Nightmare Magazine, Issue 59 (August 2017)

Home , Carrie Vaughn, Gary Whitta, John Joseph Adams, Nalo Hopkinson, Nick Mamatas, The Drowning Girl

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 59, August 2017

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: August 2017

FICTION The Devil of Rue Moret James Rabb Senbazuru V.H. Leslie The Spook School Nick Mamatas Shift Nalo Hopkinson

NONFICTION The H Word: I Need My Pain Gemma Files Book Reviews: August 2017 Terence Taylor

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS James Rabb Nick Mamatas MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue fifty-nine of 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 Gemma Files bringing us the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a fiction review from Terence Taylor.

John Joseph Adams Books Update Here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in 2017: In July, we published 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 published Sand by Hugh Howey, a reissue of his acclaimed indie-published novel (which was just announced to be in development as a television show for Syfy, with Gary Whitta and Marc Forster attached): “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 The Devil of Rue Moret James Rabb | 2165 words

The boy grew up in the tangle of the bayou, in a township known as Rue Moret. His mother had married a farmhand, but his father wasn’t the same man. The boy told himself that these things happen when life loses its luster and we create complications to bear it. He wore a small woven hat wherever he went, and he went many places for a boy of his age. He walked to school most days, alone because his half-sister had been lost in childbirth. The boy still spoke to her, believing if she’d lived that they might have walked alone together, past the tupelos and the cypress groves, and she would greet him every day after class with a magnolia blossom from the tree outside the second grade annex, and only she would know he was failing math because of Virgine Beuze, who sat in front of him and was far more interesting. She would’ve worn a hat like his—his grandmother had stitched it for him when she was alive, and surely she would have made his sister one to match. But his sister was still dead, and he was still walking alone, past the tupelos and the cypress groves. It was preferable to the closet, where the mildew crept into his clothes and he could see through the slats, see his mother and his father, who wasn’t the man she’d married. She never took off the ring, and he never asked her to, and since the boy was not scolded for being late, only for being present, he always took his time returning home. There were rumors among the higher students of an old house, decayed and twisted within the algae and the murk, bent and broken like the inhabitants of Rue Moret. They said the devil lived there, but the boy took no account of it. He’d walked the route many times, repelled innumerable demons with a sturdy branch, stomped cockroaches by the dozen, but he’d never seen the devil, not once. A day came when the boy was delayed leaving school, the inevitable result of his growing obsession with Virgine Beuze and his shrinking grasp of basic math. His teacher, who had not made the connection, insisted on private tutoring after class and sought out the boy’s mother, who said she would come for him in the evening. The child did not blame the teacher for trusting his mother and leaving him at the school, and he did not blame his mother when she failed to pick him up. He would walk home, same as always. But darkness transforms even the most familiar things, and the boy found himself lost along this trail he knew so well. He spoke with his sister until the chirps and croaks of crickets and bullfrogs drowned out his voice. He hurried on, feeling for cypress roots or sinkholes—these were the true dangers of the bayou, he kept reminding himself—brushing aside Spanish moss that seemed to cling to him and bristle over his body. The fen tightened around the boy, threatening to crush him as he had crushed those helpless roaches. He called for help, but the swamp echoed back, mocking him, and the child began to believe that the true danger of the bayou was something quite different from cypress roots and sinkholes, and he began to run, though he had always walked, wary of the boscoyos protruding from the ground, daring travelers to trip upon them, and this is just what happened to the poor boy that night, and he tumbled into the mire, striking his head on a rotted log, and the algae sealed around him, and he was gone. The child awoke to the glow of a small wood-burning stove near the center of a fisherman’s cabin. He was soaked, but he was also alive, which seemed strange because he was certain that he must have drowned like that Holcomb man they dredged up from the swamp last year, bloated and blue with eyes like glass. But the boy had none of these symptoms, and, arriving at the conclusion that it must have been a miracle, began to thank God for sparing his life. “You, boy, have you eaten?” The child looked around and found the fire’s light extending to all corners of the tiny cabin save for the one nearest the stove, and from this corner, blanketed in darkest obsidian, the voice asked again, “Have you eaten?” and the boy, too afraid not to answer a second time, responded, “No sir, I have not.” The old man —because his voice was just that, the strained rasp of one on the verge of death— asked the boy what he would like to eat, and the boy said anything would do, because anything had always done. “You are alive, and life is cause for celebration.” The boy agreed with this, and he remembered his grandmother’s pwason sale, which she had learned from her great-grandmother who came from Seychelles, and as he asked, a platter of fish was pushed from the darkness. “Eat,” commanded the voice, and the boy did, finding the dish identical to his grandmother’s preparation—better, in fact, as though all the lost subtleties she had failed to recreate in her great-grandmother’s original recipe had been suddenly revived. The child ate until he could stomach no more, and he fell back, and it was some time before he remembered the old man, who had not spoken again. The boy asked if he was still there, and the voice of a young girl responded, “I am,” and this frightened the boy terribly. “It was not my intent to alarm you,” the girl said. “I thought you might prefer this.” The boy asked which was real, and the voice responded, “Both. Neither. None closer to life than the other, none closer to death. I sought only to comfort.” But the boy was not comforted, and told the voice that he felt he should leave. “Have I been unkind?” “No, but my mother will be expecting me home.” The little girl laughed, and her voice changed as she did, and a man answered the boy, “You are not expected, child. Stay with me. I pulled you from the mire. I warmed and fed you.” The boy asked who the voice was, and the voice said he was many things, but above all, he was forgotten, like the boy. “The difference is that I do not live, and I do not die. I do not love, so I do not hate. I do not suffer, so I feel no joy. I do not change, and in this way, I am pure.” The boy began to remember the rumors he’d taken no account of, of a house, decayed and twisted within the algae and the murk, and he asked, “Are you the devil?” and the voice laughed again. “There is no such thing,” it replied. “The devil is an invention of man, an excuse for his hatred and his suffering.” And the boy, who knew only one other option, asked, “Are you God?” and the voice laughed a third time. “There is no such thing,” it replied. “God is an invention of man, an explanation for his love and his joy.” And the boy, while very smart for his age, felt he had no answer left for who this was, and before he could say this, the voice told him, “I am want. I am desire.” The boy said he did not understand, and the voice said “I will show you,” and the door to the cabin opened, and a soft breeze guided the boy outside. The breeze wove a path through the Spanish moss, and the boy followed. “Want breeds the greatest hatred, for those who have what you most desire are mortal enemies.” The child continued after the voice. “It is the foundation of love, for what is love but the desire of another’s heart?” The boy began to cry, though he couldn’t comprehend the cause. “To have it withheld is suffering, to receive it, the most profound joy.” The boy pushed through a curtain of moss and found himself before a circular pond where the path had ended. “And want is good, and want is evil, and it is God and the devil all the same, and that is who I am, boy.” From the pond a figure rose, frail and withered and coated in silt, and this figure clutched something to its chest, and as it approached, the boy could see plainly that it was a girl no older than him, but he was too afraid to run. The girl smiled at him, the sweetest smile he had ever seen, and the boy felt that all was suddenly right with the world. She drew closer while the voice encouraged him, “You could linger here, talking of what she has missed, what is still to come. You could walk alone together, past the tupelos and the cypress groves.” The girl leaned close, unfolding her arms and extending them to the boy, and in her hands she held a perfect magnolia blossom. The boy reached for it, but upon his touch the golem lost all form and collapsed back into the swamp, as though she were fabricated from it. “But that can never be.” And the boy cursed the voice for ever bringing him to this terrible place, and the voice changed to that of his sister’s, though the boy did not know how he knew, and she told him that she was born, despite what he’d been told, to his mother and to a man who was not his father, who in her case both agreed that neither wanted a child, and so she was thrown into the waters of the bayou. And the voice said it knew what he desired most, and now so did the boy, though he was too horrified to utter it, and he stumbled backward over one of those wretched boscoyos. The boy emerged from beneath the fanned leaves of a dwarf palmetto. He called to the voice, but it was quiet, save for the bullfrogs and the crickets, who had tired of tormenting him and harmonized softly in the background as dawn’s first light seeped through the canopy. The boy searched for the fisherman’s cabin, but found only the trail he knew so well, which he must have been following all along, and realizing that his clothes were dry and he had no scratches or injuries from his fall, he concluded that he must have dreamt up the entire scenario and hurried home. Unwelcome as he was, the child was confident that upon his return he could slip into bed unnoticed, but finding the door to his home open, wondered if his mother had gone out searching for him after all. He began to feel guilty for worrying her and announced his arrival, knowing a flurry of curses and beatings would follow, but no one replied. The boy checked his mother’s bedroom first and found the bed made. He checked the kitchen, then his own room, and finding them empty as well, moved to more specific locations like the bathroom and the closets, until he could say with absolute certainty that his mother was not inside the house. The boy checked the front of the home, and finding nothing more than a few stray marks in the dirt, thought that she must have gone to his school to fetch him, so he changed clothes and walked to class as he always had. He was praised by his teacher for his early arrival and completely ignored Virgine Beuze in math, which made her ignore him less than usual. But no one had seen or heard from his mother, so at the end of the day the child headed back through the bayou, back to his home which was still empty, and he stood on the porch and stared at the faint marks in the dirt and began to fret over them, small as they were, began to think they formed a more curious pattern of five and five, spread wide and continuous, and he followed them a short ways, until he came to a bog around the back side of his house, and saw that they had grown deeper and were heading towards the water. The boy approached the edge of the swamp, where the marks dug in and splayed out across the dirt, and he peered into the water, and between the thickened algae, a glimmer caught his eye. He swirled the pool, clearing the murk away as he reached in and clasped a small beacon, drawing it up from the silt, and in his hand, the boy held his mother’s wedding ring, and he remembered, in his dream, what he’d wanted more than anything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Rabb is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and short-story writer with short and feature films in pre- and post-production. His scripts ONE and The Volunteer have reached The Academy Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinals. His work is influenced by his travels and inspired by his dreams.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Senbazuru V.H. Leslie | 5055 words

Paper, scissors, rock. That’s the way we’ve always made decisions. And settled arguments, for that matter. Marriage is all about compromise after all; I put something forward, he puts something forward, and our hands do the rest. My husband jokes if only diplomacy were so easy. When we play we are back in the playground of St. Gabriel’s again, with the Catholic sisters hurrying us in opposite directions towards the boys and girls dormitories and my husband is my darling childhood Teddy. After all these years he knows how I play, my preference for paper, stretching out my hand as if holding it above a flame. I watch his calculated response, knowing his reaction in advance; his index and middle finger stretched into a v if he is being particularly stubborn or folded into a ball to satisfy me, letting me win. Sometimes I let him win. When he suggested taking the job with the British consulate in Nagasaki, I was eager to break the monotony of my daily existence and curious to see the world. Being married to a diplomat had lacked the excitement I thought customary with the role. I’d imagined life as a newlywed to be different. So I lay my hand submissively straight and gave in to destiny. Occasionally I won’t use paper but maybe rock. Scissors are my least favourite (as they hurt paper the most) and I’ll save it for only the most extreme situations. I register the hurt in Ted’s face when I use one of these two, his faith in my constancy momentarily shaken by my desire to win. It’s hard living without him.

