Fantasy Magazine Issue 47, February 2011

Table of Contents

Of Men and Wolves by An Owomoyela (fiction) The Lizard Dance by Gio Clairval & Jeff VanderMeer (fiction) The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time by Tamsyn Muir (fiction) The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois by Megan Arkenberg (fiction)

Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela Author Spotlight: Gio Clairval & Jeff VanderMeer Author Spotlight: Tamsyn Muir Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg

About the Editor © 2011 Fantasy Magazine

Cover Art by Galen Dara www.fantasy-magazine.com Of Men and Wolves An Owomoyela

I woke with salt on my face, ghost trails of the night's tears. My skin was cold. Even my back was cold where my husband should have rested; he was gone, and I should have enjoyed that aloneness. Instead a noise from the verandah roused me: soft scuffle against the swept clay, coupling with wet, insistent sounds. It turned my stomach. I pulled my beddress tight around me and went out. The sun had yet to rise. In the dim light a furred body hunched against the ground, jaws working in my husband's back. Blood had scattered around them, arrayed in a half-halo. Yellow eyes glinted, and I froze in the manner of deer. While I slept this beast had come and ripped out my husband's throat. So ended my first night in the City of Wolves.

*** Even knowing better than to run from wolves, I leapt from the porch like an oryx and ran so that the stone streets bruised my heels. There is no god but God. The Odad, my husband's people, worshipped wolves and stars and this Godless abandoned city, and now my husband was dead. I came breathless to the gates where our donkeys were tethered, uneaten—the wolves had not considered them fitting sacrifices. They had not considered me a fitting sacrifice. Only the prince of the Odad, my husband, would sate them. I went to Nashira, my donkey, and rubbed my hands over her muzzle, her neck. Her name meant She who brings good news. The sandalwood rubbed into her black hide, the musk of her skin, and the steadiness of her body calmed me, but there was no point in worshipping animals, and she could not help me. I looked to the horizon; the half-sun, caught in the act of rising, sat like a red coal, and a howl came up from the city to bid the stars farewell. That wolf should have eaten me instead. But I had run from the wolf, so perhaps I wanted to live. Even after my husband smeared me through with tallow and aloe, even after he pushed himself inside me, I wanted to live, and I wanted my people to live. I had to act. "Nashira," I said, with my fist beneath her chin asking her to rise. I untethered her as our shadows crept toward us, and I mounted and goaded her through the city gates. This evening, men of Odad would see that we had not returned from our wedding night; noon after, they would come to this city whose sandstone was the color of their pale skin. They would find me here, their prince dead. They would ride against my people. Unless I could appease them. The city smelled of dust and the sun. My skin still smelled of unguents, cardamom and myrrh. If we'd brought myrrh in the wedding packs I could anoint my husband's remains. If the city had wood or charcoal I could build him a pyre, and if the wolves ate me while I gathered the body and coal, they might be kinder than the Odad. The wolves fell silent and the city's streets were empty. A wisp of cloud hung in the sky before the sun burned it away. Who sent it out to die at dawn? And who decided that I, who should have been the fifth son of Sal, should ride a little black donkey to an abattoir, to carry a ripped-up man to the city gates to burn him? His name, that prince of the Odad, was Ishur. ***

We'd passed the wide and empty lanes of the market district when a wolf leapt into the path and Nashira shied. My heart kicked once, twice, like a hare. The wolf bowed, shoulders low, tail swimming side to side behind him. He called up to us—Khoof, khoof! The way the palace dogs said Play with me!—and bounded away. Nashira tossed, her hooves clattered, and she tried to break. I put my hands over her eyes. "Wolf-god!" I had nothing to lose. At worst he would eat me, or the true God would smite me for blasphemy. God had never looked kindly on my life before. "Come back, and when you come, bring me my husband!" Or his bloody bones. The wolf didn't return. Nashira would not walk. I dismounted and looked around; I found a caravanserai, and cajoled her into a stall and barred the gate. I'd carry Ishur's body with my own hands, if I had to. The sun had climbed two finger-widths up the sky, and though the shade felt like water on my skin, I moved on. The streets widened as I neared the temple of our wedding night. The city's roads were a great wheel whose struts led to the city walls, in whose hub stood this temple nearly so old as our two tribes. Flies swarmed in the temple air like handfuls of thrown peppercorns, landing on my husband's corpse and jumping from it. The corpse lay supine, not eaten up yet, not unrecognizable. My stomach turned, but I resolved to be as strong as my brothers, and I went to Ishur's side. I touched his flesh. Life had been ripped from the hands which had cupped me, the arms which had held me. Ishur's stomach had been ripped out, though I remembered it whole and sweating against my back. His genitals had been ripped off, his thighs opened. He stank of iron and bile. I swatted the flies away. A few attempted my eyes, and I swatted them again. I took Ishur's wrists and dragged his carcass, and it was both heavy and light— heavy because I had never grown to the girth of my brothers, never been trained in the strength of a man; light because the wolves had torn much of him away. I could see his spine, his ribs, one red scapula turning like the wing of a bird. I tugged him toward the door and a wolf trotted in, yellow eyes wide. Was he the one who had bowed to me? He was thin, and his bones protruded. He whined. Ishur and I hadn't seen wolves when we came at the setting of the sun. Ishur's father and grandfather and every ancestor had taken their wives outside the city gates, and they had come back uneaten. Ishur pulled me inside and said these walls and these wolves and this starlight were his ancestors, too, and would not harm him. In that far-off history when my people were stronger than the Odad and had chased them across the desert, they had called to God to save them. God had turned a quarter of the Odad into wolves, who had torn the Sal apart. The wolves were protectors of the Odad. They would not see him harmed. This wolf whined and swept his tail across the ground. A black band lay across his shoulders like a whipmark, and when his tail moved, his hipbones poked out one flank and then the other. I dropped Ishur's wrists. "If you would like," I said. The wolf was clever; he understood me. He trotted to Ishur's side, licked him, and tore flesh from his chest. I choked, deep near my lungs, and turned away. I ask forgiveness of almighty God. I could look at his body torn apart, so why not bear the tearing? I covered my ears. How I must have looked in the harsh light, my beddress smeared with blood, a wolf breaking his fast on my husband's chest. I stood with my palms on my ears, whispering the religious rubaiyat. For sixty-one verses the wolf ate, and then he came and nuzzled at my knee. I dropped my hands, and he wagged his tail and let his bloody tongue loll out. "Ancha," I said. It meant hip-bone; his hip-bones stuck out like the top of a lyre, even now with his belly full. I could play the lyre, but not well, and I wouldn't have the chance if the Odad killed me and my family. Or once the wolves killed me and ate me. While Ancha ate, another wolf had come from the inner halls. He was much larger, sleek and well-fed. Perhaps he'd killed Ishur. Perhaps for stealing his dinner, he'd kill me. He stepped forward and showed his teeth. Ancha yipped and took my hand in his mouth. He tugged without breaking my skin, and then let go and rolled onto his back with his paws tucked against his chest. The new wolf came closer, tail straight behind him. Ancha whined and kicked at my shin. I went to my knees, then to my back. Even dogs have kings, and even dogs bow to them. I pulled my hands to my chest, and the big wolf came up to me and lapped his tongue across my neck, my chest, my stomach. It wasn't until he pushed his head between my legs, where Ishur had touched me before wrapping me over my knees, that I shook. This new wolf snorted, and Ancha pushed his nose against my cheek, and grief and anger and shame battered inside my chest, pushing me to cry. ***

I named him Malik. King. When I tried to take Ishur he growled and backed me outside, where the sun had climbed the length of my hand. Three more lengths and it would stand in what we called the liver of the sky; then, in that time again, soldiers would leave from the Odad. I walked toward the gate, hoping to eat something and clear my head. Ancha walked with me, swishing his tail and licking from time to time at my hand. I thought of two things before reaching the caravanserai: riding back to my people, warning them to take up arms for a battle they could not win. Or perhaps I should find weapons here, and throw myself against the soldiers when they came. Either battle was hopeless. O God, most merciful. What else could I do? The Odad would ride here under the watchful eyes of the stars. When the wolves in that far-off history had torn my people apart, the Odad had cried then that they could not find their way. God turned a second quarter of their number into stars, to guide them. Even the stars would be against me. In the caravanserai I found Nashira backed into her stall by two wolves. I ran in, but no, she wasn't backed in. She sat placidly, and the wolves sat facing each other before her. I swear before God that they argued like men at market: One would khoof, and then the other, then the first. Then they beheld me and looked at Ancha, and by agreement stood and walked to another side of the room. I knew wolves. They hunted in packs by the edge of my city. But I had never seen wolves cross the room and sit down, talking in turns, as these did, Eager not to tarry, I led Nashira out toward the city gates. Ancha followed. I thought of standing at the gates and yelling, "Look here, you men of Odad! It was your god and not mine who ate your prince, your god and not mine who would not let me burn or bury him." But what man listens when another maligns his god? The Odad worshipped idols, but they were not forgiving in their unrighteousness. I set out barley for the donkeys, took dried goat and buttermilk from the provisions they'd carried, and looked up at the pale city walls. The Odad, forever ungrateful, had still cried after the gifts of the wolves and the stars; they had cried that they had no place to rest, nowhere to keep out the harsh sun, and God turned the third quarter of their people into the city which stood before me. The stone was the color of their flesh. The walls were as heavy on the eyes as their broad shoulders had been. Guardhouses sat on the walls, unused since their creation. Perhaps they might have bows left, or javelins. I knew little of weaponry, but what choice did I have? I sought a stairway, Ancha following at my heels. Perhaps I could keep Ancha with me and the Odad would see that I was favored among their gods. But the Odad have wanted to destroy my people, and now that we were weak, they were overeager. Men eager for war will ignore their gods even as they say God wills it. And besides, if Ancha was a god, he was a poor one. Even having eaten of Ishur, he was begging after the goat. Then, begging, he pushed his muzzle between my legs. I cursed and shoved him away. He tumbled down the stairs, yelping, and I gathered my dress and hurried on without him. What did it matter to him, what I had or didn't have down there? It was only a concern for my father the king, who'd needed a daughter to offer. Only a concern for his surgeons and their sharp knives, and for Ishur. I ran to the guardhouse and threw open the door. Here there were no knives, I noted. Nor weapons of any kind; only the dusty sun cut the dry monotony of sandstone and clay. Neither bow nor arrow, javelin nor lance. I walked to the window and looked out. No paths led to this city. Only the princes of the Odad came here, dragging their brides along. There was no road which the search party would ride down; I would be able to stand here and watch the plumes of dust heralding their advent, if I chose. And then I would die. Ancha whined at the door. In the night, long ago, as the Odad slept in the body- houses of their kinsmen, as the stars looked down on them, the wolves came and chased them from their home. Since that day, the city stood abandoned. Ancha crept into the guardhouse. The Odad have a saying. They say if you go into the house of God and drink and kick the walls and shout and swear, God will eat you. If you are pious and bow at every entrance and bring good wine for oblations, God will eat you. Men have no business in the house of God. I had no business there, either. I took the waterskin and threw it from the door; it burst on a roof below. "Come up, stones!" I yelled, and they jeered my voice back at me. "There's to be a war, you know! Isn't it the Sal you've wanted to destroy, all these years? Isn't that why your wolves ate my husband?" The echoes died, and the bitterness faded from the air. Perhaps it was just that the City hated everyone, Odad and Sal alike. Ancha pressed against my shins. I looked down at him, and my hand found his ears. He suffered from mange as well as malnutrition. What a poor, afflicted god. The Odad spent one night in this city before the wolves chased them out. The Odad went and hid at the crook of a river, worshipping the city from afar. Only their princes returned with their brides, and only I walked the streets wondering if the sacrificed ghosts of the city stared from every window, waiting to crowd around me and steal the breath from my throat. How horrible, to have your body unmade at the order of your king.

