Fantasy Magazine Issue 31, October 2009

Table of Contents

Clockatrice by Tanith Lee (fiction) La Mer by Simon Logan (fiction) Jews in Antarctica by Lavie Tidar (fiction) Undocumented by Rachel Swirsky (fiction) Light on the Water by Genevieve Valentine (fiction) In Dreams Tangible by Su-Yee Lin (fiction) A Song to Greet the Sun by Alaya Dawn Johnson (fiction)

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine

About the Editor

© 2009 Fantasy Magazine www.fantasy-magazine.com Clockatrice Tanith Lee

I.

Poor girl. Beautiful Diana, named for a goddess, and barely sixteen years of age. Just after midnight she descended through the gardens to meet her lover. And before any clock could strike one, she was as beautiful as she was dead.

***

The gardens at Sessonby are still very fine, but back then, in the 1590s, they had a reputation, being influenced by startling new discoveries, and even alchemy. Mazes of topiary cut in extraordinary forms (swans, minotaurs), looping paths that led to groves dominated by such items as gigantic bronze astrolabes. These indicated the place was full of magical clues. They were clever gardens, where also nocturnally sometimes hares appeared, spirit- like, from the park outside, wolfish foxes, or snakes with enamelled skins - creatures of sorcery and impulse. The Queen herself, the Great She, Elizabeth, had visited Sessonby. Diana had no thought for the Queen, even though Diana's hair was hennaed to amber, fashionably, to honor the Queen's own tresses, (or, by now, her wigs.) The moon however, Queen of Night, did exercise some authority. Full this evening, it hunted things as it moved westward, striking between screens and curtains of leaves. A stone satyr, for example, with sly, sidelong eyes, or an owl of marble that seemed to alight on spread wings below the steps. And Diana, too. For whenever it could, the moon splashed her with illumination, her blonde yellow dress with its shield-stiff bodice, the tops of her tender breasts above, her white face, and her hands flitting to the narrow gate. Outside the gate opened a glade. This was of course contrived, and at its center stood a shadow clock, based on an artifact of the ancient Egyptians, as perhaps authorized by Elizabeth's own Magus, John Dee. The way the sun fell on the clock would tell the hours. But at noon the clock's position must be reversed in order to monitor the hours after. Tonight the clock looked spitefully alert. Instead of daylight the moon boiled white across its brazen spike. And beyond loomed the huge pine trees, which Diana's great grandfather had planted in the time of Henry VII, the Tudors' first bloody-handed king. It was said a stag had been killed on the spot and buried whole there, the tree then planted in its vitals. Nourished by the feast the pine grew to vast height and girth. Diana had never liked the pine, and maybe this story was the cause. She had had an old nurse as well in childhood, who said the pine was unnatural and ate any small animals that strayed near it. Even a little child, once. A tremendous silence had filled the gardens. Diana noticed that especially now she herself had ceased to move. Quite often, inflamed by a full moon, a bird might sit singing. (Just as moths were stirred up, and fluttered about.) Tonight no bird sang. Not a thread of wind silked the branches. The foreign shrubs had congealed to black linen and gave off no perfume. Why had she made a promise to meet her lover here? They had slight need to be hasty, or furtive, she and Robert, for they were betrothed and soon to be wed. Some fancy of his, and she had acquiesced, as a wife must learn to do. But see, he had failed her, had not bothered to arrive after all. She should return at once to the house. The moon slipped a notch along the sky, and a single ray shot between the leaves like a white spear. A curious odor was on the air. It suggested - chickens, Diana thought, yet too something tindery, corrosive, and old. And then she did hear a sound, which was not the wind through the leaves, nor the rustle of her dream. It was high above her. Unwillingly she lifted her gaze, up, up the length of the pine tree, among its bristled knots of needles. What did she see? Something? Only a black shadow, shifting and turning, and then the moon's relentless ray slithered on a length of substance almost like chainmail, the half- metallic armor of a serpent or a lizard. Astonished, Diana stared. She could make nothing of it, and yet her heart beat with tremendous blows. She wished immediately to run away. But the noise came once more, that strange thin hissing, and the faint stink on the air blew over her, through her, and she could not move. She could not lift one foot from the ground, not even one hand to cover her eyes that would not close. Then silence fell back into the garden. It filled her up. It drowned her from within. Her heart had frozen. Diana was a thing of petrified material. She was colorless, amber and blonde all gone away, gray like the satyr, moon-like as the marble owl. She had been changed to stone, and as stone they found her the next day, in the glade below the pine tree. Where you may see her still. Tonight even, if you wish.

***

"Certainly there's a statue there of a young girl," he said, "in authentic Elizabethan clothes. Obviously tourists get told the story of what happened, and how she was turned to granite." "Do they believe it?" "Do you?" "Yes." "Christ," he said, and laughed. "Christ," she answered briskly, "could of course undo any evil spell and set her free. Are you expecting Him to visit?" Robert Trenchall frowned at her. He had a strong, dark face and the sort of brooding eyes she had seen already in pictures of him in various magazines. His black hair was attractively long, hanging just over the collar of his leather jacket. Probably she should resist the urge to challenge him. He could always have her thrown off his property. She was not even a journalist, only a freelance photographer. "Last night," Dru continued, now she hoped in a calm, pacifying way, "you said we could see the statue." "I did. But no one took me up on it." She thought he must hate it all, allowing people to traipse about the gardens and the rest of the estate of Sessonby. His aunt, the late, famous artist, Vera Reive, had left it to him, with all its debts, five years before. He was seldom here save in the line of duty, which must drag him away from his other work in the theater, and with music. Dru recalled an interview in which he said he would have loved Sessonby, had it not been for the constant need to prostitute the place, (tours, weekends, Historical Nights) in order to secure its upkeep. The previous evening had been part of just such a junket. An expensive, lavish dinner in the grand dining room, and the appropriate music and story-telling by Trenchall and a pair of his actor friends. The last tale, dramatically relayed just after midnight, was the legend of poor Diana Sesby, who in 1594 became literally petrified by the breath of a cockatrice, hatched in the pine tree at the foot of the gardens. Indeed, no one had taken up Trenchall's offer of viewing the stony corpse. Possibly his scowl had deterred them. Or the pouring English rain. But it was 10 a.m. now, and full light of a May morning. "So where," she said, "should I go?" Then realizing, she added sweetly, "aside, obviously, from hell?" "Sorry," he said, scowling now at his combat boots, firmly embedded in early summer mud. "That's OK. It must be—difficult. But I am interested." "I'll take you there," he said. "There's no --" "It's fine. The way the gardens are now, you might get lost. No, I don't mean because you're some dumb damn stupid woman. The mazes are overgrown, and the steps, of course, partly gave way years back. Just bear with me, and I'll guide you down." Dru glanced at him. Her guide into the dark. For even at this pre-noon hour, she had already seen the world of the gardens below was steeped in shadow, somber and unsure. "Thanks," she said. And went with him along the swampy lawn.

***

Diana Sesby still stood in the tangled glade. The pine tree was still there too, towering up, no doubt grown taller since the sixteenth century. The whole space was determinedly blank, despite the bright sunlight. It might have been roofed by a dome of polarized glass. Dru edged around the statue. It was the only one, the satyr and the owl were missing, as was the mysterious shadow clock. She could not be sure the remaining sculpture was genuinely Elizabethan, but the carven garments looked authentic, the stiff bodice and ornately arranged hair. Even the long string of - presumably - pearls. One omission though, no ruff behind the neck. Which was a little odd. Ruffs had been a fashion must in the 1590s. Dru had thought Trenchall would leave her once he had shown her how to negotiate the steps. But no, he was loitering, watching. Raising the Olympus, she aimed and took a slanting shot of the petrified girl. "Not digital, then?" Trenchall remarked. "No." She framed another lower shot. Straightening, she said, "One puzzle. If something turns you to stone, why do your clothes turn too? I mean, flesh and blood and bone and hair—fine. That's living matter, or only recently dead, like hair-ends and nails. But a dress? A necklace... I'm no scientist, but that makes no sense to me. Never has." "Hey, maybe it didn't happen, then. Maybe she's only a statue." "Except..." said Dru. She leaned forward and peered into the statue's face. Diana Sesby, if it was she, had been a good seven inches shorter. Which made it easier to stare down and to see - "My God," Dru said. He did not respond. "I assume other people have noticed this, er, detail?" "Yes." Dru, however, realigned the camera for a close-up. He had the courtesy to keep quiet as she angled in on the tiny moth, caught there just above the girl's stone temple, at the edge of her immutable hairline. The moth was also formed of stone, and chiseled with an incredible, one might say a needless, delicate accuracy. The wings were thin enough to be translucent. Two minuscule antennae were just visible against the tendrils of human hair. Trenchall said, "And yes, it resembles the proper sort of moth for the time. And yes, it seems to be part of the statue, matching stone, etc. But I wouldn't bet on its credentials. A cunning fake is much more likely."

*** Sunday evening was to be the banquet in the old hall, under the rafters in "a shining forest of candles," as the brochure put it. It was the climax of the weekend, but Dru missed it. The reason being that she was instead up in Robert Trenchall's private rooms. His invitation had arrived about an hour before the official meal was due to start. One of the house gofers brought it, smiling and non-committal. Dru wondered if Trenchall frequently chose a single young woman from the medley of guests. And if he did, was it a perk for him or a prize for her? She could politely refuse. But she had always quite fancied him. She liked his music enough too. Besides, she was curious. Even if they did not end up in the sack, she had no objections to seeing some of the house that lay off the public route. In fact, his flat, as he called it, was very plain and very much modernized, with pale walls and darkly pale curtaining, and only contemporary abstract pictures that, while Dru thought them quite good, were not to her taste. Outside the high windows the gardens shaded rapidly under more threatening clouds. A necessary wood fire had been lit in the main room, un-Elizabethan but warming. Trenchall greeted her with easy grace, as if they had known each other some while, and theirs was a liason of mutual if light-hearted respect. They ate smoked salmon, steaks, strawberries, and drank a French white wine sturdy enough to cope with pink fish, red meat, and scarlet fruit. "I'm glad you like the wine," he said. "I thought you would. I chose it with you in mind." "Really. How thoughtful." He grinned. Oh, irresistable. "I imagine," he said, "you'll be working this up, I mean the tour here, into something you can sell." "No," Dru said. "I can't afford to pay estate fees for using any of the Sessonby legends professionally. Let alone pictures from the grounds. It was just personal interest." "In other words, you'll devise something different enough, then rip us off." Dru looked at him cautiously. It had all been going so well. "I don't do that, Mr. Trenchall." "Robert. Of course you do it. Any artist, photographer, writer who comes here does it. I do it whenever I go anywhere—I use anything that interests me. And if I can't afford to pay, I change it so it's something more—how shall I say?—original." Dru put down her glass. "If you like, I'll sign a disclaimer." "Listen, Dru, I really don't mind. I don't care." He sat back. "Tell me, what do you really think of Diana's statue? The whole rigmarole?" "I think it could be true," she said flatly. "Why not? Peculiar stuff happens all the time. Yes, it will probably have a rational explanation, or at least a scientifically provable one. But it can still happen. Imagine if someone had told a man in Shakespeare's time that every snowflake has an intricate and unique pattern. Very likely, in those days, he would believe you. And it's a fact. But when someone told you that the first time—weren't you astounded?" "I don't recall. Maybe." "You should have been. It's crazy." "The cockatrice though," he said. He paused, then said, "When I was a kid Vera—aunt Vera Reive—scared the shit out of me with that story. The egg—they get born from eggs, it seems, like snakes and other reptiles—was centuries old, caught up somehow in the young stem of the pine tree. As the tree grew, so did the egg. They matured together. And of course, it had been nourished with blood. They originate in the Middle East, or the Med —depends who you read—cockatrices. Or -trixes, whatever the plural is. A cock-bird with the back end and tail of a lizard. Somehow that is such a disgusting idea. Not like a man with a bull's head or a girl with the tail of a fish—they seem OK, aesthetically, if you like... But that combination. Chicken flesh and reptile. I had bad dreams for a year." "You never used it in your music, did you?" "Fuck no. Wouldn't want to. But think of it. Just think of it." He sat forward and suddenly gripped her hand across the table. A curious seduction move? Or did he mean all this? His handsome face was intense and serious. "It hatched that very night, when that poor bloody girl, Diana—a kid, just sixteen—came down to meet her faithless lover. And its poisonous chicken-lizard breath turned her to stone, that's how they do it, it seems, and the moth caught in her hair and went to stone too. But she was just as stricken, as helpless, as a moth." "Why did her clothing change to stone too?" Dru asked again, a sharp stab at practicality. But he smiled then, still holding her hand. "You're a hard lady, hard as stone. Let me tell you then. It didn't. The statue was naked. That's the actual story. The stone garments, even the stone pearls, were carved and added later. Her original ones were in ribbons, some on the ground, all torn and shredded, as if a "Hurricano" had blown them off. And the ruff was so fragile it had disintegrated completely into nothing. They never tried to replace it in stone, thought it extra unlucky. They'd brought in John Dee, apparently, the Queen's alchemist. But by then the cockatrice was gone. Flown away. It had chicken wings, obviously. Or is it bat-wings? It could do what it bloody well wanted." Her hand was still in his. She said, "I like the story. Why didn't you tell this part last night, to the others?" "The others were pissed and thick as four short planks. And you don't like the story. It makes your flesh creep. And you believe. As I do. Even though I don't. Naturally." "Yes." Then he rose and leaned across the table and kissed her. Dru enjoyed the kiss. She had thought she would. "I'll tell you about the clock," he said. "But in a little while." They slow-motioned into the bedroom. A masculine yet comfortable room, and this time with central heating. The sex was very, very good.