• • • •

I live in a roundhouse. A tower, really. There are four windows, each presenting a different view of the surrounding landscape. To the east, the sea, just beyond Nagasaki Harbour. This is my favourite view. In constant transit, the ocean rolls by, grey and tumultuous one day, calm and tranquil the next. Some days it is spotted with the red sails of Japanese fishing boats or the rickety sampans of larger freighters. The window to the south depicts a small Japanese garden where sometimes Hiroko takes me for a walk. It is comprised of neat, straight borders of jasmine and honeysuckle. In the middle, pebbles like pale, flat eggs occupy the space that would have given way to lawn in England. It is the antithesis of my unruly garden back home. Now neglected, I imagine the profusion of wild hybrids and weeds have complete mastery over the box borders, and the wrought iron bench, speckled with rust, now completely submerged by green. To the north, a road stretches into the distance to the town centre. In the morning the road is busy with people, rickshaws and carts taking goods to and from the port. At night it is usually quiet, save for the occasional beggar drunk on sake. The west window depicts rolling green countryside and, further back, paddy fields tended by farmers, who are only tiny specks from this distance. If I turn in the middle of the room I can see out of all four windows. I am at the centre of the compass. It must have been hard, furnishing such a room on account of its shape. The bed, just off centre, juts out into the rotund space like a small island. Some of the chairs have curved backs so they don’t seem so anomalous against the curved walls. My desk seems to be the most incongruous object, its right angles at odds with the spherical nature of the room. But I wouldn’t be without it. My desk is positioned next to the east window so I can watch the boats. This is where I write my letters, though I don’t receive many anymore. I try to write. Ted used to say that you could cure anything by writing, but I can’t seem to commit anything to paper. Sometimes I just like to think. Hiroko brings me the British newspapers once a week. They are tied up in string. I keep these bits of string and tuck them away. I don’t care much for the news. I’m more interested in the paper. I usually tear out a sheet or two from the correspondence pages, the most insubstantial part, and if Hiroko ever noticed them gone, she’d be too embarrassed to question me. The Japanese don’t talk about their problems. I always make sure I read the foreign affairs pages before I leave the pile for Hiroko to collect. The wife of a diplomat must be well informed. The days are so repetitive here, one can lose track of time. The dates on the newspapers are my only indication, though they are delayed of course. They tell me our anniversary is approaching. I’m going to have to hurry.

• • • •

Do you know that you can fold a piece of paper in half no more than eight times, no matter its original size? Ted used to like folding paper. Origami is very important to the Japanese. I remember the first one he gave me. We had been in Japan a few months, and were guests at a party hosted by the Hammonds, a prominent English couple. Everyone wanted to talk to Ted. About whether war was really imminent. If expatriates should evacuate. Ted didn’t really talk to me about the war, eager to protect me from the world. But I’d hear it eventually through the wives, along with rumours about corrupt officials and counterfeit money and public relations of an altogether different sort. Ever the diplomat, he gave them the company policy, the official lines. With the crowd placated and able to sip their imported gin with ease, conversation moved on to less contentious subjects. The hostess, relieved that her soiree wasn’t overshadowed by Japanese foreign policies, gave the ladies a tour of her garden. Like many immigrants, she had attempted to embrace her new home not by adopting Japanese customs or traditions but through their modes of decoration. Nagasaki itself, with its history of being an open port when the rest of Japan was fearful of foreign intrusion, was imbued with western influences. A medley of European and Japanese architecture, it was Western and Eastern in equal measure. What’s more, as foreigners tend to, we stuck together, colonising a district of the city and making it as much like home as possible. British children were sent to European schools and British women took high tea at the Hilton on Wedgewood china. Ted used to say that the British art of hegemony was conversion through cricket and cucumber sandwiches. But it worked both ways. Many of the guests were Orientals who were perhaps more Western in customs and dress than many Europeans. Whilst the English women experimented with kimono-inspired garments and fabrics, many of the Japanese women wore the latest Parisian fashions that the European women would have to wait until next season to acquire, when the ships arrived. Amid the joviality and cocktail music, a strange exchange of identity was being played out on Mrs. Hammond’s landscaped terrace. When Ted eventually managed to extricate himself from all the questions, he found me standing beside a small water-feature of polished stones. We watched as it propelled water into a stream that coursed its way through the garden. “Ted, tell me the truth,” I asked. “Is there going to be a war?” He produced a Yen note from the pocket of his tux and began to fold it. I watched his hands move deftly with rehearsed practice. He ran his fingers along each crease with deliberate care, and I wondered if he organised his thoughts as carefully. He placed the finished object in my palm. “It’s beautiful.” He told me to place it on the water. I didn’t want to. It was too beautiful but he insisted. “The crane is a symbol of prosperity and peace,” he told me as I placed it on the stream. “But you can’t stop the current of things to come, Elaine.” I watched as it bobbed uncertainly on the surface before being swept away.

• • • •

Whenever Ted went away, which was becoming more and more frequent as the Kwantung Army swept through China, I would find a little origami crane in his stead. On my pillow when I woke, at the breakfast table, sometimes tucked into my purse, waiting until I paid a street vendor or when I took a rickshaw. I kept every one of them. I make my own now. I try to keep them as secret as possible, which is easy enough as Hiroko’s jangling keys always announce her approach, long before the sound of her unlocking my door. I wouldn’t want her to think I’m cultivating a strange habit. I am an Englishwoman, after all. After breakfast, I sit at my desk opposite the ocean and take out the segments of newspaper from the drawer. I’ll fold the page once, then, using the edge of a book as a weight, I’ll rip the paper until I have two equal rectangles. I repeat the action. Then I have four rectangles. The basis for four cranes. You can make an origami crane fairly quickly, but I tend to prolong the process, relishing each fold and crease. Twenty eight folds, to be exact. There is a lot of satisfaction to be had in their creation and doubly so knowing how much time I have invested in each one. Afterwards, I’ll attach them to the others with the string from the newspapers and hide them behind my clothes in the wardrobe. I’ll lick my fingers afterwards, rubbing the saliva into the creases of my fingertips to erase the newsprint ink.

• • • •

The rainy season, or baiu, is nearly at an end. The days have been very humid. Hiroko brings me water for taking my pills in the evening, but I dab most of it onto my brow and neck, relishing the coolness as the droplets trickle down my spine. The rain pours down in torrents, but the mischievous wind blows it in all directions, and it hammers into the side of my tower. All good fairy tales begin with a princess in a tower waiting to be rescued. I feel more like the Lady of Shalott, waiting and watching the world below, but unable to live in it. I remember when I lived in England I used to visit my mother in her tower. Except, she wasn’t really Mother by then. She looked the same, but her mind was someplace else. Aided no doubt by the pharmaceutical concoction the doctors prescribed for her, sentencing her to a permanent state of oblivion. The staff would stand a little distance away, but their presence was palpable in the small circular room. It wasn’t the most conducive environment to form a relationship. I know that trauma can often prompt a collapse of this sort. But Father didn’t speak to me about such things. It wasn’t proper. In fact, Mother left when I was so young, it was easier for Father to tell me she was a princess in a tower. Every few months we would take the long journey by train to visit her. I would take my school projects for her to see. Father encouraged me; he hoped, I think, that something would bring her back to reality. But she would stare inanely at my crayon drawings and lightly rub the surface of the page until her fingertip was waxy and the colour faded and I felt as if I, too, were being erased. The fact it looked like a fairy tale tower gave credence to Father’s lie. There were actually four of them, one tower on each corner of four crenulated grey walls, though the view from the roadside obscured the other three. I could only see the one perched beside the sea. If you looked closely, there were stars interspersed in the masonry. Every time we visited, it seemed to snow. So much so, that I can’t remember the tower without a layer of white, like icing on a wedding cake. The town lay a little distance away, beyond the curve of hills, as if the inhabitants had deemed a buffer necessary. That the tower’s fortified walls were not sufficient to contain the sickness within. The pinnacle of the town was literally the church spire, which rose to an impressive height out of the cluster of buildings, attempting to brush the heavens. I assumed my mother could see it from her window. But even if she couldn’t, she would be able to hear the bells tolling, calling the congregation to worship or announcing the joining of those in matrimony. The Lady of Shalott at least had her tapestry to keep her busy. I used to do a lot of needlepoint myself back in England, but a lot of commodities are very difficult to acquire here, especially now. I have to content myself with my paper cranes. • • • •

She left them quite by chance. In the shade of the hibiscus, on a small ledge that serves as a border, I saw them glinting at me. The kind used for trimming bonsai trees. Sunlight reflected off their shiny surface and, magpie-like, I swooped. Hiroko was tending the wilted honeysuckle, examining the waterlogged roots, and did not see me. The rains had kept us indoors for so long that I took this brief reprieve to be a sign. I intended to ask to borrow them. Yet asking posed a dilemma; what would I say I needed them for? I didn’t want to explain the birds in my cupboard. But a pair of scissors would help my project along no end. What harm would it cause to pick them up? I’m afraid to say they slipped easily into my pocket.

• • • •

Ted always maintained that our wedding was hands down the best wedding he’d ever been to. It was, of course, an elaborate affair, full of pomp and ceremony. Part way through the evening, Ted grabbed me by the hand. “Let’s elope,” he said. “We’re already married,” I replied. But I was already following him. We walked for miles, it seemed, my wedding gown trailing along the ground, snagged on brambles and ferns. He led me through the long grass and laid his jacket down for us to sit upon. Then he opened the champagne he’d been carrying and we watched the sun set over the English countryside. There were no speeches. A diplomat’s wedding with no speeches. My wedding gown still has the grass stains. Not long now until our anniversary. I’ve worked out the date from the newspapers Hiroko brought me today, along with my pills. I didn’t want to take them, but there was no point arguing with her. She no longer waits until I swallow the pills so when she left I flung them at the window. I picked them up afterwards of course and tucked them behind a panel in the back of the wardrobe, stacking them up to form small cairns of tiny white rocks, which always topple when I close the door. Hiroko means well, but I need to be fully alert if I want to finish what I’ve started. The Japanese have their own customs, but my favourite is a special tradition reserved for newlyweds. They believe that to give a couple one thousand paper cranes on their wedding day is to give a thousand years of good luck. These paper cranes are held together on lengths of string and hung up in the home. Senbazuru: a thousand paper cranes. We are not so entirely different. In England, paper marks your first year as a married couple. Everything of importance is made of paper. This year will be paper too, despite so many having passed like the pages in a book. I’m ready to finish the story. It will always be paper, until he returns.

• • • •

I’ve always been a dreamer. My head in the clouds, Ted liked to say. He was always the practical one. I suppose he had to be, in his line of work. He was able to marry his ideals with pragmatism as easily as he married me. But you have to be pragmatic to survive. After the war broke out, Ted was away a lot. His work was keeping him very busy back then. Many of the European families had started to evacuate. You needed a pass to get around town. Our European coterie that, months before, had been sipping champagne together in the warm evenings, was suddenly dispersed. The Germans and Austrians fared better, but all foreigners were regarded with a kind of contempt, a disdain too strong to be fashioned overnight. In retrospect, perhaps it had always been there, hidden behind painted smiles and strained pleasantries. Perhaps a kind of British stoicism prevented me from leaving, keeping me inside and ignorant of the dangers. Hiroko would venture to the market to get food and we would sit together silently in the evenings to eat whatever she had managed to acquire. It wasn’t much. Usually a meat broth of sorts, though I had no idea, nor did I want to know, what animal or cut of meat flavoured the meal. The banquets of food Ted and I had been used to eating before faded into memory. When they started rounding up foreigners and taking them away, I knew we had to get out.