***

Ishur had done the unthinkable when he agreed to marry me: to take a made daughter as a bride when his kingdom was the stronger. He could have refused. He would have spared my people in exchange for the honor of marrying me. I brought wine and honey when I returned to the temple. I brought the goat meat and dried figs and the cream Ishur had poured into skins to be rendered to butter by the ride. I brought the apricots we had been given and the bread and the rose-scented marriage cake and I even brought Nashira, who had not been groomed or dressed for a sacrifice. This was all I had. I walked into the cool air, the scent of blood and the buzzing of flies. Ishur's bones were gone. His blood made a smear to the door where Malik stood, his head held high. Ancha tucked his tail down, creeping to Malik. Malik raised his chin to look at me, as if to say Do you see?, and Ancha licked his muzzle, his lips, his throat. I thought of Ishur, kissing my father on each of his cheeks. I offered food and wine. I thought I would try to tame the beast, only tame him. This was not a sacrifice, Malik not a god. Still, I asked God to forgive me. "Give me my husband's bones," I asked, "or come to the gates when your Odad arrive. Speak for me. If you are anything but beasts, I implore you. Take these gifts, take my donkey, take me, but see that my people are spared." Malik came and snapped up my offerings in one bite. Two. Three—four—five. He lapped up the butter, then the wine. Ancha whimpered, but his tail wagged. Malik walked out. Leaving the dishes, putting the wineskin over my shoulder, I followed. He led me to the priests' quarters where Ishur's remains lay in state. A wide line of blood led from the outer halls like a carpet. I felt a pressure like tears, which could not be tears, against the closure of my throat. I wanted him to stand, alive and uneaten, before me. Ishur lay on a bed of ancient linen coated with wolf fur. His face was still uneaten, though it was mottled as though bruised. His foot had knocked over a jar of lampoil, and it pooled around his legs. I wished Malik would let me burn his body; now, it would be easy. I took two firestarting stones from a shelf, but Malik growled to warn me against setting his meal alight. I raised my hands, and laid the rocks between Ishur's legs. Stones to replace the stones torn off. Then I regretted being so cruel. The body smelled. I turned away. Malik still growled behind me, and Ancha took my hand to pull me out.

***

Outside, with the sun lashing my back, I knelt and called God by fifty of the hundred names. God is my refuge. I put my head to the ground. I ask clemency of almighty God. I tried not to think of Ishur pushing me into this position, my thighs beneath my chest, buttocks on my heels. Ishur, Ishur. He had looked at me with longing, half- woman that I was. Before we left his palace, the dry-nurse for his cousin's child stopped me and said You should be honored by him. She meant that women like me were no better than ewes, and he shouldn't have treated me so well. What did I care for how well he was to treat me? I looked back to see Malik watching me from the door, mouth gaping as Ancha's did. Perhaps he was smiling, but I did not risk those teeth. I stood and thought of Ishur. Why should I have thought of Ishur? My mind returned, like a dog to his dinner, to our marriage night. When we had disentangled, I had shaken in attempts not to weep. Ishur had pressed his lips to my shoulder and said that I was beautiful. Liar. Who was he to call me beautiful, who was I to hear those words? I didn't want to be beautiful, or to have him inside me. He whispered at my neck and I went tense; I wanted to stifle him, or vomit. He slept, and I could no more push him from my mind than I could push away the arms encircling me. I hated him. I ask forgiveness, I hated him. I hated every part of him, from the skin which was pale like the belly of a dog to the scent of his sweat, sweet like fermenting bread. I hated his hands on my hip, on my chest, and I hated that he had died in the night and would not stand here in this accursed city with me. I hated that the Odad would spill my people's blood, as surely as Malik spilled him. And I hated his death here, beneath these stars, as surely as I should have hated a life with him. "He didn't deserve you," I told Malik, whose lips closed over his teeth. Why would he not rip me open and finish this? "Of all the princes of the Odad, you could have done worse than letting him live." Ishur had not been unkind. He would have had his father spare the Sal. He asked for me, mutilated woman that I was. And he had been gentle; he kissed my father on each cheek before we left. How had he deserved to be torn apart, to be lost in this city with only me to mourn him? "Neither of us deserved you," I said. Malik rose and walked into the temple shade, leaving the sun to brand my shoulders. Soon even the sun would be gentle, and the world would surrender to stars. "Ancha," I said. "Least beloved among gods. You'll stand with me when the warriors arrive, won't you?" Ancha looked back into the temple with his ears up, listening for something I could not hear. Then he turned and smiled at me, a dumb-dog look, as always. "May God make you enough," I said, and took hold of Nashira's reins.

***

I did not sleep. I counted how many fingers' spans the moon moved against the sky. I looked for familiar constellations and found Adhara, the maidens. Shadir, the breast. Al-dhanab al calbarai, the tail of the dog. What names had they carried as men? Ancha waited with me, looking to the stars with a sad noise in his throat. "Were they your kinsmen?" I asked. Did they run from my people once? Were they watching for the Odad to set my people to flight? "I'll beg you or Malik for help, but the stars have nothing to say to me." Ancha put his paws on my leg and pushed his nose between my thighs, and I struck him. He yelped and leapt away, and I leapt to my feet, brandishing the nearest thing to me—the skin of wine. "What," I yelled; "If your grandfathers' grandfathers were men once you should know better than my family how I feel. Why should you mock me? Why put your head there?" I threw the wineskin, and the cork at the neck burst out. Wine spilled like blood before his claws. "Have I mocked you for being a wolf? The city for its walls? The stars for their white eyes? If you care anything for that, I charge you, help me!" And then, by God I swear, a star detached itself and fell from the sky. A howl went up, and I think the star howled with it, then a great roar shook the earth. I threw myself to the dirt. I ask forgiveness of almighty God, there is no god but God . . . The howling did not stop but multiplied. My mind raced with the religious rubaiyat, and Ancha took my wrist in his teeth, pulling me into the city. The streets clattered as though the buildings had stood and ran with me. We came to the temple. The falling star had struck it, and it burned red, the wooden pillars and the lamp oil and Ishur's body with its fire-starting stones. I yelled and ran toward the blaze, but Ancha bit my dress and made me fall. On my hands and knees I looked at the fire, the temple falling into it. I saw Malik circling the fire, and one by one, other wolves joined him. I counted four, then ten, then I stopped counting as they surrounded the fire and howled like mourners—of course, like mourners at a funeral: The city and the stars and the wolves were Ishur's kinsmen, and they had made his pyre. And I who was only his wife bowed to a different God and prayed.

***

Men from Odad did not come at noon. They pushed their camels and arrived when the sun sat like a fist on the horizon, riding through the gates and down the roads to the still-burning temple. They'd seen the star fall. They were three men, soldiers all, with the knotted belts of the Odad, with pulwars in their hands. The foremost was familiar, but I could not place his name. "Ishur your prince is dead," I said, "and I have tried to bury him—" They would not let me say that the city had instead. The foremost barked, "Then you have killed him!" and hefted his sword. What had I to lose? "Your prince was taken by your gods," I said and stepped back toward the pyre. Perhaps I should have thrown myself on it. "If there is justice in your blood, then take my life in recompense. I was born the prince of Sal. Your prince would have spared my people!" "Your blood is not as rich as his," the foremost said. I recognized him, now: Ishur's cousin. He had the same eyes, though crueler. "Look at your gods," I said, pointing to the pyre. "Your city and wolves and the star, fallen from the sky—" Ishur's cousin spurred his camel with a shout. I turned my face to the sky where the sun was climbing. I closed my eyes and my vision swam with red. "There is no god but God," I said, "and I will go to God." I did not expect my God to save me. Ishur's cousin raised his sword. I could hear the noise of his sleeve, see its shadow through the red in my eyes. I wondered if they would leave me for Ancha to eat. Perhaps it would put flesh on his ribs. I felt a body press to my legs. My eyes opened to see the pulwar falling, and I heard Ishur's cousin scream, and Malik had coursed around the burial mound and torn the cousin from his mount. Ancha pushed into my shins and I dropped to my knees to hold him. The wolves coursed in, baying; the soldiers shied and dropped their pulwars, scrambled down from camelback, hands up in entreaty to their gods. All glory is to God, there is— Ishur's cousin kicked out and lay still as Malik's teeth found his throat. The soldiers cowered and bowed. And as the sun broke from the horizon's arms Ancha licked my face, my throat, my lips, as though we were kinsmen. Under the eyes of God, the self-same God who had changed them, I could allow that we might be.

An Owomoyela, a linguistics enthusiast and denizen of the American Midwest, writes a little bit of everything, so long as it's speculative. After graduating from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008, An returned to Iowa to begin case-modding consensus reality one work of fiction at a time. Fiction bearing the mark of this elusive author can be spotted in a variety of magazines, including Fantasy Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and in Rich Horton's 2011 issue of the Year's Best. More information can be found at http://an.owomoyela.net. The Lizard Dance Gio Clairval & Jeff VanderMeer

Mai stares at the nearest girl in a circle of sneering and booing schoolmates, sees the smooth face of a future cheerleader, the tiny, pointy nose, the aquamarine eyes, Blanche, or Valerie—they resemble one another so much. Valerie—let's say—yells words that resound in Mai's head, meaningless. The stiff electric cable that ties her to the cherry tree trunk bites into her flesh, but Mai feels nothing. A shout louder than the others pierces her armor— disparaging words about her chubby cheeks and oversized thighs. She doesn't care. Nor is she afraid. Her fear is hidden behind a walled corner of her mind. She was scared when they grabbed and tied her to the tree. Not anymore. It's not because Mrs. Turtledove will look for her class, eventually, behind the tool shed in the seventh-graders’ orchard section, where they are supposed to be. Mrs. Turtledove, who is busy planting beets with another group, will come here soon. The girls have the nerve to torment their victim on the school grounds, not far from the teacher. She must give them that. The torturers plan on releasing Mai in a couple of minutes. The mocking and the pinches and the poking will stop soon, but it's not this thought that keeps Mai from being terrified. A thin line of green—thin as a papercut—speeds across the edge of her vision. Mai catches a glimpse of a tiny reptilian tail, a clever, narrow eye, claws light as sharpened pencil points gripping wood. And she remembers the first lizard, buried in her past along with that long-ago afternoon. It happened the summer of her first bumblebee, her first lick of ice cream, her first Ferris-wheel ride. Mai was sitting alone, cross-legged in the sun on warm grass, next to a large, long rock eaten through by lichen. The green smell of grass and distant flowers, the feel of the tickly ground, the clean taste of the air—all of this delights her. And then the sly scuttle onto the stone of a small brown lizard, head bobbing, throat pink and throbbing. A giggle trickled from her at the sight, a subconscious thought—a wisp of a thought, lighter than cotton candy—and her secret talent manifested, the lizard became as skillful as any Catskills song-and-dance man. Standing, the lizard slid its right leg forward with a thin, pointed toe. The minuscule foot moved forward and back, alternating in a rhythm. A jump, a chasse, another leg swing. Mai knew the brown little fellow with velvet eyes danced because of her special talent. Every day until the end of the holidays, she went out into Grandma's garden and waited for the first lizard to come by. Each time she thought "Dance!", the lizard danced. When she said "Stop," it became an ordinary lizard and made only ordinary lizard movements. She tried to make other beasts dance but it only worked with lizards. All of them. A plump one with short legs. A smaller one. A green one. They danced for Mai, better than her big sister Carla, who took dance lessons. When Mai told Grandma, Grandma looked at her with grave eyes, saying, "Dinner's ready. Wash your hands." Mai knew then that her talent had to remain a secret. "Mai" means "dancing " in Japanese—her mom had picked the name because she wanted her daughter to stand out. Mai thought that her talent was written into her name, that her name had created the talent. This bothered her vaguely, like an itch she wanted to scratch but couldn’t locate. The summer of first things ended. Mai went home to Atlanta, Georgia, and forgot. She grew up into a promising rhythmic gymnastics athlete, and by the age of ten, she was a little champion, but when a year later the bathroom scales displayed a number the coach didn't like, the club left Mai off the roster for the season. She’d have to be an alternate, probably never get a chance to compete. She stopped training and put on a lot of weight, the skin on her face as stretched as a watermelon peel. Now a girl pokes Mai with something sharp. A dribble of blood runs down Mai's arm. She doesn't feel the pain. She's observing the “critter,” as her mom calls all animals. The lizard near the carrot patch rises onto its hind legs and begins to sway, foot forward, foot back, foot to the left, foot to the right, while she watches with a sense of astonishment. Why did she see nothing for so many years? Bright eyes stare up at her. There is the almost-silent scrape and patter of lizard foot and lizard tail. Faint sounds of delight seem to issue from its throat. Mai taps her foot in cadence. The stupid girls keep shouting that she's fat and ugly. Mai doesn't hear.