***

Next morning, (Monday) standing with the other visitors, at 11 a.m., her bag on the drive, waiting for the communal coach, she saw a taxi drive up. A thin, chic American girl got out, very blonde and with flawless teeth, which she did not reveal until Robert Trenchall appeared. "Hi Robbie!" "Hi, Zuzi," said Robert Trenchall. Neither of them now saw anyone else in the whole world. Even a gofer had to come out to pay the cab. She had predicted nothing else, not since rising at seven, when Trenchall had kissed her quickly on the cheek and said, "Apologies, but we have to hurry. My steady's due back any minute." Steady. What a nice, old-fashioned term. Dru had been out of his flat inside five minutes. And by sunset, she was back in London.

***

II.

Lucky boy. Gallant Robert Southurst, named for his father and eighteen years of age. That night in 1594, he had been with his low-life mistress, who held him yet in a grasp of greed and menace, and thus he failed to meet Diana in the gardens at Sessonby. As she was struck to stone, he was howling with the pleasures of lust, and so escaped a fate similar to hers.

***

Sometime after, when Robert Southurst had seemingly recovered from the remorse and revulsion occasioned by his bride-to-be's end, (and its type) he was persuaded to marry another. Diana had been youthful and lovely, and he had liked her well enough. The new wife was two or three years Robert's elder, of the sternest Protestant leaning, and a shrew. He managed to sire four children on her, or somebody did. But a vox populi of the time reports that, in his thirties, he declared, "My true bride was slain by a cucu-trix. While I, alas, have wed it!" He did outlive this spouse nevertheless. And in his fortieth year devised a number of curious mechanical toys. These were put together by various artisans, and paraded about his own house, (Longhampton) to the fascination and fright of callers. The most elaborate of the inventions was, so contemporary chroniclers had it, a "Grete Clocke" that had been established in one of the west chambers. This artifact, reportedly seven feet in height and trimmed with ebony, gold, and silver, kept good time all day and evening, until it sounded the fateful twelve of midnight. On the twelfth stroke, a pallid figure would glide out from a panel set in below the clock-face, a figure almost life-size, which represented a slender young girl with blonde-orange hair and a blonde gown. Though a doll, she closely resembled, it appeared, Diana Sesby. Enough so that an old woman who had known Diana, on seeing the apparition, fainted, and died not long after. Having left the clock, the figure (stiffly, one must suppose) turned its head once to either side, then lifted its arms as if in supplication. But then they fell, and the animation slid slowly—and "moste fearsomely"—back into the clock-case. Following which the panel closed, and the clock ceased its motion with a clank. In order that it resume full function the next day, it must be wound up, and such was its ponderous quality, several men were needed for the task. None liked it, either. They had been known to say the clock was cursed, and would cast all Longhampton into the Pit. Notably, aside from the unnerving Diana doll, the base of the clock rested on two bizarre supports. They were described as two "Crowing Cocks" of blackest basalt, each about four feet high, and with gilded beaks, claws and crests, and the raised wings of "Gryphones." They stood savagely erect on their hugely taloned feet, in attitudes suggesting extreme rage and violence. While from the rear of both swelled out a lizard's backside, ending in a horrid coiled tail, these endpieces of contrastingly purest white-silver, scored to an armoury of scales. They had been heard to hiss too, the pair of creatures. They did it randomly, if always between sunfall and dawn. One maidservant of the house had gone mad, her hair turning white and falling from her head in a single night, because, as she swore on the holy name of the Christ, both beasts one dusk had turned to glare at her, their ruby eyes giving off a tinderous flash. The west chamber was said to have stunk for several hours, a reek like a poultry-yard, but also of gunpowder.

***

It was not generally an age of long life, but Robert Southurst survived both the death of the Queen, and the eras of King James and the primary Charles, Robert himself leaving the world in his seventy-first year. He had by then also survived two further wives, but he had kept them busy. He had peopled his house all told with seven sons and nine living daughters. About three nights before that of his demise, Robert was sitting banked up on pillows in his bed—the custom then, rather than lie flat. He was an old man, of course, his near seventy-one more the equivalent of a modern eighty-six. His lush black hair was all gone and he wore a night-cap. He was drinking one too, mulled wine from the fire now sinking on the bedroom hearth. Outside the insectile, many-paned eyes of the windows, a thin tired moon was lying on the black sky. It was a cold midnight, at autumn's end. Robert believed himself awake. But then a panel opened in the tapestried wall, and out glided a slender young woman with hennaed hair. And her gown was all in rags and streamers, and through it he glimpsed her fair white body, more glimpses than she had ever allowed him during their courtship. For he knew her at once as Diana Sesby. "God's mercy," whispered Robert, and spilled his wine down the embroidered coverlet. But Diana said to him plaintively, "Oh, Robert, my dear love, why did you not come to meet me that night?" And he shook from head to toe in the warm bed, and his feet went cold as frost. "Which night? When—when?" "That night you bade me seek for you in the glade below my father's garden. The glade with the pine tree growing there." "Did I not meet you, surely I did, my lovesome Diana," he said, not able to help himself, frozen with terror and yet racked with pity. "No, you were not there. Instead the Devil came and opened his bony serpent wings in the tree. His scaled tail coiled all around the branches, just as we are told it did in Eden. Oh, Robert, I wish I had seen you before he shut me fast in stone. But all I saw was the red back of his throat, like the stenchy gape of Hell, and now I am stopped forever, and all forevers that may be." "Poor girl," said the old man in the bed, and wept. But she only turned her head, once to the left, once to the right, then raised her arms in supplication, and let her arms fall down again by her sides. Just as the doll did that came out of the clock. Yet instead of sliding away backwards into the wall as the doll had into the clock- case, Diana Sesby merely vanished. "I have dreamed," said Robert. "I have dreamed and now I am awake again." But he knew he had not dreamed, and that he had not slept. "It is to be my death," he said. And he was quite correct. ***

A single text remained that described the anecdote. Because the priest that secretly heard the pre-mortis confession of Robert Southurst, (who clandestinely had remained a Catholic all those years) was so troubled by it, he committed this section to paper. But in Cromwell's time, less than a decade later, the chapel where the priest's books were kept was burned, along with a great many other things. And so, by now, no record exists.

***

To herself, Dru admitted that Trenchall had annoyed her. Not, obviously, by not wanting to prolong their sexual adventure, (she herself had neither anticipated nor wanted that) but by his truly bloody awful bad manners. Which had been equally evidenced in his underhanded treatment of the presumably unaware blonde American. Dru's annoyance was perhaps surprisingly sharp for a few days. And once she sloughed it, she decided she would after all make something creative of her weekend at Sessonby. Having had her photographs printed by the usual team, she studied each shot. There was one particular take of the Diana statue, more luck, she felt, than expertise— for the glade had been so dark and the ground so sludgy, (and he, a distraction). The picture showed the entire statue, all four foot nine of her, from sweeping skirt-hem to just above the top of her head. And the clearest of detail was in it, everything side-lit in a quite un-cliched way. Even the tiny moth was totally visible in the largest A3 print. Aside from this Dru had retained, and written up, the other story, which Trenchall had told her during their night. It was, he said, a "Family Myth." The notional clock intrigued Dru very much. She accordingly spent another handful of days trying to locate references to it, both via the computer, and in an estimable London library. But despite plenty of data on the house and grounds of Longhampton, (most of which, structure and park, had unfortunately burned to the ground in 1706) no mention of any unusual horology was on offer. Doubtless the whole scenario of the clock was an invention, including the guilty-conscience figure of Diana which emerged from it. Although Dru believed in miracles and wonders, she had not often discovered one that would stand up to proper scrutiny. That in mind, and neither the Longhampton nor the Sessonby searches yielding anything on the clock, (let alone Trenchall having spoken to any of the other weekend guests about it) he might have made the "Myth" up solely for her benefit. It was fair game then for a steal. After all, he had assured her he did not care if she utilized Sessonby history and folklore. And they had paid each other in kind, had they not? Accounts settled. They were quits.

***

Her plan was to employ one large piece of computer art, which would use the statue, rather altered, and two smaller pictures, mostly artistically invented. These she would link with a thousand words of unornamented prose, the entirety presented as a sort of anonymous horror tale of 16th Century England. A heavily illustrated and well-paying US magazine, for which Dru had worked before on specific assignments, seemed very interested when she approached them. It would need, she thought, the rest of the month to put everything together. What required the lengthiest labor, naturally, was the mock-up of the clock. It had to look completely solid and three-dimensional, and though it would be feasible to enhance the impression through Photoshop, for maximum effect the more real the object was to start with the better. Diana, or her statue, was after all solid and real. And even when changed—no longer stone, her hair a deep russet red, (more like Elizabeth I's later wigs) and her dress the color of a hot chestnut, plus gold chains dangling round her neck and chest rather than pearls—even the moth translated into a night-flying horned beetle—she should, hopefully, look startlingly alive. The effect Dru was aiming for was a still from an intelligent, theatrical, and beautifully-lit movie. Jack, a guy she knew from way back, helped Dru assemble the clock, along with his usual assistant, Pete. The clock's ingredients were many and various, including sheet metal, salvage, tin foil, fake gold-leaf, and not disdaining papier mache. "It won't stand much knocking about, this won't," said Jack, proud but dubious. "I'll take very good care of it," Dru promised. "I'm just going to light it, and then take its picture about nine trillion times." Her studio flat near Camden was exactly that, a studio. A tiny bedroom lay behind a plasterboard wall, next to a bathroom the size of a cupboard. The kitchen area was generally only active with the making of tea, coffee and juice, occasional storage of wine and beer, and an insane toaster that tended to throw the cooked toast straight at the ceiling. By the hour of the clock's glorious completion, the whole flat reeked of paints and adhesives. Fortunately these substances never affected Dru. And Pete, high as a kite, did not mind at all. Dru did the shoot. This went very well. And when the prints came back, she could see what she thought to be a winner. The other two smaller studies were shaping up pretty well also. As for the text, it only needed to sound neat and cool—cool in both senses. Heartless, preferably. She had not really thought of Robert Trenchall while she worked. The young Elizabethan man in her revised narrative did not have the name of Robert either. Dru had changed all the names. Diana, in Dru's version, was named Susan. While Robert Southurst received the evocative title of Francis Rustember. A wonderfully improbable and untraceable invention. The package was delivered to the editor in New York by the second week in June. London meanwhile blazed up in one of its normally brief heat-waves, which would likely finish in icy rain or hailstorms. Dru's piece was accepted inside another week. Substantially altered by her from the Trenchall tale. Dru had the young, not-betrothed-but-wife hurrying alone to meet her husband in a deep forest, having been led to think him in deadly danger. But the villainous Francis Rustember, wanting rid of her, had sent her there instead to meet with a pair of hired murderers. The cockatrice, or cocatrix as Dru's fiction had it, (Old French-English via Latin) was roused by the aura of terror and sadism, and transmuted both the assassins and the hapless young wife to stone. Francis next had the clock made, with all its cockatrice imagery—less from guilt than as a spurious memorial, which placed any blame upon an uncanny monster, and so further obscured Francis's own monstrousness. One night however, the shade of Susan Rustember stepped from the clock to accuse him. Nor did she, in Dru's take, emerge from any handy panel or tapestry, but out of a whirling vortex where the face of the clock had been—the face of time itself. Susan-Diana informed Francis-Robert that, though physically immobilized, the vehicle of the time-piece had both imbued her with the nature of the cockatrice, and conveyed her phantom forward through the years. "Your heart," she said, "is already like a stone. So be it, then." And fixed her husband-now-widower with flaring crimson eyes like fire. Francis Rustember was found the next morning, dead but with no visible mark. Yet when his attendants tried to lift the corpse, its weight was so colossal, and all out of proportion to his girth, that a physician was called, (perhaps John Dee?) and opened up the body. At which they discovered, there in the chest cavity, Rustember's heart petrified to a solid mass of granite.

***

III.