• • • •

I had the most alarming dream last night. I remember turning in the centre of the room and looking out all four windows. I was the compass point, choosing which perspective I preferred. But the landscape was different. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly how at first, as the land outside was cloaked in snow. And the snow itself fell in heavy sheets against the panes, obscuring what lay beyond. When the blizzard subsided a little, I looked out of the south window, but instead of seeing the garden, I saw the road meandering towards the town. I rushed to the north window but instead of the road, I saw Hiroko tending the garden. I stood still for a moment trying to get my bearings, my compass was off; the views were inverted. The view from the west window confirmed my suspicions. Instead of green fields, the empty ocean lay before me. But the sea was void of vessels, the harbour vacant. The west window however, was completely masked by snow. All I could see was a dark shadow, a tall silhouette like a column. A reflection of myself in the pane perhaps, but the image was so dark I couldn’t make out any of my features. I sat down at my desk, confused. I attempted to write a letter to Ted. He would know what to do. I was very cold. My breath formed little clouds, which floated on the air before dispersing. My fingers became so cold, I could barely move my pen. A butterfly landed on my finger. It stretched its wings. I remember thinking it such an oddity, to have a butterfly perched on my hand in the middle of winter. But when I looked closely I saw that it was a bird, and I realised it was as white as the snow outside. It was paper. It rested on my finger a moment, then swept back its wings and flew away. It tried to fly out of the window but glanced against the glass. I would have opened it but I remembered that the windows couldn’t be opened. It repeated this a few times but gave up after a while and lay on the sill defeated. When I touched it, it was dead. I unfolded it and unfolded it again, dissecting the creature until all that remained was limp paper. I heard a noise then. It was very faint. I strained my ears to identify its source. It sounded like rustling and it was coming from the wardrobe. I took a few tentative steps forward. The din in the wardrobe was getting louder. As I neared, the wardrobe doors suddenly burst open and a flock of paper birds flew out. They orbited the room and I watched their frantic flight in awe. But then a crane swooped to my arm. Another to my shoulder. One nestled into my hair – a makeshift nest. I swiped them away but another landed in its stead. They descended with more urgency. Their claws scratched at my skin, tearing flesh as I attempted to strike them off. They swarmed until there was no part of me left uncovered. I called Hiroko, but I knew she couldn’t come. I called, and the cranes flooded my mouth, scratching and scraping against my throat, muffling my cries with folds of paper. I tried to shake them off and they fell to the ground like confetti, leaving near-invisible marks behind. I ripped the remainder from my body, slashing and scratching at their wings, tearing the paper into shreds. The mutilated remains of a thousand paper cranes lay at my feet like the crisp first dusting of snow. I looked at my skin and could see the thread-like incisions of a thousand paper cuts; tiny, minute slits which paused pale a moment before smiling red.

• • • •

Hiroko has dressed my wounds. She registers her disappointment by not talking to me. Not that she’s talked to me much since that last day in the market. She’s never really been the same since. But her silence speaks a thousand words, as if she holds me responsible for the bloodied sheets. I’m not sure if she is angrier at having to care for me or for the theft of her scissors. I know she suspects I’ve taken them, how else to explain the curious marks on my body. But she’d never believe me if I told her about the paper birds.

• • • •

The last time I saw Ted was around the time of Tanabata. The star festival. It’s my favourite one. The Japanese believe that the Weaver Princess Vega and her lover Altair are separated by the Milky Way. But on this day they fly across the universe and are united in the heavens. The Japanese celebrate by writing poems on strips of paper and attaching them to bamboo poles to bring good fortune. It doesn’t snow in July, but all that paper and Nagasaki is clothed in white. That last time, though, we didn’t feel like celebrating. No one did. We sat in the dining room and Ted went to the drinks cabinet only to find it empty. I asked Hiroko to fetch the liquor, which was locked with our valuables in the basement. There had been a lot of attacks on foreigners and foreign sympathisers, often fuelled by alcohol. It seemed best to keep it out of sight. I waited until the jangling of keys subsided and went to him. I hadn’t seen him for so long. I had almost expected him to be arrested, knowing all that he knew, but somehow he had managed to escape capture. He wouldn’t tell me how. He looked small in his clothes, which were snagged and dirty. Hiroko returned with a few bottles and Ted poured himself a large scotch and sat down heavily. “In the next few days all foreigners will be taken to POW camps.” The statement occupied the room. He swallowed the dregs of his drink and poured another. “We should have escaped sooner.” I asked if it was too late. “We don’t have the right paperwork,” he said. “We would never make it past the check points.” “Surely you know someone we could bribe?” I had asked. “Wake up Elaine, it would never be enough.” I knew he was right. We had lived like kings before the war, and Japanese resentment ran deep. Prices had inflated anyway, but foreigners had to pay ridiculous prices for simple commodities. Even Hiroko wasn’t exempt, the street vendors charging her exorbitant amounts knowing she served a gaijin mistress. One time she had returned with bruises on her face and arms. “Is there no other money?” I asked. I could see him weighing something in his mind. And I noted the reluctance in his eyes as he told me about a great quantity of counterfeit money the embassy had seized before the war began. It should have been destroyed. Only a handful of officials even knew it even existed. “To buy our freedom?” I asked. Ted rounded on me. His eyes were fierce. “Do you know the risk if we are found out?” We made the decision the same way we always did. I knew he would try to win this one. He thought we stood a better chance of survival in a prisoner of war camp. I knew that he would play scissors before our hands even began to move. He would hope I’d play my usual hand, and be the submissive wife he was used to. But I wanted to escape, to go home. I wanted England’s green fields. I rolled my hand into a fist, unmoving as a rock.

• • • •

People often claim money doesn’t grow on trees but of course it does. Someone turns trees into pulp, then flattens in and stamps it with the head of some official. Who prints what onto those virgin notes is no concern of mine. But it matters to everyone else. Everything of importance is made of paper. Marriage licence. Money. Travel permit. Paper says who you are and what you’ve done. Our sentence was printed on paper.

• • • •

It’s our anniversary today. I’ve worked out the date from last week’s paper and though I can’t be sure, it feels like the right time. I go to my wardrobe and carefully take out the paper construction I’ve assembled. It hangs from a coat hanger, which I suspend from the wardrobe door as I close it. I sit back on the bed and admire my handiwork. I’m sure Ted would like it. The lengths of string are attached to the wooden frame, each with fifty cranes attached, which flap and float. The string is thick and coarse, and a length of bamboo would be much more suitable than a coat hanger, but needs must. As it is, the paper cranes weigh down on the coat hanger like a heavy robe, and from afar my creation resembles a white fur coat, the kind I imagine a Tsarina of imperial Russia to wear. A coat fit for a princess. I pull the small silver scissors from my pocket. I’ve sharpened them on a rock from the garden. It, too, found its way into my pocket. My beautiful paper cranes bob up and down on the string, caught like fish in a net, fighting against a current stronger than they can contend with. In fairy tales the princess is always rescued. But what if your prince can’t come? What if your prince is discovered face down in a paddy field. His body broken and bloodied, misshapen by bamboo sticks and rocks. Unrecognisable, save for the paper crane crushed in his palm. You have to be pragmatic to survive. I stand in the middle of the compass. I can see the stars out of the windows. Their brightness is reflected in the glassy surface of the ocean. Like Altair and Vega, we’ll meet again in the heavens. They are bright tonight, the stars, almost white. I watch them and realise they are falling. The stars are falling like snowflakes. But it doesn’t snow this time of year, not in Japan. I turn to my favourite view—the east. Rock: I throw the stone through the east window. The image of Nagasaki harbour shatters. The room is filled with icy air and I shield my eyes from the torrent of snow. As the snowflakes settle around me I see in the distance a tower I have known all along was there. The dark silhouette from my dream. I can see it clearly now, reaching up into the heavens. And I can hear the bells. The bells tolling as they did on my wedding day. In the garden I watch Hiroko tending the wilted honeysuckle, except it isn’t Hiroko. Never was Hiroko. Easier to think it is though, than to remember she never returned that day from market. Everything is unfolding. I look back out of the east window, but all I see is west. Scissors: I like the sound they make as the blades touch; Snip! Snip! Snip! I hold my garment of a thousand paper cranes and I cut the strings. The cranes burst free from their shackles and soar into the air. The string falls to the ground. The cranes swarm around the room in unison and then, as in my dream, rest upon me. But the paper doesn’t hurt this time. Their claws scratch against me but I feel no pain. One rests in my palm. Its wings open and close like that of a butterfly. Then it flies away. Paper: the cranes have begun to move, their wings beating, beating, beating. And suddenly I am weightless. They lift me up by my dress and I let them, remembering being carried in the arms of my prince. Teddy’s arms on our wedding day, across the threshold. My robe of a thousand paper cranes carries me over the broken glass, over the years, and out of the window I fly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR V.H. Leslie’s stories have appeared in a range of publications, including Black Static, Interzone and Shadows and Tall Trees, and have been reprinted in a range of ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies. Her short story collection Skein and Bone from Undertow Books was a finalist for both the 2016 British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards for Best Collection. Leslie was also a finalist for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for her novelette, “The Quiet Room” and she won the 2013 International Lightship First Chapter Prize. She has also been awarded Fellowships at Hawthornden Castle and the Saari Institute in Finland, where she was researching Nordic water myths for her PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. Her nonfiction has appeared in History Today, The English Review, Emag, Thresholds and This is Horror. Her debut novel, Bodies of Water, was released last year from Salt Publishing. The Spook School Nick Mamatas | 2279 words