***

"You know what a cardiac arrest is, don't you?" asks the hospital psychologist. The diminutive woman’s tag reads "Karen Lowe, Ph. D." As she wonders what talents that name brings with it, Mai watches a lizard float outside the window. The lizard has deformed antlers springing from its head. Tubes go through its body, carrying experimental chemicals. Mai thinks the doctors are cruel. The psychologist must know the critter suffers a great deal. Maybe she's in on it, or maybe not. Dr. Karen Lowe has a kind smile. "Ninety pills are enough to stop your heart, Mai." Mai agrees. Three bottles of pills should have taken her away. Instead she woke up with a headache, temporary facial paralysis, and no recollection of the previous week. She recalled only the terrifying sensation of endlessly falling through space, and not being able to scream. Now the inside of her mouth feels dead and peeling. Dr. Lowe sighs. "Do you know what I’m saying? Your muscles were dying. The condition flooded your bloodstream and caused kidney failure. It's a miracle you're alive. Can you tell me why you took the pills?" Mai thinks she must give the psychologist something, to make her happy, and also to sound reasonable so she can leave the hospital soon. "I took the pills because the other kids said I was fat." It works. Dr. Lowe's expression becomes more intense. She's the first to hear Mai's confession and she will surely look good at the doctors' meeting. Mai has noticed that the medical doctors and the psychologists get together twice a week to discuss their patients. "Your mother isn’t angry at you. I just talked to her." Dr. Lowe pauses to take a deep breath. "A beautiful lady." "D'you mean that she's slim, not fat like me?" Dr. Lowe says nothing. Mai senses the psychologist expects to hear more, something satisfying. "I didn't take the pills to punish my mom, if that's what you're thinking. I love my mom. I didn't want to make her sad. It's just that I'm fat, and the other girls laugh at me. I can't stand it anymore. It's stronger than any other feeling." As she talks, Mai realizes she's telling the truth. After a silence, Dr. Lowe asks, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" Mai thinks she would like to be as nimble as a lizard, but she can't say that aloud. She can't even say that she wanted to be a top model, before she got fat. Anyway, it’s been awhile since she dreamed of a career in fashion. Now she's twelve and she wants to be a dancer. But she can't, of course. She says she wants to be a naturalist. Dr. Lowe says it's a good choice, and she’d make a good naturalist. Mai hears the usual words grownups say to make her ugly looks seem unimportant: You don’t need to be thin to be a naturalist. They're wrong, though. You can be an adult and be fat but you can't be fat in a classroom, unless every other girl is. Until she’s grown up, it won’t pay to be a fat naturalist. Something about this thought makes her stifle a laugh. Mai says something else—maybe about how much she likes critters?—that she doesn’t remember later. Dr. Lowe asks another question. Mai says something neutral in response. Finally, Dr. Lowe rises to her feet and goes away. It's about time. Two other patients emerge from the visitor's chair, like cushions, as soon as Dr. Lowe stands up. One of the patients is a bodiless lizard head as big as a balloon, but its green companion is a tinier head as small as a tennis ball, with a tail attached to the neck. They nod, sympathy etched into their saurian faces. When the psychologist came in, Mai wanted to warn her to be careful of them while sitting in the chair, but had said nothing because she didn't want to sound crazy. The two heads melted into the moleskin as the woman sat down. But now they're up again, three-dimensional and smiling. Mai nods in response to the heads while green fluff floats down from an unseen source in the ceiling and covers every object in the room. The nurse walks in and attaches a transparent plastic bag to the IV rack. Written on the back are the words "Lizard Viral Music." When the fluid enters the drip line, Mai hears notes from a keyboard and a flute reels and skips inside her head while the steady rhythm of a bass guitar and drums resonates in her bones. A lizard comes out of the closet and executes entrechats. It has short, stubby legs, and its body is plump. Lacerta agilis. Mai learned the name of the species in science class, and she wondered why they called it "agile," when there's another species, the common lizard, which is much thinner. Mai would like to dance, too, but the needle stuck in her wrist prevents her from moving. And she's too clumsy anyway. "I can teach you when you're out of here," the critter says. As if that were possible. A white manta fish swims across the room, undulating in sinuous lines, electricity crackling when the edges of its wing-like body touch the walls. The manta halts above Mai's bed and hangs there like an oddly comforting cloud.

*** The first day back to school, Mai feels lighter. She did shed at least ten pounds, thanks to the hospital food, but the effect is lost on the mirror. It's a lightness from within, like waking up to an unexpected holiday. All morning long, Mai looks to the classroom window by her desk and waits for the bell to free her. A visit to the orchard is in order. Besides the gardener, who tends the border that marks the frontier leading to the garden, no one works on the squares of vegetables today. Every plant is tender- green while the fruit trees still seem to believe they're meant to carry flowers forever. Her chubby friend—or is it a different lizard?—dashes out from under the mint bushes, capers around her. After a few minutes, Mai tries to follow. Halted movements. Broken arabesques. Tears prickle Mai's eyes. "Don't sweat it. It'll come naturally to you," the stumpy teacher says. "Let's do some jazz steps," Fancy footwork, big leaps and quick turns. Cheeks burning from the efforts, Mai explodes with energy. Chaines, piqués, pirouettes, grand-jetés, turning jumps, tour-jetés. And slowly, by the ones and the twos and then the dozens, a torrent of lizards scuttles into the orchard and begins to dance and gyrate; they even do a little soft shoe. Closing her eyes, she sidesteps the squares of patty pan squash, ghost chili, bell peppers, elderberries, onion and lemon balm. She knows the perfectly arranged rows, like the carefully folded clothes in her drawers, always tidy because her mom says that your drawers are the mirror of your soul. A flurry of laughter punctuates her jazz dance from behind the mixed border. Someone—Valerie or another harpy—is admiring her prowess and offers a tribute to her grace. Mai takes a bow and pushes the sound into the background of the sundrenched leaves. The court of tiny chorus-line performers glides around her, never tiring, short legs never brushing against other legs, in faultless coordination. The day after—it's a Wednesday, the day of deft thieves—during history class she goes over the routine of jazz steps, taps her chubby foot to the rhythm of the Lizard Viral Music. She's wearing her ballerina flats, black and shiny after a serious rubbing. Her friends will do a square dance, and she, the lead dancer, will direct them under the limelight of the sun. When the bell rings she's already running to the door. The garden is scented and friendly as she hastens to her theater, knowing that the crowd of silent-footed ballerinas waits for her, ready to scuttle forward from under the bushes. She passes under the hedge arch that opens in the mixed border, and bursts into the orchard. A thin layer of dust covers her shoes from running on the gravel paths, but it doesn't matter, even if Mom says a person's station in society always can be determined by her footgear. One ear attuned to the distant sounds of kids playing in the schoolyard and the faint noise of traffic from the road beyond the old oaks on the edge of the garden, she stands next to the strawberries. And she finally spots her chorus line. The greetings she was about to give die in her throat. Her friends are waiting for her in a tidy row between the carrots and a kind of clover with five-petal pink flowers. Each of them is neatly skewered on a wooden stick of the kind Dad uses for brochettes when he invites the neighbors to a barbecue party. Mrs. Turtledove finds her after the recess is over. Mai, sitting on the ground in tattered clothes, plays Mikado, picking up skewers and sticking them into the ground around a carrot patch that no longer holds any carrots. A scrap of paper as large as a thumbnail is impaled on every skewer, with an illegible letter scribbled onto it. Mai refuses to explain herself. She refuses to utter one single word. The school principal calls Mai's mom, who turns up very quickly, a battle of embarrassment and worry on her classical face. It appears that Mai dug a hole in the middle of a planted patch. After class, in front of the principal and all the staff, the gardener goes to work on the freshly dug dirt with his old spade and unearths twenty-six minuscule bundles of fabric tied up with blades of grass, each bundle containing a dead lizard.

***

Mai spends six months in the hospital. Not even the psychologist, Dr. Karen Lowe of the kind smile, succeeds in extracting a word out of Mai's lips. The hospital room is white and calm and no green fluff floats down from the ceiling, no sympathetic heads emerge from the moleskin on the chair when the visitor stands up. Outside the window there's just a branch of lime tree, and the wind, and a dappled sky. The serene white manta fish is just a dropped ceiling of a substance that looks like Styrofoam. She doesn’t try to speak to it, wondering if she’s learned anything at all about the world. Sometimes, as she’s looking out the window, a lizard will sidle along the ledge. She will look at the lizard. It will look sideways at her. Mai has no idea what the lizard might be thinking.

