fingers through it over and over, the sensation delectable and maddening. He pulled the black strap of her bra out from her sleeve, removing the whole lacy garment without taking off her sweater. He slipped his hands beneath the cashmere and took her breasts into his palms. Her hard nipples felt like knots on wood, beautifully textured. Gently, Helios eased her sweater over her head. A gold chain flashed around her neck. Helios caught the pendant in his palm. “What is this?” “Alaskan amber,” said Jody. “There’s part of a bee in it.” Helios examined the gem. It was set in a simple silver oval. Rich, warm colors swirled through its heart: drifts of sienna, umber, burnt orange and carmine suspended like haze in a yellow sky. A bee hung in its center, wings trapped mid-flutter. Helios thought of all the grief that that had been poured into making this chaotic, vibrant thing, all the sorrow his daughters wept out when Phaeton’s chariot fell. Their solidified grief was incandescent as the sun. It burned him. Helios released the necklace. It swung down, a yellow globe between Jody’s breasts. She cocked her head and smiled, raising her eyebrows in invitation. Her lips sparkled. Helios moved away from the bed, and began dressing. “What?” asked Jody. “Do bees gross you out or something?” Helios’s fingers felt numb on his shirt buttons. “I’m sorry. As my friend said, I was left at the altar today.” She hesitated, and then said, “That must be rough.” “As you can imagine, I’m still in a state of shock. I hope you can forgive me for inconveniencing you.” “It’s okay,” she said. She pulled herself into a sitting position, legs tucked beneath her, and began putting on her clothes. “I can meet up with my friends tomorrow.” She tugged on her sweater and pulled a compact out of her purse, checking to make sure her lipstick hadn’t smudged from kissing. She gave Helios a sad smile, one side of her mouth pulled up into a dimple. “Try not to take it too hard, okay?” she said. “A man like you, someone else’ll snap you up in no time.” Helios had nothing to say to that. He took Jody’s elbow and escorted her to the door. He watched as she walked away down the hall, short black skirt swishing around her thighs. Apollo called out from the bathroom. “So, do your newfound sexual ethics mean we have to cut out of here too, or can you suffer alone?” Helios closed the door. All these eons and he could still picture Phaeton’s face, every detail crisp as a brush stroke. “Do whatever you want.”