It was the twenty-hour flight on which neither Gordon nor Melissa slept a wink, and the strong Greek coffee at the Athena Tavern they both chugged down at Melissa’s request, and the long-seeming walk in the plish across Kelvingrove Park at Gordon’s insistence that took them to the museum. A wayward cinder got into Melissa’s contact lenses, and she was exhausted, and jittery from the caffeine, and excited to finally be meeting her lover’s parents, and it was her first trip to Scotland, and if we’re being entirely honest, Melissa was a bit of a fanciful creature and always hoping for some transcendent experience, so she got one. Really, truly, the sacred rose in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famed gesso panel The Wassail did not wink at her as she and Gordon stood before it. She imagined the whole thing in the back of her mind, which made the front of her mind startle, then shut down, and so she swooned, falling to the floor like a pair of empty trousers after the belt was whipped out of its loops. “I love it here,” Melissa said later. “I do wish people would stop calling the bathroom ‘the toilet’ though. That makes me think of the commode.” Melissa had spent a while bent over the tiny European toilet in the “toilet” of Gordon’s parents after she woke up. “I could live here, otherwise,” she said. She drank the tea Gordon had prepared for her. “Live here on the couch, being waited on, hand and foot?” Gordon asked. “I’m sure you’re meant to, my faerie queen.” Gordon was like that. “It just seems . . . quaint.” Gordon snorted. “Don’t call anything ‘quaint’ in earshot of my mum and dad, honey bee. In the United Kingdom, ‘quaint’ means ‘fucking terrible.’” “Lovely?” Melissa tried. “Aye, that’s much better,” Gordon said. “When I showed Customs my passport, the officer called my pic ‘lovely.’ I didn’t know whether to feel complimented or offended, until they called your passport lovely too.” “Am I not?” Gordon struck a pose: pursed lips, knuckles under chin, shoulders jauntily angled. “You are.” Gordon’s parents burst into the kitchen, bringing rain and wind with them. Gordon stood to greet them and Melissa waved from the living room couch. They were a matched pair, almost spherical in their rain gear, and chattering in thick Glaswegian accents. “Are you feeling a wee bit better?” Gordon’s father called out to Melissa. “Mostly, yes. Thank you,” Melissa said. She had come to their home semi- conscious and muttering about roses. Now she tottered into the kitchen and accepted more tea while politely refusing a little something stronger offered by Gordon’s father. “Suit your own self,” he said, then after a swig added, with a wink, “So, got . . . spooked, did ya?” Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald, her sister Frances, and Herbert MacNair were called The Four in Scotland, and they were acclaimed for infusing their art with Celtic, Asian, and outright occult imagery. Over in London, where the entire political and cultural apparatus was then as now bent toward the diminishment and marginalization of all things Scots—to hear Gordon talk about it anyway—they were christened The Spook School. That’s what got Melissa so keen to visit Glasgow in the first place. To see the art up close and in person. “I guess I did, Mr. Paterson,” Melissa said. Gordon reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “But I’ll be back at it tomorrow.” “Bring a pillow in case you try for another kip,” Mr. Paterson said to Gordon, winking. Everyone chuckled but his wife. “I never could ken all the fuss about The Four,” Mrs. Paterson said. “We had to study them in school—class trips and such. It all just looked to me like they made some lovely drawings and paintings, and then stretched them all out and bleached half the color away. But you’re Greek, no? Much more interesting art among the Hellenes, I think.” “Greek-American, yes,” Melissa said. “But . . .” But when you’re raised among cheap plaster miniatures of bone-white statuary; when tin reliefs of the Acropolis feature on every wall; when even your flatulent theias are named Aphrodite and Artemis; when all your relatives smell of the deep fryer and shout at the television news because they personally were the ones who invented democracy, you just get tired, you see, ever so tired of . . . “I guess I’ve always liked Celtic things.” She shot Gordon a smile. Mr. Paterson took the opportunity to wax poetic about his perverse support for Rangers—Gordon rolled his eyes and sharply warned him “Dad!”—and the stupidity of anti-sectarian regulation that made singing songs a criminal offense, though with the caveat that “Billy Boys,” with the line “we’re up to our knees in Fenian blood” (which he sang quite well, in a steady tenor) should likely remain out of bounds. By the time Mr. Paterson had exhausted himself, his wife had finished preparing the traditional Scots meal of reheated take-away curry served on her own plates. Gordon drank Irn-Bru with his, like a child. If this were a story, after dinner Melissa and Gordon would beg off pudding and report to Gordon’s childhood room—untouched since he went off to America—and try to catch up on sleep. And the excitement of the day, with its embarrassing medical emergency and attendant barking of the Polish nurse to just “Pick yourself up and get on with your holiday!” would combine with the curry and Mr. Paterson’s terpsichorean endeavors to entrap Melissa Poulos in a portentous nightmarish dreamscape of Spook School art come to life, seeking to devour her. And perhaps this was indeed the dream she dreamed, but from Gordon’s point of view all the evening consisted of was her elbow in his nose, her knees jammed up against his chest when he tried to throw an arm around her, some snoring, a mouthful of her curls as she turned away and presented her back and arse for spooning. Then she managed to bark his shin. There was likely more abuse than that, but sleep finally took Gordon as well. Neither remembered their dreams, which is indeed the most common result of the human subconscious attempting to process proximity to genuine occult phenomena. It’s the nightmares you don’t recall even having that get you in the end. In the morning, Melissa impressed the Patersons with her ability to roll her r’s. She had a light breakfast, in the manner of an American, while the Patersons ate full Scottish, including haggis. Melissa tried a bite and decided that it wasn’t so bad after all. “Haggis has a poor reputation thanks solely to propaganda,” Mr. Paterson explained. “English propaganda, swallowed and then regurgitated by their fellows in America.” “If you dislike the English so much, Dad, why do you support Rangers?” Gordon asked, his question both petulant and well-rehearsed. “I never cared for haggis myself,” Mrs. Paterson stage-whispered to Melissa conspiratorially. “It shows from the taste!” Mr. Patterson said. And with that, Gordon and Melissa whisked themselves out of the flat and headed to the city centre and its museums. Glasgow’s venerable yet primitive subway loop served to bring them over to Kelvingrove from Ibrox. Melissa was less keen to walk in the dreach today. “Are you concerned?” Gordon asked. “About the rain?” “No, about the . . . ?” Gordon said. Melissa had told him about the winking Mackintosh rose, and they had silently agreed to tell neither the medic nor the Patersons about it. The end result was that they hadn’t the chance to discuss it privately either. “I just feel really good about today,” Melissa said. “The Wassail really is beautiful. I need to study it closely. Did you notice that the figures in the center formed the outline of a scarab?” “You tossed and turned all night.” “No, that was you,” Melissa said. “I hardly slept a wink. It was like sharing a twin bed with an excitable circus seal.” “Likewise, I’m sure, madam.” Melissa said, “I want to see the panel again. There’s a lot of hidden meanings in it. Do you know that wassailing was originally a type of Yuletide home invasion scenario? Madness of crowds and all that.” “And if the rose winks?” “We passed any number of roses in that gallery. It’s a motif. I think I saw a billboard with one when we got our tickets.” “Not the original, though.” There were many things Melissa could say to that, quoting Benjamin and the age of mechanical reproduction, the fallacy of the notion of the original, and especially how that fallacy related to art nouveau in general, with its emphasis on using modern technique and “craft” over traditional visions of originality and artistic creation, but the argument required significant nuance, and clearly Gordon wasn’t in the mood. Nor was Melissa. “Why are you ignoring everything I say?” Gordon huffed as the subway stopped at Kelvingrove. “I know all about it. I’m a Weegie; I know all about getting drunk and rowdy, and I’ve not had a drink in two years, three months, and eighteen days. I’ve been marched through Kelvingrove as often as you were brought to see that big whale hanging in the Natural History Museum back in New York; I’ve heard all the mystical bugger. It’s just that, you know? Bugger and bullshite. Plenty of Americans come to Scotland looking for fairy circles, or highlanders cutting a path through heathery moors with their huge cocks, or their great-grandma’s chamber pot. You fainted, all right? That’s all. And I don’t want you fainting again, you ken? I worry for you, pet.” And with his rant over, they were through the gate and through the turnstile and past the frowning faces of the teachers bringing children on a field trip to the museum and standing before The Wassail again. Melissa was pleased that somewhere in his juvenile belligerence Gordon used the word ken with her, as that sort of thing usually embarrassed him back in the States. Pet too was nice, but not nice enough. The Mackintosh rose winked at her again. This time, Melissa steadied herself and winked back. The women, elongated limbs as diaphanous as the gowns they wore, shimmered as if a breeze was moving through the plane of gesso. The scarab formed by the outline of their figures seemed to scuttle. Right then, thought Melissa, and she excused herself to go to the ladies’ and told Gordon not to worry; she was feeling rosy, haha, get it? In the woman’s restroom—Melissa still balked at the word Toilet on the sign— she dug into her purse for the fingernail clipper, as the TSA has seized her full- size nail file back at Newark International. She decided to start with the upper lip frenulum, and with the help of her reflection in the mirror, she clipped right through it. There was a lot of blood, but the other woman using the long row of sinks just stared down at her hands and started scrubbing roughly, refusing eye contact. By the time Melissa had pulled her lip past her nose and up to her prominent eyebrows, the toilet door slammed resoundingly shut. Her mouth gaping open like the loose hood of an oversized sweatshirt, Melissa popped her skull off her C1 vertebra and placed it in the sink before her. Then she righted her face and reached in to her throat with both hands and with a decisive yank, got the rest of her spine out. That went in the sink as well. It was getting quite messy, both inside and out, but Melissa had withdrawn plenty of Scottish £100 notes in her purse to make it worth the while of the clean-up crew. (Gordon had objected to getting Scottish notes, which many English shops south of the border won’t accept, but Melissa was just the sort of annoying romantic that insists upon them.) Melissa withdrew her pelvis via what method she couldn’t help but think of as “the hard way”, and the ribs, which had collected in the cavity of the structure, spilled out after and clattered about her ankles. The long bones of her limbs were the hardest to remove—it was a bit like trying to nail one’s own lonely self to a cross—but she managed it, legs first through the anus, and then arms out her mouth. She was looking quite good, Melissa was. A foot taller, easily, and floating several inches above the ground. Her clothes were a bloody puddle of cotton and denim at her feet, and her metacarpals and metatarsals littered the floor like so much windshield glass after a fatal car accident, but Melissa knew that she’d receive a gown just as soon as she joined the festivities. She’d hardly be the only nude in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and surely the field trip of school kids had broken for lunch by now, no? She sauntered back to The Wassail to the sound of screams and the thumps of matrons and patrons falling faint to the floor, but it was Gordon’s unearthly howl of rage and fear after she caressed his shoulder to say both hello and good-bye that finally caught Melissa up as if in a gale, and sent her flitting into the paint, to join the eternal parade.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and the forthcoming Hexen Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and many other venues. Nick is also an anthologist; his books include the Bram Stoker Award winner Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow), the Locus Award nominees The Future is Japanese and Hanzai Japan (both co-edited with Masumi Washington), and the forthcoming Mixed Up (co-edited with Molly Tanzer).

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Shift Nalo Hopkinson | 5445 words