Gio Clairval is an Italian-born writer who lives in France and writes in English. A postgraduate from La Sorbonne and Dauphine, she scoured the planet as a business consultant for fifteen years and toured France with her post-rock band for two, before beginning writing seriously four years ago. Now she commutes between Lake Como and Paris, where she is a loyal subject of LeGrosChat, a Himalayan cat or, as the French say, a Sacré de Birmanie. Her fiction is forthcoming in Weird Tales and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities,edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. She occasionally rambles at www.gioclairval.blogpost.com. Jeff VanderMeer has had novels published in fifteen languages, won multiple awards, and made the best-of-year lists of Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the LA Weekly, and many others. His award- winning short fiction has been featured on Wired.com’s GeekDad and Tor.com, as well as in many anthologies and magazines, including Conjunctions, Black Clock, and in American Fantastic Tales (Library of America). His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and hundreds of others. In addition, he has edited or co-edited more than a dozen influential fiction anthologies for, among others, Bantam Books and Pan Macmillan. On the pop culture front, VanderMeer’s work has been turned into short films for PlayStation Europe and videos featuring music by The Church. With his wife Ann, he has lectured, conducted master classes, and given workshops all over the world, including at the Brisbane Arts Center in Australia, the University of California at San Diego, and Wofford College, in South Carolina. He is a frequent guest of honor at conferences around the world, including such events as Utopiales in France, the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia, Finncon in Helsinki, and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. For more information, visit jeffvandermeer.com or contact [email protected]. The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time Tamsyn Muir

14 Arden Lane suffered from bad plumbing and magical build-up. There Dr. Rosamund Tilly had raised two children, bred sixteen chinchillas, and written her thesis, and because her name was on the deed had become the medium of all the house’s whims and wishes. She liked it, most of the time, but her best friend in all the world liked it less: “Your house is a spoiled brat,” said Danny Tsai, “and I feel inane saying that.” The house was an old, old two-storey lump, very square and not graceful, made of red brick that had to peep through thick trellises of ivy creeper and a roof that liked shedding tiles. Dr. Tilly knew it was horribly untidy and ran the risk of being burnt down by vigilantes from the Neighbourhood Association—only that it was at the end of the road, and hidden by thick yew hedge. Even then the hedge was never even at the top, and it was her neighbours’ hobby to send letters seeing if they could get her to cut it down. But Rosamund loved 14 Arden Lane; it had been willed to her by her grandmother, who died conveniently when Rosamund was twenty and had needed a house. She had admired it for its slippery wooden floors, its wide stairs and weird chimney, the poky bathrooms, and the wheezing refrigerator in the kitchen. She had carefully and thoroughly checked for ants’ nests and termites, following guides. Satisfied, she recklessly painted the walls in unlikely colours like lipstick red and moved all her coats into the closets that would shelter her coats and later the coats of her daughters. When the house turned out to be magical Rosamund Tilly just accepted this as fact. Magic built up like a breath waiting to be exhaled. On a bad day, she could touch a coffee mug and have it erupt in delicate little spikes of ceramic, a fretwork of stalactites extending outward as she pulled her hand back. Tap water might avoid her fingers when she turned on the tap. And that was just the house when it was in a good mood, because when it was upset or in a fit of bad behaviour it could make her life a misery. A spoiled brat, like Daniel said. Once Dr. Tilly had grown welts under her arms that burst and released dozens of tiny, transparent crabs, which made Danny nauseated and her daughters shriek. She had finally swept the crabs into a dustpan and let them go outside, where they crept into the bushes. Rosamund had been more disturbed than afraid, and good at choking down things that made her disturbed: Her daughters Snowdrop and Sparrow were disturbed, afraid and disquieted, but in rebellion from being named Snowdrop and Sparrow they were creatures of logic who’d always despaired of the house and dreamt of air- conditioned flats. At that point she hadn’t really blamed them. Daniel, though, had bore up well. He’d only once really lost his temper, when her kitchen parsley bit his fingers: “Why can’t you have a normal house instead of— this stupid, temperamental Disney shack,” he’d snapped. “And the water pressure is terrible.” For five weeks neither of his cellphones got reception there and Danny banged all the doors. But with Daniel, any annoyance he demonstrated was usually awkwardness, and under the staid curtness of his day-to-day Chartered Stockbroker face he liked chinchillas as well as laptops. They were two people who understood each other completely: She understood his irritability, his privacy, his inability to be serious with her when he was serious all day with everyone else. He understood just about everything with her, including a lot of things she wished he didn’t. They were as devoted to each other as two people could be, and every lunchtime when he was at his office desk and she was marking university papers they would ring up to ask what the other was eating. Accepting her magical house was a small issue. Anyway, anything 14 Arden Lane did never lasted; when the house felt it had made its point, it stopped. Usually. One of the chinchillas had been purple forever. Now that she was forty-two Rosamund Tilly could tell when the build-ups were reaching explosion point. The ivy trellises around the house would be taut and trembling, the pretty crazy-paved path curling inward trying to claw the long grass verge. Even the dust would smell like firework smoke as she dragged a cloth haphazardly over her collections of glass cats. Years ago a build-up had made her accidentally wipe off her youngest daughter's eyebrows, and Snowdrop had gone around with her fringe brushed down and full of bitter complaints. Her tweenage feelings had been further hurt by her mother finding it hilarious, but the point was underscored: Rosamund Tilly really couldn't control what happened or when. Thursday week the house made her hiccup a butterfly, and at that point she knew there was going to be a problem. 14 Arden Lane was of late empty and lonely now that it had lost the children and most of the chinchillas, and the house would sullenly take it out on her in sometimes vicious ways. Just a month ago great snakelike twists of wormy mud slithered out the kitchen sink, coiling over her dishes and bending her forks, and that had made Dr. Tilly remember the crabs. That night Danny came over from the office after a long day of chartered stockbrokering and surfed pictures of cats on his laptop as she fidgeted. "A watched pot never boils,” he said. "Don’t give the house ideas with ‘boil,’ you animal.” "Remember how aggressive it got when you put down new carpet, with the chimney and the goats?" He was clicking through pictures of disapproving rabbits, sitting next to her on the sofa. "I'm waiting for the day when you form a new plane of existence and your evil self replaces you, and I'll be able to tell her by the moustache." "You are so flip," said Rosamund. "Why do you have to be so flip?" "I'm just here to look after you, Rose," he said, and that was pretty adorable so she put her feet into his lap and prodded his computer with her socks. Daniel Tsai had long-sufferingly helped her raise two children, sixteen chinchillas and read her thesis, but he'd been obliged to: In primary school they had exchanged teal and fuschia friendship bracelets, a lifelong commitment if ever there was one. "Well? Go on and tell the house to hurry up, as the suspense is killing me." Rosamund Tilly folded herself into a lotus pose instead, which always gently bemused him and disgusted her two daughters. Being able to fold oneself into a lotus was a payoff from having done yoga when it wasn't popular and being a hippie when it wasn't fun anymore, when she'd prided herself on having the widest bellbottoms in all Hartford and fifty-six recipes involving carob. When she had moved into 14 Arden Lane she'd had carrot-coloured hair so long she could sit on it and towered three inches over Danny, who wasn't short, so she supposed the house had liked her out of pure shock. Her ears popped, like they did on a descending airplane. "I think something's coming," she said. Danny was looking at cats again. "So's Christmas." Not a lot happened, at first. There was a little tingly smell like ozone, and a sense that she'd just breathed in a lungful of water and had to spit it out. Needle-sharp shivers started at her ankles and worked their way up. She closed her eyes very tightly, and when she opened them again there was Danny, waiting, eyes crinkling a little quizzically. "Well?" he said. "Did worlds collide?" "Not for me," she said, and the sensation flared briefly again: more like the shadow of a feeling than the first sharp injection of it. Her vision blurred a little, but she wasn’t sure as they hadn't turned on all the lights in the sitting-room. The house liked it when they thought conscientiously about the environment. Dr. Tilly worried that something dreadful was about to happen. "Well?" Danny said. "Did worlds collide?" "You already said that, you broken record," she said. A third little stab. The room shifted again, and her fingers fretted at her eyes. "Well?" he said. "Did worlds collide?" The little flurries of sensation were making her palms prickle with sweat. Danny wasn't reacting. He had barely moved an inch—hadn't even moved—same expression, the same tonal quality, the same lift to the I in collide and slight Yorkshire slur to the s. When looked at, the room wasn't doing anything particularly interesting: The wallpaper wasn't turning into sugar, and the armchairs weren't growing feet. “I’m admitting defeat,” she said. "Well?" Danny said. "Did worlds collide?" For long moments Rosamund just breathed. She pinched the bridge of her nose to make that nearly-a- headache sensation go away, suddenly horribly certain that she had turned her best friend into a space mannequin and that at forty-two she would never be able to get another half as good, but the man opposite reached out and took her hand to keep her steady. Rosamund was stupidly relieved at that. "Ease up," he said. "What's happened?" Now they were both looking around. She was having no apparent effect. The rug was not bleeding, the air tasted of nothing but air, and they both had their fingerprints. Once when she was younger and pregnant she'd made soap bubbles every time she blinked, which had distracted her from being younger and pregnant and thinking listlessly about marrying the father. Danny got worried and jogged her elbow: "Earth to Rosamund Tilly. How many fingers am I holding up?" "You're not holding up any fingers, you egg." The room blurred again. Right before her Danny-on- the-sofa unzipped and re-zipped back to where he'd been sitting, so fast that it was like he hadn't moved at all. Lamplight caught all the worn patches on his suit. His expression was vague and somehow familiar— "Well?" Danny said. "Did worlds collide?" Even then she didn't get frightened, she told herself. Three cheers for Dr. Tilly. ***

Time for a test. She was a doctor, after all, and though she was a doctor of Medieval Literature she still retained a duty to Science. She launched herself off the sofa like a shell firing and went to the clock, took down the time, wrote it on the back of a grocery bill—8:14—and put it on the coffee table. Dr. Tilly stood beside it like a guard, scrunching up her hands in her daffodil-coloured skirt and feeling ridiculous as the clock marched on to 8:15. Nothing happened. Danny was leaning over to read. "8:14?" Oh, well, what the hell. Dr. Tilly tensed up before she said, "Testing?"

***

Another big blur, another jerk of dislocation as she found herself back on the sofa, totally discombobulated. Once more Danny wore that pensive, waiting expression, and she couldn't even look at it as his mouth started to round out the words, as her grocery list sat next to the clock pristine and un-written-on. The clock read 8:14. "Well?" said Danny. "Did worlds collide?" Time travel! The house had never mixed up time before. Dr. Tilly thought that she must have done something really rotten to have it drop something like this in her lap. She would have been excited if she hadn't been so horrified: The house was probably destroying the space-time continuum right now and forming a thousand glittering paradoxes all because she hadn't really cleaned the kitchen. Once she'd forgotten to weed the window boxes and the house had dissolved her feet right up to the ankle. She knew three scientific things: 1. She was caught in a time loop, set off by 2. speaking, and 3. all of this was incredibly unscientific. So Dr. Tilly got her grocery bill again and scribbled on the back, worried that perhaps this too would send her careening back to the start: CAUSED TIME LOOP, D —but nothing happened. Whew. Danny Number Six looked at her, then looked at the grocery list, then looked at her, and had the reaction that she'd guessed he had; he was completely delighted. He took his ballpoint pen out of his pocket and clicked it on and off, a sure sign of ecstasy in a stockbroker. "Are you sure?" She nodded again. "Good God. Why no verbal?" Her writing was getting increasingly cramped. SPEAKING = SWITCH. SOUND??? "All right. Don't worry, I'm a licensed professional," he said, leaning forward and putting the laptop away. "A time loop means you've already gone back. How many iterations of the loop so far, Rose?" She raised her fingers. "Six? This is insane." Dr. Tilly wrote again: Got to break it though, this is ridiculous!! "This is beyond ridiculous. Did you forget to defrost the fridge again?" Will experiment. You forget what happens each time I reset the loop. Judiciously she added a sad face, : ( "Let's not go into the physics and assume you're creating endless worlds in 14 Arden Lane with each new loop, it will give the chinchillas and I a logistics headache," he said, leaning back and drumming his fingers on his knee. "Go ahead. What’s the worst that can happen? Goodbye from the future, you know—I as Future Daniel Tsai will cease to be." That is horrible do not put it that way!! "I’m sorry," he said. "Do what you have to do, Rosamund." "I will, I promise," she said, and— ***

"Well?" said Danny Seven. "Did worlds collide?"

***

Dr. Tilly went around and touched all the walls and the photographs, hoping the house would respond. New try. "Did worlds collide?" asked Danny Eight. On the next loop she went and made sure all of the chinchillas were coping in their hutch as Danny Nine craned his head, nonplussed, and that didn't do anything either. Next. Danny Ten followed her as she left the house but going out into the street did nothing more than make her eyes squint in the chill lemon-rind glare of the lamps, and at 8:18 in that iteration her eldest daughter Sparrow sent her a text message she didn't read. The neighbours peered at her through their curtains. "Did worlds collide?" asked Danny Eleven. In the throes of despair and rattling around the house like an old car, Dr. Tilly dusted her glass cats. Nothing happened, though at one point her cellphone tweeted in her pocket. Sitting there on the sofa with what felt like an ice- cream headache, Dr. Tilly permitted herself an expletive: "Jesus H. Christ," she said. "Well?" said Danny Twelve. "Did worlds collide?" She said a ruder word.

