Fantasy Magazine, Issue 62 (December 2020)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 62, December 2020

FROM THE EDITORS Editorial, December 2020 Christie Yant and Arley Sorg

FICTION An Indefinite Number of Birds Kurt Hunt If These Walls Whispered What Would We Hear? Aynjel Kaye Umami Anya Ow Tiny House Living Kristiana Willsey

POETRY Things Might Be Different If We All Lived Underwater Kerry C. Byrne softening, come morning Hal Y. Zhang

NONFICTION All the King's Women: The Sewer Clown Tragedy of Beverly Marsh Meg Elison

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Kurt Hunt Anya Ow

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions, January 2021 Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard Subscriptions and Ebooks Stay Connected About the Fantasy Team

Editorial, December 2020 Christie Yant and Arley Sorg | 597 words

Fantasy Magazine #61 has been very well-received–many thanks to all of our readers, old and new. Now we bring you issue #62 co-edited by Christie Yant and Arley Sorg. Hope you like it!

• • • •

AS: So – 2020. What a year. And what an intense past few months. We’ve had so many challenges! Between elections and personal stuff–as we write this, on November 9th, we are both looking back at a lot of obstacles which are now behind us; and we are looking forward, embracing new opportunities, engaging in new discussions. CY: I think we’re all ready to put this bizarre and tumultuous year in the rear-view mirror and focus on the future and new possibilities. We’ve all had the shared trauma of the pandemic and the U.S. election, which exacerbated whatever personal challenges we’ve all faced, the underlying theme of the year has been one of constant change, instability, and fear. What I’m most hopeful about right now is the sense that change can start to mean something else to us: change for the good, a “new normal” that can be better for more people than the “old normal” was. AS: What we are doing here, with this magazine, it’s important to both of us. This work inevitably reflects who we are as people as well as our environments. And with this platform hopefully, on some cultural level, we can help move things towards those positive changes. CY: The experiences of the past year are certainly going to affect how people tell their stories, and the kinds of stories that we’re drawn to. I’m not sure what that’s going to look like, exactly, but I suspect that themes of justice, hope, and overcoming obstacles will be increasingly appealing. AS: I am absolutely excited at that thought. I’m eager to find more wonderful work; and I love the ways that stories can transform, can reframe, can surprise. Whether people respond to the year we’ve had through their writing, or tap into other aspects of their experiences in spite of the year’s best attempts to disrupt their lives, I can’t wait to see what people will show us. It all comes back to our purpose: We are determined to bring quality fiction to readers and we’re determined to do it right! CY: Here in the northern hemisphere we’re entering a pandemic winter, a time when we’re going to have to find and embrace ways to bolster our health and happiness while stuck inside and with limited contact with friends and family. One of the things that has always given me comfort is literature, especially reading something written from a fresh perspective. I hope that our readers find little pockets of enjoyment in Fantasy Magazine— find a comfy chair, a blanket, something to sip on, and enjoy the issue!

• • • • In this issue we have Kurt Hunt’s touching tale of two people struggling to connect in “An Indefinite Number of Birds”; friendship and love in Anjel Kaye’s moving and subtle “If These Walls Whispered What Would We Hear?”; Kerry C. Byrne’s beautifully imagined poem on communication and other-ness, “Things Might Be Different if We All Lived Underwater”; Hay Y. Zhang’s reflective poem “softening, come morning”; a vivid story of survival and sacrifice, “Umami” by Anya Ow; Kristiana Willsey’s surreal and captivating “Tiny House Living”; and a biting essay from Meg Elison called “All the King’s Women”. Enjoy!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Arley Sorg is an associate editor at Locus Magazine, where he’s been on staff since 2014. He joined the Lightspeed family in 2014 to work on the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, starting as a slush reader. He eventually worked his way up to associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He also reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate. Christie Yant writes and edits science fiction and fantasy on the central coast of California, where she lives with a dancer, an editor, a dog, and four cats. She worked as an assistant editor for Lightspeed Magazine from its launch in 2010 through 2015, and, in 2014 she edited the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed, which won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. In 2019 she co-edited (with Hugh Howey and Gary Whitta) Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against, an anthology benefitting the ACLU, and co-edited The Dystopia Triptych series of anthologies (with Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams). She is also a consulting editor for Tor.com’s line of novellas, and her own fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, and Wired.com, and has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow).

An Indefinite Number of Birds Kurt Hunt | 1523 words

Stanley began watching birds on the day he panicked and asked JD how much he really loved him, and JD responded, “Oh for fuck’s sake, Stanley. How many birds are in the sky? I don’t know—a bunch!” Stanley couldn’t get the question out of his head. By week’s end, he’d bought a birdwatching guide and an embarrassingly expensive pair of Leica binoculars. He spent a tense Sunday morning ready for the birds to awaken and sing the day’s gossips and confessions, watching and ticking things off in his journal as dawn grew from a hint to a bloody smear to proper daylight. His expectation was symphonic. The reality, sitting on the stoop in front of their fat brick apartment building, was subdued: two mourning doves mindlessly echoing each other, and one ill-looking pigeon walking silent circles around the municipal trash can across the street. Stanley counted and recounted, the kid that ran out of flower petals at “he loves me not,” fighting the irrationality of his disappointment. “You okay, babe?” JD leaned out the window. “Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be in in a sec.” Inwardly, Stanley cursed love, the father of superstition, and, in the long tradition of bouquet catchers and mistletoe hangers and lonely souls praying to so many gods to please, please, let me find love, let me be worthy of love, he counted the birds again.

• • • •

The next morning, the doves were quiet. The pigeon was dead.

• • • •

Weeks passed, much the same, and winter came. Grim and bare-skied, it mocked Stanley’s daily ritual. He grew more terse and withdrawn. JD continued making breakfasts and leaving love notes, oblivious to the ebbs and flows of the birds, the significance of each entry in the journal. Some days—the plentiful—they laughed and leaned against each other over coffee. But most days Stanley said nothing, or went straight back to bed after birdwatching. More time passed, much the same.

• • • •

“A week in Tucson and a week in the Chiricahuas?” “Tickets right here.” JD slid them—always so elegant—from the inside pocket of his jacket and passed them over. “Also, the travel agent gave me two words he said would get you pumped.” He smiled and leaned close, his lips against Stanley’s ear. “Elegant trogon.” “Elegant… uh…” JD leaned back and blushed. “Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s more specialized? Shit. Um, there’s like dozens of hummingbird species and hawks and… lots of birds. It’s like Mecca for birdwatchers, I guess.” But as JD smiled, Stanley remembered the question—how many birds are in the sky?— and the empty clouds whispered to him you are not special, and the whisper became a voice within him saying he doesn’t love you; he just pities you, and that voice became a scream. “Are you making fun of me?” He was yelling. He could hear his voice cranked an octave too high—the voice his first boyfriend called faggy. JD looked like he’d been slapped. “I just… Jesus, Stanley.” His face hardened. “I’m trying to do something nice for you, and I thought ‘hey, birds, he likes those, God knows why.’ And I thought a vacation would be good because you’ve been stomping around like a little bitch all winter and—” “There it is.” Stanley threw the tickets. “It’s a good thing you’re so nice, otherwise people might think you’re a fucking prick.” He had to yell the last few words because JD had already walked out and slammed the door behind him.

• • • •

When JD returned that night, they hugged without saying a word. Stanley struggled to keep the tears in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course I want to go. Thank you. I’m just sorry I….” JD’s arms tightened around him, anticipatory. “I’m so sorry I’m me.” They both pulled back and looked at each other, and for a moment Stanley was sure JD was going to lecture him for apologizing, like he did last time. But he didn’t. He just kissed him, and Stanley kissed back. They made it to the bed—barely. It had been months since they’d had sex, and Stanley lost himself in it, certain this was the last time.

• • • •

Tucson was warm and gorgeous and doom-laden. The vacation feeling had worn bare before the flight even landed, and Stanley only grew quieter and more tense throughout the week as the desert persisted in its emptiness, and the sand chided, ingrate. His journal remained closed. “Sorry, babe,” said JD. He sounded exhausted. “But the mountains… guaranteed action in the mountains.” But the mountains were the same. “It’s weird,” said their tour guide, a bleach-toothed woman half their age. “They’re usually really drawn to the saguaro this time of year? And, like, I guess they’re not right now?” “Well,” said JD. “It’s beautiful, anyway.” He gave Stanley a little hug from the side while Stanley tried to ignore the clamor growing within him. How many birds are in the sky? As many as you deserve. How many birds are in the sky? None.