“Did you sleep well?” she asks, and you make sure that your face is fixed into a dreamy smile as you open your eyes into the morning after. It had been an awkward third date; a clumsy fumbling in her bed, both of you apologizing and then fleeing gratefully into sleep. “I dreamt that you kissed me,” you say. That line’s worked before. She’s lovely as she was the first time you met her, particularly seen through eyes with colour vision. “You said you wanted me to be your frog.” Say it, say it, you think. She laughs. “Isn’t that kind of backwards?” “Well, it’d be a way to start over, right?” Her eyes narrow at that. You ignore it. “You could kiss me,” you tell her, as playfully as you can manage, “and make me your prince again.” She looks thoughtful at that. You reach for her, pull her close. She comes willingly, a fall of little blonde plaits brushing your face like fingers. Her hair’s too straight to hold the plaits; they’re already feathered all along their lengths. “Will you be my slimy little frog?” she whispers, a gleam of amusement in her eyes, and your heart double-times, but she kisses you on the forehead instead of the mouth. You could scream with frustration. “I’ve got morning breath,” she says apologetically. She means that you do. “I’ll go and brush my teeth,” you tell her. You try not to sound grumpy. You linger in the bathroom, staring at the whimsical shells she keeps in the little woven basket on the counter, flouting their salty pink cores. You wait for anger and pique to subside. “You hungry?” she calls from the kitchen. “I thought I’d make some oatmeal porridge.” So much for kissing games. She’s decided it’s time for breakfast instead. “Yes,” you say. “Porridge is fine.” Ban . . . Ban . . . ca-ca-Caliban . . . You know who the real tempest is, don’t you? The real storm? Is our mother Sycorax; his and mine. If you ever see her hair flying around her head when she dash at you in anger; like a whirlwind, like a lightning, like a deadly whirlpool. Wheeling and turning round her scalp like if it ever catch you, it going to drag you in, pull you down, swallow you in pieces. If you ever hear how she gnash her teeth in her head like tiger shark; if you ever hear the crack of her voice or feel the crack of her hand on your backside like a bolt out of thunder, then you would know is where the real storm there. She tell me say I must call her Scylla, or Charybdis. Say it don’t make no matter which, for she could never remember one different from the other, but she know one of them is her real name. She say never mind the name most people know her by; is a name some Englishman give her by scraping a feather quill on paper. White people magic. Her people magic, for all that she will box you if you ever remind her of that, and flash her blue, blue y’eye-them at you. Lightning braps from out of blue sky. But me and Brother, when she not there, is that Englishman name we call her by. When she hold you on her breast, you must take care never to relax, never to close your y’eye, for you might wake up with your nose hole-them filling up with the salt sea. Salt sea rushing into your lungs to drown you with her mother love. Imagine what is like to be the son of that mother. Now imagine what is like to be the sister of that son, to be sister to that there brother. There was a time they called porridge “gruel.” A time when you lived in castle moats and fetched beautiful golden balls for beautiful golden girls. When the fetching was a game, and you knew yourself to be lord of the land and the veins of water that ran through it, and you could graciously allow petty kings to build their palaces on the land, in which to raise up their avid young daughters. Ban . . . ban . . . ca-ca-Caliban . . . When I was small, I hear that blasted name so plenty that I thought it was me own. In her bathroom, you find a new toothbrush, still in its plastic package. She was thinking of you, then, of you staying overnight. You smile, mollified. You crack the plastic open, brush your teeth, looking around at the friendly messiness of her bathroom. Cotton, silk and polyester panties hanging on the shower curtain rod to dry, their crotches permanently honey-stained. Three different types of deodorant on the counter, two of them lidless, dried out. A small bottle of perfume oil, open, so that it weeps its sweetness into the air. A fine dusting of baby powder covers everything, its innocent odour making you sneeze. Someone lives here. Your own apartment—the one you found when you came on land—is as crisp and dull as a hotel room, a stop along the way. Everything is tidy there, except for the waste paper basket in your bedroom, which is crammed with empty pill bottles: marine algae capsules; iodine pills. You remind yourself that you need to buy more, to keep the cravings at bay. Caliban have a sickness. Is a sickness any of you could get. In him it manifest as a weakness; a weakness for cream. He fancy himself a prince of Africa, a mannish Cleopatra, bathing in mother’s milk. Him believe say it would make him pretty. Him never had mirrors to look in, and with the mother we had, the surface of the sea never calm enough that him could see him face in it. Him would never believe me say that him pretty already. Him fancy if cream would only touch him, if him could only submerge himself entirely in it, it would redeem him. Me woulda try it too, you know, but me have that feature you find amongst so many brown-skin people; cream make me belly gripe. Truth to tell, Brother have the same problem, but him would gladly suffer the stomach pangs and the belly-running for the chance to drink in cream, to bathe in cream, to have it dripping off him and running into him mouth. Such a different taste from the bitter salt sea milk of Sycorax. That beautiful woman making breakfast in her kitchen dives better than you do. You’ve seen her knifing so sharply through waves that you wondered they didn’t bleed in her wake. You fill the sink, wave your hands through the water. It’s bliss, the way it resists you. You wonder if you have time for a bath. It’s a pity that this isn’t one of those apartment buildings with a pool. You miss swimming. You wash your face. You pull the plug, watch the water spiral down the drain. It looks wild, like a mother’s mad hair. Then you remember that you have to be cautious around water now, even the tame, caged water of swimming pools and bathrooms. Quickly, you sink the plug back into the mouth of the drain. You must remember; anywhere there’s water, especially rioting water, it can tattle tales to your mother. Your face feels cool and squeaky now. Your mouth is wild cherry-flavoured from the toothpaste. You’re kissable. You can hear humming from the kitchen, and the scraping of a spoon against a pot. There’s a smell of cinnamon and nutmeg. Island smells. You square your shoulders, put on a smile, walk to the kitchen. Your feet are floppy, reluctant. You wish you could pay attention to what they’re telling you. When they plash around like this, when they slip and slide and don’t want to carry you upright, it’s always been a bad sign. The kisses of golden girls are chancy things. Once, after the touch of other pale lips, you looked into the eyes of a golden girl, one Miranda, and saw yourself reflected back in her moist, breathless stare. In her eyes you were tall, handsome, your shoulders powerful and your jaw square. You carried yourself with the arrogance of a prince. You held a spear in one hand. The spotted, tawny pelt of an animal that had never existed was knotted around your waist. You wore something’s teeth on a string around your neck, and you spoke in grunts, imperious. In her eyes, your bright copper skin was dark and loamy as cocoa. She had sighed and leapt upon you, kissing and biting, begging to be taken. You had let her have what she wanted. When her father stumbled upon the two of you writhing on the ground, she had leapt to her feet and changed you again; called you monster, attacker. She’d clasped her bodice closed with one hand, carefully leaving bare enough pitiful juddering bosom to spark a father’s ire. She’d looked at you regretfully, sobbed crocodile tears, and spoken the lies that had made you her father’s slave for an interminable length of years. You haven’t seen yourself in this one’s eyes yet. You need her to kiss you, to change you, to hide you from your dam. That’s what you’ve always needed. You are always awed by the ones who can work this magic. You could love one of them forever and a day. You just have to find the right one. You stay a second in the kitchen doorway. She looks up from where she stands at the little table, briskly setting two different-sized spoons beside two mismatched bowls. She smiles. “Come on in,” she says. You do, on your slippery feet. You sit to table. She’s still standing. “I’m sorry about that,” she says. She quirks a regretful smile at you. “I don’t think my cold sore is quite healed yet.” She runs a tongue tip over the corner of her lip, where you can no longer see the crusty scab. You sigh. “It’s all right. Forget it.” She goes over to the stove. You don’t pay any attention. You’re staring at the thready crack in your bowl. She says, “Brown sugar or white?” “Brown,” you tell her. “And lots of milk.” Your gut gripes at the mere thought, but milk will taint the water in which she cooked the oats. It will cloud the whisperings that water carries to your mother. Nowadays people would say that me and my mooncalf brother, we is “lactose intolerant.” But me think say them mis-name the thing. Me think say is milk can’t tolerate we, not we can’t tolerate it. So; he find himself another creamy one. Just watch at the two of them there, in that pretty domestic scene. I enter, invisible. Brother eat off most of him porridge already. Him always had a large appetite. The white lady, she only passa-passa-ing with hers, dipping the spoon in, tasting little bit, turning the spoon over and watching at it, dipping it in. She glance at him and say, “Would you like to go to the beach today?” “No!” You almost shout it. You’re not going to the beach, not to any large body of water, ever again. Your very cells keen from the loss of it, but She is in the water, looking for you. “A-true. Mummy in the water, and I in the wind, Brother,” I whisper to him, so sweet. By my choice, him never hear me yet. Don’t want him to know that me find him. Plenty time for that. Plenty time to fly and carry the news to Mama. Maybe I can find a way to be free if I do this one last thing for her. Bring her beloved son back. Is him she want, not me. Never me. “Ban, ban, ca-ca-Caliban!” I scream in him face, silently. “There’s no need to shout,” she says with an offended look. “That’s where we first saw each other, and you swam so strongly. You were beautiful in the water. So I just thought you might like to go back there.” You had been swimming for your life, but she didn’t know that. The surf tossing you crashing against the rocks, the undertow pulling you back in deeper, the waves singing their triumphant song: She’s coming. Sycorax is coming for you. Can you feel the tips of her tentacles now? Can you feel them sticking to your skin, bringing you back? She’s coming. We’ve got you now. We’ll hold you for her. Oh, there’ll be so much fun when she has you again! And you had hit out at the water, stroked through it, kicked through it, fleeing for shore. One desperate pull of your arms had taken you through foaming surf. You crashed into another body, heard a surprised, “Oh,” and then a wave tumbled you. As you fought in its depths, searching for the air and dry land, you saw her, this woman, slim as an eel, her body parting the water, her hair glowing golden. She’d extended a hand to you, like reaching for a bobbing ball. You took her hand, held on tightly to the warmth of it. She stood, and you stood, and you realised you’d been only feet from shore. “Are you all right?” she’d asked. The water had tried to suck you back in, but it was only at thigh height now. You ignored it. You kept hold of her hand, started moving with her, your saviour, to the land. You felt your heart swelling. She was perfect. “I’m doing just fine,” you’d said. “I’m sorry I startled you. What’s your name?” Behind you, you could hear the surf shouting for you to come back. But the sun was warm on your shoulders now, and you knew that you’d stay on land. As you came up out of the water, she glanced at you and smiled, and you could feel the change begin. She’s sitting at her table, still with that hurt look on her face. “I’m sorry, darling,” you say, and she brightens at the endearment, the first you’ve used with her. Under the table, your feet are trying to paddle away, away. You ignore them. “Why don’t we go for a walk?” you ask her. She smiles, nods. The many plaits of her hair sway with the rhythm. You must ask her not to wear her hair like that. Once you know her a little better. They look like tentacles. Besides, her hair’s so pale that her pink scalp shows through. Chuh. I’m sorry, darling. Him is sorry, is true. A sorry sight. I follow them out on them little walk, them Sunday perambulation. Down her street and round the corner into the district where the trendy people-them live. Where you find those cunning little shops, you know the kind, yes? Wild flowers selling at this one, half your wages for one so-so blossom. Cheeses from Greece at that one, and wine from Algiers. (Mama S. say she don’t miss Algiers one bit.) Tropical fruit selling at another store, imported from the Indies, from the hot sun places where people work them finger to the bone to pick them and box them and send them, but not to eat them. Brother and him new woman meander through those streets, making sure people look at them good. She turn her moon face to him, give him that fuck-me look, and take him hand. I see him melt. Going to be easy for her to change him now that she melt him. And then him will be gone from we again. I blow a grieving breeze oo-oo-oo through the leaves of the crab apple trees lining that street. She looks around, her face bright and open. “Such a lovely day,” she says. “Feel the air on your skin.” She releases your hand. The sweat of your mingled touch evaporates and you mourn its passing. She opens her arms to the sun, drinking in light. Of course, that white man, him only write down part of the story. Him say how our mother was a witch. How she did consort with monsters. But you know the real story? You know why them exile her from Algiers, with a baby in her belly and one at her breast? She spins and laughs, her print dress opening like a flower above her scuffed army boots. Her strong legs are revealed to mid-thigh. Them send my mother from her home because of the monster she consort with. The lord with sable eyes and skin like rich earth. My daddy. An old man sitting on a bench smiles, indulgent at her joy, but then he sees her reach for your hand again. He scowls at you, spits to one side. My daddy. A man who went for a swim one day, down, down, down, and when he see the fair maid flowing towards him, her long hair just a-swirl like weeds in the water, her skin like milk, him never ’fraid. As you both pass the old man, he shakes his head, his face clenched. She doesn’t seem to notice. You hold her hand tighter, reach to pull her warmth closer to you. But eventually you’re going down, and you know it. When my mother who wasn’t my mother yet approach the man who wasn’t my father yet, when she ask him, “Man, you eat salt, or you eat fresh?” him did know what fe say. Of course him did know. After his tutors teach him courtly ways from since he was small. After his father teach him how to woo. After his own mother teach him how to address the Wata Lady with respect. Sycorax ask him, “Man, you eat salt, or you eat fresh?” And proper proper, him respond, “Me prefer the taste of salt, thank you please.” That was the right answer. For them that does eat fresh, them going to be fresh with your business. But this man show her that he know how fe have respect. For that, she give him breath and take him down, she take him down even farther. You pass another beautiful golden girl, luxuriantly blonde. She glances at you, casts her eyes down demurely, where they just happen to rest at your crotch. You feel her burgeoning gaze there, your helpless response. Quickly you lean and kiss the shoulder of the woman you’re with. The other one’s look turns to resentful longing. You hurry on. She take him down into her own castle, and she feed him the salt foods she keep in there, the fish and oysters and clams, and him eat of them till him belly full, and him talk to her sweet, and him never get fresh with her. Not even one time. Not until she ask him to. Mama wouldn’t tell me what happen after that, but true she have two pickney, and both of we shine copper, even though she is alabaster, so me think me know is what went on. There’s a young black woman sitting on a bench, her hair tight peppercorns against her scalp. Her feet are crossed beneath her. She’s alone, reading a book. She’s pretty, but she looks too much like your sister. Too brown to ever be a golden girl. She looks up as you go by, distracted from her reading by the chattering of the woman beside you. She looks at you. Smiles. Nods a greeting. Burning up with guilt, you make your face stone. You move on. In my mother and father, salt meet with sweet. Milk meet with chocolate. No one could touch her while he was alive and ruler of his lands, but the minute him dead, her family and his get together and exile her to that little island to starve to death. Send her away with two sweet-and-sour, milk chocolate pickney; me in her belly and Caliban at her breast. Is nuh that turn her bitter? When you confine the sea, it don’t stagnate? You put milk to stand, and it nuh curdle? Chuh. Watch at my brother there, making himself fool-fool. Is time. Time to end this, to take him back down. “Mama,” I whisper. I blow one puff of wind, then another. The puffs tear a balloon out from a little girl’s hand. The balloon have a fish painted on it. I like that. The little girl cry out and run after her toy. Her father dash after her. I puff and blow, make the little metallic balloon skitter just out of the child reach. As she run, she knock over a case of fancy bottled water, the expensive fizzy kind in blue glass bottles, from a display. The bottles explode when them hit the ground, the water escaping with a shout of glee. The little girl just dance out the way of broken glass and spilled water and keep running for her balloon, reaching for it. I make it bob like a bubble in the air. Her daddy jump to one side, away from the glass. He try to snatch the back of her dress, but he too big and slow. Caliban step forward and grasp her balloon by the string. He give it back to her. She look at him, her y’eye-them big. She clutch the balloon to her bosom and smile at her daddy as he sweep her up into him arms. The storekeeper just a-wait outside her shop, to talk to the man about who going to refund her goods. “Mother,” I call. “Him is here. I find him.” The water from out the bottles start to flow together in a spiral. You hear her first in the dancing breeze that’s toying with that little girl’s balloon. You fetch the balloon for the child before you deal with what’s coming. Her father mumbles a suspicious thanks at you. You step away from them. You narrow your eyes, look around. “You’re here, aren’t you?” you say to the air. “Who’s here?” asks the woman at your side. “My sister,” you tell her. You say “sister” like you’re spitting out spoiled milk. “I don’t see anyone,” the woman says. “El!” you call out. I don’t pay him no mind. I summon up one of them hot, gusty winds. I blow over glasses of water on café tables. I grab popsicles swips! from out the hands and mouths of children. The popsicles fall down and melt, all the bright colours; melt and run like that brother of mine. Popsicle juice, café table water, spring water that break free from bottles; them all rolling together now, crashing and splashing and calling to our mother. I sing up the whirling devils. Them twirl sand into everybody eyes. Hats and baseball caps flying off heads, dancing along with me. An umbrella galloping down the road, end over end, with an old lady chasing it. All the trendy Sunday people squealing and running everywhere. “Ariel, stop it!” you say. So I run up his girlfriend skirt, make it fly high in the air. “Oh!” she cry out, trying to hold the frock down. She wearing a panty with a tear in one leg and a knot in the waistband. That make me laugh out loud. “Mama!” I shout, loud so Brother can hear me this time. “You seeing this? Look him here so!” I blow one rassclaat cluster of rain clouds over the scene, them bellies black and heavy with water. “So me see that you get a new master!” I screech at Brother. The street is empty now, but for the three of you. Everyone else has found shelter. Your girl is cowering down beside the trunk of a tree, hugging her skirt about her knees. Her hair has come loose from most of its plaits, is whipping in a tangled mess about her head. She’s shielding her face from blowing sand, but trying to look up at the sky above her, where this attack is coming from. You punch at the air, furious. You know you can’t hurt your sister, but you need to lash out anyway. “Fuck you!” you yell. “You always do this! Why can’t the two of you leave me alone!” I chuckle. “Your face favour jackass when him sick. Why you can’t leave white woman alone? You don’t see what them do to you?” “You are our mother’s creature,” you hiss at her. “Look at you, trying so hard to be ‘island,’ talking like you just come off the boat.” In your anger, your speech slips into the same rhythms as hers. “At least me nah try fe chat like something out of some Englishman book.” I make the wind howl it back at him: “At least me remember is which boat me come off from!” I burst open the clouds overhead and drench the two of them in mother water. She squeals. Good. “Ariel, Caliban; stop that squabbling, or I’ll bind you both up in a split tree forever.” The voice is a wintry runnel, fast-freezing. You both turn. Your sister has manifested, has pushed a trembling bottom lip out. Dread runs cold along your limbs. It’s Sycorax. “Yes, Mother,” you both say, standing sheepishly shoulder to shoulder. “Sorry, Mother.” Sycorax is sitting in a sticky puddle of water and melted popsicles, but a queen on her throne could not be more regal. She has wrapped an ocean wave about her like a shawl. Her eyes are open-water blue. Her writhing hair foams white over her shoulders and the marble swells of her vast breasts. Her belly is a mounded salt lick, rising from the weedy tangle of her pubic hair, a marine jungle in and out of which flit tiny blennies. The tsunami of Sycorax’s hips overflows her watery seat. Her myriad split tails are flicking, the way they do when she’s irritated. With one of them, she scratches around her navel. You think you can see the sullen head of a moray eel, lurking in the cave those hydra tails make. You don’t want to think about it. You never have. “Ariel,” says Sycorax, “have you been up to your tricks again?” “But he,” splutters your sister, “he . . .” “He never ceases with his tricks,” your mother pronounces. “Running home to Mama, leaving me with the mess he’s made.” She looks at you, and your watery legs weaken. “Caliban,” she says, “I’m getting too old to play surrogate mother to your spawn. That last school of your offspring all had poisonous stings.” “I know, Mother. I’m sorry.” “How did that happen?” she asks. You risk a glance at the woman you’ve dragged into this, the golden girl. She’s standing now, a look of interest and curiosity on her face. “This is all your fault,” you say to her. “If you had kissed me, told me what you wanted me to be, she and Ariel couldn’t have found us.” Your girl looks at you, measuring. “First tell me about the poison babies,” she says. She’s got more iron in her than you’d thought, this one. The last fairy tale princess who’d met your family hadn’t stopped screaming for two days. Ariel sniggers. “That was from his last ooman,” she says. “The two of them always quarrelling. For her, Caliban had a poison tongue.” “And spat out biting words, no doubt,” Sycorax says. “He became what she saw, and it affected the children they made. Of course she didn’t want them, of course she left; so Grannie gets to do the honours. He has brought me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack babies. Brings his offspring to me, then runs away again. And I’m getting tired of it.” Sycorax’s shawl whirls itself up into a waterspout. “And I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale tattling.” “But Mama. . . !” Ariel says. “‘But Mama’ nothing. I want you to stop pestering your brother.” Ariel puffs up till it looks as though she might burst. Her face goes anvil-cloud dark, but she says nothing. “And you,” says Sycorax, pointing at you with a suckered tentacle, “you need to stop bringing me the fallouts from your sorry love life.” “I can’t help it, Mama,” you say. “That’s how women see me.” Sycorax towers forward, her voice crashing upon your ears. “Do you want to know how I see you?” A cluster of her tentacle tails whips around your shoulders, immobilizes you. That is a moray eel under there, its fanged mouth hanging hungrily open. You are frozen in Sycorax’s gaze, a hapless, irresponsible little boy. You feel the sickening metamorphosis begin. You are changing, shrinking. The last time Sycorax did this to you, it took you forever to become man enough again to escape. You try to twist in her arms, to look away from her eyes. She pulls you forward, puckering her mouth for the kiss she will give you. “Well, yeah, I’m beginning to get a picture here,” says a voice. It’s the golden girl, shivering in her flower-print dress that’s plastered to her skinny body. She steps closer. Her boots squelch. She points at Ariel. “You say he’s colour- struck. You’re his sister, you should know. And yeah, I can see that in him. You’d think I was the sun itself, the way he looks at me.” She takes your face in her hands, turns your eyes away from your mother’s. Finally, she kisses you full on the mouth. In her eyes, you become a sunflower, helplessly turning wherever she goes. You stand rooted, waiting for her direction. She looks at your terrible mother. “You get to clean up the messes he makes.” And now you’re a baby, soiling your diapers and waiting for Mama to come and fix it. Oh, please, end this. She looks down at you, wriggling and helpless on the ground. “And I guess all those other women saw big, black dick.” So familiar, the change that wreaks on you. You’re an adult again, heavy- muscled and horny with a thick, swelling erection. You reach for her. She backs away. “But,” she says, “there’s one thing I don’t see.” You don’t care. She smells like vanilla and her skin is smooth and cool as ice cream and you want to push your tongue inside. You grab her thin, unresisting arms. She’s shaking, but she looks into your eyes. And hers are empty. You aren’t there. Shocked, you let her go. In a trembling voice, she says, “Who do you think you are?” It could be an accusation: Who do you think you are? It might be a question: Who do you think you are? You search her face for the answer. Nothing. You look to your mother, your sib. They both look as shocked as you feel. “Look,” says the golden girl, opening her hands wide. Her voice is getting less shaky. “Clearly, this is family business, and I know better than to mess with that.” She gathers her little picky plaits together, squeezes water out of them. ”It’s been really . . . interesting, meeting you all.” She looks at you, and her eyes are empty, open, friendly. You don’t know what to make of them. “Um,” she says, “maybe you can give me a call sometime.” She starts walking away. Turns back. “It’s not a brush-off; I mean it. But only call when you can tell me who you really are. Who you think you’re going to become.” And she leaves you standing there. In the silence, there’s only a faint sound of whispering water and wind in the trees. You turn to look at your mother and sister. “I,” you say.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nalo Hopkinson lives in a home filled with books, art supplies, tools, art projects at various stages of unfinished, more books, and brown-skinned mermaids. She has aches, pains, chronic fatigue, and a quirky brain. She has far too much to do, and nowhere near enough time to marathon watch annoying but addictive science fiction TV. She loves dance. She’s working on a novel about a monster carried by a girl who turns into a woman. The girl does, not the monster. She cooks great food (mostly) and mismanages her schedule. She doesn’t answer her phone or check her voice mail messages. NONFICTION The H Word: I Need My Pain Gemma Files | 1310 words