The mini heat-wave died next day. Rain hosed London down like an elementally deranged fire-fighter. Dru's open windows were quickly shut. A plan to go to a party she was not that keen on was shelved. She ate a ham sandwich and an apple, and drank a pot of tea, showered, and went to bed with Joseph R. Concorde's The Photographer's Bible: 1920-1975. Perhaps an hour after going to sleep, Dru woke again. (She was never certain of the precise time. Her bedside clock had stopped, also the bigger wall-clock in the outer room.) Her first impression was that the noise of the rain, hitting on all the windows, had increased and disturbed her. Dru lay on her back, listening intently. No. The noise she heard was not rain. The night, aside from a faint London snore of traffic, was very still. What then was that shuffling, scratching sound? A rat? A year before one had got into the roof-space, but been evicted before it caused problems. This now did have a resemblance to that ratty tumbling skitter Dru recalled. But if it were a rat, this rat must be at least twenty times the original's size. And— not alone. Definitely the sounds were slightly out of synch, duplicated. Everything came twice. Sitting up, Dru learned she was cold with fear. A fear out of all proportion to anything she had so far detected, let alone thought of. Her fear was way ahead of her. And then. She heard the hissing. So many things might hiss—a leaky valve, a damaged oxygen cylinder—she knew those. A cat might hiss, a snake, these too... And dragons, of couse, hissed. And angry hens hissed, sticking out their strange worm-like tongues. Dru leapt from bed. The bedroom door was closed on the chaos of her studio, which she had still not tidied, having no immediate new project. She had no idea of trying to barricade the door. The door, and the inner walls of the bedroom, were only plasterboard, there for privacy, not protection. In any case she was driven now, pushed and pulled to look out, and to see. The door, shoved, swung wide. Dru understood precisely what she was looking for. And there it was. Not, inevitably, where it had been, up on the sheet-draped bench, against the backdrop of the other sheet. It had got down from there, using whatever energy or agility powered it. Now it poised—or posed—at the room's center. And through the windows the raw amber eyes of the municipal streetlights lit it without artistry, but in exact detail. The clock. The clock she and Jack and Pete had constructed for the photo-shoot, from odds and ends, bits and pieces. It did not now look like that at all. It looked—as she had made it look with Photoshop. The apparatus was three-dimensional and dense, consolidated and all-at-one. In height, she estimated, it rose to nine feet, far bigger than the model. In appearance it was formed from gleaming basalt, and trimmed with bright metals and burnished wood representing suns and moons, vegetable briaries, flowers more like lilies than any Tudor Rose. Above it poked a sort of spike rather like the miniature spire of some cathedral, a gold, architectural lacework. There was only one omission—the one Dru herself had coined for its portrait. The clock had no face, no longer told time. And there inside the circular void something obscure was slowly blondly shifting and redly churning. Yet, unlike Dru's illustration, there was no hint in it of a human figure, neither girl nor stone. Rather, it was like a benighted and dissolving Martian world. Last, last of all, her eyes ran downward to the base of the clock. She had created this, and them. At least, their blue- print, these two creatures upon whose arched and sturdy spines the clock rested so intransigently. But they had far exceeded her imagination anyway. They had become themselves. Identical perhaps they were, and formed too partly of black stone and gold and silver, but also they were made of other colors, and of skin and horn, chitin, feathers. And scales. Such a lot of scales. They were cockerels certainly, but their mere bodies alone some three feet in length. Their long necks, sinuous and serpentine, craned up into the prows of beaks like a kind of tortoiseshell striated golden, and on their heads the cock-crests were erect, (like the crests of dragons) not black or gold, but a dully shining henna red. Their eyes were like faceted glass. They glittered. They were full of sight. How many mathematical times inside those insect eyes was Dru replicated? The wings spread wide, held wide, black as the wings of ravens and crows. And below, the thick and corded, pine-bark branches of their blood-red legs, spurred with adamant, and the claws extended, hooks of steel. As Dru stared at them, and at the towering clock, swaying and lumbering on their backs, (like that other earth, balanced on a turtle or toad) simultaneously they moved. For now they had her full attention. Cockatrices, Cocatrises, Cucutrixes, they gaped their beaks. She saw, in each of their mouths, two bladed lines of pointed teeth, black as obsidian and scintillant. And from the red caves of their gullets, the black worm-snakes of tongues quested, flickering. Out came the hiss. A double hiss. And she smelled the stench of them. Which was not like poultry, or tinder or guns—but like a putrefying wound. And at this signal, they each uncoiled their silver lizard- viper tails and lashed them, cat-like and furious, and mindless, pitiless. She could not speak, let alone scream. She could not move hand or foot. She saw then they, the clock, composite of some Hell she had never believed existed, come running right at her, lurching and facile—eager. Dru was aware she was about to be dead. She had forgotten her name. Death was almost on her, the lover, the wild beast, the Devil -- And the thing, clock and cocktrice, sprang past her, not upon, and flew up in the air in a sort of ignition, a spray of sparks, and a loud seismic rumbling. Straight through the biggest studio window it—they—went. The window shattering, a thousand fiery stars, a million cascading mirrors, less breakage than explosion. And over the tops of the streetlights Dru saw the horror sail, flapping and yawing like a storm-wracked galleon, up into the ceiling of the black motionless London sky, moonless and welcoming. For several more minutes she watched how they grew small and vanished, only with perspective, only into distance, and through the final loss of the orange light.

***

Jack was the one who shouted, Pete looked hurt. They had thought she might let them show the Cockatrice clock as part of a gallery exhibition they were putting together. They would have given her a proper credit, she knew that, made a reference to her piece in the magazine. "I suppose you had some mad drunk piss-up here and someone smashed it," snarled jack. She had not, of course, told them the truth. Or about the dream, if it was a dream. The nightmare. It was neither. "I'm sorry, Jack. No one smashed it. There was no party. I was on my own here. I heard a crash and when I came out --" "Then why was half of it in the fucking room and half down on the fucking pavement?" howled Jack. "Leave it, Jacky," said Pete, now looking worried. "Are you OK, Dru? You seem a bit shaky." "No, I'm all right, thanks." "But you nearly went over just then. Sit down. Jack doesn't mean --" "Don't tell her what I mean!" "Look, Jacky, look—she's shaken up. Can we get you some water, Dru? Cup of tea?" But Jack only left, and Pete, murmuring soothing words, went with him. She was relieved, though she concluded they would never want to work with her again. But what could she have said? It disintegrated the window and flew off over the roofs into outer space? The window, after all, was not broken, but quite intact. Only debris of so many sorts had been left lying all over the studio floor and, as Jack pointed out, down on the pavement below. That had been the worst to clear up. She had been threatened by the landlord with eviction. "Council won't stand for that, you know. Dodgy mess like that all over the street. D'you want to get me sued?" Nothing of the clock had remained intact. It was entirely splinters and grains, like a peculiar muesli. And...feathers. But maybe they came from passing brunette pigeons. The clock was destroyed. Only its— what? Soul? Spirit?—had flown away. (She had wondered bemusedly if any of the endless security cameras had caught it. But even if they had, no one would believe a thing like that.) "It could do what it bloody well wanted," as Robert Trenchall said. And had done so. Less than a week after, she read about him in a newspaper. Dru did not bother with papers as a rule, but this one was lying open on a wine-bar counter, as if put there for her. They talked a lot about his music, his talent. A "loss" they called it, so young. He was only thirty-two. Robert Trenchall had had, it seemed, a very public argument with his live-in lover, Susina Cruz, during which she had accused him of multiple infidelity and thrown the contents of a glass of champagne in his face. Guest tourists at the house, (Sessonby, the home of the late artist Vera Sylvia Reive) had not been unduly perturbed. Indeed, some confessed to amusement, and Trenchall himself, after some initial displeasure, had apparently laughed it off. But Ms. Cruz fled in a taxi to the airport and on to California. And next morning Trenchall was dead. There were no sinister implications either of murder or suicide. Though odd in an active and fit man of Trenchall's age, he had suffered a major stroke. The lifestyles of music and theater were blamed, and drugs were hinted at, though nothing worse was noted in his system than wine. A single curious fact the papers failed to learn, and so did not report, was that his entire body, when first discovered, was completely rigid, not from rigor mortis, but as if, one of the medics remarked, filled with hardened cement. Or stone.

***

And it was three years more before Dru's then current lover exclaimed, there in the hotel room in Montmartre, "God, Dru! When did that happen?" "What? Oh, this." "Yes. That." "I always forget about it." "How can you forget?" "Oh, it isn't like the big toe, you know. That can affect your balance seriously. But this. Well, you get used to not having it fairly fast." "But what happened?" "Accident. Something fell on it." "What fell on it?" "A clock." At which the lover became nicely protective, and drew her into an embrace, the nature of which soon altered course. By then Dru really was unfazed by the loss of the little toe on her left foot. It truly did not inconvenience her. But even after a few days without it, she had become used to its absence, only now and then making a misstep. And in a month or so that too was gone. The injury never caused her any pain either. She had never needed to seek medical attention. As well. Just as with Jack and Pete, what on earth could she have said? She had been amazingly fortunate, let off one could assume, very lightly. At the time, caught in the glare of the demon, she had believed all of her would petrify, like Diana Sesby. And maybe just like Robert Southurst's heart. But the cockatrice clock had spared her this. And that night, staggering back to bed, dropping down, passing out or only sleeping, she had not even guessed—let alone felt—the token payment that had been collected. She had known nothing at all until she got up the following morning, and took that first uneven, weirdly disgusting step. And looking down, saw. Or rather, did not see. There was no blood. No wound. Only the subtraction. She made it to the bathroom and threw up. Then she sat on the floor and studied her new foot, until she had grown used to it. At last, returning to the bed, Dru pulled off the covers, and searched until she found what, during oblivion, had simply snapped away. It said something about her, she was sure, though God knew quite what, that she kept it afterwards, still did, in a small tin box that had originally held lemon- flavored pastilles. Her toe, that was, perfect even to the tiny, once-painted toe-nail. And made thereafter, and now, not of perishable flesh and bone, but of the smoothest, coldest, grayest, and most impervious granite.

British writer Tanith Lee has written over 70 novels and 250 short stories, as well as two episodes of the BBC science fiction series Blake's 7. She writes in such genres as adult fantasy, children's fantasy, gothic horror, gothic romance, historical novels, horror and science fiction. Her series of interconnected tales,"The Flat-Earth Cycle", beginning with Night's Master and Death's Master, is a classic of fantasy literature that has been compared to Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. La Mer Simon Logan

He had forgotten how grey everything was by the shore, how desolate. The skeletal grasses that grew at the edge of the sands leaned towards him in the briny wind, the industrial carcasses of desolate factories stamping themselves on the skyline and not only was it all so grey but it was all so sad. He pressed his hand into the long black coat he wore which seemed to be trying to take off from him and fly up to meet the great, dirty seagulls that swirled above. His face and neck felt as if they were coated with a layer of heavy rubber and yet still stung from the biting chill. A light rain had darkened the beach to dry mud and peeled what little colour was left in the seaside town away. The ocean slid towards him, tempting him, ushering him towards it. When it retreated he saw it had left him a gift—a single carp, stained with pollution. The fish flapped uselessly by his foot in a serene slow-motion dance, eyes whole and wide like a terrified child. Its mouth begged numbly for help as it cut into the rough sand. He watched coldly as the carp slowed, then stopped. A light rain had begun to fall. He turned his coat’s collar up and made his way back to the boardwalk. Already the deep, heavy feeling had begun to swell in his chest, the place affecting him, infecting him, like it had done a year earlier. The rain spattered against him and through the wet spray he glimpsed one or two other souls dashing for cover, little more than thin black shapes in the distance. As he walked, he imagined that he heard her barefooted footsteps behind him. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then turned. A scrawny, mottled gull sat on the boardwalk fence, staring out to sea. It called to the ocean with its great yellow beak, uttering an ethereal sound that seemed to float beyond the horizon, then flew off towards the ugly black clumps of the fishing boats uselessly trawling their nets. He hurried on along the boardwalk as the wind battered him. After a time he felt lost and that was when he saw the hut. It had been the same the previous year as he had once again strove through the freezing, barren weather, almost having given up on finding it. The man in the bar’s directions had been misshapen and filtered through a lifetime of breathing the briny air. They had seemed, back them, to be toying with him rather than instructing him and the black feelings that the shore inspired had reached what he had then believed to be their peak. He had collapsed onto the boardwalk’s sodden wood in such a rainbow of barbed emotions that he could not think—and when he had looked up the sea mists had cleared enough to allow him a view of the fisherman’s hut in the near distance. It looked like an icy black stone against the drab sky, tiny and pitiful against the crashing waves. The sea was quieter this time, less reckless, as if it were a child that had reached puberty since the last time he had seen it. It was shy and eager and moody. The rain had eased slightly but had already done its work. He was soaked beyond his coat, beyond his clothes, beyond even his skin. That rain had beaten its way into his bloodstream one year earlier and had been coursing coldly there ever since. He approached the hut and once more thought he could feel her behind him. He ached with the memory of her. He knocked hard on the door, noticing how his hands were the colour of fire, his knuckles death-white. There was movement inside and when the door opened the smell of rotting fish-guts filled his nostrils. The man that stood before him was like a heavily knotted tree branch; little more than four and a half feet tall, bulging all over his misshapen torso, hairy and scarred and tattooed, his veins a map of clear blue lines on his pale, rippled skin. “Yes?” The dwarf considered the man before him, almost double his height but interminably thin and swathed in black, black hair. This stranger was also struck dumb by the ocean winds and an 365 days of weighty melancholia. “Well? What do you want?” His voice was embedded with the coarseness of sea fogs, his tiny eyes narrowing to pinpricks as recognition began to slide over him. Still the visitor said nothing. The raindrops had begun to thicken again, bulleting the little shack, so vulnerable as it sat next to the great, black ocean. The dwarf peered at the man, his stumpy hands gripping a gutting knife as his annoyance at this intrusion gave way to something else. “You took my wife,” the stranger said as the rain pressed down upon him. The dwarf looked the man up and down, gritting his teeth. “What do you want?” The man stared back, shaking mightily as he stood, almost lost in the blue-grey spray which dissected him. “You took my wife,” he repeated numbly. The dwarf flipped the knife deftly into his left hand then slowly stepped to one side. “Come in out of the rain,” he said.