• • • •

Stanley was jabbing at a time management game on his phone when JD said it again: “It’s so beautiful.” The metal legs of Stanley’s chair scraped against the stone patio as he turned away from the view. “It’s dead.” “Oh come on, Stanley. It’s just quiet. I like quiet.” When they’d met, Stanley had been sitting alone at a party reading a Chuck Klosterman book he’d pulled off the host’s shelf. Then a soft voice: “excuse me.” He’d looked up to dark eyes. Then that smile, that smile, for the first time—it actually made him a little dizzy, sparked a glow in him like a porch light welcoming a traveler home—and JD said, “I’m going to have to ask you to keep it down.” Stanley smiled in spite of himself, a bit of that tucked-away glow resurging. “Quiet’s alright,” he conceded. “I guess. But it’s barren out there.” “Are you kidding me? There’s yucca and snakes and, like, little fuzzy desert mice and stuff. And a bunch of hummingbirds.” “Allegedly.” JD shot him a look but didn’t slow down. “And they’re all living these secret lives, is the point, right there in front of us. But we can’t see. They’re digging secret little tunnels and building secret little nests. It’s like another planet, and we’re so lucky to catch even the smallest glimpse.” Something scurried briefly in the darkness alongside the house, as if to punctuate JD’s point. The glow in Stanley grew, was a reflection of the sunset or a premonition of dawn. “You could spend the rest of your life out here,” said JD. “Just watching it all. And find new things to love every single day that had always been there. Just… hiding. Afraid to be seen or heard.” The sun had gone, the sky a deepening red. Stanley looked away from it into the night, toward the mysterious sounds, the secret world. Did the desert creatures see something similar in him, peering in from the darkness? Did they see his glow, warm and kindled… a thing of gradient colors that couldn’t be captured in words—a thing that was only itself? And did they say to each other look, in their strange languages, look how strange, how beautiful? And what would he see, if he were in their place?

• • • • Stanley woke to the sound of glass cracking. “What—” “Oh shit!” JD’s voice came from the other room. A high rattling noise shook the rental house. Stanley lurched out of bed, fell to the ground in a tangle of sheet, and scrambled into the living room. The noise became a dull reverberation like the sound of underwater or underground, or like hearing the blood in his ears, the heart in his chest, in the silence of an insomniac night. The first thing he saw: JD, hands covering his face except for one eye. The second thing: a crack in the sliding door with a few stray feathers stuck in it. And finally: the birds. A swarm of them, landing on the patio and launching, flying thick as smoke, all sizes and shapes and colors. Stanley raced to the window and stared. Hundreds of them, or thousands. Impossible to count, the way they weaved and blurred into each other. High above, gray hawks orbited and screamed. JD joined him at the window. “Well. . .” He laughed, gesturing helplessly. “You wanted to see birds. Ta da!” “Where did they come from?” They stood together, Stanley’s hands pressed against the window, JD’s hands loose around Stanley’s waist. “Jesus,” said JD. “How many do you think there are?” Stanley shivered; his muscles unknotted, the glow like an oven within him. Morning light made everything soft, and Stanley was struck by how beautiful JD was. His eyes drifted to a burst of color, a smear of greens and whites spiraling up, up—elegant trogons, cyclonic, their feathers shining like armor, circling thick and endless, pulling his breath up with them as they rose. How many birds are in the sky? Stanley laughed and cried and hugged JD. “I have no idea,” he said. “Enough.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kurt Hunt was formed in the swamps and abandoned gravel pits of post-industrial Michigan. His short fiction has been published at Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. He is also a co-author of Archipelago, a collaborative serial fantasy adventure available now on Amazon.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight If These Walls Whispered What Would We Hear? Aynjel Kaye | 735 words

The first time Robin spent the night at my house was the first sleepover I had that there wasn’t some kind of complaint from under the eaves or deep in the walls. We were eight years old and Robin slept in a leopard-print sleeping bag that filled the space on the floor between my bed and the wall. “You still sleep with a nightlight.” And Robin’s tone wasn’t snotty and mean the way Tina’s had been. There was no unspoken baby at the end. “Yeah.” I rolled over and looked off the edge of the bed. “Don’t turn it off.” The bulb wasn’t too bright to keep me from sleeping, even without the plastic bunny cover it had once upon a time. Robin nodded. “I won’t.” In the long silence that followed Robin’s words, I held my breath and waited for Robin to turn it off anyway. Tina had, after all, and the house had been full of terror and nightmares. That was the only time Tina spent the night. Robin’s hands stayed in the sleeping bag. I breathed again and my eyelids drooped while the house whispered chaos and dreams through the whine of electricity in the walls, and the gurgle of water in the pipes, and the hum of the box-fan in the window as it dragged salt-misty air in from outside. Robin said, “You have a fish on your wall,” and I was awake all over again. I looked from Robin’s dark curls to the indentation in the wood. Robin’s fingertips hovered a breath away from the wall, the nightlight showing just how messily I’d applied the hot pink nail polish. I pressed my lips together, could kind of see how Robin got a fish. It’s just a knot, my mom had said; the old house had a lot of them. “It’s not a fish. It’s an eye.” The white paint over the wood rippled, like the flutter of eyelashes or the dreaming flick of my gramma’s wrinkled eyelid, as if it knew we were talking about it. Robin tucked back into the sleeping bag, nodded. “Is your house afraid of the dark?” I swallowed and whispered, “Yes.” “So’s mine.” Sleepiness made Robin’s voice softer and a moment later, a snore—a real snore—came from the floor. The paint and the wood settled, safe in the yellowed glow from the nightlight. “G’night, house,” I whispered. Ancient dreams lulled me to sleep.

• • • •

We were inseparable.

• • • • The last time Robin spent the night at my house, we’d both graduated from high school and Robin would be leaving the next day. Fall had crept up on us faster than I wanted. The leopard-print sleeping bag was on the floor, the glow of the nightlight showing the worn patches and frayed stitching along one side of the zipper. We were both in my twin bed. Robin was the little spoon. “Stay,” I whispered against Robin’s buzzed scalp. “Come with me,” came Robin’s equally fervent plea. I’d known the house for eight years longer than I’d known Robin, and Robin couldn’t stay any more than I could leave. Robin rolled over, never once drawing away from me. Lips right against mine, Robin whispered, “One last time? So I don’t forget you?” The storm that had threatened earlier in the day rolled in, thunder rattling windows and rumbling through us as our lips touched. Lightning turned my room impossibly bright and the house whispered our secrets through my head, a scrapbook of every moment we’d spent together, etching those memories heart- deep into my brain. And I licked and kissed those secrets over Robin’s skin, traced them along Robin’s ribcage, over hips, belly, thighs, and then sighed them into Robin’s mouth before we fell limp, legs and sheets tangled, Robin settling back to be the little spoon again. “Love you,” Robin whispered. “You can always come back,” I whispered, and I don’t know if I was awake or asleep. “If you need a home, or just a hideaway. You can always come back. I’ll be here for you. We’ll be here.” Rain battered the glass of the open window, soaked the wispy curtain that did nothing to block the storm. Robin clung gently to my hand. “G’night, sweetheart.” I pressed a kiss against the back of Robin’s head. The house sighed. “G’night, house.” Ancient dreams slithered over us to protect us from the wind and the rain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aynjel Kaye is a queer bioluminescent deep-sea monster in a human suit, lured ashore by the promise of chocolate lava cake and fancy cocktails. A graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, zir work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Polyphony 5 (Wheatland Press, 2005), So Fey (Lethe Press, 2009), and Daughters of Frankenstein (Lethe Press, 2015). Zie makes zir home near the overcast coastline of Washington State, where zie wrangles computer issues by day and gleefully stalks pixelated prey when the sun goes down. If you listen carefully on a moonless night, you might catch zir whispering strange stories about love and other slippery, slithery things into the void. Find zir online at digital- delirium.org and on Twitter as @aynjelfyre, where zie often grumbles about stories oozing beyond the bounds of short fiction word counts. Umami Anya Ow | 4576 words