There’s a line from Robert Silverberg’s Thorns that I’ve been thinking about lately: “Pain is instructive.” It links up in my head with the similarly evocative phrase “Someday, this pain will be useful to you” (most recently quoted on The Walking Dead), which in turn reminds me of the process I went through with my last book, Experimental Film (ChiZine Publications), for which I won both the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Adult Novel. Right now, I’m applying that same process to my new novel, Nightcrawling: deliberately excavating a patch of my own childhood memories, ones so painful I’ve spent years literally attempting to forget them, before running them through a filter that hopefully renders them both universal and yet specific at the same time. Context is important with these things, I guess. In putting Experimental Film together, the breakthrough moment came when—after roughly three years of planning the book’s back-story—I suddenly realized that the only way this fairly complex, extremely specific nested narrative about Ontario film culture, non- linear storytelling, ghosts, gods and the threat of the numinous was ever going to work would be if I made the main/POV character into a version of “me,” i.e. someone whose concerns and voice I understood without needing to work hard. And once I did, everything else flowed organically from that single decision, unfolding in a tangle of bad impulses leading to even worse discoveries, as though the “known,” agreed-upon universe itself were being revealed as nothing more a frosted window that my protagonist’s actions scratched away at, eventually making a hole through which she could catch a glimpse of whatever truly horrifying truths lie at the heart of everything. This problem of protagonist voice is one that permeates horror literature, quite probably because horror routinely deals with intimate emotional issues, the ones that render us most vulnerable. Caitlín R. Kiernan, who I admire deeply, has talked on many occasions about how she rejected the idea of a first-person narrative for years, because every first-person narrative is by nature unreliable. And of course, she’s completely correct on that point: we’re human beings, after all, not computers . . . we lie or misremember things, sometimes deliberately, or we forget, or we gloss over. Because we see ourselves as the protagonists of our own narratives, we tend to report events as we perceived them, rather than as they actually were, to draw conclusions we couldn’t possibly have drawn at the time, using information that we simply didn’t have at the time—to value things primarily for how they made/make us feel. Sometimes we see things without registering or recognizing them, and sometimes we don’t even understand exactly what we’re seeing, not until so much later that the knowledge is all but useless to us except to provide context in hindsight. In the end, no one person’s version of events can ever be taken at flat face value—all of it’s subjective and questionable, constantly open to interpretation, which is why (as the most casual Law & Order franchise viewer well knows) prosecutors should never proceed to trial without more than one witness’s testimony backing up their argument. I believe that that’s because we want to tell our lives like stories, because we want our lives to have a meaning, a point; we want them to be controllable, at least in hindsight. At any rate, it wasn’t until Kiernan finally embraced the concept wholeheartedly, in all its potential chaos, that she was able to write what I consider her stand-alone masterpieces, The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, both of which are tales told from the POV of narrators so unreliable they barely know themselves what’s happened to them. In one case (The Drowning Girl), said narrator has a genuine diagnosis of schizophrenia, and is well aware that her memories always come filtered through the question of whether or not she was off her meds when they occurred; the narrator of The Red Tree, on the other hand, is simply a writer, which is to say a person who tells lies for money. In both cases, Kiernan uses the narrators’ lack of faith in their own interpretations of past—and current—events to sow seeds of a far deeper underlying doubt throughout, one that barely skirts the edges of stark existential despair. Do the stories we inhabit make sense to anybody but ourselves, and can they continue on after mortality guarantees we are removed from them? Or will they die with us, and thus be lost forever—literally un-told, unremembered, since we are no longer there to remember them? It’s this sort of inherent unreliability towards which I aspire, making me instinctually frame every horror story I write as a first-person narrative. But even if I’m using a limited third-person perspective, I do my best to stick to a restricted view that ensures we “see” things only through another person’s eyes, stuck inside the moment at the very heart of the action, overborne by sensation and emotion, becoming privy to secrets only as the narrator/protagonist discovers and decodes them. So that even the way we sometimes approach things sidelong, the protective measures we employ to survive trauma, become part of a much larger meditation on the human condition’s internalized existential dread—the fact that as storytelling animals who instinctually organize facts into narratives (first this, then that and therefore this, Q.E.D), we are all on some level doomed to perceive our own lives as simply another variant of the same, a usually moral-less tale that comes complete with its very own beginning, middle and end. Most often, we choose to invest ourselves in narratives because we feel a kinship with their protagonists, because we can recognize some element of our own experience in theirs . . . but the odd thing about people (or one odd thing, at any rate; one amongst many) is how few of us have any literal sympathy for each other’s joys, or victories, or pleasures. Happiness is discounted, even devalued; what’s that line about how all happy families are alike, while all unhappy families are unhappy in different—and far more interesting—ways? Maybe it’s about the fact that not everyone can recognize happiness, even when they’re inside of it. Which is why the thread these narrative beads come strung on is almost always composed of pain, because pain is the one thing everybody understands . . . a sensation best understood in juxtaposition with its absence, as often dull and grinding as it is immense and blinding, but always worthy of respect either way. Describing your pain can create sympathy, causing others to compare it to their own; imagining someone else’s pain can build empathy, especially when it reminds you of what you’ve probably already suffered, everything you’ve already dismissed. Because love is different for everybody, but pain is a constant, and we’re attracted to it even as we flinch from it; pain, sad to say, is all too often the mortar that holds all our universes together, fictionally and otherwise. Which is why it definitely remains the engine-fuel always percolating at the heart of why I write horror—either to plumb it, to explain it to myself, or to transform it, to re- make my own weaknesses into a fantasy of wound as superpower, of closure and conclusion. Things happen for no reason in life, but in fiction, we can rectify that . . . at least, that’s the lie we tell ourselves, over and over and over. An odd fantasy of hope, even at its darkest.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best- known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild’s 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books). Book Reviews: August 2017 Terence Taylor | 2298 words

