TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 58, July 2017

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, July 2017

FICTION Promises of Spring Caspian Gray Brushdogs Stephen Graham Jones And With Her Went the Spring Caroline Ratajski The Midwife Cynthia Ward

NONFICTION The H Word: Kiss the Goat Nathan Carson Interview: Richard Kelly The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Caspian Gray Caroline Ratajski MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Nightmare Magazine Cover by grandfailure / Adobe Stock Art www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, July 2017 John Joseph Adams | 867 words

Welcome to issue fifty-eight of Nightmare. This month, we’re bringing you original fiction from Caspian Gray (“Promises of Spring”) and Caroline Ratajski (“And With Her Went the Spring”), along with reprints by Stephen Graham Jones (“Brushdogs”) and Cynthia Ward (“The Midwife”). In the latest installment of “The H Word,” we have Nathan Carson sharing the creepy truth about goats. Plus, we’ve got author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly.

ICYMI: Cosmic Powers My latest anthology, Cosmic Powers, is now available from Saga Press. It’s a collection of epic-scale science fiction, inspired by movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars, featuring brand-new stories from Dan Abnett, Jack Campbell, Linda Nagata, Seanan McGuire, Alan Dean Foster, Charlie Jane Anders, Kameron Hurley, and many others. Here’s what some reviewers have been saying about it:

“Astonishingly good [. . .] Rich in great stories.” —Rocket Stack Rank “This collection will prove to be great reading for fans of the space cowboy antics of Guardians of the Galaxy.” —RT Book Reviews “Highly recommended for anyone looking for a variety of engaging sf experiences.” —Booklist “One kickass good anthology [. . .] Highly recommended.” —File 770 “The first great anthology of the year, jam-packed with smart, entertaining sci-fi adventure stories that bring a nicely modern sensibility to old ideas and tropes.” —SF Bluestocking

Visit johnjosephadams.com/cosmic to buy the book, read selected stories from the anthology, or just learn more.

John Joseph Adams Books News: 2017 Cover Reveal No new deals to report for John Joseph Adams Books, but we did just do a cover reveal for all of our 2017 titles. If you’d like to check that out, visit johnjosephadams.com/2017-covers. Otherwise, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in the coming months: July 11, we’re publishing Carrie Vaughn’s novel, Bannerless—a post- apocalyptic mystery in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse. Here’s what some of the early reviews have been saying about it:

“Skillfully portrays a vastly altered future America. [The] focus on sustainability and responsibility is unusual, thought-provoking, and very welcome.” —Publishers Weekly “An intimate post-apocalyptic mystery [. . .] well-crafted and heartfelt.” —Kirkus “A compelling, deft post-apocalyptic tale.” ​—Library Journal “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower mixed with a modern procedural mystery […] Wonderfully intriguing.” —Thomas Wilkerson, BookPeople “Totally fascinating as a thought experiment and compulsively readable.” —Jenny Craig, Seattle Public Library

Also in July, we’re be publishing Sand by Hugh Howey, a reissue of his acclaimed indie-published novel:

“Magnificent […] After reading Wool, his other post-apocalyptic series, I didn’t think he could repeat the creation of a great world setting filled with characters you instantly care about. But he did.” — SFF World “Sand immerses you in its grubby post-apocalyptic world. […] Howey conjures a credible, brutal future.” —Financial Times

In September, we’ll be publishing Retrograde by Peter Cawdron, a hard SF novel about an international colony of astronauts on Mars, who have been prepared for every eventuality of living on another planet except one: What happens when disaster strikes Earth? In October, we’ll be publishing Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, a short story collection including three stories set in the world of Hugh’s mega-hit Wool and two never-before-published tales, plus fifteen additional stories collected together for the first time. In November, we’ll be publishing Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper—a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which an épée-fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death. A bit further out, in Spring 2018, we’ll have The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high-stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. And then in late 2018, we’ll have Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker, an epic fantasy about a group of siblings battling for control of a vast empire while a powerful demonlord pits them against each other. That’s all the JJA Books news to report for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist ten times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION Promises of Spring Caspian Gray | 5832 words

2009

It was a freezing day in January, so Cody was surprised when Tay answered the door to his apartment without a shirt. His wet hair was still slicked down from the shower. “Um, hey,” said Cody. “It’s good to see you.” “Huh,” said Tay. “Come in, I guess.” Cody expected the scar in the middle of Tay’s chest. It was raised and shining, a ragged knoll that Tay crossed his arms over as soon as he noticed Cody looking. What Cody hadn’t expected was the other one, lower on his torso, two parallel tildes that might have been waves or a curvaceous equal sign. They were deep but clean, as clearly intentional as the puncture scar was arbitrary. “Where’d those come from?” Cody asked. Tay turned away from him and reached for a shirt. “Got it all done at the same time, man.” He remembered the night they’d carried Tay back through the woods. Early March, damp but unseasonably warm, the air rich with the smells of rot and onion grass and daffodils. He’d been giddy before the screaming started, adrenaline and the promise of spring making it seem like a game at first. Tay had been delirious when they found him, the big chest wound already packed with medical foam and wrapped with tape. His bare skin was grimy to the touch, flecked everywhere with dirt, bearing designs painted on him in his own blood. It hadn’t even occurred to Cody that any of those designs might have been carved there. He’d been the second person on the scene; not the person to cut Tay down, but the person to bear his weight as he fell. It was impossible to look at Tay, even five years later, without invoking visceral memories. It didn’t take much effort to override Tay’s long face, freshly- shaved and straight from the shower, with the way he’d looked that night: dirty and bright-eyed and distant, mumbling his half of a hallucinatory argument. “I, uh, didn’t know she did that to you,” Cody said finally. Tay shrugged. Fully-clothed, he was visibly calmer. “I didn’t either, ’til later. I remember the beginning a little bit, but then it’s all just a bad trip. I mean, worse than that, obviously. Shrooms never gave me PTSD.” Cody didn’t realize this was an attempt at humor until Tay smiled, the wide stoner grin that he remembered from before. You’re okay, he realized with some surprise. Probably not his old self—the Tay he remembered had never seemed to feel any particular shame about his scrawny body, as eager to shed layers as the gym rats who’d had significantly more to show off—but not some husk, either. That was why he’d put off this trip. On some level, he’d already decided Tay was broken, that when he’d left Zanesville, he’d left the world. But here he was, still essentially himself. He’d cut his hair short, and he hesitated now where before he might have been blithe. But he was the same guy. “It’s good to see you,” Cody said, the same thing he’d said earlier, but meaning it now. “Right? I never got the chance to thank you, really. They said you carried me back.” This was embarrassing to hear. “We all carried you back. For a skinny guy, you managed to weigh kind of a lot.” Tay laughed and patted his stomach. “All the munchies, man. As soon as this metabolism slows down, I’mma get so fat no one will even recognize me.” Cody thought of Tay all the ways he’d known him: in elementary school, a shy boy in a windbreaker whose playground reputation was for running fast; in middle school, a quiet kid with a smart-aleck streak and an attitude that had gotten him kicked off the track team; in high school, smoking weed in the parking lot during lunch and failing classes with a spaced-out smile. He had parallel memories of his own life in the same fashion, the first set lived as a girl, the second as a boy, ’til the night they’d performed the ritual and everything had aligned, the girl swallowed up and replaced with the man he’d always meant to be. As a girl, he and Tay had kissed during Pocky-fueled sessions of spin the bottle, held hands during sweaty summer nights when Tay was stoned and Cody was high only on the exquisite awareness of their bodies under the starry sky. As a boy, he’d smoked pot for the first time in Tay’s messy bedroom, and in that dizzy euphoria they’d touched each other with awkward hands, throats and thighs and bellies, achingly hard and pretending not to be hard, neither of them brave enough to touch each other’s dicks. Then he’d gone home and they’d never talked about it, and Cody had quietly decided not to smoke pot again. “Anyway,” Cody said, his voice too loud, too carefree. “I just came here to let you know there’s some kids back in Zanesville who’ve been digging around about the ritual, want to pull the same shit we did. I thought maybe we should shut that whole thing down.” To his surprise, Tay started laughing. He laughed too long, the sound too crooked, and Cody had to revise his original opinion: Tay was still himself, yeah. But he definitely wasn’t okay.

2004

“Obviously no one believes in magic,” Manuela was saying. “What we believe in is doing cool shit, and I dare you to come up with a cooler way to spend a rando night in March than getting drunk in the woods and trying to summon a witch.” Codi bit her bottom lip, afraid to say anything, because every thought in her head was desperately uncool: Underage drinking makes me nervous. I don’t really like camping. If life was a horror movie, this would be a great set-up for us all to die. She’d recently kidnapped a pair of her older brother’s jeans, and she wished Manuela would notice that she was dressing more like a boy, that they could have a conversation about that instead of about witches. “Because here’s the best part,” Manuela continued. “If we actually get the witch to show up, she has to grant us one wish. One wish each, even. So think about the one thing you want more than anything else in the world. Now think how cool it would be if a witch gave it to you.” She grinned at both of them. Manuela was one of those girls who made cool seem effortless: she’d been born wearing combat boots, could talk Grand Theft Auto or Dawson’s Creek with equal aptitude, and shaved her head and wore silver eyeliner so thick it turned her into a raccoon, but a raccoon that basically every dude in school wanted to bang. Cooler yet, apparently she wasn’t even interested in banging dudes. On Manuela’s other side, Jason sighed. “I have so many wishes, though. Like, what if I pick the wrong one?” Codi couldn’t help herself. “Yeah, okay, I guess if we summon a magic witch who grants wishes, there’s the chance you could fuck it up.” “Like I fuck up everything,” Jason said, straight-faced. “Don’t go full Eeyore,” said Manuela, punching him lightly in the shoulder. He smiled at that, and it cost Codi physical effort not to roll her eyes. If she’d punched him, Jason just would’ve whined that hitting didn’t solve anything. “Okay, so what do we do to summon the witch?” Codi asked, hoping for something prohibitive in the answer. “We call her by finding a symbol on a specific tree, and then we bleed on it to consecrate it, and then she grants our wishes.” Jason nodded. “Where are you getting this from?” he asked. “Like, the design and everything.” “LaTonya Henderson’s LiveJournal. Apparently she and some other kids tried it a couple years ago, and she wrote about it, but they fucked it up and the witch never showed.” That was deeply reassuring. LaTonya Henderson had barely graduated before disappearing to Atlanta in pursuit of a music career. Nothing about her had ever hinted at secret occult mastery. “Yeah, okay,” Codi said. “If you wanna spend a Saturday night trying to summon a witch, I guess I’m in. Mind if I text Tay?” Manuela wrinkled her nose. Tay and Jason didn’t get along, but worse than that, Tay was prone to gently mocking Manuela rather than acquiescing to her whims. “Never mind,” said Codi quickly. “I’m in, then,” said Jason. “I don’t wanna be left out if something awesome happens.” “It’ll be awesome.” Manuela grinned, all teeth. “I promise.” On the bus ride home, Codi texted Tay anyway: doing something dumb with Manuela and Jason, but meet me after?

2009

“I dunno that we’re gonna be able to talk teenagers out of getting into trouble,” said Tay. “That’s, like, the whole purpose of a teenager’s existence.” He sat in the passenger seat, a duffel bag at his feet holding crumpled clothes and whatever else Tay considered indispensable for a weekend trip. Cody checked how far they’d gotten out of town before he answered. “I might have misrepresented this trip just a little bit.” Tay reached into his duffel bag and pulled out an Altoid tin that contained not mints, but a few joints. He rolled down his window and lit one of them, then inhaled richly and spoke in a goofy, breathy voice as he tried to hold in the smoke. “I could tell you were lying about something. You haven’t changed at all since high school, man.” “It was more like a lie of omission,” said Cody, keeping his eyes on the road. “I thought if I mentioned actually summoning the witch, you might be out. Even if we could stop it from ever happening again.” Tay laughed, a calmer, more bitter sound than it had been at his apartment. “I guess you could talk me into a little revenge, yeah.” “It might be dangerous,” said Cody. Tay kept a straight face. “You don’t say.” “It’s just,” Cody continued. “Witches shouldn’t be that hard to kill, as long as they don’t kill you first.” “And what stops them from killing you first?” Tay exhaled more smoke out the window. “Because if your answer is ‘the element of surprise,’ you can turn this goddamn car around.” “Jason has a plan.” “Jason was always the mopiest motherfucker. Didn’t he flunk geometry? I bet this is a great plan.” Cody tried to keep his voice even. “I’d think you’d be more excited about this than us. You’re the only one who got hurt by the witch. The three of us made out like crazy.” “Don’t act like this is some selfless bullshit. You had years of fun, and now the guilt is getting you down. And it fucking should, by the way. I didn’t agree to your goddamn ritual. I shouldn’t have paid the blood price. At the hospital, they said having my heart ripped out was a hallucination. They said it was still beating in my chest, or else I’d be dead. If Jason or Manuela had showed up at my door like you did, I’d have kicked them right out again.” He plucked another joint from the Altoids tin. “Maybe you should give it a rest,” said Cody. “So when we show up at Jason’s you’re not too high to function.” “Maybe you should go fuck yourself,” said Tay, but the words lacked heat. “At my very worst, I thought maybe you’d called me into the woods on purpose, because you needed a sacrificial goat.” “I’d never—” Cody started, but Tay waved a hand. “I said ‘at my very worst.’ I know you didn’t, and I forgave you a long time ago. I still wonder about the witch, though. Whether I was supposed to die that night, or whether I was supposed to live, or if maybe that part didn’t matter.” Cody spoke cautiously. “I think she wanted you to live, for what it’s worth. As far as we know, for the blood price, she just takes the closest uninvolved person. It wasn’t personal.” He thought of the scar. “And otherwise, you know, why treat your wound? Why leave you out like that for us to see?” “So you’d know the cost of what you’d done,” said Tay, voice utterly flat. 2004

“I can’t believe we had a snow day last week,” said Jason, his perpetual gloominess replaced by a rare sense of wonder. Manuela wasn’t even wearing a proper jacket, just a denim blazer. The moon overhead was full—something Manuela had insisted on, despite Codi’s difficulty convincing her parents she needed to be out past curfew on a Sunday night. Jason carried a backpack that contained nothing but Natty Lite tallboys, and the muffled clatter of the cans as they walked through the woods was almost as loud as the leaves crunching underfoot. The woods themselves were none too impressive; just a scattering of trees that offered the closest neighborhood a buffer between their yards and the high school. If it had been Friday or Saturday night instead of Sunday, they would have run into packs of classmates conducting their own criminal antics. “I think this is it,” Manuela announced, stopping in a little clearing with nothing in particular to distinguish it. “If it doesn’t work here, we can just chug a few beers and try again at the next one.” “Do we have to be drunk for the ritual?” Codi asked. Manuela rolled her eyes. “No, we just have to be drunk for the fun.” But sitting there drinking a mandatory ration of what tasted like seltzer water gone weirdly sour wasn’t Codi’s idea of “fun.” She kept trying to like beer, because all the alternatives—wine, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, vodkas in dessert flavors—seemed embarrassingly girly. The sound of the wind through the trees was a little creepy, despite the bright light of the moon. They heard the distant crunch of other footsteps in the leaves, then a single loud whoop of laughter, quickly silenced. Codi found this reassuring rather than menacing—it was good to know there were other kids in the woods, not just them and Manuela’s hypothetical witch. Manuela crushed two tallboys while Codi and Jason were still nursing their firsts, then sprang up to her feet in front of them. “Okay!” She was only slightly unsteady. “For the next step, I need your blood!” With a dramatic flourish, she produced a pocket knife and then cut her left palm open, maybe more deeply than she’d meant to. Jason frowned at her. “Does it have to be the palm, though? Couldn’t I just cut my arm and bleed from there?” “Oh.” Manuela blinked at him. “Uh, yeah, I guess that’s fine.” Jason took the knife and cut the back of his forearm, then passed the knife to Codi and tried to catch his own blood in the cupped palm of his other hand. “Are we doing something with the blood?” Codi asked. “Does it need to go in some kind of container?” Manuela shook her head. “We just need to drip it on the summoning circle to get the witch’s attention.” Codi put down her beer and closed the pocket knife. “Did you draw the summoning circle yet?” “No.” Manuela looked around the clearing. “It should already be here, actually.” They inspected the bark of the surrounding trees. In a multitude of half-assed teenage carvings, the closest they got to witchcraft was a “666” next to the phrase “Mike sux dix.” Manuela sighed. “Well,” she said, “LaTonya’s LiveJournal said it would be here.” She leaned back against one of the trees, supporting her weight with her hands, and then shot back to her feet as if burned. The tree was glowing softly. “There,” she said, shooting Jason a distinctly supercilious smile. “That’s why you cut your palm.”