“I have a favour to ask,” said the fushi to the chef, “and in exchange, I will grant you a wish.” “What sort of favour?” Yun San asked. She wiped sweating palms down her brown hanfu and tried to show a brave face. Thick mist had whisked her away from the back of her restaurant into the wilderness. Even were she thirty years younger and somehow able to outrun her captor, she had no idea where she was. The fushi huffed. Against the old forest, crowned in redwood and golden ginkgo, it towered over Yun San, twice as tall and thrice as wide, its muscular legs and tusked mouth cuffed with flowing white fur. Ivory and jade horns arched from its brow, streaks of pale light pulsing in stripes along its coppery coat and its dense cloud of a tail. Yun San had seen paintings and heard stories, but up close, a fushi did not look like a lion or a dog. It did not give out the animal stink of a great beast. It smelled of crushed grass and jasmine leaves, and its dark brown eyes looked uncomfortably human. “Your kind has been hunting mine,” the fushi said. It gestured at an old scar high on its hind flank with a paw. “You seek our bones for stock, our meat for braises, our manes for candies. You claim that our carcasses give you luck, but what it gives you is status.” “Luck and privilege are often the same, and status is another word for both,” Yun San said, with a guilty look at the fushi’s thick mane. She had eaten fushi candy only a few weeks ago for good luck, on her 62nd birthday. “What do you want?” “I want your kind to stop trapping us in our mountains, to stop carving us apart alive. I want humans to stop kidnapping our young to fatten for slaughter. Be grateful that this is what I want and not revenge.” “Why don’t you want revenge?” “Because the more dangerous we are, the more valuable we become as prey.” The fushi lowered its head, looking keenly at Yun San. “Can you help me?” “What is your name?” Yun San asked. “Call me Jin.” “Jin, I am only a chef. How can I help you? I don’t have the power to outlaw hunting.” “The year after the Emperor’s grandfather outlawed phoenix hunting, the last of the phoenixes died braised in wine and wolfberries, in a crowning dish served on his birthday,” Jin said with a snarl. “I do not trust the Emperor or his laws. Instead, I challenge the most famous chef in these lands. I want you to make us irrelevant. To make fushi stew, braise, and candy without fushi, and make it better.” “A challenge, hm?” Yun San said, amused. “You’d appeal to my pride?” “You were indifferent to the offer of a wish and to a veiled threat. Perhaps pride is all you have left, old mother.” “I’m not your mother.” Yun San thought things over as she rubbed her aching back. “To do this for you, I will need a sacrifice, freely given. I will myself need to make fushi stew, fushi braises, and fushi candy. I need to make the best possible version of each, so that I may understand what I need to defeat.” The fushi fell silent, staring keenly at Yun San. She forced herself to hold its gaze. Slowly, it nodded. “Give me two days, and I will bring you what you need.”

• • • •

Whispers followed the stranger who walked into the Jade Treasure Restaurant, shedding silver with the indifference of the unimaginably wealthy and demanding an audience with the chef. In the kitchen, Yun San cut her restaurant manager’s hushed description short by jointing the goat on the chopping board before her with more force than it deserved. The manager winced but stayed firm. The Imperial Censor was due to visit within the hour, so could Chef handle the rich young lady, please? Yun San washed her hands, cursed, and marched out of the kitchen, trailed by the manager as she mopped Yun San’s brow and tried to neaten her hair. The Jade Treasure girded two gardens in stone and slate, one of lush bamboo, one of verdant lotus. Lunch hour in the main restaurant meant gridlocked tables and a line of hopeful patrons out the door, staff circling through the crowd with trays of pork and prawn dumplings, fried radish cakes, roast pork wrapped sleekly in white noodles, braised stuffed beancurd, stewed tripe and more. Black-jacketed captains cut through the choreography with pots of hot tea, taking orders, making jokes. The private rooms were quieter, refined affairs where the restaurant plied the wealthy and the troublesome with flattery and alcohol. Most days, the difference was slight. Once shown to the stranger’s room, Yun San’s usual script fled unsaid. “Jin?” Jin inclined her head. How could the others have mistaken her for human? In this guise, the fushi wore the smooth skin, moon face, and red bow mouth of a classical beauty, draped in blue silk and silver embroidery. Yet she did not hold herself with the usual calculated grace of a woman of wealth or good birth. Instead, Jin gave off the same furious, raw vitality as she had in the forest. A rosewood chest sat by her feet, as high as her knees. “How did you know it was me?” Jin asked. “You didn’t change your eyes.” Yun San began to say more and hesitated. Jin’s left sleeve looked far too formless. “What happened to your arm?” “In here.” Jin gestured at the chest. “Along with some of my mane and one of my horns.” Yun San sank into one of the chairs as her knees gave out. “You . . . ” “How did you think I was going to find you what you wanted? Besides, what is a small matter like this to me, if you can help me save my kind?” “I don’t know if I can! I can only try.” Jin smiled, a smile no less intimidating in a form without tusks and horns. “So, try. And I would like to see it. To smell it. To taste.” Yun San jerked back against her chair. “Taste?” “Who else has more of a right to it than me? It’s my flesh.” “I’ll need time. I’ve never worked with the ingredient before, I—” “I’m a divine beast,” Jin said, stretching out her remaining hand in an expansive gesture. “Time describes the wealth I have. I can only hope that I’ve placed my trust in the right person.” It took Yun San three attempts to get to her feet. “Wait here.” Her most trusted staff sealed the chest and moved it to the coldroom. Back in her kitchen, Yun San sank against a workbench and wiped a hand over her face. She’d spent four decades compressed within a restaurant kitchen’s chaos, three of that as its lord and master, and she’d never once doubted herself until now. Born to an unbroken line of women who ruled their kingdoms of cast iron and fire and steam, Yun San grew naturally toward the flavours she had learned to shape the moment she had been old enough to knead rice flour by her grandmothers’ side. She drank the mélange of scallion oil and frying pork lardons and rice and more, listened to the line chefs shouting at each other in three dialects. It steadied her. Even before the restaurant, the chaos of a busy kitchen had always been in her blood. Jin sniffed the air in loud gusts as Yun San set down the steamer basket before her, pouring black vinegar into a shallow dish striped with julienned ginger. Yun San opened the basket in a flourish to reveal the pale dumplings nestled within, belching steam over the rosewood table. “Xiaolongbao. Careful, it’s hot. You’re meant to dip it into the black vinegar and—” Yun San flinched as Jin picked one up with her bare hand and popped it into her mouth. Jin swallowed. She frowned. “I’ll get you some cold water,” Yun San said, setting down the tray. A deep rumbling purr stilled her next step. Jin closed her eyes, a tongue too wide and rough for her mouth rasping her lips in pleasure. “Is that magic?” Jin asked, craning her neck to peer closely at the dumplings. “Magic? Oh, you mean the soup filling? No, that’s a matter of wrapping solidified meat aspic along with the meat.” “No,” Jin said, licking her lips again. “The taste. Is that why your people named this after the dragonfolk? The burst of richness, the textures, the paper-thin dumpling skin . . . a dish worthy of the Dragon King himself.” “No, no,” Yun San said, laughing. “It’s just the same phonetic sound. ‘Basket,’ not ‘dragon.’ ‘Little basket bun.’” Jin picked up the next and dipped it into vinegar, popping it into her mouth. Yun San couldn’t help her reflexive wince, but Jin appeared immune to scalding. The fushi ate all eight dumplings in quick succession and lashed her fingers clean with her tongue. “I did not know that humans knew such magic,” she said. “It isn’t magic; it’s just a cooking technique.” “What is magic but a technique that consumes the senses? You are a master of your form: I was right to come to you. Now make me more,” Jin said with delight. “More.