Read This! Volume 2 New Horror Fiction You Should Know

Horror and humor walk hand in hand along the beach of fiction, and if occasionally there’s only one set of footprints, it’s only because that’s when one is carrying the other. Humor breaks the tension of horror enough to make it bearable when readers might otherwise lose heart and walk away, and horror has always been in humor. Long before the ’60s fad for dead baby jokes, comedy dealt in death and destruction. As comedians like Mel Brooks have often pointed out, the worst disaster is funny when it happens to someone else. The Germans even have a word for it, schadenfreude—a perverse pleasure at other people’s misfortune. I think that feeling, no matter how shameful when applied to people we know, explains why we enjoy stories of fictional people chased down, brutalized, dying at the hands of men, monsters—or worse—for our entertainment, whether we laugh or scream. It’s because it isn’t happening to us . . . our lives are at least that much better than those on the screen, stage, or written page. We aren’t being eaten or made the butt of a joke. Roald Dahl’s classic Lamb to the Slaughter translated effortlessly to American TV on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Who doesn’t laugh when Barbara Bel Geddes serves the frozen leg of lamb she used to bludgeon her husband to death, freshly roasted, to the police? Ghostbusters wasn’t the first film to make us chuckle as we squirmed. Creepshow was both funny and scary, alternating horror and humor, each increasing the effectiveness of the other. R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps books honed the combination to a fine art, creating a decades-long franchise for young audiences, as he dances the fine line between yocks and boffs. The French Grand Guignol theater called the method “hot and cold showers,” each one-act play of the night progressively more chilling, then lightly amusing, then darker again, building to a last big laugh to relieve the tension before ramping the horror up to its highest—until someone fainted. They considered the night a loss if at least one patron wasn’t carried out, undoubtedly to the laughter of others. So, fearful and funny, do they reside in the same part of the brain? Are they kissing cousins? Whatever the reason they go so well together, like many, I enjoy a healthy helping of humor with my horror, no matter how grim. This month, I read a new novel in a series and an expansive themed collection of short stories that gave me both.

The Delirium Brief (The Laundry Files Book 8) Charles Stross Hardcover / Ebook ISBN: 978-0765394668 Publisher: Tor.com (July 11, 2017) 384 pages

There is a perverse conceit to The Delirium Brief, and others in the series as well, I am sure. It’s the eighth case of the Laundry Files, and is told from the point of view of Bob Howard (not his real name, as that can magically be used against him), Detached Senior Specialist grade one, Q-Division, SOE, a middle management bureaucrat in the British government, raised to a higher position by unfortunate circumstances. His department is under assault from competing agencies and politicians, his marriage is in crisis because of the jobs he and his wife have in the agency, and—oh yes, there is a world-destroying supernatural threat of immense magnitude rising from the literal ashes of his last assignment. Bob works for The Laundry, a covert ops group so covert that their own government barely knows they exist until the city of Leeds is largely destroyed by a battle with The Host of Air and Darkness, magical elves (not the cute kind) from another dimension trying to take over ours. As the book begins, Bob’s just been shoved in front of the glaring eye of the media to explain who they are, why no one knew they existed, what happened to Leeds, and how much is this all costing? As the newly appointed head of his department, he’s facing massive restructuring of The Laundry, its resources, and a fresh threat from an old enemy thought dead. The perverse conceit is that Bob is a bureaucrat, through and through, and the book begins with his lengthy detailing of the department, its functions and its failings. He talks like a bureaucrat, albeit one with a darkly self-aware sense of humor, and there were times when my head was reeling from pages of the intricate workings of The Laundry, how it fits into government structure, and how that works . . . Interspersed in this are personal details of how his perfect relationship got screwed up when his wife became partnered with a jealous magical weapon that wanted him dead, and his own new status as The Eater of Souls. Yes, that is just what it sounds like, even if he claims when confronted with the title on TV that it’s a joke about how often he puts his foot in his mouth. It’s not. They agree to marriage counseling to try to find a way to live together without accidently killing each other with their supernatural powers. Not your typical marital woes. All that earlier minutiae becomes important as the true evil of the book arises, the Reverend Raymond Schiller and his GP Services, working hard with money and mind control to help officials in the United States and Britain privatize supernatural defense with his company, an offshoot of his Golden Promise Ministries. Schiller is not just a corrupt televangelist offering the world up to an ancient evil; he’s a master of modern business. He subtly and swiftly rips the rug out from under Bob and his co-workers before you can say hostile takeover, using entirely traditional means, bribery and blackmail. As Bob’s co-workers include vampires (called PHANGS—Mhari is my new literary crush), wizards, and a host of other beings with mad crazy supernatural and bureaucratic skills, the battle is on. What follows is a build up in stakes and power plays that encompasses wizardry, Lovecraftian horrors almost but not quite beyond belief, the use and abuse of forces beyond human ken, and lots of good old-fashioned heartfelt human feelings, both good and bad, throughout. By the end, we’ve achieved a satisfactory conclusion that still leaves a threat equally great in play. Part of Stross’ skill is in cleverly amusing us with what seems to be misdirection, but is really essential information, as he slowly boils a Lovecraftian many-tentacled frog in the background, degree by degree. This leads to a situation suddenly fraught with extreme peril, with risks of such a current nature that it’s scarier than a simple monster story could be. Parasitic alien infestations aside— and I’ll let you find out the icky nature of how they are administered yourself— the book warns us that the most dangerous horrors in the world are administrative. In the movie Devil’s Advocate, Keanu Reeves’ character asks Al Pacino, who plays the titular Devil, “Why the law?” Lucifer’s answer is simple— because the law is in everything, and by controlling it, you control the world. The same applies to bureaucracies.