2009

Jason looked remarkably like his high school self. His expression as he let Cody and Tay into his apartment was one of morose surprise. “Goddamn,” he said, disappearing into his kitchen and coming back with three bottles of beer. “Taylor Creagh. I didn’t think Cody could convince you to come. I probably wouldn’t have, if I were you.” Cody watched Tay out of the corner of his eye. Jason had been the one who cut Tay down. They’d discussed it only once, when Tay was still in the hospital, more to get their story straight than out of any attempt to process what had happened. His wrist was so cold, Jason had said. I could smell his breath because he kept muttering to himself. Like smoke and salami. Probably that particular detail had not made it into the police report. “I didn’t have anything better going on this weekend,” said Tay. His eyes were red, his voice warm and a little bit high-pitched. “But in my defense, that’s unusual. You guys should get the fuck out of Zanesville; Columbus is a way better city.” “Can’t argue that,” said Cody, forcing cheer into his voice. “Did you have any luck with Manuela?” Jason shook his head. “Nah. Apparently she’s living in Baku, but she doesn’t do social media, and I don’t really have the resources to verify that shit.” “Baku?” Cody repeated. “It’s a city in Azerbaijan.” “Jesus,” said Cody. “Azerbaijan. I don’t even know if that’s in Europe or Asia.” “Europe,” said Tay, still in his vaguely sing-songy, too-high-to-handle-this tone of voice. “Kind of Middle East-y. They were in the Soviet Union.” But Cody was still stuck on what Tay had said in the car: I forgave you a long time ago. A sentence offered so casually, but with such softness and weight that Cody felt unsteady carrying it.

2004

“So according to LaTonya,” said Manuela, sounding less blurry around the edges. “We just bleed into this circle here, and all say together: ‘I summon thee.’ And then the witch shows up!” Codi curled her lip. “A witch wouldn’t be immortal, right? This person was probably born, like, 1920 at the latest. Why ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’?” This time both Manuela and Jason ignored her. Codi took the knife and finally cut herself, beating Manuela to bleeding on the symbol out of sheer consternation. The cut on Jason’s arm had already started to clot, and he dug into it with a few fingers until it started bleeding again. “Okay,” said Manuela. “On the count of three: 1, 2, 3! I summon thee.” They managed to get the sentence out in unison, except for Codi, who replaced “thee” with “you.” In the silence that followed, the other two glared at her. “Well, shit,” said Manuela finally. “I was kind of hoping for a puff of smoke. Let’s try it again, but this time we all say ‘thee.’“ The sigils in the bark had acquired a certain liquidity in the moonlight. They moved in a slow, shimmering fashion, and once Codi had looked at them she found it hard to look away. Is half a tallboy enough to get you drunk? She wondered. But by the time she finished the thought, she became aware that a curious amount of time had passed. The moon was farther along the horizon; the air was colder. She felt completely sober. A woman stepped out of the woods, and with her the smell of calla lilies. “Oh,” said Manuela, her voice low and close. The woman was maybe in her 50s, with a scatter of grays in her close-cropped brown hair. Her eyebrows were thick and wild, and she wore a fuzzy cable sweater that drowned her airy frame. “Hello,” she murmured. Her voice was richly feminine. “Are you prepared to pay the blood price for my services?” “Oh,” said Manuela again, taking a step forward. “We are.” The witch turned her gaze to Jason and Codi. “Does she speak for you?” “She does,” said Jason. Codi could only bring herself to nod. She felt that if she had not answered the witch’s question they would have stayed in that tableau indefinitely, not even the moon daring to move. “Then one by one you may each take my hand,” said the witch, “and whisper to me your desires.” Manuela stepped forward first, a swagger in her step that didn’t fool any of them, though Codi admired the effort. When she was finished whispering, the witch kissed her cheek, and Manuela stepped back to them seeming quite unchanged. Jason and Codi looked at each other. When Codi didn’t move, Jason stepped forward, and the witch kissed his cheek also. Codi finally forced herself forward, almost stumbling. Her wish was a fierce beast inside her chest, something she’d never said to anyone. Even to herself, she’d decided mostly on denials: “Transgender” isn’t the right word, because I don’t feel trapped in the wrong body. “Transgender” isn’t the right word, because I never hated dresses enough. “Transgender” isn’t the right word, because I don’t fall in love with girls. I’m not really transgender; it’s just that I’ve spent my whole life a little bit wrong. “I wish that I’d been born a boy,” she whispered. Next to the witch the scent of lilies was stronger, along with drug store moisturizer and the cold spring air. “Oh my sweet,” said the witch, kissing his cheek. “You already were.” And then Cody walked back to stand next to his friends, carrying the history of Codi-with-an-i like a fairy tale inside himself. The witch smiled at all of them, seraphic, and Cody realized that LaTonya Henderson would probably emerge from Atlanta a superstar, that when her songs played on the radio he would say, “You know I went to high school with that girl.” “I have extracted the blood price,” the witch said. “If you want him to live, you will have to cut him down soon from the alder tree.” That was when they first heard the screams.

2009

“So what’s the plan?” Tay asked. It was a full moon night, and Cody thought Tay looked marginally more sober. “Summon the witch,” said Jason. “Then shoot her with a gun.” Tay laughed. Cody did, too. “I’m serious,” said Jason. “You can kill a witch just like you can kill anybody else.” “The element of surprise,” Tay cackled. “I fuckin’ knew it.” “We don’t have to kill her,” said Cody. “I mean, she’s not evil.” “Did you ever look into LaTonya Henderson?” Tay asked. “Who her blood price was? Because you can say the witch isn’t ‘evil’ if you want, but I remember pretty different.” “Still,” said Cody. “Murder? I thought there was going to be a little more to it than that.” Jason shrugged. “You got a better idea, that’s cool with me.” But Cody didn’t. None of this, from the beginning, had ever been his idea. He’d just followed along, first Manuela and then Jason, and his only personal innovation was to drag Tay into it. “You still cool?” he asked Tay. Tay shrugged, but he wore a crooked grin that Cody recognized from years ago, a night spent on the playground shoving each other on the swings, trying to swing over the top of the bar, whooping at 2 a.m. until a cop car pulled into the parking lot. They’d run not because they were doing anything wrong, but because no cop would believe the almost embarrassing innocence of their shenanigans. Jason drove them out to the high school. The woods felt different in January. A thin layer of snow limned the naked trees, and the sky was perfectly clear. “Remember how secluded this used to feel?” Jason asked. “Like we could get away with anything back here.” It was impossible to feel that way now. The woods weren’t even deep enough to hide the light from the houses behind the school. “You guys did get away with ‘anything,’” said Tay, sounding more spaced-out than bitter. “I used to think I was a criminal just for smoking back here. I had to keep a second shirt in my backpack, because when I got home my mom would smell me for weed.” The image of Tay’s mother sniffing out a reluctant Tay brought a smile to Cody’s face. It was hard for a place haunted only by their teenage selves to feel ominous. “This is it?” Tay asked, when Cody and Jason stopped short. “I expected to be more impressed.” “Welcome to magic,” said Cody. “Super unimpressive, right up until the moment it fucks up everything.” “We just need to bleed on the symbol,” said Jason. “And we can do this.” “As if I haven’t bled enough for this shit,” said Tay. Jason produced a little butterfly knife and cut the palm of his hand, as if in defiance of his high school self. “Are you two in or out?” he asked, holding out the knife. Cody took it and cut his arm, imagining it was just below the scar left by the last time he’d done this, but in truth there was no scar. The injury had been too small, and too quickly healed. He held the knife out to Tay, but Tay just looked at it. “We have to cut ourselves,” Cody explained. “That’s how we summon the witch. When she said ‘blood-price,’ we thought that was what she meant. We thought we’d already paid it.” The words burbled out of him. “We would never have—if we’d known—the idea that she’d just take anyone . . .” Tay waved him quiet with one hand and took the knife with the other. “You’ll forgive a little drama,” he said, taking off his shirt. “It’s not that warm,” said Jason, and then quieted when he saw the scars. Tay ran a few thoughtful fingers over the bigger, knotted one in the middle of his chest, then traced the knife along one of the wavy lines just higher than his hip bone. There was just enough ritual to his movements that Cody wondered if Tay was imitating what the witch had done, if Tay remembered more than he was willing to admit. “Now,” said Jason, “we just bleed onto the symbol, and we say, uh, ‘I summon thee.’ And the witch shows up.” “Huh,” said Tay. Jason and Cody dripped just a little blood onto the symbol. Tay smeared his fingers across his torso, leaving three bloody tracks up his chest, and then wiped his fingers on the bark. Jason cocked the gun. “On the count of three,” he said. “One, two, three: “I summon thee.” The woods were still around them. Cody’s heart seemed to still with them, and the time between one exhalation and the next was slippery. He smelled calla lilies. Jason fired the gun. Once. Twice. The witch looked no older than she had last time, and her eyebrows were just as unkempt. She wore a coat now, instead of merely a sweater. Jason dropped the gun and sank to his knees. For one terrible second, Cody thought he was dead, but he stayed upright, eyes open, breaths shallow. “Hey,” said Tay softly. “Remember me?” A smile unfurled over the witch’s face, sumptuous and slow. “I do,” she murmured. “Your friends came for you after all. You survived.” “I guess,” said Tay. “I never felt the same, after.” “You weren’t. I took something from you, and spent it on the spell.” “The blood price.” Tay licked his lips. There was nothing whimsical or spacey or high in his tone now. “What I remember—” here he tapped the scar in the center of his chest “—is you ripping my heart out.” “‘Extracting’ would be a better word.” There was a tenderness in her voice that made her seem almost human. “And your physical heart is still in your body.” Tay waved his hand. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what the doctor said.” He turned to Cody. “Did you know I loved you?” he asked. Cody held perfectly still. “I loved you the first time around,” Tay continued. “When you were Codi- with-an-i. And then I loved you again, when you were Cody-with-a-y. But girl Codi disappeared, and you avoided me so hard after that one night you could only be straight. And then after the witch . . . I never loved anyone again. I couldn’t. So you’re as close as I ever got.” Cody swallowed. “How do you know about Codi-with-an-i?” “I remember the world before you three made your wishes, and the world after. I remember when Jason’s dad broke his arm in third grade. And I remember when you cut off your own pigtails and your mom grounded you for a month. And I remember Manuela, when she was a weird loser who got milk poured into her backpack at lunch, before she wished that she would be cool and people would like her.” “That’s it?” Cody asked, narrowing in on the detail that was easiest to process. “Manuela just wanted to be popular?” Tay shrugged. “Imagine that your whole life, people liked you. Imagine that everywhere you went, people were willing to go out of their way, at least a little bit, to help you. Imagine that anytime you wanted to sleep with somebody, they wanted to sleep with you, too. Manuela made the smartest wish a person could make. “ Cody closed his eyes. “I’m not,” he said slowly. “Cody-with-a-y isn’t necessarily straight. I just . . . panicked, I guess” “Oh.” Tay’s smile was rueful. “Well. I just wanted you to know. So maybe, someday, you can forgive me for this, like I forgave you.” He turned to the witch. “I’d like to make a wish.” “Your friend just tried to shoot me,” said the witch. “I’m still debating whether or not to snap his neck; I’m not exactly in the wish-granting mood.” Her voice now sounded very human, with none of the breathy night air of that past spring to help her transcend their surroundings. Cody was very aware of the school and the homes nearby; if he tilted his head, he was even sure he could hear the high- pitched yap of a lap dog. “That’s okay,” said Tay. “He’s not my friend, and you’ll like this, because it fucks him over.” The witch tilted her head. “I wish this was the only wish you ever granted,” said Tay. “That no one else who tried to summon you ever succeeded, and eventually the whole urban legend just died out.” The witch threw back her head and laughed. Jason struggled to his feet and aimed the gun as her concentration flickered. “No!” yelled Cody, to the wish or Jason or even the witch herself. Jason fired. The witch was suddenly very close to Tay, and she kissed his cheek. “Oh my sweet,” she whispered. And as she did, a whole swath of lifetimes was erased: Cody crawled back inside Codi, a shameful secret she was unable to articulate. The best side of Jason’s father was replaced by a man who drank and raged. Somewhere in Baku, Manuela’s friends and admirers dissipated. In Atlanta, LaTonya Henderson’s music career fizzled into mid-tier YouTubing. Ripples shot outwards: the people who had told LaTonya about the ritual, and the people who had told them. But in that clearing, under Codi’s panicked gaze, the scars on Tay’s chest smoothed out and pulled in and finally disappeared.

2004 “Dammit,” murmured Manuela. She looked suddenly vulnerable in the moonlight, her rings of silver eyeliner less exotic and more exhausted. “Guys, I know this is dumb—but for a minute, I really thought this was going to work.” Jason huffed out a sad little laugh. “I did, too.” But the words of Codi’s wish were hard and sharp in her chest. “I, um,” she said. “The thing I was going to wish for. I think I can still get it.” “Yeah?” Jason’s laugh changed tone, still humorless. “You’ve got a wish that can come true?” “Yeah,” said Codi, forcing confidence into her voice. “I think I want to talk to my doctor. And if he won’t do it, some other doctor. I think I want to take testosterone. I think I want to be a boy.” Manuela and Jason just looked at her, their gazes not so much hostile as sincerely baffled. From elsewhere in the woods, the smell of weed drifted over. “I told Tay I’d meet up with him tonight,” she said, eager to escape. “I’ll catch up with you guys later.” Eventually she would worry about Manuela and Jason telling people at school what she’d said. She would go to war about pronouns, first in her—his—own head, then with the rest of the world. He’d come out, over and over again, then finally attain the point where he could go stealth, then start coming out again as “trans visibility” became a term that even straight people threw around. But in that moment, on a warm, dark March night, Cody’s mind was blank and free as he came up on Tay in the dark, and when he saw him he smiled brilliantly. “I’m glad you texted me, dude,” Tay said. “I missed hanging out with you. Great fucking night, isn’t it?” “Yeah,” said Cody, sitting down next to him. “It really is.” Then, from somewhere in the woods, they heard screaming.