• • • •

“A veiled tasting. One made with fushi, the others without.” Yun San gestured at the identical portions of soup, braise, and candies. The ladlefuls of clear soup within white porcelain bowls slick with oil showed only faint variations of bronze. The cuts of braised meat settled between ears of mushrooms and bright wolfberries, shards of fungus and chunks of fish maw. The candies resembled delicate spheres braided out of fine white hair, dusted with red sugar. “Are you asking me to guess which contains my flesh?” Jin asked, smiling toothily. “They were all made the same way, with allowances for the length of cooking depending on the ingredients. I’m asking you which tastes the best.” Jin tossed back the first bowl. Tilting her head, she set it aside. Jin purred at the second, licking the bowl clean. The third she sniffed at suspiciously for a while before drinking, and at the fourth, her mouth parted wide, tongue curling against tusks that pressed briefly through the skin of her cheek before receding. She did the same with the other samples, savouring some, frowning at others. Sucking her fingers clean at the end, Jin set aside some of the plates and bowls in a row. “Qilin used to be a common sight,” Yun San said as she sat down, rubbing her back wearily. “People liked to boil down their spinal fins with chicken, ginger, sea slug, and abalone stock. Poachers sliced off the fins of the qilin they caught and left them to bleed to death. The stock gave the soup flavour; the fins did little for anything but the texture, easily replaced.” “Now the qilin are gone,” Jin said. She looked at the bowls she selected, curling her lip. “Those were mine, weren’t they?” “I chose the cuts of meat closest to the taste of your flesh. For the candies, several alternatives to your mane. And yet.” “And yet,” Jin said, picking up the bowl she had licked and licking it again along the rim, “the soup and braise are luxurious without being overwhelming, the aftertaste subtle yet bright, the fragrance of rain and woodsmoke layered unmistakably over the spices. The candy is crispier than the others but melts on the tongue, leaving only a bittersweet regret that you cannot have more.” “You should have been a poet,” Yun San said, startled that a fushi had plucked the words themselves from her mind. “What makes you think I’m not?” Jin set down the bowl. “You’re troubled.” “Can fushi read minds?” “We have good eyes. What could so trouble someone who has made such works of art?” “I’ve tried to find a substitute for the meat in goat or lamb, in buffalo or the black pork of the riverlands. There’s nothing like the taste of fushi.” Worse, there was nothing like the taste of the fushi she had just prepared. Yun San played to the particular flavour of the meat as she’d cooked, selecting only spices and accompanying ingredients that would accentuate rather than overpower the taste. “Are you trying to tell me that I’ve given you a limb for nothing?” Jin’s voice cut into a low and rumbling snarl. “I’d like to try something that might reach the same result you seek. Can you ask your kind to hide for a while?” Jin smiled bitterly. “If it were a simple matter of finding a good place to hide, I would not need to lose a limb. We will survive the way we have survived—barely. Do what you must, human. If you cheat me, I’ll eat your arm.”

• • • •

A crowd gathered in the street outside the Jade Treasure as the fushi bodies piled up, some frozen, some fresh: every carcass available for purchase in the Imperial capital. They numbered six. Five adults, one with a mane twice as long as Jin’s, with pitted horns and broken teeth. One cub, its hind leg mangled into pulp. Jin’s hand trembled as she bent to stroke its cheek, matted with dried blood. “Anyone you know?” Yun San murmured. Jin ignored the question. “This must have cost you.” “My children are grown and have their own lives; they don’t need my money. Besides, it’s just money.” Nothing like a limb, given freely. Jin straightened from the cub. “What are you doing next?” “Xuan!” Yun San called her gawking restaurant manager over. “The lamp oil.” “Chef, are you sure?” Xuan said, though she handed Yun San the first earthenware pot. The crowd gasped as Yun San drenched the cub in oil. Angry murmurs rippled through those watching as Yun San soaked each carcass and took a torch from Xuan. Jin hunched down, her hand curling into a claw, spoiling for a fight. “People of Yin’an!” Yun San called. “Why do we eat fushi?” “For good luck,” yelled a man from the back. “Old mother, if you don’t want luck, give it to me.” The crowd laughed, peppered by shouts of “Me! Or me!” They pressed closer, but the bouncers from the Jade Restaurant and the bulkier line chefs filed out and formed a human cordon, armed with heavy cleavers. “Wang da’ren,” Yun San said, spying one of her regulars in the crowd. “When did you last have fushi?” The merchant blushed at being the sudden focus of attention. “Last week. Madam Yun, you know I’d eat it at your restaurant, but you don’t have it on the menu.” “Did anything lucky happen to you since then? Luckier than normal?” The merchant stroked his long beard. “I’ve had a couple of good business deals.” “Would that be because of the fushi, or because of your acumen and connections?” Yun San asked. “That . . . well.” Wang coughed. Yun San called out more in the crowd by name, asking them the same questions, with similar retorts. She had known these people for years, known their friends and competitors both, understood how to flatter them. All would admit to eating fushi for luck, but to admit to eating it for status would be crass. “Watch closely,” Yun San said. The crowd rumbled in dismay as she set fire to the carcasses one by one. Oily smoke rose from blackening fur and flesh. The frozen one refused to catch at first, then burst into black flame. Startled, Yun San took a step back as the others also began to burn with a ravenous, pitch-dark fire that spat a choking stench of rotting flesh over the street. The mass of people retreated with a collective gasp. “Were those poisoned?” Wang called at her from the crowd. “Madam Yun, be careful!” Poison! People pushed at each other to get further away, jostling and shouting at each other. Yun San stared at the flame as she tossed the torch over the carcasses. Even the bones burned to ash, leaving an astringent haze in their wake. “Not poison,” Yun San said, “just cursed. The fushi are divine beasts, why wouldn’t they curse the bodies of their dead? You who have eaten fushi, think closely: when was the last time you met misfortune?” Wang paled. “It’s true! Yesterday, I fell from my sedan chair,” he said. The others chimed in, recalling accidents, deals gone wrong, illnesses. “You have all tasted fushi made from cursed fushi. Now taste mine,” Yun San said. At her gesture, serving staff emerged from her restaurant with trays of candies. She beckoned her regulars over to sample bowls of soup. “Madam Yun,” Wang said, wide-eyed, “this is like no fushi stew I’ve ever eaten, but it is fushi.” Yun San bowed to the crowd. “I have enough for one last performance, a feast for one. Xuan will handle inquiries.” With another bow, she retreated into the restaurant with Jin as the merchants converged excitedly on Xuan. “The fire was yours?” Yun San asked Jin once they were alone. “A simple trick.” Jin’s skin strained against her teeth, sharp canines distending her soft mouth. Anger burned in her eyes. “How did feeding those greedy merchants help my cause?” “Greed speaks loudly in the human world,” Yun San said with a wry smile, “and as a chef, I understand it well.”

• • • •

The Chief Minister of the Imperial Court smiled warmly as Yun San greeted him outside the private room, his gaze flicking from her to Jin and back. “Madam Yun. I hear you’ve created yet another marvel.” “You’re too kind,” Yun said, bowing as deeply as her creaky back could allow. “A feast worthy of your Excellency, I hope. It’s been more than a year since you’ve graced this restaurant with your presence.” “His Majesty the Emperor—long may he live—keeps all his Ministers busy,” said the Chief Minister, pulling at his long white beard. “And who is this lovely young lady with you?” “The procurer of the meat behind tonight’s feast. She’ll like to speak to you after you’ve eaten,” Yun said. Jin smiled with all her teeth, saying nothing. “A rather irregular business for a young lady, but I suppose that can be arranged. Bring the dishes to the door, and my taster will bring them in. There was an incident last month—not that I don’t trust you—but there are new rules for us Ministers now.” Yun San bowed. As they walked out of earshot, she said, “Please try not to be rude to the Chief Minister when you speak to him after. Even if you might think that he deserves it.” “I’ll think about it,” Jin said, smiling her sharp-toothed smile, “if you make me some of those soup dumplings while you’re working.” “This is an important cook. Should you be distracting me?” Yun San asked, in a good enough mood to be playful. “You closed your whole restaurant to feed one man’s ego. You can afford to be distracted.” Yun San chuckled. “Ha! I’ve never met anyone who thought my dumplings were worth more than the Chief Minister’s favour. I’m going to miss you when this is over.” “It isn’t over yet. Cook. But first, dumplings.” Yun San settled Jin in a disused part of the kitchen and instructed her junior chefs to ply Jin with dumplings. Rolling up her sleeves, Yun San picked up her cleaver and waved her staff to their positions. Xuan returned with a pot of tea, looking harried and asking one of the staff to change it for another blend. “His Excellency didn’t like the tea? What did we serve him?” Yun San asked. “The Jade Blossom blend, his usual favourite,” Xuan said. She shook her head. “He asked for the gold-tipped Tieguanyin instead.” “Doesn’t he always complain that it’s not worth the money?” The Chief Minister had to be in a good mood. Hopefully, they were about to make it better.