Sycorax’s Daughters Edited by Kinitra Brooks, PhD; Linda D. Addison; and Susana Morris, PhD ISBN: 978-1941958445 Cedar Grove Publishing, March 2017 565 pages

Anthologies filled with assorted authors give you the chance to enjoy a heaping buffet of stories and find new favorite authors. I met a few in this collection I’ll definitely follow in years to come, and even in the least of them saw modern horror through the eyes of a delightful group of contemporary black women authors. I was surprised to read the source of the title, and though I haven’t read The Tempest or seen a production of it in decades, was shocked that I had no memory of Sycorax at all. A quick search showed that she has life well outside of Shakespeare’s play, as other authors expanded her story. Described in The Tempest as Algerian born, she’s embraced by many as a symbol of powerful women of color, created in an era that feared the growing female power and the advance of North African Muslims into Europe. I was amused by the debate over a contradiction in the Bard’s reference to her having blue eyes. I’m a black man whose brown eyes developed blue rings in my teen years that eventually expanded to cover my irises, just like Miles Davis, Morgan Freeman, and many others. According to my eye doctor, it’s a condition called Arcus, a build up of lipid fats in the cornea that doesn’t affect vision, only eye color. It’s a gene manifested in my mother and her mother, who one day when she saw it starting in my eyes told me that it was a sign of magical powers. I’m going with grandma’s explanation. The twenty-eight stories and fourteen poems of Sycorax’s Daughters are impossible to cover here in the depth they deserve, but I think I can sample them well enough for you to get the flavor. Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of the groundbreaking Dark Matters anthologies of black science fiction, opens the collection with Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight, a beautifully noir tale that is the first of several showing us how old gods might survive into and embrace our age to survive. Later stories cover issues of identity bound up in transformation . . . Do our bodies and what they make us do, whether monstrous or beautiful, make us who and what we are, whether in Zin E. Rocklyn’s morally ambiguous heroine in Summer Skin, or one trapped by an inability to change, like Cherene Sherrad’s not quite mermaid who needs to be more than she is in Scales? Others come from our legacy as black folks in America, rooted in the past, like The Tale of Eve of De-Nile by Joy Copeland, one of my favorites, a very Hurston- like tale of the value of being specific that, like Zora’s work, is deceptively folksy while being slyly satirical, and L.H. Moore’s stylish then chilling A Little Not Music. Some are entirely of today. Dana McKnight’s Taking the Good is another new view of the survival skills of old gods, and Kim by Nicole D. Sconiers is a twisted tale of black appropriation that gives Get Out a supernatural run for its money. Others are set in speculative futures like that of Tenea D. Johnson’s Foundling and L. Marie Wood’s The Ever After, where the real horrors are all too often the human element. The novel excerpt from Valjeanne Jeffers’ Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective II made me wish I had coined the term Steamfunk and the rest of her world. The poems are interspersed throughout, and would need their own column to do them justice. I hope it’s enough to say that their range of style and subject match that of the stories and complement them beautifully as appropriate punctuation, in theme or language, to provide poetic palate cleansers between the prose, helping us see them all as individual pieces more than as a conglomerate uniform whole. The temptation would be for someone reviewing this book to declare that there is a unified singular voice here, when the delight is in the vast disparity of style, approach and themes. It’s proof that there is no single black or female voice in horror fiction any more than there is a single white male voice. If there is any connection between the wide-ranging tales told here in prose and poetry, it is that all the authors have found the same freedom to express their individual voices in horror, unbound by more staid literary conventions. They’ve also found unique ways to make their magical realities feel real, worlds you can enter and embrace as believable. Some are deeply disturbing and stick with you like childhood traumas; some are laugh-out-loud funny. They are historic, but also brutally contemporary, with familiar horrors of myth and legend and new ones with the potential to be every bit as enduring. Points of view shift from those we might call victims to that of the so-called monsters, until we are left unsure at times which is truly which. I cannot say I loved them all equally, but that’s based more on my own personal preferences in story structure, style and subject, and no fault of the authors. With such a rich feast laid before me, it’s not surprising I didn’t digest them all with equal gusto. It’s still a meal I highly recommend, prepared and presented well. With plenty of tasty treats to choose from, you can decide which you prefer for yourself. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Terence Taylor (terencetaylor.com) is an award-winning children’s television writer whose work has appeared on PBS, Nickelodeon, and Disney, among many others. After years of comforting tiny tots with TV, he turned to scaring their parents. In addition to horror and science fiction short stories, Terence is author of the first two books of his Vampire Testaments trilogy, Bite Marks and Blood Pressure, and has returned to work on the conclusion of his trilogy, Past Life. He has recently appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! and the What the #@&% Is That? anthology. Find Terence on Twitter @vamptestaments or walking his neighbor’s black Labrador mix along the banks of the Gowanus Canal and surrounding environs. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: James Rabb Erika Holt | 696 words

You do an amazing job of creating atmosphere and tone, and “The Devil of Rue Moret” has an almost fairy tale feel. Is this something you consciously strive for, or is it just part of your natural style?

While I was focused on atmosphere and tone, I didn’t actively pursue a fairy tale vibe. I think that was the direct result of taking more of a spoken-word approach to the storytelling and the impact it has on the flow of the text. I wasn’t concerned with how long a sentence was or where it should end or how many times a conjunction had been used, because people don’t do that when they tell stories out loud. I also avoided a lot of specific information such as the boy’s name and the time period, which creates a sort of narrative fog over the whole thing that gives it that sense of the mystical and surreal.

Your protagonist (who I loved immediately) remains unnamed. Why did you make this choice?

I’m so pleased you enjoyed his character! The boy, like his sister, is forgotten in his world. I wanted a sense of isolation with this child, so that you have nothing to grasp onto as the reader but his qualities, his thoughts, and the suffering he has endured. It makes him more identifiable that he has nothing, not even a name, and yet he makes the best of it because so often, people have to do just that. Naming him gave him substance, and one of the greatest cruelties, to me, was withholding that.

Although you obviously write short fiction, I see you also write screenplays. Do you find that either form influences how you approach the other? Any plans to try your hand at a novel?

Moving between screenwriting and literary writing is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, because the mediums are so deceptively different from one another. Screenwriting is predominantly visual, so it is limited emotionally and psychologically to what you can show or the characters can say. Of course, you can toy with sound design, musical cues, or editing, but that isn’t really your role. Literature, on the other hand, is blind, but gives you far more freedom to explore your characters and the world around them and in that way, paint a much clearer picture, even if it isn’t explicitly visual. I think both have influenced one another, and hopefully added complexity to my writing as a result. I am currently in the process of translating my science fiction feature script One to novel form, but each step is a learning lesson, more of a crawl than a sprint. It’s a refreshing change of pace.

What draws you to the horror genre? Are there other genres that interest you?

I’m open to everything. For me, it’s more about the individual work than what genre it falls under. I do have a unique love for horror because the feeling of fear is such a rare and genuine emotion. The cause is always evolving, but the human response remains unchanged. On the other hand, it’s infuriating as a writer, because eliciting true fear in the form of entertainment becomes more difficult every day, and once you’ve been exposed to it, you’ll never react with the same level of emotion to the same stimulus. So, you have to keep inventing perpetually.

Do you have any work forthcoming that you’d like to tell our readers about?

There’s One, as mentioned, which concerns a race of immortal humanoids who turn to the first of their kind when their immortality is threatened. I’m also working on a short story called “The Fall” which I hope to finalize in the near future. On the screenwriting side of things, I’m currently pitching two features, Ark and Jil, and touching up a TV bible for a political drama called The Divide.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Nightmare assistant editor Erika Holt lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in several anthologies including Not Our Kind, What Fates Impose, and Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. She is also co-editor of two anthologies from EDGE and Absolute XPress: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring such oddities as 1920s burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Find her at erikaholt.com or on Twitter as @erikaholt. Author Spotlight: Nick Mamatas Sandra Odell | 803 words

Short and sweet, “The Spook School” does indeed satisfy. What were some of the inspirations behind the story?

I’m a Caledonophile, basically. My wife was born in Glasgow, we’ve visited, and I read the daily papers online and follow Scottish Twitter. Fine art has also shown up in a lot of my stories, which is probably because I love museums and galleries and hanging around in artist studios, but can’t draw a stick figure. One of the themes of the story is about wanting what one can’t actually have, or be.

“The Spook School” has a terrific narrative voice, humorous and dark at the same time. When you set out to write this story, how much thought did you give to the presentation, the way the story would draw the reader in, not only to the plot but to the characters?

Oh, none. By writing the story, it all came out. I had no idea what the right- turn in the middle of the story would be, or what the themes would be—someone pointed out that it was about the discontents and dangers of “authenticity” after proofreading it for me, and I said “Huh, that sounds good”—until I composed the sentences making up those scenes and concepts in the story. That sort of discovery via composition is one of the things that keep me writing short fiction.

I loved the cultural perspectives, reaching out to “The Other” to enrich your own seemingly mundane world. Some have said that the unknown reaching into our world is “The Other” of horror. What does “horror” mean to you?

Well, everyone is an “Other” to someone else, and the Other both attracts and repels. Of course, we’re also all Others to ourselves—we’re not unitary individuals who have complete self-knowledge or even self-regard. So we’re all always looking for and running from something. As far as what horror is, for all that I write it, it doesn’t mean all that much to me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, honestly. There’s a little bit of horror, potentially, in any kind of story. It’s a spice, like salt or cumin. Sometimes there’s a little, sometimes the whole dish is designed to center the spice.

You are a prolific writer; everything from poetry, to comics, to fiction, to cultural narrative. Do you find that one type of writing feeds the others, or are your various projects fairly exclusionary?

I’d say that my primary focus is the short subject—whether it’s essays or short fiction. Scripts also tend to be short, and even my novels are fairly short. The common wisdom is that a genre novel has to be at least 80,000 words long, but thirteen years after my first, I’ve never managed to write one that length, and it’s not been necessary to do so. I like little projects, and writing to theme, and mixing genres and forms, so I end up keeping very busy.

You recently gave a speech at the United Nations on the Gwangju Diary. How did you become involved in such a far-reaching seminar?

Back twenty years ago, a friend of mine, Kap Su Seol, approached me about helping him translate a book on the topic of the Gwangju Uprising, Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, which we edited and added to, giving it the name Kwangju Diary. (Since then, style guides have called for the city to be spelled with a G rather than a K.) It took a few years of us working together, but we finally got it in shape and published via a small series of the University of California press. The book fell out of print as academic books usually do, but the title sparked a small uptick in the number of books written about Gwangju and the US role in the massacre that ended the uprising. The tide of politics turned, and a lot of right-wing revisionism vis-a-vis the uprising was being put into print, so eventually we decided to grant the copyright to our translation to the May 18 Memorial Foundation in perpetuity, to guarantee that the book will stay in print forever. The seminar at the UN, which featured reporter Terry Anderson, CIA employee and former ambassador Donald Gregg, and radical Koreanist and historian Bruce Cumings, was a celebration of the book’s republication. It’s now called Gwangju Diary and will be made freely available soon. It was quite an unusual event—I spoke a bit about the diary and about Han Kang’s wonderful documentary novel Human Acts. 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. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 99 words

Coming up in September, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Silvia Moreno-Garcia (“Jade, Blood”) and Ashok K. Banker (“The Fisher Queen”), along with reprints by Chesya Burke (“He Who Takes Away the Pain”) and John Skipp (“Art is the Devil”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors and a fresh new review from Adam-Troy Castro. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

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

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey) THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey) THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey) Armored Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu) [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)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey Shift by Hugh Howey Dust by Hugh Howey Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn Sand by Hugh Howey Retrograde by Peter Cawdron Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

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