***

The shack was a microcosm for the town it sat on the edges of, just as the dwarf was. A fisherman that had nothing to catch and a fishing village with no working fishermen. A ghost place in so many ways. Thick wooden shelves lined the walls, the low ceiling’s skeleton of rotten wooden beams draped with disused nets and rusting equipment. The jaws of a medium-sized shark hung at an angle on the back of the front door. By the window, a sturdy table with a large cleaver wedged into the wood and strands of oily fish entrails spread across it. The dwarf had given him a piece of tarp to wrap around himself but seemed not to be bothered by the chill that hung inside. “I remember you now,” the dwarf said. “You’ve been here before. Last year. You . . . and that pretty little thing.” There was something about the way he said it, made it like a razor. “Do you remember what you did to her?” the visitor asked without looking up, the rain dripping from his hair thick and acidic from the smoke stacks that smogged the sky. “I do lots of things, hard to keep track sometimes.” The visitor looked up, peeling his hair away from his sunken face, arms draped over his legs in the chair he was slumped in. The dwarf moved towards him, eyes level with the other man. “Question is, do you remember what you did to her? From that look on your face, I’m thinking you might just.” He stalked around the back of the chair. “What’s done is done, my friend. And what’s done cannot be undone.” The ocean winds battered the tiny shelter and there was the sound of a fog horn or factory alarm going off in the distance—a mere memory, another ghost. “I want her back,” the visitor said. The dwarf’s chuckle was more of a snarl, as rough as his blistered skin. “You can’t have her. She belongs to the water.” He leaned in closer so that the visitor felt his beard scraping cold, sensitive skin. “It’s too late.”

*** His name was Daniel, this stranger, this man-shadow. And she had been Ceri. They had stayed in the room that Daniel now lay in, curled up on the floor because he couldn’t bear to be back in the bed where she had spent her final night. There had been an ill-tempered wind that night too, and a silence between them. The raw floorboards beneath him creaked as he rocked himself over the sound of the bed and breakfast’s landlady’s footsteps on the stairs. She paused by his door, her shadow thrown in the crack of light at the bottom, then faded again. Daniel felt himself drifting to the memory of Ceri’s night-whimpers, the desperate sighs she made on those few occasions she managed sleep. It hadn’t been life; it hadn’t been fair. It had been the only thing left to do.

***

It was three am and it looked as if the sky had collapsed and fallen to the ground, now liquid and pitch black. Tendrils of oily surf crept up the sand and around his legs. He had looked into the shack moments earlier after finding himself back at the shore and made sure the little fisherman was as asleep as he had appeared to be then climbed down off the pier that stretched out into water. The howling wind covered any noise he might have made but the dwarf had a supernatural air to him, born of the same piscean magic that had allowed him to communicate with the ocean and do as Daniel had asked one year earlier. To Daniel it seemed not that he walked into the freezing blackness but that it came to him, up his legs, his stomach, his chest. He could see foot-long fish flipping themselves out of the water and splashing back in again, fish that hadn’t been there for a very long time now. They beat a steady rhythm amongst the pinprick explosions of the raindrops on the surface but fell silent as he became submerged. Beneath, it was utterly black and yet somehow he was able to see. Oxygen bubbles turned luminous by moonlight spilled from his nose and lips, his hair like seaweed, flowing upwards from his scalp. The ocean floor was desolate. Broken pieces of reef and ancient, worn rocks were all that remained on the porcelain sands at the bottom. He moved through the water in a way he shouldn’t have been able to, sensing ribbon-like shapes moving around him but unable to look. It took him moments to reach the burial place, where the tips of the treasure chests stuck out from the soft ground they were half- buried in. They were at all angles, having been plunged in from the pier above. It surprised him how many there were. How many lives? Each container was an ending, another crumbling jewel handed over to La Mer by the stunted fisherman and his callused hands. Down here the world was described entirely in shades of blue, just as Ceri’s world had been. All of it diluted, shifting. You moved through it with the feeling that you had no control over your movements, that they were mediated by some greater force; by a distinct, unmentionable blackness. He moved between the makeshift graves, touching each one as he went. Sparks of memory, fragments of lives left to rot on the sea-floor because the world no longer had need for them, bit him like tiny piranha. And with each step another chest was revealed, more and more until it seemed the whole ocean bed was covered in them. He tried to speak her name, spilled bubbles into the darkness. Turned and realised that each chest he had touched had opened behind him and lurching water-shadows spilled out of them. Within some, the white glint of skull or bone. He spun around, his movements sluggish and delayed in the grip of La Mer, as the graves opened for him and he couldn’t escape when fingers began to grab him or when limbs wrapped around him. He sought desperately amidst the corpse-rabble to find her face but there was too many of them. His mouth filled with sand as he was pressed downward, his previously unacknowledged ability to breath without breathing suddenly leaving him and ice water was filling his lungs and the last thing he remembered was the beauty of the ocean’s surface above him, studded by raindrops filled by moonlight like bullets.

***

Then there was the smell of strong coffee, mixed with tobacco and sea salt. Daniel’s eyes opened through a layer of grit to a low, chunky table with what looked like teeth scattered across its surface. A blanket had been laid across him and a fire burned weakly in the hearth on the other side of the room. The dwarf was sitting on the edge of the table, his malformed legs barely reaching the ground. His clothes were filthy and looked damp in places. He picked at his teeth with an incisor that had previously been at home in the maw of an adult basking shark. “Drink this,” he said, and offered a steaming mug to Daniel. Daniel stared back numbly then suddenly lurched forward as he reached for the coffee. His body spasmed and a cool stream of watery vomit ruptured from him. He hacked and coughed, spat sandy residue out. It took a few moments for his consciousness to adjust and understand where he was. “You think it’s going to be that easy?” the dwarf asked him, his demeanour stuck somewhere between anger and amusement. Daniel gripped the mug but did not sip, taking comfort merely in the heat and aroma it gave off. “I don’t remember coming here.” “Somewhere between dream and reality, that’s where this place is now. It doesn’t matter which. You think I care which? Isn’t nothing left to keep us from drifting off into the sky or La Mer come capture us.” “I want her back.” “I’ve told you already, boy, you can’t have her.” “I’ll give you whatever you want—whatever it takes.” “She doesn’t belong to you, doesn’t belong to me. I play no part in this anymore. La Mer has her now and that steely bitch don’t give anything back, let me tell you.” There was a wet slapping sound from across the room. Daniel squinted past the blur of salt water corrupting his face and saw movement on the opposite wall. It was a fish like the one he had seen the day before on the shore, a fat black carp that had been pinned to the woodwork by its tail with a gutting knife. It bucked numbly, eyes like marbles about to slide out of its scaly head. “La Mer’s getting tired,” the fisherman said as they watched the animal slowly suffocate. “Nothing left to suck out of her, soon.” Daniel sipped on the coffee. He felt like an astronaut floating off into space, nothing to hold him down any more. The cuts he had made on his arms had begun to sting again from the salt water, as fresh as the day he had pressed razor blades into them, and the ocean was inside him. “I remember when there was life here. When the sky was blue and not grey and La Mer didn’t reflect it like bad metal. I remember when things weren’t this empty.” The dwarf stood by the window, lit a cigarette. The fish slowed its protestations, the sound of the cold marine wind filling the tiny shack, perched like a mollusc on the edge of the pier. Gulls screeched high above as if they were being murdered. And the ocean was great and black and forever. “I’ve lost count of how many I’ve put down there, you know.” “There could be one less,” Daniel offered weakly. “There could be,” the fisherman agreed, puffing out smoke at the gull perched outside the window. Scars littered the creature’s body. “But I don’t take from La Mer, I give to her. That’s the way it works. And don’t forget—it was you who came to me.” There was the sting, the barb that had been lodged in Daniel’s chest for a year. The fisherman had put Ceri down there but only because he had asked. “I had my reasons,” Daniel told him. “Everyone does. But its not my place to ask.” “I did it for her—she couldn’t bear it any longer.” “She tell you that?” And the dwarf was peering at him, shaggy eyebrows jolting across his brow. Daniel tipped his head to one side. “I just knew.” “You don’t seem so sure.” “Less every day. That’s why I’m here.” And back to the start again. “You can’t ever be with her again, my friend. I can maybe give you a moment but that’s all.” “What do you mean, a moment?” The fish had stopped flapping. The gull had flown. “La Mer is a creature like any other and grows tired. At night she sleeps and doesn’t hold as tight to that which she has. It’s the best time to fish. Or used to be. But your wife . . . this isn’t what you want. It isn’t what you think it is.” “Don’t tell me what I want.” “You don’t seem to know too good yourself,” the dwarf said, shrugging mildly and Daniel could feel him discarding the offer. “I want whatever you can give me.” Daniel was sitting upright now, the tarp discarded, the coffee put back on the table next to the shark teeth. “She won’t be the same. Once La Mer takes her ... She won’t be what you think she will.” “I don’t care.” The fisherman grimaced, realising he couldn’t be swayed and regretting offering the man what had meant to be a distraction. “You can’t have her back.” Daniel stood, abruptly towering over the dwarf, sadness displaced by something almost akin to hope. He hadn’t gone back to the town expecting anything, seeming instead to drift there because that was all that was left. And if he were to die, he should die there, of all places. “One hour,” he said. “Can you give me that?” The fisherman defiantly stared back, hateful of the impedance on his quietly disintegrating life and anxious to let it crumble in peace. He nodded once. “Come back tomorrow.”

***

Awakening with no memory of walking back to the bed and breakfast had been no surprise for Daniel. His life had had the blurred edges of a dream for some time now, selectively adopting reality when it saw fit. Ceri’s footsteps; the cold caress of the ocean; the fisherman; the blood-haze of self-inflected trauma. Visiting the fisherman making another deal with him to undo the first—it might have happened, or not. None of which mattered. He had come to the shore again that afternoon, already the light fading, the sky melting at the horizon like dirty wax. It was the only place left for him. He felt the weeping shadow of Ceri behind him, watched the impossible reflections of the box-graves rippling on the ocean surface twenty meters out. It felt like the end. He didn’t know how much he could trust a man who would abduct and bury another person in the bottom of the ocean without any inclination to know why but when there was only one choice there was no need for doubt. Plans formed in his head, plans to swim out and away from the dwarf before he could do anything or run up the beach and into the taxi he had arranged earlier in the day. One hour could never be enough and it didn’t matter what the fisherman said. Of course he would be with her again—there could be no other way.

***

Despite his awkward shape the dwarf possessed a strange grace as he dropped himself into the ocean that evening. The winds had picked up, stirring up bars of surf that glided across the water’s dark surface and scattering flocks of gulls into a frenzy as pieces of poisoned, dead fish floated up out of the darkness. Daniel crouched on the edge of the pier where it descended onto the sand, hands draped between his legs, heart cold and heavy in his chest like a rock. Everything was slowing down, filtered blue just like Ceri had said in those final months. The marriage had been a weak effort to try and drag her out of the darkness. They had both known it wouldn’t work but what had there been left? Through the lithium and lopraphamine, the Prozac and herbal remedies. Through time spent apart and time spent together. Just blue. The oceans surface parted and the dwarf dragged himself out, walking up onto the shore by himself. Daniel stood, went to meet him halfway, suddenly panicking. “Where is she? You said you would . . . ” The dwarf was coughing as he held up his hand, ice- water spilling off of him making his skin look even more leathery than it had before. He hadn’t even bothered changing, his clothes heavy and sagging, pieces of seaweed trapped in the lining of his pockets. “It’s started,” he said, gathering his breath and trying to banish the image of that first grave, the one that he had buried what seemed like and eternity ago. The one with his own wife’s rotting bones in it. “She’ll come to you soon—as the sun sets, when La Mer is at her weakest.” Daniel looked to the water, fearful of trickery but knowing there was nothing he could do either way. He was at the mercy of the devious troll that had put her there in the first place, a creature with no good reason to be doing what he was doing. He remained looking out at the shuddering water surface, listening to the fisherman move wetly back up to his shack and he wondered if the dwarf would be aware of Ceri standing there, as black and translucent as the dying wisp of an extinguished candle.

***

Her hair was dark as before, her skin whiter. Her lips purple, eyes clear. There were some dark veins visible around her shoulders and neck where the wedding dress hung around the top of her breasts. One of the gothic, elbow-length gloves she wore had peeled downwards like excess flesh and was wrapped around a bony wrist. She came out of the ocean as if it were poisoned honey, the water taking longer than it should to slide off of her. The old steely bitch was more reluctant than the dwarf might have thought. The wedding dress had turned black, perhaps rotting. It dragged behind Ceri as she stepped onto the beach, bare feet plunging into the soft sand. Her arms were outstretched, palms turned upwards. And then she stood before him, after all that time, after all that suffering. Her features were perfect, her face soft and no longer creased as it always had been. Did she remember the dwarf coming for her as Daniel lay in the bed beside her, unmoving as she was dragged away? The taste of the venom-soaked rag that had been pressed into her face? The sound of the ocean caressing her in the chest? Daniel reached for her, ready for his hand to move through the illusion. He touched her arm and though it was bitterly cold it was solid; it was there. She was there. She came into his arms and returned the gesture when he squeezed her to him. The frenzied gulls had quietened down but still circled above, swooping occasionally. In the distance, over Ceri’s shoulder, a massive tanker split the horizon, billowing smoke. Daniel could feel the fisherman watching them from the window. And none of that mattered. Her lips were warm. Her lips were warm. He couldn’t speak, now cocooned in a numbness that was not of the thick, depressive origin it had previously been but instead a gentle, sad one. Ceri’s eyes were as brown as always. She seemed slightly dazed, slightly distant but glad of his presence. Daniel cupped her face with his palm, traced a finger up her jaw, around her ear and into her hair; felt sadness surge in him as her eyes fluttered with satisfaction at his touch and then she suddenly slumped into him and he had to lower himself to the beach, supporting her as they went. They lay on the sand, Ceri curled in his arms as the freezing water crept slowly up towards them. La Mer was anxious, as temperamental as ever. Daniel pulled Ceri further up the shore and away from the creeping, watery fingers. She gazed up at him, and it was clear that she was only partly there. He brushed a streak of clotted hair from her face. He’d cancelled the taxi before going back to the shack earlier, perhaps sensing it would be pointless. He had known the dwarf would be right, that he couldn’t have her back no matter how much he wanted. He’d given her away and would never have her again. But for now, she was with him again. The tanker in the distance sounded a horn, a low, resounding scream that shuddered across the ocean towards him. Where now? What now? With each pulse of water that leeched out of the ocean like blood from a knife wound the time they had together slipped away. The rhythm of the surf counted down the seconds and all Daniel could do was draw her closer. All he could do; and all he needed to do. That anything else would come of his return other than this one last moment together was no great surprise to him—that he would feel so complete holding her, knowing that she was slipping away from him once more, never to return, was. And soon he was breathing drowsily into her hair.