• • • •

“The Minister will see you both now,” Xuan said. Yun San yawned. “That took a while. I thought he would never be done with dessert.” She got slowly to her feet as Jin popped the last piece of candy into her mouth, wiping her sugar- dusted fingers on her clothes. The red sugar disappeared the moment it touched the fabric, but Xuan didn’t appear to notice, clearing her throat politely. “Chef, you’re old friends with the Minister, but Lady Jin . . . ” “She’s earned the right to an audience—more than either of us. Tell everyone to take the rest of the day off. I’ll pay all of you a bonus tomorrow.” As they walked back to the private room, Jin said, “Now what?” “I’d prefer that you don’t bite his head off. That’d probably get all of us killed.” Jin frowned at her. “Until I pay my favour to you, I will not do anything that will cause you harm.” “It was a joke, fushi. Do you want me to speak, or would you prefer to?” “Tell him another story of greed,” Jin growled, “and if it’s not enough, we will see.” Guards patted them both down before allowing them into the private room. A pale- cheeked man in a cowled dark robe sat at the rosewood table, two guards in scale armour at his back and the Chief Minister standing respectfully by his side. Even before they were introduced, Yun San sank to her knees and kowtowed. “Your Majesty! This humble servant is unworthy of your presence. May you live for a thousand years.” The Emperor glanced at Jin, who, to Yun San’s dull horror, stared him coldly in the eye. “Show your respect to the Son of Heaven,” the Chief Minister said with a quelling stare. “Who do you think you are?” Jin laughed. “Your Majesty,” Yun San began, fear prickling down her back in a cold sweat. “Lady Jin is—” “Who do I think I am?” Jin said with a mocking smile. She stepped back, ripping the sash off her waist and shrugging off her outer robes. The Emperor stiffened, even as his guards took a step forward with their hands on their blades. “Who do you think I am?” Mist poured out over the floor, waist-deep where Yun San knelt. Three great paws flexed on the dark tiles, Jin’s laughter shaking the ground under Yun San’s knees. She scrambled to her feet as the guards drew their blades. “Wait, please,” Yun San said, spreading her arms. “The dishes that you ate. Here is the source!” The Chief Minister gasped. The Emperor’s gaze flicked to Jin’s missing paw. “Explain yourself,” he said. “Your Majesty, the fushi dishes that you had—were they any different from those you’ve had before?” Yun San asked. “They were better. Sweeter, richer, more complex even than the dishes made by the Imperial kitchens. You are a talented chef,” the Emperor said. “I would not dare to be compared to the Imperial kitchens. The reason lay not within my ability but in the source,” Yun San said, gesturing at Jin behind her. The Emperor sniffed. “Surely you don’t expect me to believe your story about curses.” “Your Majesty in his wisdom has divined the true meaning of my words. There is no curse. This is the difference: the meat I used was a gift from a divine beast, given willingly.” The Emperor looked at Jin, then at Yun San. “Why would a fushi do such a thing?” he asked. “To allow me to make a dish worthy of the Son of Heaven,” Yun San said, bowing deeply. “Such that a bargain might be made with a man of power.” “What bargain do you seek?” the Emperor asked, amused. “I did not think that the fushi could speak, let alone strike bargains.” Jin let out a loud snort. Before she could say something biting, Yun San said, “Your Majesty, my grandmother used to describe the flight of the phoenixes over the river valleys in winter. She said that on a clear night, they looked like stars rising, like bright cherry flowers blooming in the sky.” “There are no more phoenixes,” said the Chief Minister. “My uncle talked of the qilin that stalked through the bamboo groves, once friendly enough with travellers that they would bow in exchange for offerings. Of the great tigers that stalked through the deeper forests like tongues of living flame, the lords of their domain. Of the white rhinoceroses of the plains, of the pink dolphins of the rivers, of the star-shelled tortoises in the fields.” The Emperor looked grave. “Those are gone as well. I am aware.” Yun San knelt. “Your Majesty, you may have deemed the fushi’s gift worthy, but living things should not need to be deemed worthy of human regard to be worthy of our respect. You do not ask the jade baubles in your palace to justify their value. Why do we ask living treasures to prove themselves worthy of our protection? Your Majesty, I ask you to protect not just the divine beasts, but the others that are vanishing under your care. Is feeding our greed worth the sacrifice of all that is strange and beautiful in the world?” “Get up.” The Emperor glanced up at Jin. “You and your kind are welcome to the Imperial parklands. There are deer aplenty.” “To become part of your menagerie? No,” Jin said, curling her lip in disdain. “To become one of my advisors,” said the Emperor, “or do you still trust people to govern your affairs?” “All we ask is to be left alone, but I see your point,” Jin conceded. “I’ll issue a decree when I return to the Palace.” The Emperor said, rising to his feet. “Thank you both for the meal.”

• • • •

“I’d be careful going to the parklands,” Yun San said after the Emperor and his entourage left as discreetly as they had arrived. “This Emperor is known to have a love of the arts, and doesn’t like to kill, but he’s a lazy man who leaves most matters of governance to his ministers. The Palace is a dangerous place. This won’t be easy.” “Few things worth doing are easy. I consider your half of the bargain paid. What do you want in return?” Jin asked. “You gave me your arm, and I didn’t technically do what you asked. Do you still want to grant me a wish?” “Why not? I expect no one to work for free.” “I’m an old woman with no real interest in the world but food. Tell you what. Sneak me samples of the dishes from the Imperial kitchens now and then, and I’ll count us even.” Jin chuckled. “Small wonder that you understand greed.” “It served us well so far, hasn’t it?” “So it has.” Jin nuzzled Yun San carefully against her back, shifting her a step. “Thank you.” “Don’t. The cost, the risk, the consequences, that’s all still yours to bear. All I can do is wish you luck.” “Sometimes luck is all we need,” Jin said. She bared her tusks into a toothy grin. “Now, is there more of that candy?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anya Ow is the author of The Firebird’s Tale and Cradle and Grave, and is an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Daily SF, Uncanny, the 2019 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror anthology and more. Born in Singapore, Anya has a Bachelor of Laws from Melbourne University and a Bachelor of Applied Design from Billy Blue College of Design. She lives in Melbourne with her two cats, working as a graphic designer, illustrator, and chief studio dog briber for a creative agency. She can be found at www.anyasy.com or on twitter @anyasy. To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Tiny House Living Kristiana Willsey | 1402 words

After years of roommates and sublets and shared bathrooms, other people’s beard trimmings in the sink and other people’s leftovers leaking a brown film into the refrigerator, Jude moved into a walnut shell. She went in feet first, arms locked overhead in a butterfly stroke, letting all the air out of her chest in one long exhale like a spelunker. Inside, it was snug. Cozy. It didn’t have laundry or parking or a proper kitchen, only a hotplate on a fold-down shelf, but Jude liked the warm brown curve of the walls, the way they met overhead like the nave of a chapel. She liked that there was only room for a few things, so everything in her walnut shell was the best of its kind: a rattan bed with a blush silk coverlet, tangerines in a silver bowl, a scrap of Persian rug in faded reds and golds, a single bone-white plate. There weren’t any windows, of course, so she hung a private galaxy of string lights, which she started to like better than the stars outside, since these were hers alone. She liked that she could reach everything in her room from her bed, that she could see all of her beautiful things together wherever she was. She was happy there. Five days a week, Jude wrote marketing copy for a company that sold discounts on wine tastings and cardio strip classes and microdermabrasion. She learned to do a lot with a little space. An email subject heading was like a haiku, concise and arresting: “Don’t Sleep on These Mattress Deals!” “Eyes on the Prize! Half off Lasik Surgery!” “New Year, Less You! 80% Off Cryotherapy Body Sculpting!” People spent their money differently now, the company asserted. People wanted experiences, not things. It was all about investing in yourself. It wasn’t a bad job, and once a month there was a sheet cake for everyone’s birthday. But after a while, it started to be too much. There were too many emails, and too many deals, and everyone started filtering their subscriptions. A perfect subject heading didn’t matter if it was shunted to the spam folder. Jude’s position was “redefined.” An artisanal coffee bar opened near her walnut shell. “You could ask for more,” her coworker said, over undressed salads in the wan fluorescent light of the break room. Jude grimaced. “I don’t need more,” she said. “It’s a trap. There’s always going to be people with more than you and people with less than you. Asking for more is what makes people unhappy.” She picked the tomatoes out of her salad with a plastic fork. “I have everything I need.”

• • • •

So Jude moved into a hazelnut shell. She went in inch by inch, hitching and writhing like a hare being swallowed by a snake. The hazelnut shell had no room for her bed, so she slept upright in a wingback chair covered in gold plush, loved bald like the Velveteen Rabbit. At night she wrapped herself in a gray cashmere blanket with a deep fringe, and in the morning a cream linen robe with a red sash. She found the robe in a thrift shop, which went to show how little people understood about beautiful things. There wasn’t room in the hazelnut shell for her books or photographs, but she had a good memory and a library card. It was a relief, she decided, to leave the rattan bed and the galaxy lights, which in the end were not very important. Jude liked the way the hazelnut shell walls were slightly furred, the way she could curl up in her velvet chair and touch them on either side. She decided to be happy there. But after a while, it too started to be too much. Her new position was freelance and paid by the word. Her hazelnut shell developed an aphid infestation, and the landlord stopped answering her texts. “Why don’t you move back home?” her mother asked over the phone. “It’s just getting impossible to live there. I can clean out your old bedroom. I’ll put the Beanie Babies on eBay. Can you help me with that?” “No, it’s fine,” Jude said. “I’ll be fine. I know what’s important. I have everything I need.”