©2017 by Caspian Gray.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caspian Gray is a used car salesman who has previously worked as a funeral director’s apprentice, a pet nutritionist, an English teacher in Japan, a Japanese teacher in America, and a crystal healing “expert” in a head shop. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares a home with a tall man and a small dachshund.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Brushdogs Stephen Graham Jones | 3803 words

Junior wasn’t even forty-five minutes into the trees when his son Denny called him on the walkie, to meet back at the truck. Denny was twelve, and Junior could tell he’d got spooked again. He wasn’t going to get any less spooked if Junior called him on it, though. So, instead of staking out a north-facing meadow like he’d been intending, waiting for the sun to glint off some elk horn, Junior tracked himself back, stepping in his own boot prints when he could. And it’s not that he didn’t understand: coming out an hour before dawn, walking blind into the blue-black cold, some of the drifts swallowing you up to the hip, it wasn’t the same as watching football on the couch. The bear tracks they’d seen yesterday hadn’t helped either, he supposed. Since then, Junior was pretty sure Denny wasn’t so much watching the trees for elk anymore, but for teeth. He was right to be scared, too. Junior was pretty sure he had been, at that age. But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day. One thing Junior knew for sure was that if he’d been in walkie contact with his dad, then there wouldn’t have been any meets at the truck. Junior was doing better, though. It was one of his promises. So he eased up to the truck, waiting for Denny to spot him in the mirror. When Denny didn’t, Junior knocked on the side window, and Denny led him fifteen minutes up a forgotten logging road, to a thick patch of trees he’d probably stepped into for the windbreak, to pee. “Whoah,” Junior said. It was a massacre. The bear’s dining room. At least two winters of horse bones, some of them bleached white, some of them still stringy with black meat. Junior had to admit it: this probably would have spooked him, twenty years ago. Hell, it kind of did now. “They’re supposed to be asleep,” Denny said. “Right?” Junior nodded. It was his own words. The tracks they’d seen yesterday, he’d assured Denny, would lead them to a musty den if they followed them. “Let’s go work the Line,” Junior said, and Denny was game. The Line wasn’t the one that separated the reservation from Canada, but from Glacier Park. It was just across the road from Chief Mountain. Twenty-five years ago, Junior had popped his first buck there, across a clearing of stumps he’d been pretending just needed tabletops to make a proper restaurant. That had been his secret Indian trick to hunting, back then: to not hunt. The same way you never find your wallet when you’re actually looking for it. Just, keep a rifle with you. Junior dropped Denny off right at the gate, told him to walk straight up the fence, and keep an eye out. “Check?” Denny said into his walkie, stepping out, gearing up. “Check,” Junior said into his walkie, his own voice echoing him. “Just walk back to Chief Mountain if you lose the fence,” Junior told Denny. “You’ll hit the road first. I’ll be up at that other pull-out. Maybe you’ll scare something my way, yeah?” “Yeah,” Denny said, looking at the tree line with pupils shaped like bears, Junior knew. Junior left him there, pulled over a quarter mile or so up the road. He hadn’t been lying about them scaring elk or some whitetail into each other’s paths, either. It was how he’d learned to hunt, his uncles pointing down this or that coulee, telling him to slip down there, make some noise, they’d shoot anything that spooked up. Denny wasn’t just a brushdog, though. Really, Junior was half-hoping to scare something over to him. Every animal on the reservation, it knows to run for the Park when Bambi shooters are in the forest. The kid deserved an elk this year, or a nice buck. Something to hook him into this way of doing things, instead of all the other ways there always were, in Browning. Junior pulled his gloves on, locked the door, and beat his way through the brush, keeping his rifle high like he was a soldier fording a river, not a latter-day Indian with a burned arm and forty-percent disability. Maybe a half hour into it, half-convinced the world was made of trees all blown over into each other, the ground under his boots tilted up sharply. Junior followed, eager for an open space. Like was supposed to happen, the trees thinned the windier it got—the higher Junior got—until he stepped out of the crunchy snow, then onto the blown-flat yellow grass of . . . not quite a meadow, but a bare knob, anyway. One of a hundred, surely, if you were flying above. But, standing on it, it was the only— no, it wasn’t the only one: directly to the west of Junior, like a mirror image, like he’d walked up to his own reflection, was another bare knob. Except this one, it had a little pyramid of black rocks right at the very crest. Junior looked away to search his head for the word, finally dredged it up: cairn. Like what you arrange over your favorite dog, when the ground’s frozen and you can’t cut into it with a shovel. Like what you put over your favorite dog for temporary, promising the whole while to come back in Spring, do it right. But you never do, Junior knew. Because you don’t want to have to see. Except—who would bury a dog way the hell out here? Maybe this was some super-old grave, some baby from the Lewis and Clark clown parade. Or maybe it was older. Maybe it was real. Junior brought his rifle up, leveled the scope on the cairn and steadied the cross-hairs against the wind, gusting like it knew Junior was trying to draw a bead. The rocks looked just the same, only closer up now, and trembling, the scope dialed up to nine. Trembling until they smudged out, anyway. Junior took an involuntary step back, pressing the scope harder into his right eye socket—stupid, stupid, he said to himself—and then got things focused again. When there was just blackness again, a fabric texture to it, Junior lowered the scope, looked across with his real eyes. Denny. He’d lost the Line, it looked like, was falling up through the trees as well, his rifle slung over his shoulder. Instead of doing it like Junior had taught—two steps, stop, listen, look, wait, then two more steps—Denny was just stumbling across the yellow grass, his face slack like he’d been out there for hours, not thirty minutes. One of his gloves was gone, Junior noted. His first impulse was to put the scope on Denny, so he could give a report later. Saw you out there, Cold Hand Luke. Didn’t you see me? Except, even if he drew the bolt back on his rifle, just the idea of putting his son in those crosshairs made him feel hollow under the jaw. Saw you out there, son. By those black rocks. Junior said it aloud, the wind pulling his words away. And Denny was lost, Junior could tell. With Chief Mountain looming behind, the Park right there to the west, and Canada just a rifle shot to the north, if that, the kid had managed to get off-track somehow. Again. And in spite of how the Line was a three-strand fence for the first couple hundred yards. All you had to do then was walk where the fence would have been, if it went on. It didn’t even take a sense of direction. The Park Service had come through with chainsaws back when, shaved a line through the woods, to tell the Indians what was America, what wasn’t. Just follow the stumps, kid. Junior had told him that at some point, hadn’t he? Now Denny was doing one thing Junior had taught, anyway: going up the closest hill to eyeball for a landmark. To find Chief Mountain, like Blackfeet had been doing since forever. “Looking the wrong way there, son,” Junior said, using his best John Wayne voice. Soon enough, Denny was going to have to look over, see Junior waiting there for him. Even if he wasn’t scoping for Chief Mountain or for the elk he was supposed to be after, then he would at least be checking for the bear he probably thought he was climbing away from. That he could probably hear huffing and grunting right behind him. His knob of hill was steep enough now that he was having to reach ahead, touch the ground with his bare fingertips. Junior took a step higher, his back straightening, some alarm ringing behind his eyes. It was nothing. Stupid. You’re the one being stupid, Junior told himself, in his own dad’s voice. With his hands to the ground like that, Denny had looked like something else. Junior wasn’t even sure what. A four-legged, as the old-time Blackfeet said it, in books written by white men. And Denny still wasn’t looking across. “Hey!” Junior called, but didn’t put any real force behind it. Still, Denny’s head rotated over at an angle Junior associated with owls more than people, his face snapping up perfectly level, his jaw hanging loose, mouth a skewed black oval, eyes vacant even at this distance, and Junior’s breath caught hard enough in his throat that he had to cough. By the time he was able to look back up, Denny’s front hand was reaching forward delicately to the cairn, like warming his palm by a cast-iron stove. Junior brought the soft back of his glove to his face, to rub the blear and the heat from his eyes. And Denny. The bald knob across from him, it was just that again. No rocks, no son. Nothing. Junior lifted the walkie, said, “Den-man? You out there?” Fifteen seconds later, the walkie crackled back in Junior’s hand. No words, just static. Open air. Because of distance, he told himself. Because these walkies had been clearance over in Cutbank, were pretty much line-of-sight piece-of-craps. When Junior stepped out of the tree line and into the ditch thirty minutes later, ready to tap the horn three times—their signal—there in the passenger seat of the truck was a shape that slowly assembled itself into Denny: hat, jacket, safety- orange gloves, frosted breath. Behind the steamed up window, he turned his head to Junior and watched.

• • • •

Because Deezie was in Seattle sitting by her dad’s hospital bed, Junior cracked open two cans of chili and poured them into a pan, shook their can shape away. Denny was in his room, peeling out of his hunting gear. If Deezie were here, he’d have had to strip at the door. Junior set the pan down into its ring of flame. On the ride home he’d said the obvious aloud to Denny: that he’d found his other glove, yeah? Good thing they were orange, right? Denny had looked at his hands in his lap, then out the window. “I like hunting,” he’d said. They were picking up speed coming through Babb Flats. Once Junior had seen a whole herd of elk there, pale in the moonlight like ghosts of themselves. “How many horses do you think it was?” Denny asked then, and came around to face Junior. His face up-close was just normal. “How many’d that bear eat, you mean?” Junior asked, changing hands on the wheel. Denny nodded. “We should have counted the skulls, I guess,” Junior said, raising his eyebrows to Denny in halfway invitation. Deezie wouldn’t be home for two more days. Maybe counting skulls would get Denny over the hump of his fear. “Grub in ten,” Junior called down the hall. Denny’s door was closed. No sounds from in there. Junior knocked, said it again, about food. “Check,” Denny said, like they were still talking through the walkies. Fifteen minutes later, the game was on and the couch was the couch and Junior was making his same joke to Denny about chili: that people shouldn’t eat stuff that looks the same going in as it does coming out. Even Deezie would laugh at that one, some nights. Like had been happening more and more lately, Junior fell asleep somewhere in the third quarter, woke to an empty room, a flatlined television. And—an open front door? “Den-man?” he said out loud, on the chance. No answer. Junior crossed to the door, hoisting his rifle up on the way. On that chance. There was nothing, though. Nobody. Junior had already closed the door when it registered, that something had been different outside. Not wrong, just . . . not the same. Because he was the dad and couldn’t afford to be scared, he hauled the door open and stepped out without looking first. His eyes adjusted, fed him what was different. Another cairn. Out where the road to their house crooked over the creek. Another cairn had been stacked out there. Junior walked half the way there in sock feet then looked back to the house, sure it was going to be surrounded now by ghost elk, or that there was going to be a figure in the doorway, watching him. It was just the house. The same one he’d walked out from twenty seconds ago. “Deezie,” he said then, quiet, secret, because her name always reminded him who he was. And because maybe, six hundred miles away, she would hear, look his way, and that would be enough to keep him safe. To show himself he could—because she might be watching—Junior walked all the way out to the cairn. With his heel, his gun in both hands, he dislodged the top rock, sent it clattering down the side, taking a couple of small pieces of slate with it. Under that top rock was just another rock. Because it was rocks all the way down. That’s all it could be. Cairn was the wrong word, probably. Pile would have been better. Like what you end up with when you’re trying to plow a field but keep snagging on rocks, keep having to carry them over to the one fence post left from when there were corrals here. That’s all it was. Junior studied the trees all around, his rifle at port arms, and heard himself telling Denny again that he just had to walk toward Chief Mountain to find the road. Chief was too far to even see from this side of Browning, though. Junior shook his head and went inside without looking behind him even once. Hours later in bed, his leg kicked deep into territory Deezie insisted was hers, Junior realized he was awake, and wasn’t sure how long he had been. After that came the realization that he’d been listening. With his whole body. Something was moving down the hall, and Junior couldn’t have said exactly why, but it was something big, something too big for the hall, but it was lumbering down it all the same. “Six,” he heard himself say, like an offering. It was how many skulls there had been at the bear’s dinner table. He didn’t know if that was a lucky number or not. He rolled over, away from Deezie’s side, and his burned arm crackled under him and he flinched, had to fumble for the light to see that he’d heard wrong. That his arm was just the same, that it wasn’t on fire anymore. That all the therapy had worked. Still, instead of sleeping, he rubbed the lotion into his scar tissue, into the moonscape of his melted skin, and then higher, into his shoulder as well. Just to be sure.

• • • •

“But I want to see,” Denny said. The six skulls. They were in the truck. The sun was just happening. “Later,” Junior said, and hated himself for it but did it anyway, again: glanced over at Denny’s hands. One of his gloves was safety-orange, but the other was Deezie’s wool one. It was white with red-thread stripes that always looked like they were going to catch on something, tear away. “What about that—that pyramid of rocks yesterday?” Junior said then, just real casual, after running it through his head a dozen times, a dozen ways. In reply, Denny looked out his window. He had no idea about the gloves. Or the chili still crusted on his lips. Junior swallowed. It was loud in his ears. “Who won last night?” he asked. “Patriots,” Denny said. “Good old Pilgrims,” Junior said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on the steering wheel. It was another one of his jokes: of course the Pilgrims won. Look around, right? “I want to go to the skulls,” Denny said, his voice flat. “After this,” Junior said. “After what?” “Chief Mountain.” “Chief Mountain,” Denny repeated. Junior moved his mouth in that way he used to do when his brother was torturing him and he was promising himself not to cry this time. He cranked his window down. “I saw a young bear here once,” he said, hooking his chin down the road they weren’t taking, the other way through Babb. Denny looked down that road and Junior held his breath, waited for Denny to call him out: this wasn’t Junior’s story, it was one of his uncle’s. Junior was stealing it. Denny just looked over, waited for the rest. “I had that little Toyota then, the hatchback. Jace drives it now. The one with the primered hood?” Junior could feel his face heating up, even with the window down. “You were, like, papoose size,” he said, and waited for Denny to lodge his objection about that not being a Blackfeet word. Instead, he just sat there with his one orange hand, his one white hand. Six skulls in his head. “I was looking for this one old bull I knew had come over from the park,” Junior said. “I was just married to your mom then, and we needed meat, yeah?” No nod. Just the eyes. “So I was just cruising along, and this young bear, he just comes trotting right up the yellow stripes, his feet flapping like flippers they were so big. Like he was a cartoon of himself. When he stopped beside me to put his paw print on the flank of my trusty steed”—not even a blink of disgust—“I could see his collar, the one that told he was crossing the Line here, that he was on Indian land now.” The rest of the story was his Aunt Lonnie, using her favorite nail polish to trace the bear’s paw print in the Toyota, but Junior didn’t have the heart, and Deezie didn’t wear nail polish anyway. This story had been doomed from the start. “I miss that Toyota,” he said. “It was one of the magic ones, I think.” “Papoose,” Denny finally said. Five minutes later Junior turned them up toward Chief Mountain. The truck coughed like there was air in the line, but it caught, pulled them up the black ribbon of road, the clouds cold enough that they were skimming the trees. There was nobody else. In the summer, people would come up to tie ribbons to certain branches, to trunks that felt right, but in the winter those ribbons were all faded and frozen, their prayers trapped. “There’s where I came out,” Junior said, slowing to show his tracks crunching through the crust of snow in the ditch. Denny was looking higher, though. Junior slowed to a stop two hundred yards farther up the road, where the next pair of boots had crossed the ditch. And the handprints beside the boots. Because he’d fallen, Junior told himself. Because he was twelve. “This is you,” he said, and Denny looked over to him, then back out into the trees. “You don’t remember, do you?” Junior said, the lump in his throat cracking his voice up. “We were here yesterday,” Denny said. “We were here yesterday,” Junior said, and, because that’s what you do, Denny stepped down. “It’s loud in there,” he said, pointing with his face into the trees. “Scare something good my way,” Junior told him, instead of everything else. Denny kept looking. “There’s a restaurant out there somewhere,” Junior said then, having to close his eyes to get it said, his chin trembling. “There’s no tabletops, but it used to be a —a place.” “A restaurant,” Denny said, looking back to Junior, not seeming to care he was sitting there behind the wheel crying. “They served venison,” Junior said, and looked hard the other way, toward Chief Mountain, stationed up in the clouds like a sentinel. Junior prayed it was watching right now. After a thirty-count, he looked back to the other side of the road. Denny was gone, into the trees. Junior turned around, pulled down to where he’d gone in yesterday— everything had to be the same—and stepped in all his same footprints as close as he could, and, crashing through the trees like he was, he could almost feel his uncles on the rise behind him, waiting for what he was about to flush out. If they were still around, they could have told him what’s buried in the cairns, he knew. Or told him not to look. But it was too late now. He was already doing it. They were already doing it, him and Denny, Den-man, father and son out in the woods, in the cold, trying to undo the day before, and Junior only realized it was too late when he opened his mouth to call to Denny, and static from the walkie came out. From deeper in the trees, his real son opened his mouth, answered with that same open-air hiss, and like that, they felt toward each other in the new darkness.

©2014 by Stephen Graham Jones. Originally published in The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen Graham Jones is the author of twenty-two or twenty-three books so far, and some two hundred fifty short stories. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. And With Her Went the Spring Caroline Ratajski | 3507 words

They searched for weeks, but never found her. It was decided without words that “weeks” was the appropriate unit of time. Some girls are “weeks” and some girls are “days.” And some girls are missing posters that get seen by too few and ignored by too many. But she had done so well. Tried so hard. She followed all the rules that girls were meant to follow. She deserved weeks. Her father cried. “I just want to bury my daughter.” Her mother was silent behind him. She held him up like a beam holds a home. He couldn’t fathom how something like this could happen, but her mother could. In her own youth, she knew it could happen to her. She felt at all times the cool hand on the back of her neck, sharp claws pressed against soft skin, waiting for her moment of weakness, waiting for her to end her watch. If at any moment she relaxed, if at any moment she believed herself to be safe, at peace, she knew it would strike, plunging her into a lifelong winter. And on the day her daughter was born, when she first held her baby, screaming and bloody, she saw a silvered hand of ice wrap itself around her child’s neck. A curse passed from mothers to daughters.