***

Dr. Tilly put her head in her hands, which caught Danny Thirteen’s attention immediately as he reached over to touch her shoulder. "What happened?" he said, and for a moment she was tempted to explain everything again; to rely on his thoughtfulness and candor, but instead she sighed and went to get her notebook. Perhaps waiting was another experiment too, and she didn't have to worry him in the process. I'm mute. The house is not happy with me. "Is that all?" The relief in her best friend's voice was palpable. "Well, that’s nothing. We could play Charades." NO "We could enjoy the quiet." Rosamund made a very rude motion like a gunshot salute, and seeing her so uncharacteristically hangdog he relented: "Well, come here and we'll watch TV until the house forgives you, but we just missed the news." They both pretended to watch the Food Network on mute. 14 Arden Lane was silent except for the low burble of the dishwasher and the muffled sound of chinchillas in the next room. She put her head on the shoulder of his dusty coat and allowed herself five seconds of frustrated self-pity, and enjoyed those five seconds immensely. When she and Daniel were alone she pretended that he never flinched slightly or was given pause by anything, and she just smelled the old familiar smell of his shampoo and overheated laptop. At 8:18 her cellphone buzzed in her pocket, which she ignored. She and Danny had once both sworn that they would be presidents, astronauts and rock stars, and now in their forties they shared mid-life crises in the same way they’d used to share chocolates. She knew she could be careless and cavalier and hard to deal with, and had won the lottery with Daniel. As best friends went he was reliably fantastic. She liked the way his dark hair was cut short, with sprigs of early gray at the temples, liked his hair in general: It was a pretty shallow thing to like about a person, but she liked so much about Danny that she was amazed by every new thing she found charming. There were lines at his eyes and mouth that made his rare smile a little lopsided and piratical, no asset for a chartered stockbroker. When she touched his hair he hesitated. "It's bizarre not to have you talking," he said. "I have to admit, I don’t actually like it." Rosamund wrote afresh in her notebook: Sometimes I think you're angry at me. "Don't even try to have a conversation like this," he said, avoiding the issue like a champ, "it annoys me watching you painstakingly write that out." There was a terrible loneliness in her as she touched his neck, folded down a piece of his collar. It wasn’t 14 Arden Lane that was lonely, she suddenly thought, it was her; she was an armoured creature, self-sufficient, but for the terrible fact of needing her best friend all the time excepting when she wanted to finish a book. Her fingers curled at his neck and she was aware of everything, aware of the outside night-time and how her clothes felt on her skin, of how his face was a mask and how he wouldn't look at her. Her fingers brushed his cheek and his jaw and the side of his mouth, sifted through his hair. Rosamund Tilly was an empty glass. "Don't," said Danny. At university they'd draped all over each other and never cared. They'd both had their gay periods then, reverting straight the next semester when Rosamund admitted she couldn't do all the clogged-up sinks and he admitted he couldn't deal with the late nights, and life proceeded from there. Daniel had one and a half divorces and Dr. Tilly had littered Hartford with a committed lack of commitment. She’d also littered Hartford with Snowdrop and Sparrow Tilly, who were the delights of her life, or at least would be when one or the other stopped texting her, and now that they were grown up being without Daniel was a terrible chore. Rosamund had never been lonely for anyone except Daniel Tsai, and when she pressed closer she could feel the beat of his heart slithering arrhythmically against her arm. "Don't," he said again. Her mouth was very close to his mouth. Danny's dark eyes were fathomless and closed. "We can’t handle change, Rosamund. I love you too much and know you too well. Think about this." The room closed down claustrophobically on her. She wanted to say: Do you know how long I've thought about this? Or: I want you more than anyone I ever thought I wanted. And: I'm so sorry. Instead she accidentally said, "I— "

***

"Well?" Danny Fourteen said. "Did worlds collide?" ***

Dr. Tilly quit wasting time. She shot to her feet, made a beeline for her notebook, laptop jabbing into her thigh and irritated at the faint smell of chinchillas as she wrote. He said, "What," as she flipped over pages, pretty patient as she gestured him away from trying to look—all he did was eventually get up and get himself a glass of water, as though this were a perfectly normal evening. "Just nod your head for all's well and shake it for things not well," said Daniel, "maybe flailing a little for something in the middle, God knows, I didn’t learn how to deal with this in school." Now used to gestures, she jabbed a finger at him until he sat back down on the squashy sofa and looked up at her expectantly. Dr. Tilly did not expect to feel so shaky. She tasted nervousness in her saliva as she flipped up the notebook— Don't stop me, Daniel. "Oh, yes, that calms me down," said Danny. "That makes me feel perfectly at ease." Flip. We need to talk. "Okay. Any reason you're using flashcards?” Flip. & what I'm saying here is all true and nothing to do with any house magic. Danny still looked pretty buttoned-up and patient, but his voice had that overly reasonable cast people took on if they thought you were a bit loopy. "Okay. Go on." what did you have for lunch today?? “Rose, you already asked, and it was a peanut butter protein bar.” Mr. Daniel Tsai, are you in love with me? He didn't even take it in. He read it, looked at her face, saw the question there as well, and smiled as gently as a chartered stockbroker could when faced with a woman for whom the date was over—self-effacing, running one hand through that gray-sprigged hair as though trying to consider how best to put things. "So that's what you're worried about," he said carefully. "Rosamund, you know I care about you, don’t you? You and the girls are the most important people in my life who don't share my genetic code." This was not going well. She had made some mistake. When Danny decided the best defense was a good offense, he went in with irritated guns blazing. "I know we joke around a lot," he was saying. "Is it the flirting? We can stop if it makes you uncomfortable. To be honest, I do love you. But I haven't been in love with you since I was eighteen." It was incredible. She hadn't thought you could physically feel your heart breaking, a sort of sucking sensation near the aorta as it imploded into itself. Dr. Tilly hadn't thought her heart would break at all. "Don't worry," he added, "nothing's going to change, Rose. Nothing." "Let me try this again," she said.

***

"Well?" Danny Fifteen said. "Did worlds collide?"

***

It was a little funny, even, how his reactions didn't change, how she noticed the quirk of his eyebrows once he got to halfway through her litany. Her handwriting had perhaps been a little messier this time. There was only one change now, a question of semantics— “Rose, you already asked,” said Danny, “and it was a peanut butter protein bar.” Mr. Daniel Tsai: I am in love with you. Dr. Tilly held that one for the longest time, gripped between her knees. Once she'd gotten to forty she thought she'd been an emotional bulwark, but now she felt as though all her insides were scooped out and replaced with packing peanuts. She felt thick and heavy. Danny re-read the sign six times, eyes darting to her face before going back and reading it again, and she thought she imagined him swallowing. "Well," he said, with admirable calmness, "what do I do with that information, Dr. Rosamund Tilly?" She scribbled inanely: I'm not sure? Romantic embraces?? "So you immediately assume I'm in love with you, in a fit of o'erweening hubris," snapped her best friend, but even as she gaped and horrible dread filled her he made the queerest half-smile expression. The smell of sofa and dusty chinchillas no longer irritated Dr. Tilly. "Don't mind me," he said, and Danny leaned over to kiss her. He kissed her kindly until she didn’t want to be kissed kindly any more, at which point he smeared her chapstick from her top lip to her bottom lip. "Please just talk," he said, and she was too busy trying to memorize the way that his mouth felt and how the cradle of his hips were against her own. "I love you. Say it again." "I've never loved anyone else," said Dr. Tilly. ***

"Well?" Danny Sixteen said. "Did worlds collide?"

***

This time all she did was unfold herself: got up wearily off the sofa and could not look him in the eye, had that quizzical expression of his burned repulsively into her brain forevermore. Dr. Tilly stood up and paced around the room, hating every hair on her head and every brick in 14 Arden Lane's walls, and at one point kicked the chimney grate until it hurt her big toe. Danny just watched. The cellphone buzzed for the umpteenth time in the pocket of her skirt, and now she yanked it out savagely to read: 8:18 PM Sent from: Sparrow Dont forget to fix the fridge mum! Dr. Tilly imagined that the house was a little sorry as she got the hairdryer and proceeded to defrost everything up to and including the freezer, cartons of milk and meat sitting on the countertop as Danny watched and provided towels. If there had been a Queen's Award for feeling exhausted, she would have won it. Feeling tired made one feel sadder and when one was sad one felt tireder, and she got down on her knees and scrubbed out the remnants of old carrots as she half-daydreamed about being kissed. "There," she said, "are you happy now, you wretched house?" Nothing happened. Her brain burst into tears. Danny looked at her expression and said, "All right. Plan B," and did what he did every time she had a pressure headache, which was to turn off the lights so that only a thin filter from the kitchen made its way into the sitting-room. He spread the sofa blanket out on their laps and put his arm around her, and they listened to the far- off roar of cars in the street and the tiny squeaks of chinchillas dust-bathing. Dr. Tilly thought she understood why he was angry: There they were, two people who knew each other so well that just by an expression he could tell what she needed, and all they did was stand and stare at opposite sides of the crevasse. "A time loop?" he said, when she finally told him. "You’ve got to be kidding me. A time loop? You met my doppelgangers?" The expression on her face must have been like a coffee stain that couldn't be wiped clean, so he relented: "Well, I suppose worlds really did collide." The house tried to get back into her good books by making tiny mandarin-coloured lights appear like fireflies, and she nearly forgave it when Danny reached out and let one alight on his finger. When he passed it to her it was sweet and warm like tumbledryer lint. So was his hand. "Yes," said Dr. Tilly, "they did, now that I think about it."

***

When everyone else in the faculty asked about her tired face the next day, she said “House troubles,” and everyone nodded as though that made any sort of sense. The neighbours had stuffed two notes about the hedge in 14 Arden Lane’s letterbox, and the house had retaliated by covering them in snails; the water pressure in her morning shower had been shocking; the house had made jasmine bloom from the ivy trellises, but Rosamund Tilly informed it that this was a poor show and botanically incorrect. It was Danny who had to call her at lunchtime as she sat down to mark some coursework, and she hadn’t any lunch. “Tuna salad and three crackers,” said Daniel. “You?” She looked in her desk drawer. “Five Peppermint Tic- Tacs.” “Rose, that’s disgusting,” he said, and she could hear him drumming a pen on his desk. Danny didn’t mince words: “Look, you can’t go on like this, and I don’t mean your lunch. God only knows what your house will do the next time.” “It’s lonely,” she said, though her heart wasn’t really into defending it. “The girls are too far away. I was thinking of getting another chinchilla." “I was thinking more along the lines of a roommate,” he said a bit crisply, “and before you say anything else—I was thinking of me. For one, I’m at your house so often I think I’m legally your common-law friendship-bracelet wife. What do you say?” Her eyelids undrooped. Her headache cleared. Dr. Tilly’s Tic-Tacs melted on her tongue, sharp and clean and sweet. “I think that might do the trick,” she said. It did. The plumbing was still terrible, but in Rosamund’s opinion 14 Arden Lane was good as gold.