• • • •

So Jude moved into a cherry stone, the creamy exterior walls still sticky with red pulp. She went in like the last of the bathwater, like the scented foam circling the drain. There wasn’t room for anything inside the cherry stone except herself. But she had always liked beautiful things, so Jude scoured her skin with almond oil and sugar, buffed her nails to a hard quartz pink, and parted her hair pin-straight down the middle. Happiness was mostly a matter of perspective. If she wasn’t happy, she had only herself to blame. “I am enough,” she reminded herself. “Take care of the good things you have.” First Jude shaved the short, crisp hairs from her legs and forearms, plucked the down from her upper lip, from her temples, from the tops of her toes. Then she ran her hands over her face, found her brows, and pulled them out with her fingernails, one by one. Her eyelashes came next, those little scimitars with cutting edges she could not stop feeling. Every day she ran her fingers over her scalp and found rough patches, and over time she rubbed them smooth. The more she shed, the larger she seemed. By the time she was hairless as an infant, she was even closer to the curved ivory walls of the cherry stone around her.

• • • •

When the company finally went under, Jude didn’t really mind. She told herself it was an opportunity to focus on simple living, on really paring down. “A person can live on a dollar a day,” she told her mother. “If I had a garden, I could grow my own beans.” “You don’t have a garden,” her mother said. “You don’t even have a windowsill. Why don’t you come home?” “I am home,” Jude said. She didn’t have any reason to go out now, so she didn’t. It was dark and warm and peaceful in her cherry stone. She could hear herself think there. Jude ran her hands over her body and thought about what was important. She had had her appendix removed when she was ten, her wisdom teeth out in college. What didn’t help you could only hurt you. What else could she do without? She reached down her throat and drew out a kidney, red and warm and slippery. With clean living, a person didn’t need both kidneys. “Have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” she quoted to herself. She had never wanted children, so she reached down her throat and hooked her uterus out like a fish splayed across her fingers. Next, her spleen. It was just a bloated puce grub in her hand, but no amount of space was too small to reclaim. Her lungs? She was used to so little air now. She reached in with both hands, dug her manicured nails into the spongy pink mass, and dragged one up through her throat. Her intestines came next, wound hand over hand like fibrous, bloody yarn. She felt better already, clearing out so much dead weight. Seen all together like this, it was so clearly not beautiful, so obviously nothing that she wanted. The viscera made a damp armload, and she hesitated a minute, reading and re-reading the diagrams, before depositing it into the green “organic waste” dumpster. Her heart she wasn’t sure about—of course people, generally, found hearts useful, but did she? Looking at it in her hand, purple and veined like a skinned animal, she decided it did not spark joy.

• • • •

One day, a couple came to rent the cherry stone. Jude’s landlord had pinned a notice on the exterior wall, but she had not been outside to see it. The couple went in like paper dolls, hand in hand; they went down like pills swallowed dry. The woman’s heels left bloody divots in Jude’s tongue, the hem of her cream linen wrap dress tickled down the ladder of Jude’s esophagus. “I like the exposed ribs,” the woman said. “Architectural.” “This isn’t too bad,” the man said. “It’s small, but it’s enough for us. I think we could be happy here.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kristiana Willsey is a writer and an academic who lives in Los Angeles. She is a 2019 graduate of Clarion West, and has previously published in The Toast and Toasted Cake, in addition to scholarly articles and book chapters. She has a PhD in Folklore and teaches at the University of Southern California.

Things Might Be Different If We All Lived Underwater Kerry C. Byrne | 274 words

Sometimes, when I speak, it comes out in bubbles— but because you are on land you cannot see them. Big, shining ideas emerge from my lungs, rise in the air

It looks like silence to you. Some absence of mind, some poverty of intellectualism.

If I was a water creature, I would be a platypus mermaid. In childhood I decided: the platypus is a superior animal, confounding in their unbelonging, comfortable in their liminality.

You may not understand the appeal of the platypus mermaid. That is okay. I do not understand the appeal of speaking on land, where dusty words disintegrate, when you could speak underwater, in many quiet bubbles.

Sometimes, when I speak, I find myself submerged: navigating currents with open lips. You are left behind, but only because you would not breathe; drowning humans is for sirens, not the business of platypus mermaids.

You stare, fish-eyed, human lung’d, as I try to spit words out through rivers and lakes and seaweed and sediment, grasping at wet sand, choking it down to form the half-baked land language you prefer. Sometimes, when I speak, you ask too much; so comfortable on earth, you do not seek the water, the depths; gravity unsure. If you did, though. If you did, I would comfort you, kiss your lips to help you breathe, rub your back as you choked up thoughts, fish-eyed, mer-lung’d, in big, shining, bubbles that float to a sun-dappled surface.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry C. Byrne is an autistic, queer and nonbinary writer/cat lover living in Toronto. Their work is forthcoming and/or published in Kaleidotrope, THIS Magazine, The Temz Review, and others. The rest of the time, they can be found working on Augur Magazine as publisher—or diving deep into the endless void that is their homebrew D&D world. Find them on Twitter as @kercoby. softening, come morning Hal Y. Zhang | 84 words

I am standing next to the unsunken earth, not yet a part of it though I wonder— those who have been here and rooted into the same unyielding ground, did they also feel the urge to seep between eggshell cracks and become food and fervor, did they also love death rotundly as humus loves the forbidden touch, sweet and striated in its own patience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hal Y. Zhang is a lapsed physicist who splits her time between the east coast of the United States and the Internet, where she writes at halyzhang.com. Her speculative poetry and prose is in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Fireside. Aqueduct Press published her women-with-sharp-things collection, Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Arms.

All the King's Women: The Sewer Clown Tragedy of Beverly Marsh Meg Elison | 1357 words

Walking out of the theater after seeing IT part one in 2017, there was only one person I wanted to talk to. Best-selling and Hugo-winning author Seanan McGuire is one of the only humans I’ve ever met who loves Stephen King like I do. When I got to Twitter, she was already yelling. And she was joined by best-seller and Hugo winner Catherynne M. Valente, who is on the same level as Seanan and me when it comes to these books. Our fingers flew with fury, rage-tweeting how bad the movie was. Everything that could have been updated to be less sexist or less racist than the late-eighties source material was somehow made worse. The three of us screeched like harpies about a multitude of injustices: the teased but intangible Turtle, the flattening of the story’s only Black character, but most of all: Beverly. There is much in the character of Beverly Marsh that we three remembered fondly from the book, but the original novel is also very problematic. Remakes allow us to recontextualize, to update, and to analyze the texts that make up the foundation of our culture. This is particularly true in King’s construction of nonwhite characters, and in his women. Unfortunately, the film took what was good about Bev and Kobe’d it into a cosmic dumpster. I reread the novel, trying to recapture what I had loved about her, to regain my sense of Beverly Marsh, the gunslinger. Perhaps this is almost always the case with rereading, but I found that it was worse than I remembered. King is better than most male writers at constructing female characters, but the bar is so low that it makes me grit my teeth to admit that he beats the average. Bev Marsh is the only female main character in IT. Tropes: she’s a Smurfette. She’s a Cool Girl, a tomboy who doesn’t know she’s hot and is just one of the guys. She’s valuable only for sex, and that doesn’t even make any sense when compared to the other characters. As adults, each of the boys has retained the supernatural powers won and honed in the confrontation with the amorphous villain of the tale. Bill becomes a novelist because he was their leader and storyteller. Waifish little Eddie Kapsbrak has a successful limousine company because he was always their navigator. Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier turns his voice acting and smartassery into radio DJ celebrity. Ben Hanscom, the group’s builder and fabricator, becomes an architect. Stanley Uris brings his precognitive certainty about the right course of action into his marriage, to his wife’s surprise and disquiet. Mike Hanlon begins and ends in the role of archivist and memory for the group; he brings in the Derry chronicle as evidence of the monster’s longevity and keeps the watch for its return as a librarian in his hometown. Each boys’ skills carry forward into their adult life.