• • • •

It was the twilight of summer when the girl was last seen. She wasn’t that girl. She knew the kind of troubles that followed that girl, and made certain they would never find her. Home before dark. Chaperones for dates. Never off in the woods. Never alone. But he’d had a question to ask her. “Not here,” he’d said. Not in the crowded, dirty plaza at the center of town, currently overflowing with market-goers, a deer carcass buzzing with flies hanging in the butcher’s stall just feet from where they stood. “I want to take you somewhere else. Somewhere special.” They walked through the plaza, his hand in hers, past the stalls swollen with summer fruits, overripe, pungent. She choked on their sickly sweet scent, yet she was grateful that they overpowered the smell of clotting blood that wafted from the butcher as he dismembered a small animal. Somewhere special. The phrase made her heart go light, and she found herself smiling as they passed the butcher, his cleaver swinging down and severing a lamb’s spine. He led her to the edge of their small city, past it. Weather-worn stone buildings built by father’s-fathers gave way to small farms, and still they walked, toward the woods, toward the tall mountain. Never off in the woods. Never alone. Except, she wasn’t alone, was she? She was with him. And she knew him. Didn’t she? The city was lost behind a curtain of trees. Ahead, the old keep emerged, settled in the side of the mountain. Once a safe place in times of war, it had begun to crumble and fall apart after centuries of abandonment. Only now it was not so abandoned. There was a thick blanket on the ground, and a basket of food and wine, soft cheeses and sweet fruits and bread baked just that morning. She’d never had wine, hadn’t been allowed when she was young. As she grew, she learned why it had been forbidden, of the ways the drink can change a person, how it can be an undoing. But that warning was for boys who were not this boy. It was for the boys she did not know. And she knew this boy. She took the bread and the wine. He would ask what he wanted in his own time, and she decided she could wait.

• • • •

There are many ways to lose a girl. This is simply one of them.

• • • •

When he finally asked her, it wasn’t the question she’d been waiting for. He had been kissing her as they sat in the mountaintop ruins, holding her face so gently at first, becoming more insistent as they continued, more hungry. His hands reached, moving in ways she understood but couldn’t explain. When his lips crept along her jawline and settled at her ear, he whispered his desire. Her stomach twisted for a moment, fearful, but she pushed that aside. Her first thought was to flee, but she didn’t know why. This boy was good. She knew this boy. She said she didn’t want to. Not now. Not like this. But the blanket beneath them was so soft. The forest around them so still and so beautiful. Everything was perfect. She was perfect. They were perfect. She stood, and the wine in her belly followed shortly after, making her stumble. Too much wine. She wasn’t that girl. He grabbed her wrist and held firm, standing when she tried to pull away. She strained against him, pleading for him to let her go. He insisted he wouldn’t hurt her. The pain shooting up her arm said otherwise. They struggled. He, to calm her down, to make certain when they reached the bottom of the mountain their stories would be the same. She, to get away, to simply get away. His grip was tight, but her wrist was small. She pulled free. She ran. He chased. He was faster. He grabbed her. Caught her shoulder. Spun her around. She fell. She fell.

• • • •

He did nothing wrong. That is what he whispers to himself each night.

• • • •

Her head was light and her body was a feather on the wind. There was no earth below her. Above was a foreign sky, stars glowing bright in all the wrong places. Falling became something like being carried on a warm sea. The knot in her gut, brought on by the primal fear of the earth working to pull a body down, slowly began to release. Arms wrapped around her, and for a moment she remembered his touch, the way he pressed her to the ground. But this was gentle, like her mother’s embrace when she had been small. Two arms, then four, more, caging her in compassion. She was enveloped in a warmth that reached through her skin and traced the lines of her bones, and for the first time she realized how cold she had been. A sharp pain in her neck suddenly released, and she gasped, terrified that something in her had broken, that the stabbing anxiety she carried in her heart had finally been realized. She held her breath and trembled. Peace can be a terror when you have never known it before. Moments passed, and nothing happened, and nothing happened. The safety promised by the embrace blurred the line between the body and the spirit, and her heart and her soul both ached as one. She could scream now, and she did, relentlessly, wordlessly, a cry of hurt and terror, of discovery and loss. What a waste it all had been. She had done everything expected of her, she had stayed so cautiously within the borders of girlhood, of propriety, of safety. All for nothing. In the end, there was just no way to be careful enough.

• • • •

He ran from the mountain, erasing all evidence that he had ever been there. He left her body in the ruins, cold and alone. When he returned to town, he said nothing. He bathed himself in scalding water and went to sleep and dreamed of darkness. The search began that night. In the morning, he searched with them. Where could his love have gone? How can she just vanish? “You were the last person to see her.” I didn’t do anything. He nearly said. He didn’t say. Too much guilt in that phrase. Too much guilt in his heart. They had gone walking, he told her parents, and then she remembered she had to take care of the goats, and she had to rush home. That was the story he told. He didn’t know where she was. He wished he did. By morning, the entire town was searching for her. Such a good girl. Such a sweet girl. She always kept her face clean. Always kept her clothes mended. Her hair was so beautiful. Lips like spring blossoms. Eyes like the sun. They never thought to go into the mountain. They never thought she would go so far on her own. And they were right. She wouldn’t have. Not alone. Not without someone she trusted. He could only agree, too strangled by guilt to say more.

• • • • Time moved like in a dream. Days lasted years and months lasted days. She found herself tasting colors and seeing emotions, and she could understand the words whispered by the rain and the desires of the sun and the longing of the moon. She was everywhere and everything, expansive and great and trembling with the enormity of it. The star inside her had burst with light and was forming a new universe. And then she was reduced back to a single point in the darkness, cold and alone. There was ground beneath her now. She brought herself slowly to her feet and looked around, but there was little to see. A simple cave, dimly lit by some unknown source, the walls a smudge of grey stone. As if she had never hit the ground, but had simply slipped through the mountain and arrived here. The cave grew brighter, and she turned around, forced to shield her eyes when she faced the light. When she lowered her arm, a figure stood before her, a caricature of a human body. The limbs too long, arms branching into fingers that curled and stretched like dead ivy on a brick wall, spindle-thin legs and feet that drew back like a faun’s would, perched on black hooves, and wrapped in ephemeral white, wearing its own soul like a shroud. Every step it took clicked against the stone floor. As the creature drew near, she could see the hollow, lipless face, framed by hair that flowed pomegranate red, skin the bluish-white of ice, eyes black as oil. She realized, terrified, that this was their smile. When they spoke, their voice made her think of wind that swept over freshly- turned earth. It reminded her of a church crowded full for a funeral, a hundred voices whispering, grieving. “You’re early.”

• • • •

For him, time moved like in a nightmare. Days lasted years and months lasted days. The search went on for far too long, pressing closer and closer to the ruins, but never quite reaching there. They didn’t go to the ruins, but he did. Two months passed before he could finally go without suspicion. Two ugly, hate-filled months that nearly ended in the death of an innocent old man, suspected to be her killer for the simple fact that he was quiet and reclusive and an easy target. Nobody cared for the old man. Not like they cared for him, one of the shining stars of the town, one of the bright young men who will grow to lead their city in a manner befitting its history. As he approached the ruins high on the mountain, he was surprised at how clear the air was. There was no heaviness, no stench of decay, nothing but cool air rushing over him like a baptism. But it had been two months. Nature was swift and brutal. It was deep in fall, and the animals had to prepare for winter. Surely everything was gone by now? When he reached the remains of the stone walls, he waited a moment before going inside. He rested his hand against the crumbling structure and took a breath, remembering the warm summer when he lost her after trying to have her. If only she hadn’t fought. He’d done nothing the other men in town hadn’t done. He’d heard them speak in the tavern. He’d seen them as he’d grown. He knew exactly what was permitted, what he was owed. He’d followed the map he’d been given. He walked around the corner. Her body lay on the ground, untouched by rot or ruin. Her skin soft and whole, cheeks plump and lips full, as if waiting to be woken from her sleep by a kiss. But the color was gone, drained from her body, pooled around her like black tar over dead leaves. Even the bruises on her wrists, where he’d held her so tightly, had vanished, leaving behind unmarred flesh the color of stone. He looked around the ruins. In the bushes, a deer was watching him. Unnerved, he yelled at it, shouting for it to go away. His arms flailed over his head as he screamed for the deer to simply leave him in peace. He flung rocks, narrowly missing the animal, striking nearby trees. But the deer remained.

• • • •

Her body persisted in the cool forest, patient, waiting. Waiting for what? he wondered.

• • • •

She stumbled back, but her legs were weak, and she fell. Arms wrapped around her, two, then four, and she was cradled, and once again she felt the gentle love of falling. Their eyes were still dark, almost black, but this close she could see the tinge of red, of old, thick blood that pools on a slaughterhouse floor. “I’m dead,” she whispered, realizing. They helped her back to her feet. “You came with no coin,” They said, with the sadness of a small child. “You were not ready to come.” “Is anybody ever ready?” They smiled again, and she learned to be less terrified. One hand of long fingers and coarse skin reached out for hers. She let her soft, greying flesh rest against it. “The world above will say I took you,” They said. “I did not take you.” “I know.” Her hands slowly cooled. She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs wouldn’t work. They didn’t need to, anymore. “I do not take any of you before it is time.” They turn over her hands, trace a stone-rough finger against her palm. “You are given to me. You are sent to me.” They were a blend of sadness and anger, the sound of fury, of hot tears spilled in another world. But the dead could not cry. “The same was said of me,” They told her. “It was said that I was taken from Earth, and with me went the spring. The world turned cold and the sun vanished from the sky.” “The sun returned,” she told Them. “The world became warm again.” “Of course it did. The world doesn’t stop for one lost girl.”

• • • •

Her body wouldn’t go away. When he was young, one of their mousers had a litter. Tiny squirming beans suckling at their purring mother. He picked one up. He held it too hard. He was too little to understand. That had gone away. Or later, when he was old enough to understand, but not quite old enough to catch himself before acting, he played too roughly with his friends at the retaining wall. They knocked a weaker boy, the boy with the lame leg, into the river. The boy was rescued, but his mind was never quite right again. The boy’s parents demand he be punished for what he had done to their child. That too had gone away. He didn’t mean to. He never meant to. He simply didn’t know his own strength. Didn’t know what he was capable of. Accidents happen. Why won’t she go away? • • • •

The world doesn’t stop for one lost girl. He would go on, she realized. There are other girls. Ones who have not yet been lost, one way or another. There are so many ways to lose a girl. Even those like her, who spot every trap, who watch every move, who balance themselves so precisely that they could never fall, even they can slip through the cracks. But him? He will be fine. “How many would it take, then?” They know she was not asking Them. The world above has forgotten Them as much as it has forgotten her and every other girl that has come here too early. “How many girls must be lost before the world stops and takes notice?” For a moment, she could see the girl in the wisp of white that shrouded Them. Hair dark as the night sky, thick and curled, rich brown skin and eyes full of stars. Once They were a girl of joy and love and light, with the same heart that she had, the same hope and happiness. The same fear. The same caution. The same narrow line to walk. But then the girl vanished, and all that was left was this creature of shadow and bone, who could give her no answer, who wanted just as badly as she did to steal spring and warmth and light from the world that had stolen it from her. “The world won’t stop?” she asked. “Then I will make the world stop.” The cave trembled and cracked open above her. Light poured in, hot as molten stone, searing her icy skin. She was dragged upward, pulled from the place where she fell to. But unlike before, she did not fight. She writhed from the pain of the heat, a scream trapped behind her lips pressed firmly shut, but she did not fight. Then all at once it was cool again. The air sparkled with snowfall. It was winter in the world above, when the days were cold and the nights were long and dark. “I need a weapon.” She’d never so much as held a blade except for cooking dinner. But she felt a fury that would overcome anything, even the timidness of her former life. “You are a girl with a heart full anger, in search of a fight. You are a weapon.”

• • • •

That’s the trick, of course. The lie that no one speaks, but everybody tells. The thing that is known everywhere, but said by no one. There are only two types of girls in this world: the lucky and the lost.

• • • •

Her head is pain and her body is ice. The sky is a mass of grey, edging towards night or away from dawn, she can’t tell which. Everything is made brighter by the snow. Fat flakes drift down over her. They do not melt when they touch her skin. She sits up. His eyes are wide. His breath is still. Her hand comes away red when she touches the back of her neck. There is a rustling in the brush. A deer dashes off into the woods, leaving them alone. He breathes a name in shock. She recognized the name as hers. But it doesn’t suit her anymore. Now she bears the names of a thousand lost girls, gouged into the flesh of her back, etched into her bones, the sound of their last cries running through her veins and flowing into her dead heart. She is bigger now than just one name. She grabs his wrist and holds firm. He tries to pull away, but she stands firm, a stone carving of a girl. She is a snare, and he is her prey. He strains, pleading for her to let him go. She remembers pleading the same. She remembers how he said he would not hurt her. She lets him go free, making no such promise. Lets him have a moment to run, a moment of hope, just as she had when she was still warm, when it was still just her name in her mouth and her blood in her veins. He runs. She chases. She is faster. She is so much faster. Her feet are light on the ground, like a deer, and she takes her time chasing him down. In his fear, he falls. She descends upon him, nails and teeth. Her fingers press into his eyes, and her teeth rip through the soft flesh of his face. Her mouth becomes warm with blood. His hand gropes the ground and he finds a rock. He swings it at her face, but he is slow and blind. She catches the stone, tears it from his hand, and uses it to finish what she started. No, what he started, during that summer picnic in the ruins. Then, she comes down from the mountain, eyes on the town that made him. ©2017 by Caroline Ratajski.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caroline Ratajski is a writer and software engineer currently living in Silicon Valley, California, USA. Previously published as Morgan Dempsey, her fiction is available in Broken Time Blues and Danse Macabre, as well as at Redstone Science Fiction. She is represented by Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary, LLC.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Midwife Cynthia Ward | 4578 words