Tamsyn Muir is based in Auckland, New Zealand, where she divides her time between writing, teaching and dogs. A graduate of the Clarion Writer's Workshop 2010, this is her first publication. The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois Megan Arkenberg

Dear Madame,

My sincerest apologies for my inexcusable delay in responding to your inquiry after the celebrated carousel of the Margravine of Blois. The truth is—and I write this with utmost regret—that the reports responsible for so much distress in your admirable person are accurate in every respect. I myself bore witness to the destruction of that most miraculous clockwork, and what remains—a handful of silver gears, and a pair of bay horses with the most phenomenally lifelike coloring and expression— allows only for positive identification. As for the events that permitted such a wrenching tragedy (your words, madame, but I find them wonderfully apt) to occur, I enclose some pages which I wrote from the seventeenth of September to October fourteenth of last year, in faith that all will be clarified. In this, madame, as in all things, I hope to show myself to be Your most Humble and Obedient Servant,

Antoine Aristide de Saint-Pierre

***

September 17

The lady Porphyrogene’s house is called Summerfall, and it stands at the end of a long white drive lined with plane trees and elm. To the east, bare hills roll up to meet the lowering autumn clouds; to the west, the land slopes sharply to the sea, where clear waves fold over reddish weeds and palely colored stones—lavender, glass-green, dogwood-blossom pink. The front lawn is left barren, the better to show Summerfall’s magnificent façade. In back are the gardens, and in the center of the gardens, the carousel of the Margravine of Blois. “Most of them want to see that first,” Porphyrogene said the moment I stepped down from my carriage. She took up my bags, two in each hand, and headed for the central stair. “I trust your tastes are not so common, M’sieur Saint-Pierre.” “No,” I said, hardly sure what I was agreeing to. I have concluded, over the full three hours of our acquaintance, that this is quite common with Porphyrogene. She is a smaller woman than her letters led me to expect, with whitening hair and skin the color of cream-clotted coffee. I must confess, I anticipated a woman of greater beauty, familiar as I am with my hostess’s many amorous conquests. Apparently, Porphyrogene’s expectations were the reverse. “You’re rather handsome, for a professor,” she said. “I suppose some pretty, dithering little fiancée will be sending you love letters to interrupt your work?” “Have no fear on that account, madame. I was widowed last April.” “Oh.” She said it quite flatly, and gave me an odd look over her shoulder. “My condolences, m’sieur.” Presently, we reached my apartment—a series of six rooms at the top of the eastern wing, damp-smelling and paneled in sage-colored wood. My bedroom, library, and private parlor all overlook the sea. By ingenious design, or my own imagination, the faux-balconies covering the windows are like cast-iron bars. “You will be spending most of your time alone,” Porphyrogene said. “Business keeps me outside the house. Perhaps you would prefer to take your dinner here?” “Yes,” I said, “if that can be arranged.” “It can.” She paused for a moment, one hand on her hip, the other tucking a white curl behind her ear. “I would prefer it, m’sieur, if you left the north wing to itself. The rest of Summerfall is yours to investigate. If you need anything . . . ” She pointed to a frayed cord hanging over the bedside table. “Ring for Jean-Baptiste.” Such is the living mistress of Summerfall. Tonight, I expect, I shall be introduced to its ghosts.

***

September 18

I found no ghosts last night, regrettably, and sleep was not much more in evidence. This house must have a thousand clocks in it; I’ve counted over a dozen in my own apartments, chiming and sending out miniature automata processions on every hour. I know little enough of the Clockmaker’s art, but judging from the uniform and uncanny realism in the tiny figures, I believe they were all crafted by the same hand. And while my pen dwells on uncanny uniformity: It is my conclusion (from an admittedly hasty collection of data) that every room in Summerfall has at least one portrait of the same woman in red. Her features are very distinct: dark skin, pillowy lips painted scarlet, two severely straight eyebrows, of which the left is always raised a fraction of an inch higher than the right. I am sure this woman is no relative of Porphyrogene—nor does a past lover seem likely, as my hostess is not the sort to cling sentimentally to old mementos. At breakfast this morning, I was introduced to the shadowy figure of Porphyrogene’s valet, Jean-Baptiste. He is a man as gray as his livery, and he moves with an unpleasantly mouse-like scurry. “Where is Porphyrogene?” I asked, pushing a reluctant clump of dry eggs around on my plate. “Madame is occupied in the gardens today.” “Enjoying the last flowers of the season, I expect?” “Perhaps. I couldn’t say.” My eggs, deeply dissatisfied with their treatment at the tines of my fork, promptly made their dissatisfaction known by plopping onto the parlor rug. I dropped my fork in surrender. “Would it be possible for me to join her?” I asked—purely for the sake of politeness, as I could not imagine permission being denied. “Oh, no, monsieur,” Jean-Baptiste said. The weather, he intimated—and it truly is horrendously gray and chill —might affect monsieur’s mood in undesirable ways, and wouldn’t monsieur rather spend such a dreary day before a roaring fire in monsieur’s well-apportioned library? In truth, he sounded much like Violeta’s old maidservant—though Jean-Baptiste, at least, does not seem worried that I am going to walk purposefully into the ocean. Whether such a possibility continues, nearly a year and half after I first voiced the intention, I cannot say. Though I do know this: It is good to be hunting again, good to be seeking a ghost whose tragedy has nothing to do with mine.

September 18, later

I think Jean-Baptiste is right, and the miserable weather is exerting an unpleasant influence on my nerves. I woke moments ago from a most disconcerting dream. I was standing on a beach of gray stones, and as each wave rolled in it stained the rocks a different hue— powder-pink and eggshell-blue, cream-yellow and sage- green. The water felt warm against my feet, over my ankles and up to my knees. I bent and spread my fingers in the prickling foam. Suddenly, I caught Violeta’s scent mingling with the brine—the smell of lavender soap, the sickly-sweet tinge of sweat. I looked up from the stones—they were dark colors now, crimson and cobalt and golden as egg-yolks —and turned to my wife, my heart pounding beneath my tongue. The woman beside me was not Violeta. Her black skin, her red lips and gown, her left eyebrow lifted in vague amusement . . . it was the woman from the portraits. I woke a moment later to the chiming of a hundred clocks.

***

September 20

Porphyrogene took her dinner with me yesterday afternoon. She must have come in from the gardens without stopping to dress, as her hair and gown were positively soaked. “Have you found anything yet?” she asked. It would be difficult to overemphasize the impatience in her voice; it was as though her sleeve had caught fire, and she was asking after a pitcher of water. “Sounds, apparitions, cold spots in the doorways?” “Nothing of that variety, no.” I felt unaccountably reluctant to mention my dream of Violeta. We sat for a few minutes in silence, before the clock on the table between us began to chime four. “Who is the woman in the portraits?” Porphyrogene looked faintly startled as she glanced at the nearest specimen, hanging in an oval frame between the parlor windows. “She was the Margravine of Blois,” she said, and took a slow sip of champagne. “Was? The Margravine of Blois is dead?” She chuckled softly over the rim of her glass, but her eyes looked pained. “Yes, rather.” A pause. “She died six years ago—here, actually.” “How?” “I didn’t murder her, m’sieur, if that’s what you’re implying.” Her fingers drummed on the glass’s stem. “That’s not to say I didn’t want to. Perhaps you are too young to remember, but it was quite a scandal when she left me twelve years ago. A popular rhyme or two was made about it—they say I still keep the blankets turned down on her side of the bed, waiting for her to come home.” “But she did come home.” I leaned back in my chair, gazing at the portrait. “If she left you twelve years ago, why did she come back six years later to die?” Porphyrogene sighed—deeply, from her chest. “Well, I’m sure it wasn’t to see me again. Perhaps she wanted to be near the carousel.” “And what is so special about the carousel?” Porphyrogene shook her head. “Everything.”

***

September 23

Jean-Baptiste brought breakfast to my rooms this morning—a small blessing, as what little sleep I can afford is soured with unsettling dreams, and by dawn I am in no shape to navigate Summerfall alone. In addition to its usual burden of cold coffee and overcooked eggs, the tray carried four or five keys on an iron ring. They were old work, plain but sturdy, with a faint shield- shaped impression on the bows that may have been Porphyrogene’s coat-of-arms. “For the library, monsieur,” Jean-Baptiste said, indicating the largest of the keys. I glanced at the door in the back of my parlor, eyebrows raised inquiringly. “No, monsieur. The library in the north wing.” He held up a delicate hand to forestall my protestations. “Madame told me to offer. She thinks it will allow your investigations to . . . progress.” How delightful, I thought sourly—as if it were due to some intellectual ineptitude on my part that Summerfall’s ghost had failed to manifest. I’d have her know, in seven years of investigations I had never once lacked results. Still, curiosity always has gotten the better of me; I took the key with profuse thanks, finished my breakfast, and went down to the north wing just as the clocks in the corridor were chiming nine. By sheer volume, the north wing must have more clockwork than the rest of Summerfall combined—a peculiarity that does not, most fortunately, continue into the library itself. It is a very handsome set of chambers, spreading over three stories and a charming mezzanine. Pale walnut shelves, naturally, take up most of the walls, though the mezzanine has seven long windows of colored glass, and a few panels near the fireplaces are covered with creamy damask. Desks, armchairs, and pink plush couches are scattered throughout. One room in particular captured my interest. It is, I believe, the farthest north in Summerfall, and one massive window would look out over the gardens if I could successfully manhandle its brocade curtain aside. The desks were lost beneath an avalanche of books which bore no conceivable relationship to each other—the collected romances of Roland, an anonymous sheath of ballads, Christopher of Cloud’s celebrated treatise on clockwork. I paused on finding this last, as it lay open to a page with innumerable notes scrawled in the margins. Here is what I have managed to copy of the page’s text: It is a frequently criticized aspect of the automatic arts that only the smallest clockworks are self- perpetrating, that is, may continue their so-called lives without their Maker’s interference. [Here, Monsieur Cloud makes a digression on the religious parallels evident in this circumstance.] To this, we reply that no other state could be desired. What Clockmaker fails to remember the case of Malory Gerard, whose automata king went mad one day, escaped the music box for which he had been built, and proceeded to do battle with Monsieur Gerard’s collection of exotic songbirds? (This breed of insanity, incidentally, seems most common with automata whose tasks are ceaseless and repetitive. The jaquemarts of an actual clock have fifty-nine minutes between each hourly procession in which to stabilize, whereas Madame Gerard’s king waltzed constantly to the same facile tune.) While this anecdote is rather amusing, it takes little imagination to provoke a shudder at the thought of what a life-sized rampaging automata might do to his erstwhile masters. Most of the scribbled notes were illegible, but I could make out two or three: patronizing idiot—Malory Gerard’s taste in music would drive anyone mad—hold the bloody thing in place and you wouldn’t have this problem! The handwriting was distinctive, not for its illegibility, but for the qualities that made it illegible: a hard leftward slant, trailing loops in its y’s and q’s, an overall suggestion of hastiness that came not from negligence, but from an intelligence too avid to work slowly. It should come as no surprise, then, that when on another pile I found an entire folio volume filled with the handwriting of the Margravine of Blois, I took it back to my rooms for further study. Here is the title, embossed on crimson leather binding in a heavy copperplate: A Catalogue of the Works of the Celebrated Margravine of Blois, compiled by Herself in the house called Summerfall. Two entries in particular caught my attention. I reproduce them here, with their accompanying marginalia. The Clock of the Bride of Death is kept in Summerfall’s guest apartments at the top of the eastern wing. [My apartments—from the following description, I gather this is the clock by my dressing table whose incessant humming disturbs my sleep] It is the most populous of the house’s clocks, with over fifty individual automata, and the only one set to music—the late Évariste of Blois’s “Waltz for Dead Lover.” The key figures are as follows: the skeleton dancers, one couple for every hour; Death with his mask and violin; the Bride, who emerges at midnight with a shower of miniature rose petals; and Évariste, who leads each reprisal of the waltz from his perch at the stroke of twelve. [The last segment is crossed out, and this penciled in above it: Evariste insisted on revising his waltz with each reprisal. He has been allowed to retire to the Clock of Waters in the music room.] The other entry covers the last pages of the catalogue. The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois contains four and twenty automata, none less than twelve hands tall. Beginning with the pair of blood bays and circling left, they are: the bays, Hesperus and Phosphorus; Prometheus the black bear; the Cockatrice, the Phoenix, the Chimera, the Sphinx, and the Manticore; Terpsichore the zebra, Ambrosias the elephant, Gamaliel the lion, Caesar the panther; the three white horses of the moon, named Artemis and Luna and Selene; the three black horses of the sun, named Apollo and Helios and Sol; the dragons, Boreas and Ariel; Lucien the serpent, Zephyr the eagle, Clytemnestra the ox, and Antigone, the silver dolphin. [In fainter ink near the bottom of the page: Clytemnestra does not like the current Duke of Cloud. Gamaliel will only carry virgins if their lovers are riding Caesar, and Caesar will not carry men over forty who wear too much musk. Phosphorus will suffer no mistress but my own—the lady Porphyrogene.] Of the page’s final bit of marginalia, I can only read the name Hesperus, and a word that might be killed.