***

When he awoke the sun had bled into the horizon a bright orange glow and all that was left beside him was the thin, shallow trench marking where Ceri had been dragged back into the ocean. Sand stuck to his face, crumbling from him as he sat up. There were pieces of her wedding dress, black little fragments, embedded in the trail as it vanished into the water. And on one of the scraps, the glitter of the wedding ring Ceri had taken down with her into her burial place. It all seemed calmer, La Mer content again that she had her jewel back. Daniel stood, brushing himself off. He tried to see the blurry shapes of the box-graves reflected on the surface but though it was brighter than it had been the day before all he could make out were lumps of coral and algae- soaked rocks. He could still feel the ghost of her lips on his. Behind him the boardwalk of the pier creaked and he saw the fisherman looking back down at him. The dwarf had a knife in one hand, a diseased fish in the other, both hanging by his sides. For the first time there was an untainted smile on his face. The sun caught on something on his finger. Daniel looked into his own palm at the ring, the gesture La Mer had left him. He slipped it onto his pinkie finger, the only one it would fit on, squinting in the daylight. He could feel the world ready to slot back into place again. Not yet, but soon. The sea lapped at his feet and felt almost warm.

Simon Logan is the author of the industrial fiction novel Pretty Little Things to Fill Up The Void and the short story collections Nothing Is Inflammable, Rohypnol Brides and I-O, all published by Prime Books. His new novel, Katja From The Punk Band, is due for release from ChiZine Publications in early 2010. You can find out everything you need to about him at his website coldandalone.com. Jews in Antarctica Lavie Tidar

Dad’s friend Nitzan says the messiah will be come in five years. We’re sitting around the dinner table at their place. It’s high on the hill, overlooking the sprawl of light that is Johannesburg. Their maid is making the main course in the kitchen. Nitzan makes us all put on yarmulkes and blesses the food. “The messiah is nigh,” he says. “Like a horse?” my brother says. Nitzan says, “What?” “Nigh," my brother says. “Like a horse.” “Neigh,” Nitzan says. “And you—” and here he points his finger at the table, going from person to person until the pointing finger comes to me—“you should be prepared." “What do you mean?” I say. To show I’m not nervous I take a sip of the soup. It’s too sweet. Nitzan says, “When moshiach comes—” he likes to slip Yiddish into his conversation, even though he doesn’t actually speak it—“each and every one of us will be seen by God. We shall be evaluated. You can’t hide secrets from God,” he says, still looking at me. When I put down the spoon it hits the plate and makes a noise. Nitzan smiles, like he knows something I don’t. "You must follow the mitzvahs," he says. At that moment their maid appears from the kitchen and serves us the main course of the meal.

***

There are 613 mitzvahs a Jew must follow, plus 7 rabbinic commandments. There are 365 negative commandments (thou shalt not...)—one for every day of the year—and 248 positive commandments (thou shall...). They include Number 26, which is not to blaspheme, and Number 33, to burn a city that has turned to idol worship. There is Number 43: not to listen to a false prophet, and Number 45: not to be afraid of killing the false prophet. Some of them are easy: Number 163 says, not to let Moabite and Ammonite males marry into the Jewish people, and there aren’t any Moabites or Ammonites any more. 165 is easy too: not to refrain from marrying a third generation Edomite convert. There are no Edomites any more, even if you wanted to refrain from marrying one. There are a lot of mitzvahs for resting: 96 (rest on the first day of Passover), 100 (rest on Shavuot), 102 (rest on Rosh Hashana), 104 (rest on Sukkot). 186 (not to eat worms found in fruit on the ground) is fairly easy. Same for 192 (not to eat blood). A lot are to do with the temple, and there hasn’t been a temple in two thousand years, so I guess they’re not applicable. Therefore, I am not in danger of 347: not to burn honey or yeast on the altar, plus I think only Cohens and Levis can work in the temple anyway. I’m exempt from 454: observe the laws of menstrual impurity, or at least I think I am. 290 is also sort of easy: to blow the Shofar on the tenth of Tishrei to free the slaves. I guess we don’t have to do that any more since we have no slaves to free, only maids. On the drive back I ask my dad if it is true, if the messiah really is coming. My mother sighs. My dad says, “He has already come.” This contradicts Nitzan, and I’m taken aback a little, because in our house Nitzan is generally considered something of an authority on things. “He was a rabbi in New York,” my dad says. “That is in America.” “Why do you say was?” I say. “The rebbe,” my dad says—like Nitzan, he likes to work a bit of Yiddish in when he can—“or rather, the physical incarnation of the rebbe, has passed away. But the rebbe will return.” “What do you mean?” “What is there not to understand?” I think about the awesome power of God and I realise what is going to happen. “In five years?” I say. My dad shakes his head. “I don’t know about that. But soon. Then the dead will rise and it will be paradise on earth.” “Stop filling your sons’ heads with nonsense,” my mother says. My dad shakes his head. “And what will you say when you come before God?” But my mother has no answer for that.

***

I wake up in the night and my skin is dry and itching and my throat is sore, and it’s hard to swallow. I dreamed about a man dressed all in black. He wore a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat and he was very old. At first I didn’t see him. I was in a cemetery. Then the ground kind of shook and this old hand, with paper-thin yellowing skin, burst out of the black earth of the cemetery. The hand grabbed hold of the ground and seemed to push. More earth was disturbed and something rose from below the ground, a thin emaciated body, a head that was not much more than a skull hanging from it. Its eyes shone, a terrible yellow. It saw me. “Five eight five!” it screeched at me. “Fear your father or mother!” It raised a long, bony finger. “Four nine four! Make a guard rail around flat roofs!” “Please," I said—I remember saying, "please, I don’t —” “Rise!" the creature shouted. “Rise!” Everywhere, gravestones shook, the earth rose and trembled. Hands, skeletal hands reached up from the ground, thousands and thousands of hands like a garden of bones, sprouting. “Two three six!” the first-risen shouted, coming towards me. “Do not cross-breed animals! Eighty-five, you must bless the food after eating! Sixty-two, do not engage in astrology! Sixty-four!” It came closer and closer and its hand landed on my shoulder and I think I screamed. “Sixty-four,” the old voice, the terrible old voice whispered in my ear. It was then I wake up. I sit on the bed and hug myself and know I have to be prepared. Sixty-four. I know sixty-four. Sixty-four is: do not attempt to contact the dead. ***

For the next several days I make plans. Our house has a basement. There is an old wardrobe down there. It used to belong to my mother but now she has a new one, and this one’s too heavy to do anything with. I make a secret door in the bottom of the wardrobe and cover it with a false bottom. That takes me some time. When it is done I hammer the doors shut from the inside. Now, the only way in is from the bottom, where you have to crawl to reach it, and once inside the hole is closed shut. Next time we go to the supermarket, I get my mother to buy me a can of tinned meat and I put it into the area I designate for the food. I start taking tea and coffee and sugar from the kitchen and hear my mother complain to my dad about the maid. “She is stealing the sugar,” my mother says. “I am sure of it.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” my father says. “Is everyone going to rise from the dead when the messiah comes?” I ask my dad. He shakes his head. “Of course not,” he says. “Only Jews will.” This is good news. It means I would have a lot less to worry about than if everyone came back to life. I take my brother’s air-gun when he isn’t looking and put it in the shelter, and then I worry about the mitzvah that says do not steal, but I don’t steal it, I merely borrow it, and he will thank me when the time comes. To be on the safe side I begin constructing a second shelter, under the bed. When I think about it, it is a much better hiding place. Less distance to travel, small and snug. I put cookies, my comic books, juice boxes, the air- gun and a few tins down there. My mother has had enough. She fires the maid. I’m jealous of the maid. If she dies, she won’t have to come back as an undead thing. I don’t understand why I have to. At night I pray to God. I say, “God, if I die, please don’t make me come back from the dead.” I think about it for a moment. “Or Grandpa, or Grandma, or Cousin Avi who drowned in the swimming pool.” I stop, then say, “Thank you.” Five years, Nitzan said. I have five years to prepare. Learn kung fu. Buy an Uzi. Run to Antarctica. There are no Jews in Antarctica. At night I dream of Cousin Avi. He stands in a puddle of water beside my bed. His eyes are bloated and his skin is blue. “Seventy,” he says. “Men must not wear women’s clothing.” “I have a gun, Avi,” I say. “So step away from the bed with your hands up.” The corpse’s mouth opens in what could be a smile or a scream. “Guns won’t help you when messiah comes,” he says. “Four. Love God. Five. Fear God.” “How many are you?” I say. The corpse seems to smile again. “Untold millions,” it says. “And we shall inherit the earth.” I fire at the corpse and hear a sound like bubbles or laughter and Avi disappears and I wake up and my bed is wet. But I have time. I have five years to get ready. They’ll never take me alive.

***

When messiah comes I will be prepared I have made a safe shelter Under my bed I have a matte-black bible And my comic books And when messiah comes I will know what to do So when the dead shall rise I will be prepared All comfy and snug Under my bed. Lavie Tidhar is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), and the author of the novella An Occupation of Angels (2005) and the linked-story collection HebrewPunk (2007). His stories appeared in Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Clarkesworld Magazine and many others, and in translation in seven languages. Undocumented Rachel Swirsky