• • • •

Beverly Marsh doesn’t carry marksmanship forward by becoming a sniper or even a darts champion. She doesn’t carry the power of her sexuality into adulthood, or use it in any substantive way. Instead, her damaged sexuality functions as a beacon to attract abusive partners like her father. Bev’s brush with the infinite gives her no gifts, not even the confidence that a positive early sexual experience might impart. There are clues to this in the final battle itself: the Ritual of Chud and the lead-up to it. Bev is anointed their marksman when the boys realize she’s the best shot in the group. She gets a chance to wound the monster with a silver slug and a slingshot, but she has Final Girl disease, so the monster must come back after she’s had her moment with it. During the ritual, Beverly becomes the utterly predictable horror bystander, shouting things like “Help him!” or “Somebody do something!” while Bill and Richie and Eddie make bold and brave moves. If Beverly’s power is in her sex, then fine! I’m in favor of all the sex we can swallow in cosmic fiction. King could have put that to use in the final fight. She could unite the team physically at some crucial moment. She could even fuck the monster in a bit of astral distraction as later King heroine Susannah Dean does, because this is naturally one of the powers the author gives the only woman in the group (The Waste Lands, 1991). Bev does none of this. Her power goes nowhere. It serves her only once: in the infamous tween gangbang scene, where she uses “this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity.” Sex is where Bev Marsh gets weird. She’s the best shot among the boys. She’s as brave as they are when it comes to fighting monsters or standing up to bullies. She’s one of the guys when they’re not thinking about it. However, when they do think about it, it’s all they can think, and the reader is treated to version after version of their evaluations of and fixations on her body. That’s germane to an adolescent experience, but it never balances out. The boys in the story do not experience embarrassing erections in class or the confusion of nocturnal emissions.

• • • •

There are so many references to Beverly Marsh’s new-budded breasts that one feels compelled to check the byline to be sure King isn’t Humbert Humbert in disguise. She thinks about them all the time, because they hurt. They embarrass her. She wakes up in the morning to examine them in the mirror, to see if they have grown. “They were extremely small—not much more than spring apples, really—but they were there,” King writes in her little-girl voice. The boys think about Bev’s breasts all the time, because they can see them and as everyone knows, visible breasts are public property and men and boys are rendered senseless by their existence. King writes Bev busting out of her prepubescent clothes, erotically and frighteningly aware of the curves of her hips and ass in her tight jean shorts. Even her father gives her the hot-eye.

• • • •

Some of this is pretty true to life.

• • • • Having lived through female-bodied puberty myself, I can tell you that growing breasts does hurt and I was often aware of them as they came in. Maybe some readers found Bev’s report on that experience authentic. However, the real problem is that none of the boys, who are as old as Beverly and going through the same biological process as she is, are ever presented to the reader in the same way. Bill is tall, Ben is fat, Mike is black, Eddie has asthma, and so forth. All of their bodies are characterized to us, but never sexually objectified for the reader, or for each other. When they experience desire and arousal for the first time, that experience is made holy and crystallized into beautiful moments of blameless voyeurism and familiar locker-room evaluations of Bev and other girls. The author does not linger on their calves or their curves to describe them to us in aching detail. They are allowed to be boys, pure and innocent in their nascent sexuality, until Beverly initiates them, motherly in her generosity. This has to occur, because Bev’s power lies inexorably in her sex. As her own father asks her, what does a girl do with all those boys if it isn’t what she does on her back?

• • • •

Try as he might, King can’t provide her (or us) with an answer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her series, The Road to Nowhere, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She was a James A. Tiptree Award Honoree in 2018. In 2020, she is publishing her first collection, called Big Girl with PM Press and her first young adult novel, Find Layla with Skyscape. Meg has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time. You can find her at megelison.com and on Twitter @megelison.

Author Spotlight: Kurt Hunt Arley Sorg | 1932 words

You have a number of very short pieces out, not just at venues where you would expect the stories to be short, such as “In the End the World Will Break Your Heart” at Daily Science Fiction and “Loneliness in Transit, Sixty Light Years from Earth” at Flash Fiction Online, but also at venues which typically run longer stories, including “Boss” at Kaleidotrope, clocking in at about a thousand words, and “Tigerskin,” 1,246 words at Strange Horizons. What do you like about writing at these lengths, and what are the key factors to composing a successful story within such a short space?

My inability to focus and lack of free time make very short stories ideal because I can actually finish them. They also just come more naturally to me because my current strengths as a storyteller are turns of phrase, evocative descriptions—elements that can make a short- short sparkle but can’t prop up a longer piece. As for composing a successful story in such a short space, I’m no expert, but I try to listen to people who are. You need to immerse the reader in the characters and setting right away. Tone is huge. It allows you to say so much without using words. You also need to make the reader truly believe the story is just a sliver of a broader reality. But I suppose the most important thing a very short story needs is focus. Specific character; specific problem. That doesn’t mean the focus needs to be small in scope, mind you. “Loneliness in Transit” is a good example because it involves a 50,000+ year journey, but the story is about a very specific mission and relationship. It’s Baudelaire’s “Windows”—inventing the story of a person from just a few details, “from almost nothing.” The story’s bigger than what we see on the page.

“An Indefinite Number of Birds” begins with Stanley’s panic and his literalizing what JD tells him. I feel like I probably know people who have somewhat similar personalities. How did this story begin for you; what was the inspiration and how did it develop?

The inspiration was entirely in the title, which was gifted to me by Stewart Baker by way of Vylar Kaftan. It immediately sparked something in me. You watch a flock of birds pass by and you never know how many there are. They’re just all over the damn place, always an indefinite number. But for this title, whatever story it belonged to, that number mattered for some reason. Why would it matter if you could identify the precise number of birds? And how hopeless a task is that? I landed on augury, mostly in answer to Stanley’s anxieties or insecurities (or whatever they are) leading him in a desperate search for certainty in an uncertain world. Superstition is an attempt to tame chaos. Do you relate to Stanley, or JD for that matter, in specific ways? Or is the story more of an exercise in crafting characters and situations outside your own experiences?

I’ll probably regret being this open about it, but Stanley is most certainly an aspect of myself. Like Groucho Marx didn’t want to be a member of any club that would have him, I instinctively distrust when people seem to like me: they must be confused, or it’s a trick somehow, or they want something. Or maybe they just have terrible taste. I hate compliments. I’ve learned to become a bit more gracious, but they still make me feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out by beetles like that dude in The Mummy. But I’ve been on the JD side of that relationship as well, where I see how awesome someone is and am baffled that they can’t just see it and accept it. I suppose this story is a bit of me reminding myself that sometimes it’s OK to just accept love and, especially if you love or respect the person who loves you, sometimes it’s OK to let the way they see you leak a little bit into how you see yourself.

In a way, this story reminds me of James Joyce’s “Araby,” in that this emotion – love – becomes transformed. The focus shifts to the external, love becomes obsession, a fixation on something that has taken the place of love. One major difference here is the participation of two characters, instead of one person creating an imagined relationship. Because of the presence of two characters, here the obsession interferes with the relationship. But obsession never breaks them. Do you feel like this story suggests love and obsession can coexist? Are they related; are they wavelengths of the same thing? Or is it more that love looks different to different people?

Ah, yes, well, I’m often compared to Joyce. *adjusts spectacles* So I decided to reread “Araby” before answering this question, to ensure I look smart. But when I pulled down my copy of The Dubliners, it had a bookmark in it at the beginning of “Araby.” This is true. If I were a superstitious man. . . Anyway, I see what you mean, but I think the presence of a second character isn’t such a gamechanger in terms of what drives the conflict. The protag in “Araby” didn’t exist in a bubble, we just basically never see him interact with people in the story. When he talked with his friends and siblings and parents off the page, this imaginary relationship was looming in his head, and it was often probably more “real” to him than the actual relationships in front of him. That’s what we’re seeing here: two people in a real relationship, with one of them slowly drifting toward an imaginary/catastrophized version of the relationship (and himself). I think love is dangerously related to obsession, and they can coexist, and people see it differently. But what I think, more than any of that, is that love is harder to define or recognize than I think we prefer to admit. “Love” is such a big concept, such a huge presence, in American culture, but it’s always more complicated than its portrayal. You might not recognize when it’s there, and you might not recognize when it’s not. It’s an easy source of anxiety.

There is this layer of sly commentary on the shaming of feminine males, which adds depth to Stanley’s character, creating in an instant an imagined history of being othered and suffering ridicule, even at the hands of other men with whom he (in theory) should feel a sense of community. Is this deliberate/intended? Is it important? Or is this just my own interpretation of the story?