***

September 27

The weather has become unbearable—the lightning burns the sky without pause, the thunder’s roll is as constant as the sea’s—and today I have found the first evidence of Summerfall’s ghosts. One manifestation I am quite familiar with, and it points—however unsteadily—to the ghost’s identity. No matter how many times I return the Margravine of Blois’s catalogue to its place on the shelf, it appears on a desk the next morning, always open to the entry on the carousel. This has happened four days now consecutively, and I can find no natural cause. (Of course, Jean-Baptiste will not hear of me spending the night in the library.) The other circumstance is subtle, so that I hesitate to mention it at all, yet I have gathered enough incidental evidence to be certain that something is in fact taking place. The clocks of the Margravine of Blois are dying. Having studied the Margravine’s catalogue on the night of the twenty-third, I took an inventory of the thirteen clocks in my apartment. That night, all of them seemed to operate passably; but on the twenty-forth, the Clock of Ravens was missing three of its birds. The next night, the prince from the Clock of the Seventh Slumber would not awaken, no matter how many times his clockwork princess kissed him; and yesterday evening, Death laid down his violin and refused to play. I repeat that I know little of the Clockmaker’s art, and moreover, I do not know if such occurrences as these have been frequent in the past, or if this is a new development. I shall have to read more of Monsieur Cloud before I draw any conclusions. Strangely, while I am glad to have made some progress in my investigations, these discoveries do not relieve the restlessness that has plagued me for days. When I think of a ghost in Summerfall, I feel—dare I say it?—a sort of vague and simmering envy. Why should Porphyrogene be haunted by the woman she loved? Why should I not be?

***

September 28

Dinner with Porphyrogene again. Whatever her business is outside of Summerfall, the rain must keep her from it. She was terribly restless all afternoon, turning every surface beneath her fingertips into an impromptu and poorly-tuned pianoforte. My news about the Margravine’s catalogue did not impress her—“We all have our lullabies, don’t we, m’sieur?” was her cryptic response—but my report on the clocks seemed to plunge her into melancholy. “No,” she said in response to my inquiry, “it is not new, though it seems to be accelerating. How terrible . . . ” She closed her eyes and laid a hand across the lids. “Do you miss your wife, M’sieur Saint-Pierre?” I literally choked on my wine. “Madame, you may as well ask if I breathe.” “She doesn’t haunt you, then?” “No,” I said, remembering my thoughts from last night. “Forgive me, but I don’t think—” “Do you know that the carousel is broken? It hasn’t worked in twelve years.” She lifted her hand from her eyes. “It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, that all their work dies with them?” Involuntarily, I shuddered. “There are days you wish, don’t you, that you had something of hers—a letter, a lock of hair—something you could hold and say, this is her. This exists because she did.” Porphyrogene stood and began pacing between the parlor windows. “The rhymes didn’t lie entirely, you know. I did leave her blankets turned down. As if that was all it would take to keep her here.” Keep her here, she said—not bring her back. There was a brief silence. I said, quite softly, “I understand.” She turned to me, and I felt my face heating. “Violeta could have moved the world,” I said. “When she died, I could only watch as it rolled back into place.” “The cruelest things on earth,” Porphyrogene said, “are that it never changes and it never stops. Grief, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, is a carousel. You get on and you ride as fast and as hard as you can, but it only brings you back to where you started.” We finished the meal in silence. It must have been clear from my eyes, as I know it was clear from hers, that neither of us was whom the other wanted to see across the table.

***

September 30

That dream again. I am standing on the shore as the sea rolls in, staining the bleached stones with all the colors of a jewel box. Suddenly, the smell of lavender and fever. I turn and see the Margravine of Blois. This time, I reach for her. Her face becomes Violeta’s the moment before it slips through my fingers like foam.

*** October 1

I have found the bedroom of the Margravine of Blois. It is at the end of a long corridor in the north wing, which I discovered by means of a concealed passage behind one of the library shelves. I cannot say the existence of the passage surprises me very much. From what I have seen of Summerfall, and of Jean-Baptiste’s miraculous powers of apparition, I’d expected to encounter one sooner or later. On emerging behind a standing clock of prodigious size, I had planned merely to look around, perhaps trying the keys from Porphyrogene’s ring; but upon seeing in one room the distinctive handwriting of the Margravine of Blois, I abandoned caution and went to investigate. The writing, incidentally, which arches over the bed and would normally be hidden by the curtains, quotes only a line of poetry: Here I took my rest; my joy came in other places. I cannot imagine why, as the chamber itself seems cheerful—enough, I was going to say, but truly a great deal more than that. The walls and bedclothes are covered in golden silk, painted, in the case of the former, with emerald branches that serve as perches for dozens of painted birds. A portrait over the dressing table shows Porphyrogene seated on a garden bench, the Margravine of Blois kneeling at her feet. There is only one clock in the room, standing on a window ledge, its hands formed by a pair of racing blood bays. As I came closer, I saw that there was a slip of paper wedged into the door of the pendulum box, yellowed and ratty, as though it had been taken out and stuffed back in many times—more times, indeed, than its contents seem to warrant. Here they are, transcribed from the writing of the Margravine of Blois:

April 13

Ha!—you see, madame, that I bow as always to my lady’s request. Though your sad little jest alone could not tease laughter from these lips, your command shall be to me as God’s.

April 19

Another, my love? Are all your riddles so miserable? Pray bring something more cheerful, lest I am forced to drastic measures to steal a smile from your sweet mouth.

April 24 I am forced to reply in kind: What goes on scales in the morning, on feathers at noon, and sleeps at the end of the day on flesh and bone?

April 24

A ring, madame: the jeweler’s scale when it is made, to the down box in which I purchased it (at no small cost, I might add), to my lady’s finger, if she is clever enough to undo the knot with which it is bound to Phosphorus’s neck!

And indeed, the miniature bay on the hour hand still wears a silver ring. Though tempted, I did not try the knot.

***

October 2

I have been hesitant to pull the golden cord, but curiosity, as always, has finally gotten the better of me. For days I had pondered a question to which, it seemed to me, Jean-Baptiste would know the answer. “Why did she ask me to come here?” He blinked, his large pale eyes moving slowly down and up. “Monsieur?” “Be honest, Jean-Baptiste—you know there is no ghost in Summerfall. Certainly no ghost of the Margravine of Blois.” He nodded slowly. “I suspected so, monsieur. She was not the sort to linger. I myself have seen nothing, mind you—nothing but the clocks, and while they are haunting enough in their own way, I daresay Monsieur Christopher of Cloud could put them in their place.” It occurred to me to wonder how familiar a servant could be with Monsieur Cloud, but I let it pass. There is no denying that the Margravine of Blois was a genius Clockmaker; perhaps it permeated her conversation, even with her lover’s valet. Jean-Baptiste was watching warily as I paced the room. “Monsieur? Will that be all?” “No,” I said. “I know Porphyrogene is no fool. What did she expect to gain from me, if this place isn’t haunted?” “Perhaps she wants to be haunted, monsieur.” It took every ounce of self-control I possess to limit my reaction to a raised eyebrow. “I beg your pardon, monsieur.” He waited until I gestured for him to go on. “Porphyrogene is not grieving for the Margravine of Blois. It seems to me she cried all her tears for the woman twelve years ago. But for the artist, the builder of the carousel? That is a hard thing to let die.” “I suppose it is,” I said. And weak fool that I am, I began to cry.

October 2, later

In the northernmost room of the library, there is a book by the Margravine of Blois called Clockwork Souls. I have always thought it was a silly concern, and a quintessentially artistic one—what happens to automata after they die. In all probability, they are simply gone, vanished as if they never were. With all my experience, I have never met a clockwork ghost. Nor have I met the ghost of the Margravine of Blois. Does this mean that she, too, is simply gone? And even her clockwork is vanishing—the carousel is broken, the clocks are dying or dead. Isn’t it a terrible thought, that all their work dies with them? And here is a worse thought: The night Violeta died, I climbed up to the rain-slick roof and looked up at the sky. One-by-one, the heavy clouds were clearing and the stars emerging from the darkness. In a feverish fantasy, I imagined that there had been a time, when the world was young, that stars filled the sky—made it a solid sheet of light arching over the earth. But one-by-one, the stars began to die—and Man, having a poor memory, began to believe that the sky had always been black. I am a widow. I am the black spot left in the sky when a star has guttered out.

***

October 9

For a week, I have been gone with fever. I need not detail my dreams, save to say that they were the haunting grounds for more than one ghost. I woke this morning to find Porphyrogene standing over me, a moist cloth in one hand and a look of profound unease on her face. “You were calling for Violeta,” was all she said. I flopped back on my pillows, and found myself staring at the portrait of the Margravine of Blois hung over my head. “Why did she leave?” I asked. Porphyrogene followed my gaze, her lips pressed thin. “An accident,” she said finally. “On the carousel. The simple fact, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, is that all clockwork goes mad eventually, and she built that carousel too big. We thought it was going to be Phosphorus first—he was such a violent, crazy thing, and wouldn’t be tame for anyone but me—but it wasn’t. It was his brother.” She chaffed her wrists, heedless of the cloth in her hand. “Hesperus was carrying Évariste of Blois—the Margravine’s cousin, son of the famous composer. The carousel had stopped, and the Margravine was helping me down from Phosphorus’s saddle. Hesperus reared suddenly. She managed to roll out from under his hooves, but Évariste fell.” “Was he . . . ?” “Trampled. The corpse was unrecognizable.” Porphyrogene looked down at her hands, then swiftly dabbed at my forehead with the damp cloth, as if that glance had brought it back to her mind. “I begged her to stay, of course. It was a nasty scene all around. She said Hesperus’s madness had been a much-needed awakening, showing how enslaved she had become to me—a gelding, like Phosphorus when I held his reins. Those were the last words she spoke to me. She did something to the carousel before she left, and it hasn’t worked since.” “You said she died here—because of the carousel.” “I think . . . ” She frowned, biting her lip. “I think she wanted to reawaken it. She was terribly sick by then— consumption—she knew she was dying. I think she wanted to leave something behind.” I sat up. It was a slow, laborious process, and it left the room buzzing around me like a swarm of bees. “Why is it so hard,” I asked when I’d caught my breath, “to believe she came back for you?” Porphyrogene shook her head, smiling or grimacing. “I’m serious. Why does it have to be the carousel— some unfinished business, left behind for you?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You should get some rest, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, after your fever . . . ” “I want to be haunted, Porphyrogene.” She looked at me as if I had gone mad—as if I were about to trample something, or go battling songbirds. “I told you that Violeta doesn’t haunt me, and it’s true. Horribly, unbearably true. When I think of everything she was, the quick ripostes over dinner, the magnificent letters she wrote when we were away from each other, her way with languages . . . it makes me sick. All of it is gone.” I felt a moistness on my lip, and licked it away, thinking it was sweat; but it tasted sweet, the briny sweetness of tears. “Anything that could remain of her, I would take. A disembodied foot-fall, a slip of mist, a cool breeze in the night. A book that could not stay shut. And if I thought here was a man who could draw ghosts to a house—” “How dare you,” Porphyrogene interrupted, “compare your flippant little wife to the Margravine of Blois?" “You’re trying to build a ghost, Porphyrogene. You want to be haunted.” She flung the cloth at me and ran from the room.