Near my childhood home, there ran a river that flowed through a deposit of rust. The rusty water was tinted yellow-orange, the color of an early sunset. When I was young, I thought it looked like a river of gold. On hot afternoons, mother took us to the shore of the river. Flies swarmed the mud banks and the hills in the distance were peppered with pink, white and yellow homes. While mother sat, watching my elder brothers play on the bank, I told her stories. They always began the same way: “There is an island in the river of gold where there is a castle. Everyone there is rich and happy and there are no slaves.” I was the first of my family to be born in America. During my childhood, my father held two jobs with no hope of reaching minimum wage without a green card. My mother was forced to leave her job scrubbing rich women’s bathrooms after she almost died giving birth to my younger sister, Estrella. After that she walked bow- legged and we had only enough money for one meal a day. During the long afternoons after mother couldn’t work anymore, I tried to ease the tiredness out of her eyes by describing the diamond tower that rose in the middle of the island, the ladies who played lutes and broke hearts, the knights who jousted and feuded and defended the river of gold from sea monsters with rusty scales. “Who does the laundry?” scoffed my cousin Flora one afternoon when she was visiting from Mexico. Flora was older than me, but younger than my aunts, an awkward in-between age. Her mother sent her to visit a lot when I was little. I didn’t like her. I was too young to understand the passion behind her politics. All I heard was the anger she leveled at my brothers and I for coveting American toys; at papa for silently enduring his boss’s racist slurs; at the rich kids in the gated communities across the valley for owning their multi-storied mansions while my family crowded into two mud-floored rooms. I looked to mama for help, but she only fanned herself with a red kerchief and waited for me to continue. I thought fast. “Madeleine the washerwoman,” I said. “Her hands are burned with lye from scrubbing and her back bends like an arrow pointing to the ground. Her children play tag among the vats of water and pretend there are animals in the shapes of the steam.” My answer got their attention. Mama’s eyes lingered on the calluses that marred her palms. Flora leaned forward, the light sketching dramatic shadows across the ridges of her hollow cheekbones. “How did Madeleine’s back get bent?” “It just did,” I said. I set down Estrella who toddled off to play with our brothers. I turned to mama. “I don’t want to tell any more stories. I’m going home, okay?” It took years for me to learn the answer to Flora’s question. It came when I was in high school, long after I’d stopped telling stories about the river of gold and retreated into my teenage habit of spending as much time as possible in solitude, reading other people’s words. That day, mama called me out of class. I met her in the principal’s office. My two older brothers, Pablo and Jorge, had already arrived. Mama held six-year-old Estrella tightly by the hand, ignoring the little girl’s attempts to pull free. From that alone, I knew something was wrong. “What happened?” I asked. Mama said nothing. She led us out of the office into Uncle Alain’s pick-up truck, which our family shared when he didn’t need it. We chipped in insurance and repair money when we could. For several long minutes, mama sat hunched over the steering wheel. Jorge and Alain bullied Estrella into the middle of the bench in back. I sat in the passenger seat. “Mama?” She sat up, inhaling a fast startled breath, and pulled out of the parking space. Scanning over her shoulder for cars, she spoke in bursts. “Your papa was attacked...on his way to work at...the slaughterhouse,” she said. “Five white men in business suits. What do they want with your father, men in expensive clothes like that? They said he was taking their jobs. Like your papa ever earned more than rice and beans. “They broke his nose and three of his ribs, maybe more. Alain strapped him into the bed of the truck and brought him home. Alain says they probably left him there to die. I want to take him to the hospital, but he won’t let me.” Estrella started to keen. Pablo, the elder of our two brothers, hugged her. Jorge told her to stop crying. Pablo punched him in the arm. “Stop!” said mama. “Not today. Just stop.” At home, papa lay on a palette mama had made up for him in the bigger of our two rooms. As we walked in, his eyes focused on me briefly, blurry with pain. I lingered by the door. Mama touched her hand to papa’s forehead, then reached for a cool cloth. “This is foolishness, Eduardo,” she said. “We have to get you to the hospital.” Papa’s voice was barely audible. “No. You can take care of me.” “Don’t worry,” said Jorge. He stood over papa’s palette, fists balled at his sides. “I’ll get them. They won’t get away with it.” It’s difficult for me to remember Jorge at sixteen: he stood tall and skinny, with an adam’s apple so big it looked like he’d swallowed a whole fruit. From the tips of his long bony feet to his uncombed hair, he was filled with bluster and machismo, always rushing to do what you told him not to. “Quiet, Jorge, don’t say such things,” said mama. At the same time, Pablo rolled his eyes and said, “Grow up.” At eighteen, Pablo was sober and straight-laced. Without vying for authority, he always held it, the quiet child who can entice birds to land on his shoulders. But despite his natural gifts, he hadn’t yet learned when not to speak wounding truths. Jorge flew at him, eager to repay the incident in the truck. Pablo batted him off, landing a shot accidentally on the younger boy’s jaw. He shot an exasperated look at Uncle Alain as if to say what are we going to do with these kids? Estrella bawled. “Stop it!” shouted mama. “Look what you’re doing to papa!” We looked. Papa had rolled up as close to a fetal ball as he could manage with his broken ribs. His eyes were squeezed shut, furrowing his skin into deep crags. The wrinkles showed how pale he was, how frighteningly old he looked. Uncle Alain held up one hand in his gently authoritative way. “Why don’t we talk about this at my house?” “But we should take him to the hospital,” mama said. “All this talk is only keeping him awake,” Alain replied. He looked at me. “You stay with him. Make sure he gets some sleep.” The family left. Jorge went last. Before he went out the door, he wiped the bloody corner of his mouth with his wrist and made a fist at Pablo’s back, glancing up to make sure I’d noticed. The moment before my family left, the house was grave and uncomfortable. I felt aware of minute processes in my body: the pulse in my throat, the tightening of my stomach around the small amount I’d eaten for lunch, the tired ache behind my eyes. Yet I can’t help but remember that moment fondly; it was the last time my family held the shape I’d grown up expecting. The next day, Pablo dropped out of high school so he could find a second job and support the family. Not to be outdone, Jorge turned himself in to the principal as an illegal so he’d get thrown out. He wanted to prove he was a man too. When Pablo discovered what Jorge was planning, he tried to stop him from going. He pleaded with him, shouted at him, threatened to beat him up and tie him down. Jorge threw the first punch—or so Pablo said. I have only Pablo’s word. They circled each other, ready to beat out tensions that had been simmering for years. Pablo fought strong and steady, but Jorge held nothing back. He bit chunks out of Pablo’s arm, ripped open a gash above Pablo’s eye with the sharp ring he wore on his pinky. When Pablo knocked him on the ground, Jorge picked up a piece of broken glass from the gutter and went after Pablo’s neck. Pablo backed away, hands raised. Jorge scrambled to his feet. “Don’t follow me,” Jorge ordered and ran off—to join the Mexican army probably, mama said. He never came home. Estrella and I stayed in school. I won a scholarship to college, and later a fellowship to a Ph.D. program in Spanish literature which prepared me to teach the politics of radical novels to my community college students. Ten years later, I helped Estrella take out loans so she could enter medical school and eventually found a free clinic. Growing up, I’d always known my younger sister and I were different from the rest of the family. We’d been born here; we were citizens. I’d never expected to see our family split along that arbitrary line. But those stories are only part of what made the moment I want to tell. The heart of my tale lies years before I became a literature professor, on the night my father was assaulted. As soon as everyone left the house, papa’s eyes drifted open again. I found some leftover soup and spooned it into him. I tried to change his shirt, but as I pulled it off, I saw the fabric was stuck to his back with fresh blood. “What’s this?” I asked. It didn’t match any of the injuries mama had described. Papa turned his head. “Don’t tell your Mama.” I peeled back his shirt. Across papa’s shoulders, a series of jagged slashes spelled the word “WET.” The cuts weren’t deep, but I knew they’d scar. An image rose in front of my eyes, so real I could almost touch it. Madeleine the washerwoman from my imaginary island of gold: tiny, dark-skinned and bow- legged like mama, but with Pablo’s short-fingered hands, Jorge’s broad eyes, Estrella’s wavy black curls that caught the light like stars in a night sky, and papa’s... Madeleine turned her back to me and unbuttoned her starched collar, lowering her blouse inch by inch to show me her nape, the top of her spine, her shoulder blades. I beat my forehead with my palm to drive the vision away. Papa’s real body lay in front of me. I beat harder to drive that away too. “What did they do to you? Oh God. Oh, Holy mother of Christ.” I should have tended him, helped him conceal his secret, at least for the night. Instead, I eased him onto the pallet and fled. I saw Mama outside, arguing with Alain. “Go in!” I shouted. “Papa needs you!” I ran down the curving road to the river where the answer to Flora’s long-ago question surged beneath slick layers of oil and detritus. The next day, Jorge would raise a piece of glass against his brother, the glint in his eye an echo of the one that had shone in the pupils of the man who cut hatred into papa, setting these events into motion. My family would crack apart like the ground in an earthquake, leaving us grasping to stretch our fingers across the widening rift. At that moment, my mind did the same. Without childhood to transform it into magic, the river was orange, not gold, stained by trash coursing downstream from the city, not dragon scales and treasure troves. This was what Flora had always known, wasn’t it? What she’d seen as I stood on the banks, spinning fantasies of fairy gold. Madeleine the washerwoman hunched beneath my pretty words like the garbage beneath the river’s ruddy sheen. The lords and ladies of the island laughed and sipped champagne and decked themselves in emeralds and rubies, never seeing who lay crushed beneath their feet. And if she died—well, washerwomen were replaceable, weren’t they? There was always an endless supply of laborers to scrub and starve and lie crushed beneath delicate heels. I felt the story of my life rewrite itself, like the letters of a coded message rearranging into innumerable illegible patterns until, suddenly: clarity. The sun dipped beneath the white, pink and yellow homes in the distance. A dusk breeze drew cold around my shoulders and crickets emerged to play their mournful melodies. As the water roiled in the dying light, I began to speak. “There is an island in the river of gold, and it’s true, you can find castles there. Everyone who lives on the island is happy, and there are no slaves. “Not by that name.”

Rachel Swirsky is a fiction MFA student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in markets including Ideomancer, Abyss & Apex, Mothering Magazine, and Lone Star Stories, and was recently nominated for a Rhysling. You can learn more about her work at rachelswirsky.com. Light on the Water Genevieve Valentine

49 loved the hotel across the river, and that spring, when fog covered her, he knew he had to tell her. She was all by herself on that side of the river, just her and the rocky shore and the long highway that wound in a ribbon far behind her, and she seemed always so lonely he wanted her to know she was not unloved. He thought maybe he could court her, but all the life in him left at 5pm, and by the time the sun set all 49 could do was sit in the dark and watch her lights blinking on and off like the notes of a song.

***

49 envied 47, who had people living in him. Sometimes two of 47’s insides fought, and 49 pressed all his beams closer to listen, wondering what it must be like to be so alive all the time, to feel them breathing up against your walls at night as they slept. He thought about the hotel filled up all night with people to shelter, and his every rafter ached. ***

He stopped his elevator to see if the people would stay, but they took his eighteen flights of stairs in their haste to be away from him, and the next day no one came at all except the repairman. The repairman must have known what was going on, because he only kicked the open doors until 49 closed them. Then he went home and no one came again all that day, and 49 sat aching for the lives inside of the little hotel until it was morning and 49’s people came back. But 49 saw he had done something, at last, in his favor; when his people came back that morning they worked into the night to make up for lost time, and light from his windows fell across the water in bright snakes, in poems; the little hotel across the way saw it, must have known what it meant, because a matching pattern of windows filled all the dark places on the water until the whole river between them was ablaze.

***

49 sent two pigeons with a paper cup from his roof, and they brought back half a croissant, and so 49 and the hotel were engaged. His foundations shook when they knew. Before 49 there had been a warehouse; 47 and 49 and 50 and 48 across the street had all been one big warehouse alive with thrumming machines, and they shared the memory of the ratcheting and the in-and-out file of workers and the deep, solid satisfaction that the best building was one in which things got done. A hotel; a temporary house for strangers; it was of no use at all, it was abominable, and the deep beams in the earth trembled and shifted. 49 wished he was like 47, who went blithely on day and night with people to care for, who couldn’t hear the disappointed rumblings amidst his squabbling, laughing, breathing insides. He wished his windows opened, so he could feel the river wind blow all the way through him, instead of just battering his front like his foundations battered him from beneath. But he didn’t return the croissant; he had given his word to the little hotel. After a few days the croissant was gone, but the pigeons remained, and in a little corner behind the roof- access door they built a nest on top of an old pipe. 49 shut down his ventilation at night, so that when they settled in no noise would wake them, and he thought what a beautiful gift the hotel had given him.

***

For the wedding her windows gleamed in the sun, and his blinds were all pulled down so she wouldn’t see he was shabby. In the high wind 47 and 48 and 50 swayed and moaned their congratulations, but across the river there was only the little hotel and the wide road, and she stood apart and alone. 49 hoped she was happy, and that the congratulations reached her.

***

He found it most surprising that she liked his calm; she liked when the shades were up after dark and she could see his quiet, empty insides. He wished he could take some of her people, which were chaotic and always changing, insides that didn’t care for her like she cared for them. They stayed awake all night with their lamps on in the windows, and she never rested until they rested. On still nights, the little mosaic of light lay across the river, so close that if he could stretch out his shadow he could touch them.

***

For a long time there was just the long road behind the little hotel, so when the cranes and the trucks came both 49 and the hotel knew what was happening, and were filled with joy. The people laid out grids for a line of buildings along the road, stood together and pointed at this place or that place, and behind them the road filled with bulldozers and trailers and rolls of insulation. 49 was glad that the hotel would have some buildings close, some others to help block the worst of the wind and the sun, and to keep her from being afraid in the dark so far away from him. When they emptied the hotel of her people, he wondered why; when 47 had been rebuilt 49’s insides had continued to come and go, grumbling about the noise. For a week she was still, and trucks took away loads of furniture from inside her and brought in flats of laced- down steel girders, and at night she sat empty and the moon moved across the blank windows. On the eighth morning they stood apart from her and pushed the detonators, and in the bright sun the little hotel across the river collapsed into herself and sank with no other sound but a sigh. The ground under 49 shook with the impact; his pigeons took flight, and he so he stood alone and empty and looked across the way, where there was nothing left of the little hotel but dust.

***

49 grieved for the hotel; he grieved until his roof sagged, he turned away his sight until his windows cracked, and so complete was his sadness that he didn’t notice that his people had left until the notice went up on his ground floor: FOR SALE. He leaned against 47 and listened to all the people living; two children on the third floor ran up and down the halls, and their footsteps trembled against the mortar. He had no sight outside himself, and didn’t care that the people who bought him tore him apart until only his shell was left; even then they altered him, changing his windows and scraping away the gray paint on his doors. But they built new walls inside him, new walls and plumbing, and despite himself 49 became interested in what was happening to him, wondering what he would become. Then one day the repairman came to put in the gas lines for stoves and he realized he was getting insides of his own, people who would live within him, people he could care for and protect and who would go to sleep inside of him. This was a transformation he could not believe, until he looked around him; 47 was still holding his people, but across the way staid 50 and 48 had gotten the same treatment - he could see that inside 50 people were already beginning to live, hanging curtains and leaving lamps on at night, little warm teeth in 50’s long-empty face. The people put new windows in 49, looking out over the river, and by that time he was brave enough to look where his little hotel had been. It was a park, now, tucked between a restaurant and some shops painted bright colors; children gathered along the riverbank and threw bread to the ducks until the light faded. As it got dark, one by one they left, and where the little hotel had stood now all was soft and green and quiet, resting for the morning without any human noise. One light in the park stayed on, glowing from behind the tall clock on the pillar that stood in the very center of the wide green; its light just reached the water, and floated there like the first word of a letter she had left him, like a single note of a song.

Genevieve Valentine is a writer in New York; her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Farrago’s Wainscot, Diet Soap, Journal of Mythic Arts, and Fantasy. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog. She is currently working on a formula to evaluate the awfulness of any given film, a scale that will be measured in Julians. In Dreams Tangible Su-Yee Lin

I.

Laurel wanders from place to place, scattering seeds of doubt wherever she goes. She makes people doubt the reality of the world, weaves illusions that have more depth than reality can ever have. She is a dream weaver. We found her first tape long ago, hidden in between the pages of a book. There are ships with flying sails in the corners of her mind. There are men in disguise, women dressed as men, pirates pretending to be dandies. She wonders about black holes and time travel, about parallel universes and big friendly giants. She thinks that snozzcumbers would taste terrible but longs to try them anyway. One should always keep one’s mind open. Open enough to catch every stray thought shooting out around them. She is intangible yet tangible. One feels that if one touches her, she will dissolve into a puddle of soapy water like a wizard, or perhaps just disappear in a poof of light and smoke. Yet she is all too real, always there when you need her and always, always unattainable. Distant as a mountain’s silhouette on the horizon, as close as the empty presence in the other chair. Untouchable. Everyone yearns to have someone like her in their life, as a mother, a sister, a lover, a friend, an ally. She will never let you down.

***

II.