Though his estate had fallen upon difficult times, my husband Geoffrey retained the midwife to nurse me through my delirium, for Marguerite Willette had knowledge of the illnesses which come upon a woman who has borne and lost a child. Marguerite little resembled the crude, dull-witted folk who lived in the town, but her humble breeding was evident in the cast of her face, which revealed her French ancestry, and in the swarthy hue of her complexion and raven darkness of her tresses, which betrayed the blood of the savages that once inhabited this land. Her eyes, however, were as green as a wildcat’s, and they possessed a gaze of such penetrating quality that, when I opened my eyes and found her looking upon me, I gave a startled cry. My husband was in my bed-chamber, and at once he was at my side. I spoke his name and reached out to him, and he embraced me with all the gentleness one must show an invalid, thanking God I had been restored to him. At length he said, “I cannot express my relief, Emily, that you recognize me! For a month you have lain in delirium. How I feared your mind would not recover! We owe much to Miss Marguerite Willette.” At his words, I recognized the keen-eyed woman as the midwife who had attended me through the long hours of my confinement, and remembered the discomfort I had experienced at the intensity of her gaze. She bowed her head, and I felt an unwarranted relief that she had averted her disconcertingly acute eyes. But she looked frequently to my husband, alert, I thought, for any direction he might give her. In the candlelight, I saw how thin and wan Geoffrey’s countenance had become, marked deeply by grief for his lost son and concern for his wife; I resolved to do all that Marguerite directed, to recover my health, and cease to burden my husband with anxiety for the continuance of his family. Neither must I trouble him with my grief, though it lay on me with an oppressive weight; I would pray for strength. I reached for my cross, which I have worn since childhood, but it was not at my throat. “Geoffrey!” I cried. “Where is my cross?” “Emily, your voice shakes as if you think it lost forever. You were restless in your illness, and we feared you might harm yourself, so we removed the necklace from your throat.” “Where is it?” I cried. “I have always worn my cross! I must have it, Geoffrey.” “It is here,” he said, and opened the drawer of my night-table. Then my cross depended from his hand, twisting in the candlelight. Astonishment filled me as I saw an expression of distaste pass across Marguerite’s face; then I realized my cross must be too plain for a Frenchwoman. The Papists favor a questionable ornamentation, images of Christ upon their crosses. Geoffrey clasped the gold chain about my throat, and with the cross once more upon my breast, I felt a measure of comfort. I knew our son was safe with God, and God was watching over us, as my husband watched over me. As Geoffrey slipped his arms about my shoulders, Marguerite spoke. “I beg pardon for this interruption, Mr. Sylvester,” she said in her barbaric French accent, “but you must not keep your wife from her rest. You imperil her recovery.” Geoffrey was stricken at the thought of doing his wife harm, and he apologized to me, and took his leave. Marguerite cared for me with all the solicitude one expects of a nurse. Her eyes retained their piercing quality, but she maintained a modest and respectful demeanor; I was grateful for her attention, and knew Geoffrey was grateful, as well. Weakened by my delirium and my nine months of bed-rest, I could stand only with Marguerite’s or Geoffrey’s assistance, and, despite this support, I could walk but a few steps. Geoffrey visited my chamber and assisted me as frequently as his duties permitted. They are considerable, for he is an attorney with a prominent Augusta firm. His business takes him regularly to Portland, and sometimes to Boston, which is where, with God’s blessings, we chanced to meet. He is the scion of one of the oldest families of the New World, the Sylvesters, who built their fortune with the tall pines of the land they wrested from the savage Kennebecs. But by the time Geoffrey’s father passed on, all the pines had been cut for masts, and most of the land had been sold; so Geoffrey entered a profession that might restore his fortunes. Geoffrey Sylvester is the last of his line; the son I bore died within the hour of his birth. I was naught but a burden to this fine man, too frail and sickly to fulfill a wife’s duties; yet Geoffrey remained as considerate as the day he asked for my hand in marriage. I prayed to God for a lightening of my husband’s burdens, and for the restoration of his fortunes; I prayed for a lessening of my grief, and for the swift return of my health; and I prayed I would learn to bear all my duties cheerfully, as a wife should. I apologized to Geoffrey for my debility, and told him that if he thought it necessary to put me aside and take a new wife, to assure the continuance of his line, I would understand. At this, his care-worn face went white as new-fallen snow, and he said, “I shall never put you aside, Emily! Do not trouble yourself with such foolish worries. Your strength improves with every passing day. We will have another son.” My husband was right, of course. My strength improved, and within a month I was walking without assistance. Despite the numerous and exigent obligations of his employ, Geoffrey witnessed my accomplishment, standing ready to give assistance if I should need it; but, with God’s help, I did not. Joy transformed Geoffrey’s face, almost obscuring his weariness, and when I returned to my bed, he tenderly drew the blankets over me. That night, Geoffrey returned to my room, whispering my name, and speaking of his happiness that I had recovered. I was startled to find him in my chamber, for I still had much need of rest. He placed his candle on the night-table and embraced me, telling me how much he loved me and missed me, and slipped his hand into my night-clothes, touching me intimately. I knew it was my duty to submit to my husband’s desire, but I could not help myself: I tried to push him away. My arms were weak as mist; he never noticed my efforts as he cast back the coverlets and pushed up my nightgown. My anxiety increased at the shock of the cold air and the cold hand on my limbs, and I screamed. “Mr. Sylvester! Have you no care for your wife’s health?” Geoffrey leaped up from my bed, his face twisting with consternation, and he cried, “Emily, I thought you had recovered—oh, God! Can you ever forgive me?” Marguerite stepped between Geoffrey and my bed. “She hasn’t the strength to be a wife to you now, Mr. Sylvester,” she said sternly. “And it will be months before she has the strength to carry a child. Go, before you do her more harm!” My husband’s face filled with shame and remorse, and he obeyed my midwife’s command; but she hardly noticed, for she had turned to me, to smooth my nightgown and draw up the covers, restoring my modesty. So great was my relief that I barely noticed the discomforting intensity of her regard. Indeed, I fell immediately into a deep and dreamless slumber. Thenceforth, Marguerite watched Geoffrey with unblinking eyes whenever he visited me, but she had no reason for concern; he had realized how much strength I had yet to regain, and did nothing which might hinder my recovery. And soon a morning came when I felt stronger at the conclusion of my exercise than I had at the beginning, and, as my husband embraced me with exceeding gentleness, I was emboldened to say, “I am not weary, Geoffrey—might I walk with you to your carriage to wish you Godspeed?” His tender expression changed to one of concern. “It would not be wise for you to venture outdoors so soon, Emily.” “I have no intention of exhausting myself,” I assured him. “I was confined to bed for so many months, I shall not risk a relapse by remaining long outside. I will do no more than see you off on your journey, and say my farewells to our son.” “Emily, you mustn’t risk the return of delirium!” Geoffrey said. “You haven’t the strength to bear the sensations which visiting the grave will excite. I cannot permit it.” “Geoffrey, I missed the funeral! Almost two months have passed since our child was buried. What sort of mother am I, who does not visit her son’s grave?” Marguerite spoke. “A short walk in the fresh air will do Madame Sylvester good. I shall accompany her, of course.” “If you believe she has the strength, Marguerite,” Geoffrey said, “I shall permit it.” At last I would say goodbye to my son. When we stepped outside, I found that autumn had taken the land. The morning air held a damp chill which penetrated wool and flesh to make the bones ache. The elms which lined the drive stood stark and black against the grey sky, and the spruce forest surrounding the estate formed a dark wall which seemed impenetrable. The lawns of the estate were unmown, and in the dull light filtering through the low, unbroken layer of cloud, the limp grass had an odd, unwholesome aspect, as if it were an old man’s hair grown long in the grave. Disquieted by my morbid fancy, I kept my gaze elevated, and my attention upon my husband. Beside the waiting carriage, Geoffrey embraced me, and we exchanged farewells. He apologized that he had not the time to go with me to our son’s grave; but he must hurry to Augusta, as urgent business required that he make the train to Portland. He climbed reluctantly into the seat beside his stableman, and the carriage moved away. As my husband disappeared into the black forest, my grief became heavier with sudden loneliness. I told Marguerite I must visit my son’s grave alone. She studied me with her bold green eyes, to ascertain whether my strength were faltering, and agreed I might have a few moments to myself. As she moved away from me, walking silently, her long hair unbound, and glossy as a raven’s wing, it seemed to me that I looked upon a wild animal, a creature of the night. I turned away from her, and my gaze fell upon the Sylvester house, which I had not looked upon in nearly a year. In comparison to the rude shacks of the town, this gabled mansion must seem a grand palace to Marguerite Willette, for all its neglect. It had withstood an hundred and more northern winters, which stripped the paint from the weatherboards and turned the exposed wood grey as cloud. Shutters dangled from broken hinges, revealing dust-dull panes; the few intact shutters were closed. Many windows had been boarded up, to cover broken glass, and keep out the winds of winter. Altogether, the house presented a sinister aspect which I had not noticed when Geoffrey had brought me here last year through the bright forest of early autumn; I had seen the neglect, but joy in arrival at my new home had prevented me from perceiving the extent of decay. It seemed almost as if some malign force were acting upon the Sylvester family, and I wondered for a moment if a pagan spirit were seeking to avenge the dead Kennebecs for the loss of their land. The garden had once been orderly and beautiful in the English manner; now the paths were buried beneath dead leaves that sank wetly underfoot, releasing a fetid odor, and rank weeds and crawling vines covered the garden like a shroud. No evidence of the garden remained save a few thorny sticks which bore dark rosebuds lured forth by the treacherous warmth of an Indian summer. I bent close to the barbed black stalks, searching for a bloom, and found the buds had all loosened their petals, but only in frost-stricken death. The lacy tatterings of decay made it seem that worms had gotten into the buds, and, though I searched every corner of the garden, I could not find a rose fit to lay upon my son’s grave. I emerged from the garden near a fence of black iron spears which enclosed a small plot: the Sylvester family cemetery. With effort, I opened the gate, which protested with a hideous screech, as if it had been opened rarely through the years, and I stepped among the gravestones. The more distant were of marble; their chiseled letters were worn, and obscured by leprous patches of lichen. Most, however, were of polished granite, and the letters were as sharp as the day they had been carved. I read the name upon the nearest granite surface, and my legs went soft as melting beeswax; I would have collapsed, had I not seized my son’s gravestone. Grief threatened to steal my senses as well as my strength, but I gripped the gravestone so its sharp edges cut my palms, and the painful sensation revived me. I saw that my husband had placed flowers on the grave, a bouquet of red wildflowers which shone to my tear-bright eyes like splashes of paint. I blinked, and found myself remembering my midwife’s aversion to my cross as I saw that the wildflowers were mixed with pine tassels and bound with a knotted cornhusk, in a crude Indian fetich. Marguerite Willette was neither midwife nor Papist, but a priestess serving the pagan spirits of her ancestors. It had not been lingering illness which had caused me to think a malign force sought the downfall of the Sylvesters; a vengeful Indian demon haunted the estate, and its evil acts were manifest in my ill health, and the deterioration of the estate and decline of the family. Even the death of Geoffrey’s heir had not satisfied the demon: it must desecrate the innocent infant’s grave! Marguerite was the most loathsome of mortals, a willing slave of devils. A witch. I thanked God for directing me hence to discover the fetich, and, grasping my cross in one hand, I raised the fetich and cast it out of the hallowed ground. I realized then that the witch had not confined her evil to her attempt to desecrate the grave. In the guise of midwife, that servant of demons had killed my child! I rose, intending to flee to my husband’s house and lock the witch outside. But I was overwhelmed by the weight of my awful discoveries, and I swooned at the cemetery gate. When my senses returned, I found myself in my chamber, with Geoffrey sitting beside my bed. The flickering candlelight revealed that the lines in his gaunt face were graven more deeply than they had been when I had revived from delirium. “In your fragile state, I should never have allowed you to visit the grave!” said Geoffrey. “Marguerite says you have been unconscious all day—I feared you might never awaken!” The witch must be near, lingering to pretend concern for her charge, and to hear whatever words passed between my husband and myself. Therefore, I gestured for Geoffrey to lean close, and whispered softly in his ear. “Geoffrey, an evil spirit is haunting your family! It—“ “Emily, what are you saying?” Geoffrey exclaimed. “There are no evil spirits!” I realized I should never have told him of my discovery. My words must seem to Geoffrey to indicate only a relapse into delirium. He is an attorney, a servant of law and logic; he sees the world as a place of order and light. He could not see the manifold evidence of the demon’s efforts to destroy his family. “Geoffrey, I apologize for the confusion of my speech. I spoke of an evil dream that came upon me in my swoon.” “God forgive me for allowing you to endanger yourself!” Geoffrey cried. “As I feared, the visit to the grave has revived morbid and dangerous memories. Emily, promise me you will venture out-of-doors no more!” He grasped my hands. His felt hot as coals. “I could not bear to lose you!” I gave Geoffrey my promise, and he gave me a kiss as light and soft upon my cheek as the delicate brush of moth wings. When he leaned back, I saw Marguerite watching us. Her bold gaze no longer made me feel as if I were under the scrutiny of a forest animal, an innocent beast. I had always seen it in her eyes, yet I had not known why her regard caused me such profound unease. But I had discovered Marguerite was a witch; and I knew God’s commandment concerning witches. Marguerite stepped forward, her face a mask of repentance. “I have apologized to Mr. Sylvester, Madame,” she said, “and I must ask your pardon as well. I pray you will forgive me for so greatly misjudging the speed of your recovery.” I spoke words of forgiveness, and assured her, “I will do whatever you think best.” I could not permit the witch, or the demon she served, to know that I had found them out. Marguerite said my husband must not remain and weary me further when I had suffered a serious reverse. Geoffrey kissed me, and turned away. I glanced clandestinely at Marguerite, and saw that she was watching Geoffrey with a curiously intent expression; I felt a sickening chill as I recognized her look as one of undisguised ardor. The witch had immoral intentions toward my husband, and did not even scruple to hide her lust from the wife of the man she desired; she was no more troubled by shame than her hot-blooded French forebears, or the black-hearted savages with whom they lay in utter disregard of propriety. When Geoffrey was gone from the room, Marguerite turned to me, and a look expressive of the deepest hatred passed across her face. It was an expression of inhuman intensity, and my heart quailed as I realized her depraved lust had allowed the demon to enter her soul and take possession of her body; her diabolic master could now wreak direct and grievous harm on Geoffrey! The loathsome expression immediately vanished from Marguerite’s countenance, as if the demon had realized it risked discovery, and Marguerite exclaimed in tones of false concern: “Madame, you are so pale! You must rest!” She seated herself by my bed, to wait until I fell asleep. I was weary; despite her terrifying gaze, my lids closed. But sleep was banished by the tumult of emotions in my breast. My husband had not shared my bed for many months; indeed, I had felt relief that he had not. All men have needs, and the flesh is weak; I had given the demon the means to reach Geoffrey. Terror for Geoffrey’s life and soul wracked me, but I held myself motionless; and at last I heard the scrape of a chair sliding, the scuff of footsteps retreating, and the creak and click of a door closing. I lay still; I did not want the witch to hear me following. But at last I arose and went forth from my bed-chamber. My candle cast a small circle of light, and the corridor seemed limitless; the darkness pressed close on every side, as if the spirit sought to extinguish my light and my soul. I clasped my cross and prayed to God, and He gave me the strength to continue. I came at last to my husband’s room, and found the door closed. But the knob turned quietly beneath my hand, and I found myself looking upon a blazing hearth, and upon my husband’s bed. The sight that greeted my eyes turned me cold again—so cold I felt I had plunged through winter ice into the Kennebec River. My husband lay on his back, unclothed, with the witch upon him. Her face and Geoffrey’s were hidden by the straight black fall of her hair, and her bare flesh was dark in the hearth-light; she seemed her own Indian ancestress, restored to corporeality, as she comported herself unlike a woman, taking the man’s position upon Geoffrey. Her hands touched Geoffrey’s bare flesh, her fingers running down his arm, his chest, his stomach; and she seemed to welcome his touch, pressing her flesh into his cupped hands, her hips against his. I knew the demon possessed her, but still her shameful behavior sent a shock of horror shivering through me, and I fear I betrayed myself with a gasp. Marguerite raised her head so swiftly that her hair flew back, exposing Geoffrey’s face; his countenance was so pale and drawn, it seemed the life was almost gone from his mortal flesh—I realized the demon was drawing the soul from my husband! The witch turned her terrible eyes upon me. I averted my face and, pulling my cross from about my neck, I ran to the fireside. She shouted; Geoffrey called my name; but I did not look at them. I dropped my candle to the hearth-stone and closed my hands on a sharp-tipped fire iron. There is only one way to treat a witch, but I could not do what was necessary unless she could not resist. A prayer on my lips and the cross against my palm, I raised the iron rod and turned toward the demon. Geoffrey seemed in the grip of a profound terror, though he had no reason to fear me. Marguerite’s dark face showed the most startled expression; it was plain to see the demon had expected never to be discovered. “Emily, don’t!” Geoffrey cried, revealing how frightfully strong the demon’s influence was upon him. “In God’s name, begone!” I cried, and swung the iron. I was astonished that the skull caved in, with a sound like bird’s-eggs trodden upon in high grass; I had expected only that the blow would distract the demon long enough for me to thrust my cross into Geoffrey’s hand. But the witch’s flesh proved vulnerable to iron, or to the alliance of iron and cross, and the witch’s body fell at my feet. Blood shone bright red on my hands, and on the black iron, and on Geoffrey’s breast and face. His countenance twisted into an expression of guilt painful to behold, and he slipped off the bed and sank to his knees before me. “Emily, I beg your forgiveness! I never meant to betray our vows—” I lowered the iron and raised one hand to touch his face. “You must not apologize, Geoffrey,” I said. “You did not know what you did! The Indian spirit that possessed Marguerite exerted an irresistible influence upon your fallible flesh.” I pressed my cross into his unresisting hands. “You must wear the cross always, for the protection of your immortal soul!” The body lay motionless upon the floor; but death can be feigned, so I struck the skull again. The body never stirred; I had succeeded in driving the demon from its mortal shell. I dropped the iron. “Marguerite killed our son, Geoffrey.” I could hardly speak for the weight of grief upon my heart. “She killed him in service to a vengeful Indian demon which seeks your death and the end of your family! Marguerite was a witch! And we must burn the witch, as God commands!” Geoffrey remained silent, but his expression was altered by astonishment and horror as he realized the dreadful fate he had so narrowly avoided. He had always denied the existence of spirits, yet now he had incontrovertible proof that a demon had commanded the death of his son and heir, and very nearly taken his own life. I seized the witch’s arm with both my hands, and attempted to drag the body to the hearth. “Help me, Geoffrey! We must burn the witch, lest the demon reanimate her lifeless flesh!” Geoffrey raised my cross and stared at it, then bundled me in his arms. “Oh, Emily, Emily.” He spoke my name over and over, and he held me tight, as if he thought I would run away from him. I could not help but notice how he trembled at the realization of his narrow escape from death and damnation. I made him swear in God’s name to wear the cross always, for the safety of his soul and his family. Then he said I must return to my room. When I protested, he assured me that he would dispose of the body properly; and I felt so terribly weary that I allowed him to escort me to my chamber, and put me to bed. Though I reminded Geoffrey that he must not delay burning the witch’s body, he stayed with me, sitting by our bed and holding my hand. In my exhaustion, and my knowledge that my husband had the protection of my cross, I fell asleep. When I awoke, I was alone, and my cross once more lay on my breast. I ran to the door, and found it locked. Terrified, I pounded upon the door, calling to my husband in my loudest voice, warning him that his soul was in grievous danger. He came to the door and assured me that he had taken care of the body, and that he had God’s protection even as I did. A doctor was coming from Augusta, he said, to ascertain whether my health had been adversely affected by my exertions of last night. I assured him that I had recovered completely, and expressed how strongly I desired to be with him, but he did not unlock the door. Though my bed-chamber is high above the ground, I ran to the window, desperate to escape the room and confirm that Geoffrey had the protection of a cross. But when I drew back the heavy drapes, I saw that my window had been entirely covered by boards. I shattered the glass as I struck the wood, attempting to loosen a board with blows of my fist; the sharp pain and bright splash of blood immediately recalled me to myself, and brought me to a realization of the foolishness of my actions. Why would Geoffrey tell me he had protection if he were not wearing a cross? He knew his immortal soul was at risk! A loving husband, he feared for my soul, and demonstrated the depth of his concern by returning my cross to me and sealing my room to ensure my safety. But Geoffrey’s love is all the protection I need.