It’s deliberate and it’s important, and I think it’s universal. Not that specific trait, but the sensation of feeling like you’re somehow wrong. Everyone, at some point in their life, has a sense of who they think they’re supposed to be, and finds themselves lacking. It’s a cruel thing, though, because the “standard”—the expectation we’re supposedly straying from—is so often in our heads. We invent others’ expectations and then feel bad we’re not meeting those fictional expectations. We shame ourselves. In this story, JD never shames Stanley for seeming feminine. But Stanley still has that trauma from an earlier relationship—and no doubt from other places—and he’s internalized it. It feeds into his problem of being too in his head, but it also isolates him from JD because he’s convinced he can’t be himself because his self is wrong. And his defense is to close himself off, which is really the source of most of his pain.

This casually mentioned idea at the outset of the story becomes important to Stanley, but JD doesn’t quite get what the birds really mean. Nonetheless, JD tries to keep Stanley happy. Misunderstanding is a classic storytelling device, used in any number of narratives, and it often feels forced, like a cheap trick to create drama. Here, the story is built upon this fundamental misunderstanding. But in this story, it feels like something that really happens, something most people can relate to. It feels genuine. How do you make that work–what makes it feel real here when it so often feels contrived?

Too often, misunderstanding exists only because the plot requires it. You get the classic “why didn’t these idiots just have a conversation” style of misunderstanding, which is boring. I think it works here because for Stanley it’s an intensely private thing. An embarrassing secret. The disconnect arises because Stanley absolutely cannot bring himself to talk about the situation, and that makes sense in light of the self-loathing edge we see in him. I think that’s how these things often happen when anxiety or depression is involved.

I think in the hands of some authors, this story would end in tragedy, or even irony: the birds crashing through the glass and wreaking havoc. Did you play with different endings, different possibilities? Or did you always have this ending in mind? My stories almost always show up as an opening line or two, followed by an ending. This story was an exception. I wasn’t sure it even had an ending while I was writing it. But the ending was never very different from this. No surprise to anyone who read the story or this interview, but my brain tends to go straight to bad endings. Not necessarily booming chaos; more the slow, withering loss, like what the characters barely escape here. The more I write, though, the more I try to fight against those endings. I made a very deliberate choice to find a happy ending in this mess, because I think Stanley is lost and the story needed to reflect that. If this had ended on a down note, what exactly would the story be saying? “Sometimes you psych yourself out that you’re unlovable and, surprise! You’re right, and also fuck you!” Bleh.

Is this work emblematic of the sorts of things you write, or of the themes you gravitate towards? Or is each piece completely different from the next? And what else are you working on? What do you have coming up that new readers and fans can look forward to?

It’s emblematic in terms of tone and length, but I only ever finish stories accidentally, so I’m probably the wrong person to ask about what I write. My stories are kind of all over the place, but yes, some themes just keep showing up. As applied here, I’d say depression and interconnectedness are definitely the recurring visitors. Relevant to your first question, I’m working on writing longer pieces. I got to play around with longer, plot-driven work in the serial Archipelago I wrote with Charlotte Ashley and Andrew Leon Hudson, and I have a lot of ideas and characters that just don’t fit in a very short story. World-building is especially brutal at short lengths, so I have some secondary world and alt-history I’m playing around with.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Arley Sorg is an associate editor at Locus Magazine, where he’s been on staff since 2014. He joined the Lightspeed family in 2014 to work on the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, starting as a slush reader. He eventually worked his way up to associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He also reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate. Author Spotlight: Anya Ow Arley Sorg | 1180 words

I love Yun San – she’s determined, she’s got grit. She’s clever, bold, and creative. Do you relate to her in specific ways? Or to Jin for that matter?

I certainly can’t cook as well as Yun San, nor am I as fierce as Jin. The main thing I have in common with Yun San is her love of food – the favour she asks Jin, in the end, would be the same thing I would’ve asked for in her shoes. Chinese Imperial cuisine has resulted in a number of popular dishes today, some of which are my favourites, like Peking duck. As with Yun San, I also feel that it’s regrettable that some people treasure monuments and inanimate treasures more than our biodiversity.

Did you draw on anyone in particular for these characters? Did they change in specific ways from story conception to first draft to submitted draft?

As with many of my chef characters, Yun San is inspired by the women home cooks in my family like my mom and aunts, all of whom are creative, love what they do, and pass on what they know to their kids and relatives. People who’ve been following my recent Twitter might think that Jin is a reference to Sucker Punch’s recent, gorgeous 13th Century game set in Japan, but she isn’t. I wrote this story months before the game came out, and the name is a coincidence in terms of its English spelling (though not the written character): the Chinese word for gold, vs the game’s Japanese word for benevolence. With Jin, I tried to imagine how a sentient divine creature should feel when faced with extinction by cookpot: with fury, helplessness, and resentment. For this story, there wasn’t much of a difference between drafts, as I was lucky to have a clear idea of what I wanted the story to be about from the start and the characters that it needed to drive it.

There are these moments of tasteful, careful shock delivered in the story, such as when you find out whose meat Jin has brought for Yun San to use. How do you make this work, how do you land this great punch, without pushing it over into the gratuitous or going too soft and being underwhelming?

In Australian restaurants, there’s been a push toward not just the ‘paddock to plate’ sort of approach to food, but also about respecting the ingredient. As the story is told from Yun San’s point of view, I tried to express each twist in terms of Jin’s sacrifice and Yun San’s respect, without milking it for shock value. Without lingering unnecessarily on the element of horror, I had Yun San default quickly to her years of experience, training, and discipline to move the story along without necessarily downplaying the twists. Does this story tap into or stand in relationship to any specific tales, myths, or folklore, beyond referencing certain creatures and beings?

The main fushi / Chinese lion legend involves a beast called Nian (year) that used to terrorise a village every year and had to be frightened off by firecrackers and the colour red. I wanted to write a story where people and fushi could have a reason to try and find a way to coexist peacefully. Some of the creatures referred to in the story are real species that have since either gone extinct or become critically endangered, either because of habitat loss, poaching, or other reasons. With the world in the state as it is now, I hope we’ll continue to try and learn coexistence before it becomes too late for other species.

On the one hand, there’s this sort of mythical fairy tale going on with this story. But it really covers a lot of ground. I see concepts around hunting to extinction – as well as what we consider acceptable to eat and what we don’t; power structures and navigating or manipulating them; careful, at first uneasy relationships; self-sacrifice and different kinds of cultural integrations; and possibly more (don’t think I covered everything), all wrapped into a love letter to food and cooking. What was the initial inspiration for this piece – how did it start and how did it develop?

As with many of my food stories, they tend to start with a craving for a particular type of food. For Umami, it was xiao long bao, one of my favourite kinds of dumplings. The first time I heard the name of the dumpling, I did also think it named for a dragon rather than a basket. After knowing that I wanted to write a story involving xiao long bao in some way, it was easier to segue into themes and issues particular to that cuisine that I also wanted to write about. The qilin reference is very much a reference to shark’s fin, for example.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing this tale?

I knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t be possible for Jin to get what she wanted — there would be no reasonable way for Yun San to be able to help her fulfil her request. It was difficult coming up with a way for the story to progress to a resolution that could still be satisfying for every character.

What is the heart of this story for you? What do you really want people to know about it?

Umami is very much about the relationship between food and conservation, as well as our attitude towards coexistence with other species. I’d love for people to think more carefully about where their food comes from and how it’s prepared. Not just about high profile food like shark’s fin, but also types of food on our shelves that we might be starting to eat or fish out of existence. Also, try xiao long bao if you haven’t! But don’t eat it the way Jin does. You will burn your mouth.

What else are you working on now, or what do you have coming up which you want new fans to know about?

It’s early November as I’m writing this, so I’m doing the same thing I attempt to do every November: participate in Nanowrimo. Nano might not work for everyone, and I don’t always manage to complete the word count during the month itself, but almost all my finished books have started as Nano projects — including the novella I published this year, Cradle and Grave. I have a few projects in the works that hopefully will find a good home, including a cyberpunk graphic novel murder mystery looking at how hawker street food culture might be different in a future where a too-warm earth is the new normal. Thanks for reading!

Coming Attractions, January 2021 Fantasy Staff | 82 words

Coming up in the January issue of Fantasy Magazine… We have original fiction from Tonya Liburd (“10 Steps to a Whole New You”) and C.E. McGill (“Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind”), along with flash fiction from Marissa Lingen (“The Billionaire Shapeshifter Ex-Wives Club”) and Megan Chee (“Incense”). We also have poetry by Magaly Garcia (“Butterfly-Hummingbird”) and Maria Zoccola (“like the gator loves the snake”). And finally, Arley interviews author N.K. Jemisin. Thanks for reading! Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

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