***

After dinner, Eilethyia offered to continue keeping Bridget company. Bridget declined. She wanted time alone. She paced the waterfront, hugging herself against the chill. Pale clouds had drifted over the gibbous moon, and crickets had emerged from the ornamental hedges lining the sidewalk to serenade potential mates. Bridget stared down at the blurred reflections of halogen bulbs in the water, submerged and insignificant suns. Everything can be overwhelmed, she thought. Everything can be drowned. When her teeth started chattering, she turned back to the hotel, ready to collect her luggage and move on. In the corridor leading to the honeymoon suite, Bridget collided with a statuesque African-American woman. The woman’s clothes were rumpled and her makeup smeared. She smelled of Helios: ash and smoke and sparkle. Bridget’s stomach churned as the woman disappeared into the elevator. This soon? This fast? She felt betrayed, and then furious with herself for being surprised at betrayal. She slid the key card into the door without knocking. As she entered, she heard splashing as a male voice moaned from the bathroom, “Not another one.” Bridget’s anger bellowed full-throated. She put her hand over her eyes and pushed blindly past the bathroom. “Don’t worry,” she snapped. “I’m just here to get my clothes.” Eyes still covered, she turned toward the dresser and began yanking drawers open. Her unpacked suitcase lay on the rug beside her, lid askew. She felt so stupid for having taken the time to put her clothes away in the suite. She’d been all aflutter that morning, expecting to come back a married woman, not wanting to be distracted by luggage. She threw her clothes into the suitcase in huge, hasty, rumpled piles. “Do you want help with that?” asked Helios from behind her. Bridget turned. He sat on the bed, still dressed neatly in dress shirt and tuxedo pants. His jacket lay draped over the arm of an over-stuffed chair by the window. “Why aren’t you in the bathroom with your buddy?” asked Bridget. “Hi there,” called a voice from the bathroom. Bridget spun around, recognizing Apollo’s timbre. The debonair god leaned against the door frame, a hotel towel wrapped around his waist. A slender, young-looking man stood behind him, staring curiously at Bridget from behind his tousled blond hair. “We were just trying to have some fun in here,” Apollo said. “Some of us aren’t so hung up on buying the cow.” Apollo’s voice seeped with disdain at the word cow. Bridget was momentarily taken aback as she realized it wasn’t marriage he was mocking, but mortals’ animal flesh. “Get out of here, Apollo,” said Helios. Apollo looked miffed. “You said we could stay.” Helios’s voice was level but taut with tension. He spoke slowly. “Just get out.” “Fine.” Apollo took the blond’s hand. “Let’s get out of here. The blond frowned. “Where are we going? I told my roommate I wasn’t coming back tonight.” Apollo shrugged off the blond’s protestations. He turned to Helios, his eyes icy. “Mortals come and go. It’s your friends you should be careful to keep.” Helios did not soften. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.” Apollo led the blond out of the room. The door slammed behind them. “I see he hasn’t changed since this afternoon,” said Bridget. “He hasn’t changed in four thousand years. And he won’t, either.” Bridget looked out the window. Twelve floors below, cars pushed past on a busy expressway, headlights garish in the darkness. “I’m sorry about your dress,” said Helios. “I didn’t mean to burn it. I wanted to look impressive.” “You wanted to show off,” said Bridget. “No, that’s not it—” “You waited until I was walking up the aisle when all heads were turning toward me. You couldn’t stand someone else having everyone’s attention.” “I didn’t think about it.” “You never do, do you? You just do what you want and don’t worry about the consequences.” Helios neared Bridget, his presence tangibly hot. “This is silly,” he said, voice firm and commanding. “It was an accident. It won’t happen again.” He smelled like sparks thrown into cold air, like firefly swarms piercing humid summer evenings. An aura ignited around his solid, golden form, flashing and sparking like the northern lights. Bridget looked up at his smooth burnished skin, his shoulders broad and straight like the line of the horizon. She felt fragile and insignificant under his gaze, overwhelmed by her primal mind’s awe of the sun. Her mouth dried and her heart sped up, accelerating to match his aura’s flicker. She pulled away. “Don’t do that. Don’t manipulate me.” Helios’s aura winked out. He paced away from her, strides long and angry. “Why do you think you’ve spent your life alone?” he asked. “No one’s ever good enough for you. I could turn you into a laurel tree, you know. I could change your skin to match your heart and turn you into a woman of ice, and then have you set out so that you’d melt under my heat.” “Well, wouldn’t that prove me wrong?” Bridget asked. “It’s definitely not narcissistic to kill someone because she won’t marry you.” Bridget barked a laugh. “I don’t know why you care anyway. The same night I leave, you have another woman in your room. We’re all just mortals anyway. You exchange one for another for another. Can you even tell the difference?” Helios halted. His face was wet, his hands were shaking. “Is that what you think?” he said. “Am I wrong?” A moment of silence hung in the air. Helios exhaled a wracking sigh. “How long does it take a mortal man to get over the death of his son?” “I’m not sure,” said Bridget, quietly. “I’m not sure they ever do.” She leaned back against the window, the glass smooth and cool against the back of her neck. She closed her eyes. “We’ve both got problems, I think. I think we’ve got to find the solutions on our own rather than looking for them in other people.” Helios said nothing. When Bridget opened her eyes, he had become diffuse, the hotel lights shimmering through his increasingly translucent body. Through the walls, they could hear the noise of party- goers returning to their rooms after the revelry of the wee hours. Traffic thickened on the expressway below. The night was almost over. “You need to go, don’t you?” asked Bridget. Helios nodded. “I’ll look down on you from time to time,” he said. Bridget almost smiled. Helios leaned toward her, his lips pressing warm against her own. She was bathed in his heat for a moment, and then he was gone. Bridget turned toward the window to watch the gray sky slowly brightening with pink and peach. She wondered where she’d be tomorrow, who she’d find to share her long nights in the lab, her ability to find romance in sunspots. Soon, there would be the break of morning, yellow blazing boldly against azure. Now there was the horizon, flat and distant and caught between the worlds of sky and ground.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Subterranean Magazine, Interzone, and Weird Tales. She also edits PodCastle, the world’s first audio fantasy magazine, which puts up reprints of the best fantasy fiction for free listening online. Her website is rachelswirsky.com Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky

The Editors

This week’s "behind the story" features Rachel Swirsky, author of Marrying the Sun. We asked her to tell us a bit about drawing on mythology when creating her story.

***

In 2006, as my friend Vylar Kaftan was planning her wedding, she kept having horrible visions. What if there was a storm? Or lightning struck the groom? Or she suffered spontaneous human combustion? That summer, Vylar and I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, a fundraiser for the workshop. Writers take pledges for marathon writing, much the same way that people take pledges for walk-a-thons. During the write-a-thon, Vylar organized an exchange in which several writers contributed first lines to stories they didn’t intend to write. I submitted “The trouble with claiming to be a shapeshifter is someone eventually expects you to prove it.” In exchange, I received the line Vylar had written: “The wedding went well until the bride caught fire.” I’ve been fairly amused by the amount of praise that line has drawn in critique groups, since of course it’s the part of the story I didn’t write. As I wrote this story and filled in the plot and characters, I realized that I wanted to examine the reason why people are drawn to stories about the coupling of gods and mortals. Of course, there are the originals from the myths—Zeus as a golden shower, a bull, or a swan, seducing mortal maidens. At the time I was writing this story, there had also recently been a call for submissions to an anthology about mortals sleeping with divinities. It’s a plotline that seems to have cultural and psychological attraction. This story was also an experiment for me in terms of style. I wanted to write something straightforward and dialogue-driven with “transparent” prose. For me, this style naturally trends toward humor. I tried to mix elements of farce with some more somber emotions. Some of my early readers had problems with that mix, but I’m intrigued by tragicomic stories. At Clarion West, Connie Willis told us was that tragedy and comedy are identical events, told from different perspectives. I think it’s interesting to blend those perspectives. Author Spotlight: Darja Malcolm- Clarke