©1995 by Cynthia Ward. Originally published in Desire Burn: Women's Stories from the Dark Side of Passion. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cynthia Ward has published stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Shattered Prism, Weird Tales, Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (Prime Books), and other anthologies and magazines. Her stories “Norms” and “#rising” made the Tangent Online Recommended Reading List for 2011 and 2014. She edited the anthologies Lost Trails: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West Volumes One and Two for WolfSinger Publications, and has a pair of anthologies forthcoming in collaboration with Charles G. Waugh. With Nisi Shawl, Cynthia co-created the groundbreaking Writing the Other fiction writers workshop and coauthored the diversity fiction-writing handbook Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (Aqueduct Press). Her short novel, The Adventure of the Incognita Countess, is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press (2017). She lives in Los Angeles, where she is not working on a screenplay. NONFICTION The H Word: Kiss the Goat Nathan Carson | 2121 words

Goats in Horror

And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. — Matthew 25:33

After the serpent, the goat is widely considered the most evil animal in mythology, literature, film, and music. From biblical verse to Baphomet, Black Phillip and beyond, the cloven-hoofed mammal has long been maligned. But the majority of these allusions are surface-level references to a beast that is broadly misunderstood. Having grown up on a farm in rural Oregon, goats have long been a part of my life, as much a part of the environment as the forested hills, dark rainclouds, mold, moss, and fungus. In some ways, I became numb to their energy, because what could be more banal than another livestock auction, or being paid a few dollars an hour to shuffle alfalfa hay bales from field to truck to barn? Still, there are mysteries to these highly intelligent creatures that have rarely if ever been plumbed by the vast number of artists inspired by long looks into those inhuman horizontal pupils. As far back as the Bible, goats are unfairly pitted against their wooly kin. Sheep are given eternal life, but goats are cast into the Lake of Fire. The psychology behind this derives from the fact that a sheep will stand in mud and rain with little on its mind, while a goat is always poking its head through the fence seeking some prize of sustenance, or standing on hind legs to reach for higher fruit. Perhaps Eve was a role model, or vice versa. Even Aesop immortalized certain character flaws in his fable The Goat and The Vine, in which a goat hides from hunters in a cluster of vines, and then when danger has passed, begins to eat those same vines. The short-sighted feast causes a rustling and alerts the hunters to his presence for the last time. R.I.P. Mr. The Goat. So effective is the distant reference of goat villainy that urban legends abound. The Chupacabra (the infamous Mexican “goat sucker”) is not far behind Bigfoot and Nessie in cryptozoology circles, thanks in part to a profile boost on an episode of X-Files. The United States owns a few of its own modern myths, including Louisville’s Goat Man of Pope Lick, and The Black Goat of New Orleans. And let none of us forget the goatific aspect of pagan holiday favorite Krampus. In horror films, goats appear hither and yon. One was employed for a scene in Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (2009), but the actor was so problematic, a puppet was created to perform many of the scenes. The most famous onscreen goat of our time is the exquisitely delicious Black Phillip from The VVitch (2016). Many scenes had to be cut or changed due to the surly nature of the 210-pound buck named Charlie who played Black Phillip. There’s an excellent article on Hollywoodreporter.com (bit.ly/2qmZouf) all about the difficulties of shooting Charlie’s scenes, including an anecdote about him sending his co-star Ralph Ineson to the hospital after ramming his horns into Ineson’s ribs, resulting in a dislodged tendon, and a film shoot that was completed over the next several weeks with the poor man on a heavy dosage of painkillers. On the written page, one of the best-remembered Norwegian fairy tales is “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Unusual for folklore, the goats are the heroes in this popular story, which introduced the horror of the bridge troll to a world of children, nearly all of whom are forced to cross a bridge at some point in their young lives. In fact, the very earliest nightmare I can recall was related to a bridge troll, so this myth carries extra weight with me. Apparently it was potent for Stephen King as well, considering this same tale was the inspiration for IT. King cites a collection of HP Lovecraft tales as his reason for writing horror fiction, and one of Lovecraft’s most infamous creations was the Outer God Shub- Niggurath, aka “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.” Though HPL invoked her name in several story-embedded incantations, he did not describe her physical form. She became a symbol of a perverse kind of fertility and sexuality in his work. There is no shortage of horror-oriented books to be found with goat themes or titles. Among the better known are Goat Dance by Douglas Clegg, Goats from Lambs by Paul P.K. Kingston, Goat Mother by Pierre V. Comtois, The Goat by Bill Kieffer, and the forthcoming second book in his Death Metal Epic series: Goat Song Sacrifice by Dean Swinford. Likewise, goat references rear their heads in Ramsey Campbell’s The Night of the Claw and Stephen King’s The Reach. The Goat’s Head by Lex Sinclair and They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson both show publishers’ proclivities for conjuring the image of Baphomet. French occult author Eliphas Levi drew his famous “Sabbatic Goat” image back in 1856, thus forever wedding the concept of goats and demonic evil. In the early twentieth century, this figure became an important element in Crowley’s cosmology. According to Thelemic lore, Baphomet was a divine androgyne and “the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.” These are hardly good character references for the poor beasts, but goat-headed Baphomet has become a damned popular image. I will not pretend to have read all of the aforementioned books, but so far as I can ascertain, none of these stories deal deeply with the actual concerns of goats or goat breeders, nor do any of these authors seem to have profound firsthand dealings with goats (and if you did, I’d love to hear from you. We should collaborate on the ultimate goat horror project.) Per usual, it’s an easy and evocative beast to employ in a story for readers who are even less familiar with the subject, yet not immune to the implications that such a hoary creature conjures on a primal level. As mentioned, I grew up with goats. And when I think about some of the things I’ve seen in person, or stories I heard while growing up with a mother who enjoyed cult fame as a goat breeder and, eventually, a goat judge, I find plenty of occasions to squirm. As a gift to writers, filmmakers, and artists who want to conjure a deeper darkness from the vast possibilities offered by our favorite barnyard beast, I offer here a series of reminiscences and ruminations that are ripe for creative exploration. Goats begin to grow horns within the first few weeks. By maturity, these are vicious curved protuberances; sharp, hard, and deadly. Because goats can often injure one another with their horns, it is a common practice for goat breeders and domesticators to “de-horn” them within the first few days. This is accomplished by holding a hot brand to the nerves on the head from which horns grow— without anesthesia, of course. Now before you cry “animal cruelty,” I think it’s fair to liken this practice to male circumcision, which is performed on millions of humans and generally accepted by western society as something that the child will never remember. (Actually, I dislike both practices, but what you gonna do?) Not much later in life, show goats are tattooed. The tattoo implement resembles a ghoulish set of salad tongs. Alphanumerical symbols are set inside the device, much like in an old-fashioned printing press. Ink is smeared on the skin of the ear (traditionally the right ear, though the Lamancha breed has such small ears that they are usually tattooed on the tail). Then the pliers are clamped down and the ear is pierced simultaneously with enough tiny needles to create a legible five-digit string of letters and numbers that will be recognizable for the duration of the animal’s life. According to my mother, chips are beginning to replace this outdated procedure. The scent of male goats is strong. The buck’s odor operates as musk to the doe. Bucks will commonly urinate on their own faces to increase the scent, which absolutely drives the does wild. At times, it is advantageous to induce heat in a doe, in order to bring her into a breedable state. This is sometimes accomplished by holding “buck rags” in the face of the doe. These rags are soaked with the product of male goat musk glands. The malodorous material is kept in an airtight container (I’ve most often seen yogurt and butter tubs) for use at that very special time. Even more determined are those fearless breeders who milk goat semen by hand in order to inseminate a prize doe at a later time. You think I’m joking. I’m not. Of course, there’s more to life on the farm than jerking off goats. (When I sent this article to Ma Carson for fact-checking, she corroborated my story and sent several helpful notes, then made it crystal clear: “Trust me—I have never jerked off a goat.”) Sometimes young are turned sideways in the womb, and the industrious breeder must physically reach inside the straining mother in order to twist the baby by hand until it can come out on its own. Other goats make their way through the birth canal, but die instantly because of birth defects. One of our animals was born with some of its vital organs on the outside of its body. A visiting friend of mine found it first, running breathlessly into the house to tell my mother that he’d found an “alien” in the pasture. There were also cases in which goats accidentally bred with neighboring sheep, which can sometimes lead to offspring. But because sheep have fifty-four chromosomes and goats have sixty, most of these are stillborn. (And for the record, only sheep baa. Goats bleat.) I’ve also seen a nursing mother try and fail to leap a barbed wire fence, the resulting injury being a nipple torn most of the way off, hanging by a bloody thread like J.K. Rowling’s Nearly Headless Nick. It was hideous, and I felt so bad for the poor gal. Another time, I was coaxed into the barnyard to hold the head of a screaming goat while medicine was spread directly onto its bleary eye due to a weeping infection. We once had a bad experience with a driver losing control on an icy winter road; he hit a telephone pole, which dropped its live wires onto our fence-line, resulting in the electrocution death of several animals. It was quite a process to convince the insurance company of the value of those pedigreed, prize- winning show animals. Countless jokes abound about lonely shepherds. One popular theory in my middle school class was that the best way to have sex with a goat is to put on hip- wader boots and slide the animal’s hind legs inside so that it can’t get away. Children are disgusting. Sadly, there were true stories of goats that were harmed by humans—luckily, never on our property. But we heard a dark tale about some goats in a terribly nervous state of distress around humans. In this case it was found that a nearby farm worker was sneaking into the barn at night and having his way with the animals. Humans truly are more abhorrent than snakes, bugs, or . . . goats. When death came, my mother would carry the carcass into the nearby woods. Rather than burying them, she simply cast them onto something she affectionately called The Goat Pile. Over time, this grew into a heaping mound of skeletons, with the least desiccated bodies slowly decomposing on top. To my dismay, no photos exist of this amazing and very real phenomenon. One year, our creek flooded, and the entire Goat Pile was washed away in a single night. I have often wondered what lucky individual far downstream found generations of goat bones and bodies washed up on their shore when the clouds parted and the waters receded . . . If you’re still reading this, congratulations! You are probably a horror author or connoisseur. Hopefully you have learned something. And the next time you want to insert goats into one of your projects, you can imagine something far more gruesome, titillating, evocative, and reverent than a simple horned skull, hooved shadow, or bleating in the night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nathan Carson is a musician and writer from Portland, OR. He is widely known as co- founder and drummer of the internationally touring doom metal band Witch Mountain, host of the XRAY FM radio show The Heavy Metal Sewïng Cïrcle, and owner of the boutique music booking agency Nanotear. He has published articles in Rue Morgue, The Oregonian, Willamette Week, Orbitz, SF Weekly, Terrorizer, Noisey (Vice), and countless other music magazines and blogs. More recently, he has turned his sights to weird fiction, publishing short stories and novelettes in critically acclaimed horror anthologies. His first standalone novella, Starr Creek, was recently released by Lazy Fascist Press and currently sits at #1 on the Goodreads list of “Books Like Stranger Things.” Interview: Richard Kelly The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7181 words

Richard Kelly is the writer and director behind the films Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, and The Box. We’ll be speaking with him about his new 4K restoration of Donnie Darko, which hit theaters this spring. This interview first appeared in April 2017 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

• • • •

We’re talking to you this week because Donnie Darko is coming back to theaters. Tell us about that.

We did a restoration from the original negatives at a 4K resolution, and we did a lot of very careful work restoring the image to its original quality. This was a film that was released in the year 2001 in a very limited way, and a lot of people have never seen it on the big screen. So, Arrow Films, which is a great company out of the United Kingdom, came to me, and we had the resources to really bring this film back to theaters in a way that no one has seen before.

Are there differences between this and previous versions people might have seen or is it just the image quality is improved a lot?

I’d say the image quality overall is significantly improved, but I did a little bit more visual effects work on the director’s cut version of the film (towards the end), and also in the version that we did in 2004. There’s a little bit more visual enhancement, I’d say, particularly in the director’s cut, but I think that the quality is something that no one has ever seen before because the film was never really transferred into the digital space with the proper care. The color space, and the grain, and the contrast values, and the skin tones; none of that was really up to the standards that Stephen Poster, our cinematographer, and I had hoped. I do think it’s a significant improvement and worthy of seeing it on the big screen. That sounds really, really cool. I want to mention that Donnie Darko is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it probably I would guess between ten and twenty times, and I hadn’t watched it for a couple of years though. I just watched it again a few nights ago, and one thing that really struck me on this rewatch is just how many of the characters are reading books or talking about books in the movie. I was wondering, would you say you have a particular interest in books and reading?

I kind of joke sometimes that making films is like being in high school, or that Hollywood is like high school, or that life is an extension of high school. College is an extension of an advancement in your career. It’s almost like my education from specific English teachers, and science teachers, and my public education growing up in Virginia, informed my entire artistic point of view. I’m often going back and telling stories about teachers, and having characters read books that were very formative and influential on my artistic voice. It’s almost like honoring these other texts that are out there. It’s an intertextuality, and it’s a reference that’s very clear and obvious at times. I don’t want to feel like I want to obscure the influences. I want to put them and build them into the narrative. You’re talking about Graham Green or Stephen King or Richard Adams. These are all authors and books that you see characters reading within the story, and those are books that I grew up reading, and my family grew up reading, and it just feels like characters are digesting narratives within your own narrative. I like to be pretty transparent about that, I guess.