She wasn’t attacked today. Laurel was very worried about this. Her assassin was always prompt. In this world, the only things you could rely on were chocolate and assassins, not death and taxes. And even the chocolate was beginning to lose its gratification value. She’d noticed the man dressed in black scaling the ivy on the wall of her dorm during the second week of college while gazing out the window. He had leapt through her open window, punching in the screen. She had watched calmly as he threatened her silently with a knife then she had kicked it out of his hand so that it flew into the air, glinted silver in the moonlight, then landed, hilt down into her hand. He was only a boy after all, perhaps a year or two older than she. They had bowed to each other and he had left, rappelling down the wall. She had waved as he leapt to the ground and headed away, blending with the night. So that was the routine every night from then on. 9 o’clock sharp. It was a good thing that Laurel’s roommate was never around, preferring to spend most of her time in her boyfriend’s dorm. Sometimes she and her assassin would share a smile as they went through the pattern, like an inside joke. They were like secret friends. She didn’t know him and didn’t know if he knew her. In her mind, she called him Astrophel. She could only see his eyes. He had golden eyes. Once, she wondered who had sent him and why he came every night but she soon forgot. But today he hadn’t come. She waited and waited, time passing by on tiptoe, silently moving past. He was an actor, an essential part of their play for two. Assassins don’t let their victims down. She bit her lip, furrowed her brow then went to sleep at 12.

***

II.½ Who is Astrophel, you ask? He is mysterious and without morals. But what he has is loyalty and dignity. He will never let go of his pride although he knows the value of keeping his mind open. He is scrupulous. He cracks nuts with his teeth, shelling them slowly and eating them while the shells are in his mouth. He has good teeth. He will dangle off bridges, hanging from the tips of fingers and leap over cars in one jump. He likes to climb on statues and pretend that he is George Washington or Napoleon Bonaparte or perhaps even the pirate, Bluebeard. He has no beard, though. He can spin so fast that his hair lifts him into the air, although his hair isn’t very long which just makes it all the more fascinating. He claims it makes him dizzy. He is reckless and interesting and someone one would want as a friend, never as an enemy. He will protect you if he likes you but sometimes, even people like him need to be protected. And that’s what Laurel is for.

***

III.

That night, Laurel’s mind was filled with dreams. She dreamt of ghosts and shadows, things only vaguely remembered, odd shapes that lingered in the back of her mind. When she woke up, they fled like frightened mice, the dust of reality covering their trails. She fixed the dreams of others that came her way, wanting repair. Robin wanted to be the same as the others. In her dream, they flew up all around her, light as clouds, swooping and soaring through the air like birds. She was left alone on the ground, earthbound. She gazed up through her tears, jumped, flapped . . . fell. Laurel gave her wings. And up she flew, laughing in exultation. Christopher ran and ran, through a maze of brush, fog masking his way, his breath panting in his chest. Something was chasing him but what, he did not know. He was seized with a sense of urgency, of danger. He couldn’t stop and his destination was unknown. The landscape changed around his feet, the ground changing from water to sand to mud. He recognized nothing. Laurel twitched a dream strand here and there, out in the corners of the web. He found his house in front of him and slowly drifted to a stop. Opened the door, shut it behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. He was safe here. Only one stayed completely clear in her mind and that was her own. That one she recorded. The dreams that you remember clearly are always true. "There is a light shining down dimly upon me. Or is it light? The world changes while we sleep, influenced by our dreams. Emotions seem abstract here, distant as a forgotten thought. Everything I see is tinted a slight blue and it smells the way the air smells after a thunderstorm. My roof has disappeared to show a clear sky; I am gazing into open space, the planets and stars thrown into sharp focus above me. I smile and the mushy material under my head shifts. The horizon seems to be outlined by a light colored mass, which I walk toward, through a substance between liquid and solid. Along the way, I see a gun floating atop the liquid ground, rolling in waves toward me. Reaching down, I grasp it and suddenly shoot into the air. A small bright star shoots out, hovers in the sky and falls . . . sinks into the murk but lighting the way down. When I reach the light colored mass, I find it to be an assortment of long thin sticks, glowing yellow. Some are so tall that they seem to disappear into one of the stars overhead while others are only double my height, their tips ragged as if they had been snapped; all of them go all the way down into the liquid that I’m standing on, so deep that they eventually seem to disappear into the darkness. They give off an air of frigidness, of cold. They are hot to the touch yet it seems like they are encased by entirely smooth ice. I snatch my hand away and look around more carefully. I reach one of the ones that are broken and notice that it doesn’t contain the same sort of energy that the non-broken ones do. It feels cool and I experience a strange vertigo while touching it. The world tilts and I am thrown off." That’s how she realizes that Astrophel has been lost. She has to find him. She buys a first class ticket to the moon. She left her tape recorder. We found it on her bed, covered by her sheets.

***

III.½

There’s something that’s always said about dreams. They disappear like foam in the beat of a heart yet sometimes, they will stay with you forever, the images of the mind stuck in transit. Where do they go when they’re gone? Off the edge of the widest ocean, high up into the sky where they become true and not just some chaotic images from the minds of humans trying to make sense of their lives? There are places only stars can go. There are places only assassins can go. And there are places where both assassins and stars can’t go but combined, can. And there is no place that Laurel cannot go.

***

IV.

The spaceship was a one-man, or in this case, one- woman vehicle. Laurel liked the feel of the chairs and how they swiveled. She liked the feel of being entirely enclosed in a tiny room of metal hurtling around in outer space. She saw the galaxies spinning away, past her window and sink into the star-specked ocean of space. She thought of them as fish. The spaceship landed with a soft plop and the door opened. Laurel stepped out and looked all around. The ground was pale and filled with craters. She shook her head. This was not what she was looking for. She waved to the spaceship and walked away, leaving soft white footprints. The spaceship lifted a probe and flew away. She walked and walked, her feet barely touching the ground before she was up again, gravity a lesser force here than what she was used to. This was nothing like her dream. Here it was all solid, craters scattered about like so many dents on the face of the moon, pock marks. But she knew what she was looking for. Her dream had told her. A grove of light was the key. Along the way, she told herself about a man named That who often appeared in one boy’s dreams of superheroes and battleships and warriors, of pirates and cannibals and secret agents. She felt lonely sometimes so imagined that That was traveling with her. When he appeared, she wasn’t surprised. After all, things from the mind took on a life of their own, a reality when Laurel was around. But he soon became annoying with his mask and his frequent shouting of "Superpowers come to my aid!" and "Zam! Pow! Kaboom!" so she banished him. We found him sitting by himself on the moon but he refused to talk to us. He said we were the enemy. She found the grove soon after. The ragged ones were taller than the ones in her dream but she knew not to touch them. He was a fallen star, after all. So she grabbed one of the long ones that reached into the sky and touched a star and hugged it tight. The world exploded around her.

***

V.

Or rather, she exploded out into outer space. She saw whirls and sparkles that stung her eyes and bits of infinite darkness so she closed her eyes, held on tight, and waited for the world to subside. The vein of a star was hot under her fingers. Living. She arrived in the middle of a dinner party. We watched her hurtle through the skylight like a shooting star, sparks of light glistening all around her, dwarfing the light of the chandelier. The skylight sealed up after she came down. Her small mass was light to the masked man whose arms she fell into but later on, he told us that it was like holding the sun. She smiled at him and he closed his eyes. She whispered into his ear then kissed him on the cheek and then she disappeared into the dancing crowd, an ordinary girl. Ordinary? No, never ordinary. The masked man later told us that she had told him that he was a star like the one she was looking for. Her smile hurt his eyes.

***

V ½

Who was that masked man anyway? Maybe he was the father, the son, the older brother of someone you know. Maybe he kissed you goodnight when you were young or scowled at you angrily when you took his daughter out on a date. He might have baked you a birthday cake once. The one that actually had your name spelled out correctly and flowers made of lemon peels, which made you tear up because it was oh so perfect. The assassin would call him father. But what are fathers to stars? Especially fallen ones. We wonder what his name is. Could it be Turpentine? Semi sweet? Aphrodisiac? Or something more common like Roger or Carpenter or Courtney? Perhaps he is a woman dressed up as a man dressed up as a woman dressed up as a man. We will never know. ***

VI.

Laurel was in the depths of the world. She had found it through a trapdoor under the dinner table. Stairs going down and down, twisting and turning under her feet like moss-covered rocks, chittering like insects. She told them to hush and their chittering subsided only to be replaced by utter silence. She didn’t like that either but decided to let it be. The stairs led to a door. A door of age darkened wood, covered with grime. The door would not open. So she kicked it down. And she went through. We wondered what she was searching for. It looked like a star to us, a bright shining star. But to her, it was a boy. A boy she called Astrophel. She could recognize him by his eyes. His hands and feet were bound and his hands tied but with one look from Laurel, they sizzled away like nothing. What was reality to someone who wasn’t real? Natural laws became permeable, the very substance of the world separate and malleable. He smiled. She smiled. And the door opened. A large man blocked the door. "What’s the best way to kill a star?" He paused, "Combine him with another star." He pulled out a gun and shot.

***

VI. ½

Everything needs to be done in a certain way. Even when there are no normal rules, there are rules governing the unnatural. Or else the world would be total chaos and no one wants that. Astrophel understood that. Sometimes to fly, one has to fall. Sometimes stars have to be shot. Laurel understood that. Things have to be allowed to run their natural course. There is something beautiful about explaining logic with illogic. Let’s run our unnatural course and see what we find. A tape, perhaps?

*** VII.

A sickening mirage of light and shadow and sound pounds against the senses. Haloed by fire and trailing light, they sailed through space at hyperspeed, shot from the barrel of a gun. Caught by a stray cloud, they landed softly on a hill overlooking the world. And the first thing the assassin ever said to Laurel was, "Thank you." He smiled. She smiled. And that was it. But that was all that was needed. After all, what could an assassin who was a fallen star say to a person like Laurel who can see their dreams? So they sat and watched the sky. And while they sat and watched stars shooting through the galaxies, Laurel told her assassin about That. A man who was only a figment of an imagination, made real on a distant moon light years away. Then she told him about the countless dreams she has woven, their threads twanging from her touch, the dreamers forever unknowing in their bliss. She knows everything there is to know about anyone. That is why we wish we could have someone like her in our lives, someone who will always understand. We have the tape she left behind, on that hill on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. We never heard about her again. After all, it’s hard to catch a shooting star. We can only wish.

Su-Yee Lin is a first-year MFA student in Fiction at UMass-Amherst. She graduated from Brown University in 2009 where she learned all sorts of things like moondancing and parkour and won the Francis Mason Harris prize for her writing. "In Dreams Tangible" is her first published story. A Song to Greet the Sun Alaya Dawn Johnson

i.

Will her brothers mourn the loss of their jeweled seed? Her mother has baked all night dead silent in the kitchen. The ashes are bitter as cacaotl grounds But give no liminal visions. Sunrise: the bread is dense, each slab gray as evening moss. The father will not eat his slice— It’s salted with his tears.

He used the natleoc, the stick of thorns covered in dust and spores above his doorway, for that was what the priests prescribed and he would have this done as the gods demanded. She did not cry when the sharp points broke her skin, and so he hit her a second time. They both stared at the blood coursing down her arm and breast, astonished and a little afraid at the beauty of the forbidden liquid. “Father?” she said, just like that. Mild and trusting, and he recalled when she had been younger, a child, not the disobedient strumpet before him, and a red cormorant had stolen the choicest wood-ear from her basket. “Father?” she had said, and he’d given her two of his own, and she’d smiled. As she’d smiled for that barbarian? That bare-chested metl? The sun god shalt not suffer a disobedient daughter to live. And his priests shalt not suffer her father to receive the twelfth district tax appointment, the one for which he had slaved these more than twenty years, without extreme repentance. “Father?” she said again, as the blood dripped onto his floor, marking his house with his spilled honor. Condemning her to death. There had been spores on the natleoc, more than enough to poison her blood, even without the miasma of river air. But she didn’t seem to understand. He must finish it. They said he must, to reclaim his family’s honor. But he could not speak. So he hit her again, across her cheek. The thorns bit deep, and this time she did cry out. She stumbled to her knees. “Is this about Colqi?” The whole district already knew. He was a laughingstock. His friend Ollin, the twelfth district constable, had told him of his daughter’s disobedience and recommended he see the priests. “Your daughter has been seen by the river, holding hands with a metl. The one who plays reeds in the cacaotl house.” And the priests had given him a feather, yellow for vengeance, and told him to break her skin. He would dye it red with her blood and bring the proof back to them, and by such measures would his shame be expiated. He killed her then, closed his eyes to the sight of her blood, his ears to the sound of her sharp breaths. “Father,” she said, “you have killed me.” So he shattered her jaw and she could not speak. So he crushed her windpipe and she could not weep. And in her lips, he put a wizened wood-ear, because he remembered she had loved them, and went off to fetch his wife. His sons were good boys; they had held back their mother long enough.

***

ii. His legs are long, lithe with unearned grace His fingers dance like caterpillar legs Over the reeds of his pipes He hides from the sun But the river hears—it loves him as she does. She, the sun’s daughter, by conquering fathers forbidden To keep her heart in the basket of his reeds— Fragile beneath the one-eyed god’s stare.