The Editors

“The Holy Spirit’s ‘endless speaking’ seemed to me an apt metaphor for the patriarchal/phallocentric discourse in which Western culture is so embedded. It informs the basic assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman. . .“ Over the next few weeks we’re rolling out some new features at Fantasy Magazine. One that we’re very excited about is Puppet Strings, a cousin to our Author Spotlights. Once or twice a month a Fantasy author will give you a sneak peek into the magic behind their fiction– be it the inspiration, the writing process, the research, or whatever else. Then for the next five days the author will answer questions and participate in discussion about their story. Our first author is Darja Malcolm-Clarke, author of His One True Bride.

*** In 2003 I thought I was going to be a medievalist and took a graduate course that looked at texts by English medieval mystics. These women achieved a state of communion with God in grotesque ways, and I was fascinated by the prominence of taboo and the abject in their reaching the divine–this comprised excessive effluvia, nonsensical speech, bizarre bodily movements, and engaging with the filthy to touch the sublime (one mystic drinks a leper’s bathwater, for instance).One of the mystics that we read was Blessed Angela of Foligno, and one passage in particular captured me. Angela tells how God’s visits cast her into a state of ecstasy. When He withdraws from her, though, Angela says, I could not nor did I scream out any other words than these: “Love still unknown, why? why? why?” Furthermore, these screams were so choked up in my throat that the words were unintelligible. Nonetheless what remained with me was a certitude that God, without any doubt, had been speaking to me. [. . .] After this experience, I felt my joints become dislocated (142). I love the idea that a spontaneous, violent physical reaction is the only possible response to being separated from the divine after it being so close (whatever form He or She might take, and through whatever belief system). That is how I imagine being in contact with the divine must be: it undoes you. There’s no going back. But I came upon an unsettling and quietly violent passage elsewhere in the Book of Blessed Angela, a passage which became the epigram for “His One True Bride”: the Holy Spirit says he will accompany Angela on her way to Saint Francis’ church in Assisi, and he tells her that he will continually speak to her such that she will “not be able to do otherwise than listen” (139). The Holy Spirit’s willingness, even eagerness in that phrase (at least to a modern ear) to negate Angela’s own thoughts– her very being, one could argue–and bind her suggests a desire to dominate, to make Himself the center of her experience. The passage struck me as both ominous and highly gendered. It begged the question: what if God were not the beneficent being often imagined, but a more sinister, self-interested one? With the medieval mystics (along with the tradition of anchorites) as inspiration for the Harper’s Brides, I tried to think through the gendered violence implied in Angela’s words. What if you are undone by God as Angela was, but it’s not done in good faith? The Holy Spirit’s “endless speaking” seemed to me an apt metaphor for the patriarchal/phallocentric discourse in which Western culture is so embedded. It informs the basic assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman–we’re fed it so often it can be hard to think other options. One prominent form that takes is the way our culture narrates women in relation to the body. The female body is not just a thing but also a social construct; how culture regards that construct reveals a lot about how women are valued. The female body construct in our culture is subjected to constant figurative/metaphorical violence–we see the Bride Torn Asunder and all the other Brides daily. In my town of Bloomington, Indiana, there is an advertisement for apartments on the side of city busses that shows an image of a female torso with a caption that reads, “Close to everything.” Not only do we get the dismembered image of a female torso, but we’re further asked to make the mental leap to envision the female body in terms of its other segmented and sexualized parts. What kind of culture do we live in that dismemberment upon dismemberment is not only a casual sight but a way of selling apartments. . .and everything else? How does it change our idea of who or what women are. . .and who or what men are? Like Angela whose joints become dislocated after the Holy Spirit leaves her, none of us are the same after hearing the roar of this kind of gendered discourse in our ears. And like those who worship the Harper, we are complicit, all of us. We learn to participate and believe it is desirable. I think we are already a culture that worships the Harper. The story tries to grapple with how we can deal with this problem, and, I hope, presents some options, metaphorical or otherwise. That is what I was thinking when I wrote the story– though of course I would never say this is the only way to read it. It can be about companionship, about overcoming obstacles, about the power of turning your back on what demeans you, that the swamp is your friend–anything that speaks to you.

Citation: Angela of Foligno. Angela of Foligno: Complete Works. The Classics of Western Spirituality: A Library of the Great Spiritual Masters. Translated by Paul Lachance, O.F.M. New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993. About the Editors

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and information about her popular online writing classes, see www.kittywumpus.net.

Sean Wallace is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of Prime Books. In his spare time he has edited or co-edited a number of projects, including two magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine and Fantasy Magazine, and a number of anthologies, including Best New Fantasy, Japanese Dreams, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, People of the Book, Robots: Recent A.I., and War & Space: Recent Combat. He lives in Germantown, MD, with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin daughters, Cordelia and Natalie.