It’s interesting that you talk about the influence of your high school English teachers because I maybe would have guessed from Donnie Darko that you didn’t like high school that much. Is that a fair statement?

Well, I think high school can be pretty miserable, and it can be a difficult experience for anyone. Some people have it a lot easier than others. I certainly had it pretty easy compared to a lot of other people. I wasn’t really bullied, or I wasn’t subjected to abuse in the way that a lot of people who go through that experience are. I would say also that high school is a time when a boy becomes a man and a girl becomes a woman, and we all go through these significant changes, and we have to confront the brutal reality of life and where we go beyond high school. Do we escape our home town? Do we stay there forever? Do we get married and have children? Do we pursue an ambitious career on the other side of the country? There are major life decisions looming. I think that this is a story about a character who is probably trying to confront a system of conformity, and a system that existed right at a very particular time: In October of 1988 on the eve of a presidential election. I was just trying to create a character who had a lot of internal conflict, and who was confronting his community and trying to make sense of the world, I guess.

Speaking of confronting the community, a bunch of the adults in this movie —like Kitty Farmer in particular—are these sanctimonious hypocrite kind of characters. Were you drawing on personal experience for those sorts of characters?

I tried to have sympathy for all the characters in the film, even Kitty Farmer who is to some degree, yes, sanctimonious, judgmental, and perhaps misguided. I wanted to still have sympathy for her, and to think that she really does love the kids, and she does care about them, and she may be going about it in a misguided way where she may be idolizing this self-help motivational speaker who is a false prophet or a charlatan. Even in the portrayal of Donnie’s parents, even though they are on a different side of the political spectrum as their children, and you’re dealing with these Reagan-era parents who are conservatives, I wanted them to be very likeable. I think it’s easy to try and paint the adults in these kinds of movies as being out of touch or really almost cartoonishly doofus type characters, so I was trying to have empathy. Hopefully we were able to give them three dimensions, and the actors certainly did a wonderful job. I’m very lucky to get to work with all these actors.

The actor in particular who plays Donnie’s dad is just hilarious, and he makes the character very likeable, even though he is this sort of conservative guy.

Holmes Osborne. I’ve worked with him on all three of my films. It’s interesting, he kind of shape-shifts through all three of my films in playing various incarnations of a conservative archetype in different time frames in American history. In Donnie Darko, he plays this 1988 suburban, Reagan-era dad who is actually quite rebellious and non-conformist, surprisingly, for that kind of character. In Southland Tales, he plays the kind of puppet vice presidential character to the Republican ticket whose wife is the head of a national security agency. In The Box, he plays Cameron Diaz’s father, who is a detective trying to follow the mystery of this mysterious box that his daughter and son-in-law have received. It’s interesting how Holmes appears in all three movies as this shape- shifting archetype with a connection to a conservative government, authority police background. Holmes is a lovely person and a great friend. I’m glad to get to work with him.

I wanted to ask you about The Box because I just watched it for the first time the other night, and it’s based on a Richard Matheson short story called “Button, Button.” I had seen the Twilight Zone adaptation of that growing up, and it was one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. For years, I’ve always told that to people as the example of a story that I think has the perfect ending. Could you talk about how you came to the “Button, Button” story?

Like a lot of other people, when that episode aired in, I believe, 1985, with the revival of the Twilight Zone, I saw it as a kid, and was just taken by it and haunted by it. Many years later, I decided to approach Richard Matheson about optioning the story, and it turned out the origin story for “Button, Button” was published in Playboy Magazine in 1971. I optioned the story from Mr. Matheson. It was probably a seven- or eight-page short story. It’s not very substantial in terms of the narrative beyond the conceptual idea, but it was a compelling conceit. I struggled for a long time with how I would adapt it into a feature film, and I was able to expand upon it using my family and my parents’ story—how they met, and how they came to be married, and how my father worked at NASA. He was working on the Mars Viking project in the early ’70s up until 1976, when we landed on Mars and photographed it for the first time. It became a way of melding Matheson’s short story with a lot of autobiographical elements, and then a bigger government conspiracy behind what this experiment might mean, and what would be the greater metaphysical implications of the experiment, and the global or interstellar ramifications of such an experiment. It became something much bigger and more elaborate. It really used Richard Matheson’s story as the seed or the kernel of the whole thing. For people who haven’t seen the movie or read the story, the premise is that this guy comes to your door with a box with this button in it, and if you push the button a stranger dies and you get a million dollars. I always loved that premise. I was really surprised when I went back and read the original story that the ending is actually completely different from the ending of the Twilight Zone episode. You said that you interacted with Richard Matheson. Did you ever talk to him about the different endings?

We never met in person, and I regret not getting to sit down with him and spend time with him. It was a situation where I wasn’t sure what his ultimate health status was at the time when we were making the film. We had the short story, and that had a very specific ending where Arthur, the husband, gets pushed in front of a subway by a mysterious person. The final line of dialogue from Mr. Steward (who delivers the button) is something along the lines of “My dear, did you ever really think that you knew your husband?”— implying that the person that they didn’t know who would die was her husband. The ending of the teleplay of the episode is different in the sense that they ask, once they get the money and Mr. Steward comes to retrieve the button unit after the button has been pushed, and they ask him, “Well, where do you go from here? Who are you going to visit next?” And he says, “Well, I promise you it will be someone you don’t know”—implying that the next time the button unit is pushed, something might happen to either Arthur or Norma. It’s left as cliff hanger. My film, I kind of try to combine elements from both of the renderings of the story to a certain degree, but obviously I added things. There’s so much more to the story that I had to build for a two-hour movie.

You really added a ton to the story, and one thing I thought was interesting is that you make it about this altruism coefficient, this test of ethics, and that how many people push the button is a way of testing out how functional our society is. I thought it was interesting because the people in your movie are not desperately poor. They live a pretty comfortable life. They could obviously use a million dollars, but it made me wonder, do you think that more people would push the button in the United States than elsewhere? Is there something about the United States that makes us think that we need or deserve a million dollars no matter the cost? There was a lot of discussion going through our inner group of people when we were making the film, and I had advisors and people from NASA and a lot of people involved in a lot of deep conversations and the meaning behind the story. We were very careful to try to inject as much logic into what could be a very murky, illogical puzzle, right? What does it mean, “someone you don’t know”? This was written in 1971, and the story, to my mind, would only work in the ’70s because if you have smartphones and the internet, everyone knows everyone now. There’s no such thing as a stranger anymore, because you can find everyone online. It was a conceit that would only work in the ’70s when people were still restricted by things like telephone books and rotary telephones. In terms of your question about the ethical implications and what it might mean for Americans, that’s a really interesting question that I don’t necessarily have the answer for. But I think the film is trying to explore that. The higher intelligence played by Frank Langella, Mr. Steward—who is sort of the interstellar employee who has come to Earth to conduct these tests—lands in Norfolk, Virginia in one of the most highly secured military facilities in the world, just south of the capital of the most powerful country in the world. There’s a logic to why he arrives there, and that he arrives there right after we have contacted or disrupted Mars. We were thinking that they would start collecting highly intelligent, moral, upstanding people to conduct this test, and any scientist can look at that button unit in that box and see that there’s no technology inside of it. You have James Marsden’s character, who is almost goofing around with it, saying “Push it. Who cares? This is obviously some kind of scam or hoax.” But, strategically, Mr. Steward has only presented himself to the wife while the husband is at work, and his face is so otherworldly that she’s convinced that there is really something at stake. We tried to map it out so that the husband almost convinces the wife to do it, and she almost just does it out of a curiosity in a moment. They’re very decent people. They just don’t believe that it’s real. They almost think that it’s just a trick. We were very careful. We didn’t want it to be made a decision that was made with malice, or with a real belief that their actions were going to have real repercussions of someone’s death. Of course, it all turns out to be something much more significant than they intended. As to whether Americans would push the button more than people in other countries: That’s a much bigger question about ethics and morality, and it also has to do with our connection to technology. We obviously have things like drone strikes now. We have devices that can be implemented that separate the person from the act of violence or the instrument of violence, right? We have people who have to physically push a button in a military trailer outside of Las Vegas that will launch a missile and potentially end hundreds of lives in a second, so we’re getting into a situation where the idea of pushing a button that will result in the death of another person is a pretty substantial thing that we’re going to have to deal with moving forward as a species.

I ask that question in part because I watched The Box right after I watched Southland Tales, and I thought it was interesting because I saw you say that Southland Tales . . . it’s this sort of dystopian, near future, science fiction satire of American culture, and you said that somebody asked you what has come true from that movie, and you said, “More things than I can even count have come true from it.”

Yeah. Southland Tales is a big, sprawling alternative future fantasy of 1988 after nuclear bombs have been detonated in Texas at the Texas border in Abilene. So, that’s a film that deals with the hypothetical worst case scenario of World War III and domestic surveillance and a political process that has been turned into a really grotesque spectacle of extreme right versus extreme left. We seemed to have arrived at a place that is startlingly familiar with respect to that film. It’s troubling, but I make all of these films to try to be cathartic, and try to inspire dialogue.

I think it’s particularly interesting, in light of recent events. Your plot point in Southland Tales is this group is trying to disseminate a fake news story, basically, in order to swing a presidential election, which obviously has a lot of resonance now.

Right. The fake story in Southland Tales is a police shooting of these neo- Marxist underground figures played by Amy Poehler and Wood Harris. They are these sort of slam poets, Venice Beach underground revolutionaries, and it’s played, obviously, comedically. They’re intending to stage their own deaths in order to frame a movie star, played by Dwayne Johnson, who is married into the Republican family running on the presidential ticket. It’s this idea to stage a racially motivated political murder, but then it goes haywire when Jon Lovitz actually commits the murder for real. That was built into the very elaborate plot of Southland Tales: that there was this staged double murder gone horribly wrong resulting in a botched blackmail attempt to take down the Republican ticket. It’s a lot of elaborate plotting. The density of the plot is also meant to be an homage to a lot of film noirs that have really, really dense plotting.

I wanted to mention, speaking of things that kind of came true, one of the really funny details in the movie is that all of the U.S. battle tanks in the movie have Hustler logos. They’re sponsored by Hustler. I don’t know if you saw, but there was this story where PornHub is sponsoring snowplows. Because of budget cuts, towns don’t have enough money to plow all the snow, so PornHub is stepping in to help them, and now there are all of these snowplows driving around with PornHub logos on them.

I was not aware of that. That’s . . . wow. I had not heard that. That’s interesting, of all things, that PornHub would put their name on.

I think there’s an intentional double entendre there.

[Laughter]

I’m curious; I know that Southland Tales got kind of a mixed reception when it came out, but given how prescient it’s turned out to be, have you seen people giving it a second look now?

A lot of people have really started to embrace the film and discover it. I am very grateful for that. Obviously, the state of the world is very troubling, and I take no pleasure in seeing the world become something like we rendered in Southland Tales, but at the same time, we made that film to try and express this apocalyptic fantasy that could be cathartic for people to try to use to analyze what is happening to the world. And why is it happening? And how can we use comedy, and how can we use all of these great comedic actors, and people from Saturday Night Live and pop culture, who are all talented in their own way, to tell this really elaborate political fantasy? We made this film to try and deal with our apocalyptic anxieties, and this was in the year 2005 when we shot the film. We were literally shooting the film while Katrina was unfolding, and the Iraq war was in full swing, and there was a lot of anxiety of that particular era. It was just before the iPhone was released, and it was sort of the dawn of social media. Facebook and Twitter were on the horizon. It was a very specific time. Looking back now, again, I still see Southland Tales as being an unfinished endeavor. We never really got to finish it properly. We had bitten off more than we could chew. It was too big. It was too ambitious. It was too sprawling. There were graphic novels, a website, and all this stuff. It was a lot. I think now we’re in a different world, and there’s new ways of telling stories and new delivery mechanisms. My hope is that we can come back around to Southland Tales and do a final, finished, longer version of it at some point. That’s my hope.

One thing I’ve talked about with a couple of guests now is that it has become hard to do political satire, because the current events are so self- satirizing. If you had come up with the idea back in 2005 to make Donald Trump president of the United States, I’m guessing you would have rejected it for being too silly or too on the nose, right?

He would have been too cartoonish for Southland Tales in a way. The political candidates in Southland Tales, played by Holmes Osborne and Miranda Richardson, who plays Nana Mae Frost, who is the real power behind him, and she’s running the NSA. It’s almost like they’re sort of engineering a presidential ticket by virtue of domestic surveillance and bringing it out into the public. This entity called US Ident is what we call it in the film. I think that someone like Donald Trump probably would have been too cartoonish for the movie, which is strange to say, but it was not even in our imagination at the time that something like this could have come to fruition. I know The Simpsons predicted it in an episode probably in like 2003 where it’s a future episode where Donald Trump is president, but again, The Simpsons is an animated show, and it can go as broad and cartoonish and absurd as they see fit. As to today’s level of satire, it’s hard to top what’s happening in the real world in terms of the ridiculousness and the vulgarity and the shamelessness of this political nightmare that we wake up with every day. I don’t know what that’s going to do to the state of comedy and satire, and I know that even the South Park guys have decided that they’re going to stop dealing with Trump or rendering Trump stories because they don’t feel like they want to do it anymore. It’s going to be interesting. I think that we’re all activated. A lot of people are politically activated, and I think we’re going to hopefully see a lot more films that are very, very aggressive in speaking to these political times. I saw what Robert Redford said at the beginning of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. He had a really thoughtful quote about how the political pendulum swings back and forth, and when it swings in the direction of the extreme right or the alt-right, as it has in this recent election, I think you’re going to see a lot of artists becoming really activated, and hopefully people who are paying for the movies and the television are going to be supportive of that political activation. In a resistance movement, really.

Absolutely, yeah. I do want to get back to Donnie Darko, because I mentioned this was one of my favorite movies. The first time I watched it, I remember I was with some friends at a writing workshop, and we all watched it, and at the end I said, “Wow, that movie was great. I’m not really sure what happened, but it was great.” That must be a reaction you get a lot to the movie, right?

I think it’s a little overwhelming for people who watch it the first time, and that’s okay. That’s the kind of experience I want to deliver for people is a really complicated story. A lot of layers, and a lot of hidden clues spread throughout, but I want it to wash over the viewer and leave them a little dizzy. That’s my motive as an artist: to put you on a roller coaster and have you walk out of the theater a little disoriented. The idea that these movies are meant to stand the test of time, and they’re meant to warrant multiple viewings. You should be able to come back to it and see new things. My intention is it needs to hold up over time. It needs to be worthy of a second and possibly third viewing. That’s a risk you take, because not everyone is appreciative of that kind of film. A lot of people go to the theater, and they want everything spelled out, and they want to walk out knowing exactly what happened, and then they want to go to dinner, or they want to go have a drink, or move on with their life. My movies aren’t those kinds of movies. They’re always going to leave you with a lot of questions. It’s an intentional decision I’ve made in the kind of stories I want to tell.

There was a director’s cut, right? Was the theatrical cut how you intended it at the time, or did you have to cut stuff out because of money or things like that?

I’m happy with both cuts, and we’ve restored both cuts, and I think that it’s probably better for people to watch the theatrical cut first, and if they want more, or they want to dig deeper, or they want to see more of what was inside the time travel book, or more of the relationship with Donnie and his father, and more of what Drew Barrymore and her curriculum was all about, and more of the layers, they can go and watch the director’s cut and have that alternate experience. It was meant to be that the two versions of the film could co-exist, and we would restore both of them, and have them available for people. I’d even probably say I’m not satisfied with either cut of the movie. There’s always more that I want to do, and my imagination often is bigger than the means of production that I have access to. I always want to do stuff that I can’t afford, or that’s outside of the budget, or that’s going to make a narrative too long for a two-hour theatrical release window. That’s just part of my unwieldy ambition, or maybe my amateurity, I guess. I’ve been working to try and refine my upcoming films to make sure that they are going to be digestible in a two-hour time frame, and that I’m not going to have forty-five minutes of deleted scenes. On The Box, there’s like forty to forty-five minutes of deleted scenes in that film, and it was extremely difficult to edit it down to one hour and fifty-five minutes, which I believe was the contractual running time on that film. It’s part of me just learning how to refine my process as a filmmaker.