Constable Ollin is out traveling. So the girls whisper and laugh at Number 12, the cacaotl house where he and the other petty bureaucrats of the twelfth district like to partake in the evening. Zorrah regards him with mild curiosity between her sets. It’s not like the dour constable to order such fine mushroom grounds in his cacaotl—he is known to enjoy less stupefying brews. She’s dressed in little but her cochineal hair and clacking castanets. When she dances, Ollin stares along with the rest, but who knows what music he sees, or what rainbows he hears. “Her hair sounds just like morning,” Ollin says, late in the night. Another patron, deep into Number 12’s legendary Quetzal brew, nods in complete understanding. The rumor of what happened to that girl, that daughter of the crabbed tax collector Mazatlin, spreads through the tavern like the bitter resin of grounds steeped overlong in a brew. She hadn’t been very pretty, Zorrah remembers, but she had a smile that could coax the sun to love the moon. An honor killing? That little man? That beautiful smile? “Old Miq had better retire soon, else Mazatlin might honor kill him too!” one passably bold wit offers, but the constable merely nods his head to unseen music. The others laugh nervously. Old Miq, the twelfth district comptroller whose job Mazatlin so violently desires, has been known to deny favors to those with indiscreet tongues. Halfway through the night, the piper Colqi seems to choke on his reeds. He’s metl, but it’s a lax crowd at Number 12, more concerned with the potency of the brew and the tapestry of the music than the fickleness of imperial policy. That’s just their day job. Still, the jeers as he stumbles off the stage have a cruel aftertaste, a privileged savor. “Your mother teach you to suck like that?” “What can you expect? Bunch of lazy monkeys.” “Leave him be!” shouts Zorrah, and they all do. Cochineal hair commands respect. The music resumes, absent silent pipes. The metl goes traveling, hunkered down in the shadows like a wood-ear on the underside of a rotting log. “From the muddy banks of the Nanacoal,” says the constable, a vague quotation, involuntarily uttered. The metl has heard. “I have gathered the reeds,” he says, finishing the line. The constable: “I wove them tightly enough for a desiccated heart.” And oh, the metl’s voice is suddenly like that of his reeds, dark as silt, turbulent as the river:

“Not yet have I found you. And I am left with this basket of the river’s weeds Filled only with my longing And the one-eyed god’s flesh.”

The constable begins to weep. Everyone sees, but no one makes much of it. He’s traveling, after all. “I saw you smiling by the river,” the constable says. “You touched her arm. That smile could greet the sun!” “That’s not how it goes,” giggles one of the other girls as she comes up behind him. “Don’t you know your Ilticloc? Maybe someone should refresh your memory.” The constable follows her lead, stumbles up the stairs. The metl travels alone. ***

iii.

The reeds are a safe place to hide a heart Says Ilticloc, and who are we to argue? Where can the moon and sun love, but in the shadows? But she steps beyond their fall To the one-eyed god’s embrace—fierce and fleeting. My love, says the moon’s son Caterpillar fingers dancing along her breast. Stay by my side, and we will always sing the brightest colors. My love, says the sun’s ward Her smile a tongue of its flame. I would put the pomegranate seed between your lips, I would strike my shells to the beat of your heart, Were my will my own. Sweeter than any jeweled seed, that kiss Emboldened by her fickle sun.

High above the riverbank, the constable— Who has longed for her symphony these many years — Sees all.

We loved her, never let them say otherwise, in all the ways brothers can love a sister. Every summer, at high sun, she would spend all night gathering wood-ears and glow tongues to weave into wreaths. The best in the district, and she made them for both of us, so the girls would look as we walked along the river, and wonder if we might ask their fathers for permission. To our mother, she gave the best of all, with the reds of wild soma and the blues of poison nightshade. At night, mother would glow like the empress, and our father was proud. We loved our little sister, you see, but our father is our family’s sun, his word a surrogate for the god’s, and she had defied him. We had no choice; there will be war at the end of the rains, and we will make our names in it, so long as we may bear our father’s sign and his grace. Our mother did not understand. We held her arms as she wept and cursed, and though we spoke to cover the sound, we all heard our sister’s cries, blue as the poison nightshade she’d once wreathed around our mother’s neck. “Do you remember, mother,” we said, “when our sister was ten and father lost her in the streets by the palace? How we all looked for hours, calling her name, peering inside every door? And do you remember that night, after the moon had risen and ascended its heights, a woman leaves the palace by a side gate. Her hair is silver with blight, her eyes reflective as a cat’s. And she is holding our sister’s hand, and they are talking like the moon to the stars? The woman was princess Xocotzin, mother, do you remember? Before the emperor banished her to that convent.” “Yes,” our mother said, when we had thought fury sealed her lips. “ ‘She’s a bold one,’ the princess told me. ‘I pray the sun won’t burn her.’ And now I sting at the reproach in her eyes that day, the sorrow of the blight and of each year’s first morning.” Our mother fell silent, and in that moment we all three realized the house was still. An ominous absence, colored gray as slate after the rains. Below us, no one cried. Then our father’s footsteps, heavy on the stairs. “It’s done,” our mother said, and held us so we could weep.

*** iv.

If the sun cannot mourn, the moon will. If the moon cannot mourn, the earth will. If the earth cannot mourn, may the river? And if not the river, at least the hollow reeds Whistling along its banks. Leave him be, the one who whispers hoarsely there. You have forsaken his joy, You have buried his heart in the river’s clay. What is left to him now but the memory of a song The sweet red seed never tasted?

The years had twisted my husband, my Mazatlin, the way an oak tree will grow gnarled and hard around the persistent flowering of honey mushrooms. But I had always thought of his heart, like that of the oak, as strong and unblemished. I had not thought the rotting threads reached so deep. Now, I recall the heartsblood, the dreaded spore that shoots its threads through our veins, reaching blindly and steadily for the heart. And when it arrives, it takes root. It grips like a choke vine and when it grows, it blooms. A fortnight, a death’s face, the saying goes. And I have never seen the heartsblood bloom, but he had. He told me the misshapen floret of that deadly mushroom does resemble a face, never revealed until the host’s life has fled. It bursts through the chest wall at the very end— a stranger’s face to bring you to death. He had seen his uncle die like that, when he was a child. He understood why the gods enjoined us to never break the skin, to never profane our hearths with blood. And yet he sliced her with the natleoc, he made her bleed before he killed her. The priests told him to, he said, as though I should congratulate him for his careful adherence to their instructions. I told him I was leaving. He had not stopped weeping since the moment her cries finally ceased, but he did then, his face frozen with shock. “You too?” he said, as though our daughter had wanted to have her blood spilled, her throat crushed. I saw our wedding in his eyes, heard the singers’ twining harmonies as we walked through the streets. I saw the nun break the pomegranate, scattering it seeds. “I put the jeweled seeds between your lips,” my love had said, because he was no fool or illiterate, ignorant of his Ilticloc. “Oh, to be the ruby in your lips,” I said. “The longing and the light on your tongue.” And so we had kissed, and if the seeds that day were bitter, I did not notice. I named my daughter for them. “Where can you go, woman?” my husband asked, arm raised as though he would strike me, too. “Who would take in a disobedient wife?” “The lady Xocotzin,” I said, for I remembered the story my sons had told me and held it like one of my daughter’s wreaths. “You will shame me. We could have so much, soon.” I shook my head. “They will never give you that post, Mazatlin. It was always meant for Ollin.” The lady Xocotzin has welcomed me, and lets me share in her cacaotl. Each time, I pray for visions of my daughter, but I see nothing but heartsblood, a man rotting from within.

***

v.

The nochtli cactus-pear is orange for a princess And white for the gods. Merchants hawk their fruit like jewels, this Liminal Night. But the girl who walks alone has no care for her belly. Ayamotli lingers like pepper on her tongue. What sound is that, what skillful notes Draw her closer to the shadows? It is the metl, laughing with his kind, Feasting on Liminal visions, and each bite a song. Her questions float between them—

After all, They are traveling together.

The first time she finds you, it’s the Night of Liminal Dreaming, at the start of carnival. You have never met her before, and she is asking for a song. “Sweet and sticky and rich, like a pear tart with curds and honey,” she says, and because it’s the first night, you understand. A few hours ago you too drank the ayamotli, the nectar of the gods, and in a few hours you too will be traveling. You lift the reeds to your lips, and they are as familiar to you as your fingers and your breath. You play as she asks, a song of your people and of your childhood. “How far the sun?” cries the flute. “Near as your heart, far as your love’s.” She doesn’t know the tune, but she smiles, for it goes down sweet and sad, just like she wanted. She is alone this first night, or has slipped away from a parental gaze occluded by visions of gauzy heavens, of powers only annually accessible. And because it’s a Liminal Night, because the ayamotli has turned words to colors, smells to symphonies, songs to braided carpet, you ask her to go traveling with you. You know you shouldn’t, that hands so soft and hair so dark could only belong to one of them. They have taken your people’s land, outlawed your customs, sacrificed your children to their flaming god. They have shunned and exploited you, and they may kill you if they see you corrupting one of their daughters with your song. But it is carnival, with more powers abroad than even this insatiable empire can constrain. You look at her clear, enchanted eyes—they are like the river, and she floats upon it. Concentrate, and so can you. You touch her hands and you both hover a few impossible inches above the mud brick pavement. “Will you write a song for me?” she asks. “For the carnival and the river and the forbidden streets where your people live?” “Now?” you say, startled. She won’t meet your eyes. “I cannot stay long from my family. But songs remember where they were born— even on my side of the river.” Just like one of them, to demand something so precious and pretend to have some right to it. Your fury boils the air around you yellow and green. This means nothing to her. You’re the ball in her game, the carnival is her field. Her sandals smack the pavement. She’s lost the ayamotli’s grip. “You hate me,” she says. “No.” And it hovers somewhere near the truth. You imagine everything this girl represents, every wrong her people have committed against yours, every barbed boundary between your world and hers. “What’s your name?” you ask. She tells you as you both float away.

***

vi.

Only the mother wears mourning red. Within convent walls, she does not see The father, passed over and lonely Finding no solace among the colors of the earth. The brothers have gone to war— One wears his sister’s token against his breast One will die on the sun god’s mountain. The metl has made a new song: Yellow, for anger Blue, for memory Black, for oblivion. On the banks of the Nanacoal, A boar has trampled the reeds.

Father! His beauty is deeper than the sky! He sings, and he will weave a song for me when we marry. His eyes are so light, his hair so sleek. And we have flown through the city, over merchant’s courtyards and temple pyramids. We have slept with our heads pillowed on the waves, we have sunk to the bottom of the ocean and seen great volcanoes on the edge of a monstrous lake. We have sat by the river and stared at the sun and I have understood every song ever written. Oh, Father! May you bless me, for I am his.

Alaya Dawn Johnson lives, writes, cooks and (perhaps most importantly) eats in New York City. Her literary loves are all forms of speculative fiction, historical fiction, and the occasional highbrow novel. Her culinary loves are all kinds of ethnic food, particularly South Indian, which she feels must be close to ambrosia. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures, and has lived and traveled extensively in Japan. Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine Cat Rambo

What was the seed for the lovely story "Light On the Water"?

If you cross the Queensboro Bridge at night, the light from the skyscrapers on the Manhattan side almost touch Roosevelt Island, where the buildings are shorter and quieter. Looking at it is like reading semaphore flags.

Do you have any favorite buildings in NYC? What's been your favorite living space there?

I love the Ukrainian Institute, which is a stone's throw from the Met Museum, and a truly gorgeous building. The Angel Orensanz Foundation is also beautiful, but repurposed churches are sort of shoe-ins. My favorite living space in New York is my current apartment in Queens, even though the quiet of the backyards across the way has recently given way to a series of unsolicited concerts by a group of musical theatre aficionados whose determination far outstrips their talent. What inanimate objects do you find the most spooky?

Rather than particular objects, I tend to be struck more by the relationships between object and their locations; no one has warm fuzzies seeing a burned-out medical facility with a melted doll inside. (I hope. If you do, don't tell me.)

Why do you write under such an obviously made-up pen name? :)

I can only guess from my name (which is, in fact, my legal one) that my parents wanted me to be in the soaps. I hope one day they can forgive me for doing this instead.

What's your idea of a perfect fantasy short story? Any examples?

I think any number of short stories can be a perfect way to tell that particular story. Despite this falling a little on the spec side of fantasy, I will say that when I was in seventh grade, our class read "Ado," by Connie Willis, and I have thought about it about six hundred times since, so whatever she was trying to accomplish, it stuck. (It also woke up a tiny little political conscience, which has since been dulled by hopelessness and sad music.)

What's your idea of a perfect fantasy movie?

This question stymies me, because some fantasy movies are perfect in their over-the-top grandeur and others in their painstaking realism; I suppose a perfect fantasy movie would have compelling characters in a well-realized world, wandering around to a gorgeous score. (My demands of plot are few.)

What childhood stories scared you the most?

One of the early volumes of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has a story about a girl who wakes up one morning to find that spiders are hatching out of her face. It is not the kind of story anyone should bring to Show and Tell and read to an eight-year-old arachnophobe.

What role does food play in your fiction?

Food serves the same role in a story as any other tangible element; it's an opportunity to deepen the world of the story, set tone, and build character.

What conventions will you be at in the next year?

I'm making plans for Wiscon, Readercon, and World Fantasy, though I seem to end up at several other cons throughout the year. (Not sure how that happens, but it's masterful procrasination.)

Any other upcoming fiction/readings/events of yours that readers should be watching for?

I have some short stories set for publication in the near future; in the seemingly-impossibly-far future, my first novel is due from Prime Books in 2011.

What's the best piece of writing (other than your own) that you've read lately?

I first read this book a year or so ago, but I can never say enough good things about "Travel Light" by Naomi Mitchison. It's a short novel about a girl living in a world of mishmashed folklore, trying to decide who she is and how much to change the world, or let it change her. It's in the style of a child's tale but is as relevant to adults as all the best children's tales are, and the writing is understated and evocative. 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.