Right, speaking of that ambition, another part that really struck me rewatching Donnie Darko is there is this musical sequence when it introduces you to all of the characters in the high school when Donnie first comes to school. I think you were twenty-six at the time you made this movie? It was your first feature film. It just strikes me as an incredibly ambitious, audacious sort of thing to put in your first feature.

I was twenty-five when we were on set, and I was actually calling “action” on set, and that sequence in the high school was shot at Loyola High School near downtown Los Angeles. It was almost a full day of shooting in our first week, and it was like a music video very carefully choreographed to a Tears for Fears song called “Head Over Heels.” When you’re in your first week of principle photography as a first-time director at the age of twenty-five, you’ve got a lot of people looking over your shoulder wondering whether you’ve got the goods, whether you even deserve to be in this position, and you’ve got a lot of people who are lifting equipment and busting their ass to help you make your day and get all of your shots in time. They’re looking at you doing this ambitious, potentially self-indulgent sequence, and kind of thinking, “Is this really necessary? Is this really going to make it into the final cut?” There was a lot of skepticism about pulling that sequence off, and I was very stubborn and very adamant that we do it. We didn’t even have the permission from Tears for Fears to use the song, so a lot of people were not happy with me for demanding to shoot that sequence, and I had a wonderful cinematographer named Steven Poster who was helping me pull it off. We shot the whole sequence with all of these Steadicam shots, and then the footage came back from the lab, and the editors started to cut it together. I was like, “Please, guys, cut it together as quickly as possible. I need to show it to people. Put the song in there, and do the speed ramps, and let’s get a cut of that sequence.” The editors came back, and it was Friday of our first day of principle photography, and I had a VHS tape—this was at the time when people were still looking at VHS tapes—and I put it in a VCR on one of the monitors in the trailer, and I invited about eight people from the crew to look at the Tears for Fear Steadicam sequence with the song, and they all looked at it, and everyone kind of looked at me like, “Okay, we get it. That’s really, really cool. We get it now. Okay, Richard, we’re going to let you indulge in some of this stuff now. Okay.” It was a morale boost, you know? I always find that if you can start showing your crew footage as soon as possible, and particularly the stuff that’s working. Start showing the dailies because it builds morale, and if you’re taking more risks, it’s going to incentivize the crew to help you continue to take those risks. It’s also a risk too because if you can’t get the song, then you’ve wasted a bunch of time and money, and if you can’t put another song to it, that’s trouble. We were also able to send the sequence to the band. We sent it to Tears for Fears, and I think they were really knocked out by it, and they wanted to help us secure their song. These are the risks that one can take if one wishes—but do it with great strategy.

Like I said, it’s such a great sequence. I was just reading this Guardian article, and they describe Donnie Darko as “a touchstone work for the generation that grew up with it.” I was curious, when did you first get an inkling that this movie was becoming a cultural touchstone for that generation?

I think the moment where I realized it was going to really connect with people was March or April of 2002 when the film had just been out on DVD for the first time. We had a pretty minor theatrical release the previous October. Right after 9/11. A very low per-screen average, and it only lasted in theaters for a few weeks. Maybe about 500,000 dollars, which was a fairly okay amount for how little marketing the film had. It was a very nominal theatrical release. We thought that the movie had basically disappeared, and it would never really ever reach a wide audience. So, come March or April of 2002, I was walking down the sidewalk of the East Village, and I passed by a place called the Pioneer Two Boots Pizza Parlor, and there was a Donnie Darko poster hanging in the window. I’m like, “What is happening here? Why is my poster hanging here?” I went inside, and I talked to the manager. I’m like, “That’s my movie. Why do you have the poster hanging up?” He said, “We have a little movie theater connected to our pizza joint here, and we’re playing your movie every Saturday night at midnight, and it’s selling out.” I’m like, “Really?” He’s like, “Yeah, come by.” So, we showed up when the movie was finishing that Saturday night, and I didn’t expect more than a few people to be there. And it was indeed sold out. There were people with cameras. I think Michael Musto from the Village Voice was there. I ended up doing an impromptu Q&A at like two in the morning. I was in shock. I had never expected this new wave of enthusiasm to emerge. I knew right there that the movie wasn’t done, that it had a longer life. Then London came to the rescue, and the following Halloween we had this incredibly successful art house release in the UK that turned the movie into a hit internationally.

That’s really, really cool. I’m curious, do you have big fan reactions to the movie? Like Frank tattoos, or Donnie Darko-themed weddings, or people who made big life changes after seeing the movie, or anything like that?

I’ve seen pretty much everything that you’ve just mentioned. It continues to amaze me that people have this emotional response to it, and that they want to create artwork based on it, or tattoos, or paintings, or sculptures. You name it. I’ve seen it all. There’s merchandise associated with the film now. It’s taken on a life of its own. If anything, I appreciate that, and I’m happy to continue talking to people about it. Doing this restoration was important to get it back on the big screen. I am always wanting to push this film as far into the mainstream as I feel I can, because the more mainstream my work can be perceived, it will just help me do bigger and more original political films, and that’s what I want to do. I want to continue doing my own original ideas and they’re not always very cheap. They’re quite expensive and complicated and immersive in their worlds. The more Donnie Darko can be seen as a mainstream hit the better. It’s come a long way from being a failure to being a cult film to now, I believe, being something that everyone has heard about. That’s a wonderful thing. Again, I see this as a means to push forward and try and tell more original political stories, really, is my intention.

Do people approach you with their interpretations of the movie where you’re just like, “Wow, that’s weird. I never would have thought of that one.”

I try to distance myself from all the different theories in the sense that people are allowed to think whatever they want. If they have an interpretation of the story that I disagree with, or that I think is wrong, it’s not really my place to get in there and argue with anyone. I presented the film for what it is, and I’ve done a director’s cut of it that’s a bit longer and more detailed. I’m just grateful that people are talking about my work, and that they are passionate about it. You can only engage so much with fan theories before I think you end up going down a spiral of self-analysis that’s probably not healthy.

I’ve heard you say that you might do a Donnie Darko sequel. Is there anything more to say about that?

I think that’s a discussion for down the road. I don’t know if something would ever materialize or happen. I don’t control the rights to Donnie Darko. I had to relinquish the underlying rights when I was twenty-four when I set the project up. I want to protect the intellectual property and make sure that if anything is ever done with it that it’s done for a proper reason: that there’s a new story to tell. It would probably be a much bigger endeavor, and something much more ambitious than what the original film is. More than anything, I would hate to see it rebooted or remade or something done with it for cynical reasons. We’ll see what happens. There’s always an open door to going back to this and doing something much bigger. I’ll always keep that door open. At the same time, I want to protect the film from . . . who knows what, but it could happen.

I saw Jake Gyllenhaal said he’d be up to reprise the role of Donnie Darko.

I would love to work with Jake again. Jake is an enormous talent. We’ll see. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but there’s all sorts of possibilities out there. I’ll say that.

There was this S. Darko movie that you were not involved with, right? Do you have a position about that movie?

I’ve never seen it. That was a situation where I don’t control the rights, and they approached me about being involved with that, and I just was not interested at all. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it because I didn’t feel like it was in any way necessary or at the point in time I was against it being made at all. It was basically presented to me as, “Well, if you’re not going to be involved, it’s going to happen regardless. There’s nothing you can do to stop it from getting made.” There was really nothing I could do. I’ve never seen it, and I don’t really see it as being anything that I authorize or endorse in anyway. That was not fun. The thing that bothered me a lot is that over the years people just assume that I allowed it to happen or that I profited from it or that I sold off the rights to someone else, and that just wasn’t the case at all. When you direct your first movie at that young of an age, you never get to control the underlying rights to anything, really.

I also wanted to ask you if you have anything else in the works you want to let people know about? It looks like you worked on a bunch of stuff.

There’s a bunch of stuff in the works, but I can’t confirm any of it until I know that everything is in place. I don’t want to disrupt any of the delicate process of getting a film greenlit. We’re really close on a bunch of things, but once the ink is dry or the deal is completely official or the greenlight is no longer blinking between yellow and green, I can then confirm it. At this point, I can’t talk any more about anything. I wish I could.

I saw one of them maybe involves a futuristic Manhattan. I don’t know if that’s still in the works or not, but that sounds cool to me. I’ll put in a word of support for that one.

There’s a lot where I’m trying to look forward into the future, and then some other things where I’m looking back into the past. Some are a combination of both. I do like to tell stories that are etched in the timeline very specifically at very specific dates and times. I will say that all the films are connected. All the films I’ve made are connected back to Donnie Darko in ways that are deeper and more significant than people realize. Stay tuned for more. I’ve been working really hard. A lot of writing. I’ve written so much I think my eyeballs are about to fall out of my head. My fingers are getting numb.

That sounds really good, and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what you come up with next. We’ve been speaking with Richard Kelly. Richard, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Caspian Gray Sandra Odell | 692 words

“Promises of Spring” begins with a tense combination of urban legend thriller, teen confusion, and the chilling realization that time does not heal all wounds. What can you tell us about the inspiration for this story?

I like writing about teenagers because everything is so vivid and immediate to them, and they make bad decisions on the reg, which is more fun in fiction. Also it was nice outside, and I was sitting on the porch looking at all the mayapple umbrellas popping up, and I thought, “How could I ruin this?”

The witch appears, and the appearance of the witch, are both comparatively mundane, making the reality of Tay’s screams all the more terrifying. That terror carries in the back and forth nature of the narrative between 2009 and 2004. How did you approach this dual narrative? Was it always your intention to present the story in this fashion?

I like writing about the aftereffects of trauma, but a lot of the suspense of plotting comes from the lead-up to or creation of trauma, so I guess I just wanted to have my cake and eat it, too.

You make excellent use of sensory details to flesh out the setting of the story: the yap of a lap dog; how Tay strokes his scars; the smell of calla lilies; woods so thin you could see the lights of the houses on the other side. When writing, how conscious are you of setting the scene, of providing just enough detail to catch the readers’ imaginations?

Years ago, Rosecrans Baldwin wrote a little essay about the phrase “somewhere a dog barked,” and ever since, when I’ve included a dog barking in the distance, it’s been as a kind of joke with myself. In general, I think and write in dialogue first, then add these grounding details later, as an afterthought to the interactions of characters. Whether in print or on the screen, drug use often plays a large part in horror fiction. Some critics have attributed this to the inherent wickedness of drug use, how using drugs, even if the result is some form of enlightenment, opens the door to the evils and horrors that befall the characters. With the changing attitudes towards marijuana in the US, do you see a difference in the role drugs play in horror?

Anything that alters a person’s perceptions is pretty rich ground for horror, but I think it’s deeply important to consider what status quo you’re endorsing when you engage in the “a transgression is punished” narrative.

You recently became a parent (congratulations!). How has this impacted your writing time? Tell us a bit about your writing routine.

I do exactly what they tell you not to do: I only write sometimes, when I have an idea, and when I like what I’m writing. For years I tried to write every day, but it just made me miserable, and what had been a private joy instead became performative work, with friends sharing daily word counts and trying to cheer/goad/shame each other into productivity. That works for a lot of people, but I’m not one of them. I write in bursts at random times: during a lull at work, at night after the baby’s asleep, at my favorite bar when I have a rare evening to myself.

You excel at writing horror, but what do you like to read? What genres or sorts of nonfiction tickle your fancy?

Right now I’m halfway through Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Saga, which has been an absolute delight. I’m also reading Mary Roach’s latest, and I highly recommend her if you enjoy popular science and have ever laughed at a fart joke. I just finished the first trade of Gotham Academy, which is lighthearted fun. The last book I read that really blew me away was Hanya Yanagihara’s People in the Trees, which I recommend to absolutely everyone.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Sandra Odell is a forty-seven-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first. Author Spotlight: Caroline Ratajski Setsu Uzumé | 850 words

I absolutely adored this story, and found myself howling for revenge along with her at the end. How similar is this piece to the rest of your work? Do you have particular themes that you revisit?

Thank you so much! Well, looking over my work (and I had to, because I didn’t know the answer) it seems like I often have trauma and coping as a theme. I suppose in this case the “coping” is a bit less about seeking help and a bit more about tearing a city to the ground. But I try not to judge the way people heal. You do you, girl. Raise hell.

This is a fascinating revisit of Persephone, Inana, and countless others’ descent into the underworld. What about that myth resonated with you?

The telling of Persephone that I’ve always enjoyed had to do with her portrayal as the dreaded Queen of the Underworld. I thought about that in my initial draft of this story, of a Persephone who sought the underworld as a means to escape some other fate, or to claim something greater for herself. When there are fewer options for women, it’s interesting to see people get creative. But, as I was working on this story, there was a highly publicized case dealing with sexual assault on a college campus. The way it played out . . . “infuriating” doesn’t begin to describe it. As a result, my exploration of a girl who went to claim her throne among the dead transformed into the story of a girl who was sent to the underworld without her consent, and returned with the wrath of a thousand lost girls in her bones. Maybe someday I’ll write the other one, though.

The “lost girl” narrative gets reframed to center on the people around her, how it affects her parents, her town, the boy, and the news coverage. How do stories like this engage with that kind of behavior in the real world?

I mentioned the case that drove me to write this story in this way, so I was observing that in real time. How everybody was so concerned to not ruin this boy’s life, ignoring the fact that he had committed a crime that ruined this girl’s life. How there was so much evidence he did this horrible thing that he was convicted, and yet he served no real sentence. It drove home that there is no way to be good enough, to be safe enough, because the system isn’t made to protect the vulnerable. It’s not made to center on the victim, on keeping her safe. I think fiction is a great way to turn a lens on the flaws of society and bring these horrors into focus. Reading stories from various perspectives helps breed empathy. And for cases like this, it can be difficult to understand what’s happening while it’s happening. But fiction can help people see the forest for the trees. Instead of living it, people can observe it, and perhaps better understand how obscene this reframing is.

I’ve read that you have a methodical approach to writing your stories. How closely did the final draft resemble what you had originally envisioned? Does it ever deviate in unexpected ways?

Tragically, there’s one stage of my writing process that isn’t methodical, and that’s writing the rough draft. Everything after that is color-coded, outlined, analyzed, given checklists, sticky tabs, harnessing every tool your office supply store has to offer. But the more I write, the more I realize that for me to get from a blank page to a zero draft (not quite good enough to be called a first draft, but the general idea of the story is there), I simply have to write at the thing until a story falls out. But honestly, after coming to terms with the realization that I’ll likely never be an outliner, I’ve learned to have fun with it, and to enjoy being surprised by what lands on the page. It’s like there’s a portion of my brain that’s figured out the story, and I just have to coax it out. Sure, the part of me that likes organization, the part that yearns for checklists and progress bars, is going to be disappointed with this approach. But I calm that with a daily word count, so it balances out in the end.

What are you working on at the moment? What can we look forward to next from you?

Right now I’m editing a novel, YA psychological horror. It’s about four teens in a small coastal town in California, dealing with various traumas in their own lives; then a fog settles on the town, their psychological demons physically manifest in various ways, and they have to figure out how to survive. There’s no publication date for it, though. Fingers crossed!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Setsu grew up in New York, and spent her formative years in and out of dojos. She likes swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. She does not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Her work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find her on Twitter @KatanaPen. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 125 words

Coming up in August, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from James Rabb (“The Devil of Rue Moret”) and Nick Mamatas (“ The Spook School”), along with reprints by V.H. Leslie (“Senbazuru”) and Nalo Hopkinson (“Shift”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and Terence Taylor will offer up his thoughts on new fiction. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ashok K. Banker, and Karin Lowachee. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey) THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey) THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey) Armored Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu) [forthcoming Oct. 2017] Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live Cosmic Powers Dead Man’s Hand Epic: Legends Of Fantasy Federations The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects Lightspeed: Year One The Living Dead The Living Dead 2 Loosed Upon the World The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination Operation Arcana Other Worlds Than These Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen) Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson) Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson) Seeds of Change Under the Moons of Mars Wastelands Wastelands 2 The Way Of The Wizard What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.