***

October 10

All this time, she has been going down to the carousel. It explains the persistent re-opening of the Margravine’s catalogue, and Jean-Baptiste’s familiarity with Christopher of Cloud—what valet, after all, is not familiar with his mistress’s reading? For six years, perhaps longer, she has been trying to reawaken the carousel of the Margravine of Blois. The rain let up sometime over the seven days of my sickness, and I went down this afternoon to the gardens. Years of neglect have left them as barren and white as salt flats. In the center of the desolation, as red and black and golden as the Margravine herself, is the carousel and its twenty-four clockworks. Even from a distance, I could see their characters from their poses and expressions: clever Antigone, balanced nearly on her tail, and graceful Ambrosias with his trunk held high, and proud Clytemnestra striding firmly across the metal stage. Closest to me, the bays Phosphorus and Hesperus lay peaceful and dormant on folded legs. I did not stay long, as I knew Porphyrogene would be coming down shortly. But I will confess, there is something terribly captivating about the carousel. When I lay my hand against Phosphorus’s flank, it felt as warm as living flesh—or as warm as metal that living hands had touched.

***

October 13

This shall be my last night in Summerfall. As I said to Jean-Baptiste, there is no sense in me staying on when the only ghosts are made of metal. “I understand, monsieur,” he said, then looked at me oddly. “I know she has done little to show it, but the lady Porphyrogene is grateful that you came. It was good to have this bed filled again, if you understand me.” “I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed, leaping up from the furniture in question. “That bed, monsieur. It was Porphyrogene’s, while the Margravine of Blois lived in Summerfall.” “The very bed whose blankets poets satired, I don’t wonder.” Weariness came over me then, and I leaned heavily against the wall. “You know, Jean-Baptiste, I wish I had followed Porphyrogene’s example. The last thing my wife touched was a silk blanket, to pull it closer around her. I wish I had never moved that blanket, so that something could remain as Violeta had put it.” “Ah,” Jean-Baptiste said, eyeing the bed pensively. “But then where would monsieur have slept?”

***

October 14, early morning

In my dream, Violeta is riding the carousel of the Margravine of Blois. I am watching her from the gravel walkway, my heart pounding in my throat, and she waves each time she passes me, standing gracefully in the blood bay’s stirrups. But something is wrong. With each cycle, her color drains a little more. Soon she is nothing but a streak of white, like a tearstain . . . and then she is gone. Still, the carousel turns.

October 14

I found Porphyrogene out in the gardens before dawn. She had a sheaf of papers spread across Clytemnestra’s broad back, and a stack of tools piled at her feet. I crossed the gravel walkway in two strides and leapt onto the carousel stage with a reverberant clang. “What are you doing here?” Porphyrogene snapped, not looking up from her book. From where I stood, I could see that the page was rimmed with slanted marginalia. I came up on the other side of the ox and flipped the treatise closed. “I have a gift for you,” I said, and when Porphyrogene looked up at me, I held out a silver ring in the palm of my hand. The change in her was sudden and terrible. Her eyes widened, her lips pressed thin and pale, the long bridge of her nose tightened into a web of wrinkles. “How dare you,” she said, snatching the ring from my hand. “How —” “How dare I what, Porphyrogene? She bought that ring for your finger, not for a clockwork horse.” “I thought you of all people would understand.” Her fingers closed into a fist around the ring, as though she could crush it. “What harm could there be in keeping everything the way it was, before . . . ?” “Are you happy, Porphyrogene?” I interrupted. She shook her head, not looking at me. “How can you even ask?” I circled around Clytemnestra, past Antigone’s silver tail, and crouched down by Hesperus’s head, where the pile of tools gleamed. A steel pike lay across the top, its slender tip designed to pry open the nearly seamless clockwork. I took it in my hand, feeling its cool weight up through my arm like the trail of a phantom finger. “There are three things in the world you can never change,” I said. Turning from Hesperus’s wild eyes, I found myself facing the paper-thin membrane of Antigone’s tail. “The first is that the Margravine of Blois lived.” Swiftly, before Porphyrogene could stop me, I drove the spike through the silver dolphin. “No!” Porphyrogene shouted, but I continued over her protest. “She lived, she built this carousel and a thousand brilliant clocks besides, and she laughed at your riddles because you told her to. She loved color and she loved this house and she loved you.” I punctuated each phrase with a blow to one of the clockworks: Clytemnestra’s smooth flank, Zephyr’s outspread wing, Lucien’s undulating tongue. Porphyrogene made no move to stop me, though her eyes were darkening with fury. I could only hope she was listening to my words. “The second,” I said, “is that the Margravine of Blois died, and her genius died with her.” Was it my imagination, or did a look of relief come into Boreas’s snarling face as I drove the spike into his belly? Porphyrogene caught my wrist as I turned to Ariel. Tears brimmed unchecked in her eyes. “And the third?” she said. “The third is that you cannot bring the Margravine of Blois back from the dead, and it’s killing you to try. That’s the thing with ghosts—even metal ones.” I broke her grip and slashed at Ariel’s claws. “There are things the living and the dead cannot share. The Margravine of Blois isn’t any more dead because her clockwork no longer runs, and she wouldn’t be any more alive if it could. But we have a choice, Porphyrogene—between me and a ghost, between you and a carousel. The living or the dead.” I held out the spike to her, as I had held out the ring. “Choose however you want,” I said, “but you must choose. You cannot jump on Phosphorus’s back and hope the world doesn’t change anymore while you’re going in circles.” For a long moment, Pophyrogene looked at me. She opened her palm, slid the silver ring onto her finger. Then she took the spike.

***

That, madame, is the tragedy of the celebrated carousel of the Margravine of Blois. The remains are buried in Summerfall—where, as you may see from the address on this package, I have decided to stay on. Porphyrogene has begun to expand her library, Jean- Baptiste is designing some small clockworks, and I am continuing my investigations, but the house seems large enough to accommodate all these imperialistic pursuits. Though there is one room, at the end of a long corridor in the north wing, whose purpose we have agreed upon; it houses a pair of clockwork bays, their elegant legs folded beneath them in repose. Should these be of interest to you, madame, you are most welcome to come some day to Summerfall and we shall introduce you. They are really quite beautiful, a testament to the enduring genius of the celebrated Margravine of Blois.

—Antoine Aristide de Saint-Pierre

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin, pursuing a degree in Quoting Oscar Wilde. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna. Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela Jennifer Konieczny

On your blog, you’ve said that “Of Men and Wolves” is “a story about sex and gender, gods and men, and the destructive forces of politics. Sort of. And wolves.” Could you talk about the different elements and how they intersect?

While attending the University of Iowa, I took a class on gender in historical perspectives. (This is also the class in which "Defective steam-powered circumcision machines" came up as a potential answer in one multiple-choice question. I've long since forgotten what the question was, but answers like that stick with you.) One of the cases we learned about involved a set of twins, one of whom suffered a severe burn which destroyed his penis when his circumcision was cauterized. The damage was severe enough that doctors thought the best thing for it was to assign him female (his testes were removed before the age of two) and have his parents raise him that way. Despite this fact, and despite the fact that he began taking female hormones, he developed a male gender identity. Which is fascinating to me, because it's one more case of the links between genetics, physiology, socialization and gender being incredibly tangled and hard to interpret. All the way back in the 1910s you had scientists like Eugen Steinach in Vienna experimenting with hormones and gonads in rats and guinea pigs, coming up with the conclusion that if you controlled those, you'd control gendered behavior, which was neatly refuted here. And that's not even beginning to examine the significant population of people born with the physiology of one sex who develop, despite a lot of people's attempts to police it, an identity as another gender, and it certainly doesn't touch on anyone with nonstandard physiologies, be that in genital presence or structure, chromosomal makeup, hormone sensitivity, etc. Anyone who thinks gendering people is easy should take a look at this interactive challenge. And that's just for a start. And yet, defining sex and gender is something people get downright vitriolic about—probably the natural result of having a culture in which gender roles are foundational to a lot of how we construct our society. In "Of Men And Wolves," we have a whole knot of different problems: The Sal need to marry off a daughter to appease the Odad, so they create a daughter against her will; the Odad consider this to be barely acceptable—one gets the feeling that being attracted to a "made" woman is something to be regarded with more than a little disdain. But the Odad Prince is attracted to her. Which, on the one hand, is good, because it preserves the diplomatic marriage. On the other hand, the main character has to confront the fact that the person she's being married off to is attracted to the source of her dysphoria. And then there are the wolves. And at first glance, the wolves don't seem to fit into this anywhere, until you realize that their story is the main character's story, just playing out in a time when the politics were reversed. They also brought a lot of ancillary elements: an added menace, a chance for the main character to interact with someone, and several ethological tics revolving around the loins. (Which is not, I have to admit, a sentence I ever foresaw myself typing.) This is also a story that's inextricably laced through with power dynamics. You have gods acting at the behest of kings, people getting changed into things they aren't at the behest of kings, two tribes pressing their advantages over each other, and the hierarchy of the wolves to go along with it, not to mention the issue of sacrifice which keeps coming up. And it doesn't look like anyone is happy with the way things worked out. Your main character is “the fifth son of a royal house who desperately needed daughters to offer in political marriages” in “a culture which says, yes, you’re allowed to convert a child to whatever you need, if you’re royalty.” Was it difficult to develop and write this character, to balance the character’s dsyphoria with external events?

Well, there are different sorts of difficulty involved, here. From a character-development perspective, the character evolved quite naturally from the concept. As someone who doesn't identify as cisgendered and experiences some level of dysphoria myself, much of how the main character reacted or interacted with her world seemed straightforward to me—just dialed up considerably from what I'm used to. Her situation revolved around her identity, and that required that attention be paid to her dysphoria, which in some ways made my job easier; there was an explicit rather than an implicit reason to dwell on that experience for a while. And there were the wolves, again. Part of the advice Chuck Palahniuk gave us at Clarion West was to keep narration "on the body," and anyone who's lived with dogs knows how bodily their communication gets. Their attention to the main character and their predation of Ishur tied her dysphoria directly into the plot. What was difficult was getting the emotional impact to the reader. Or, said another way, comprehension was easy; communication was hard. The main character's dysphoria is a constant presence, and it had to be shown woven directly in with the texture of her life. Finding ways of touching on the small details without bogging down the story was a challenge. I hope I succeeded.

The sentence, “How horrible, to have your body unmade at the order of your king,” seems to capture the essence of your story. Could you speak to that? How great is people’s responsibility, do you think, for fulfilling the will of their kings or their governments? How much responsibility falls on the king or government to protect their people?

Now, that is a question I can't speak with any grand authority on. I'm not the political one in my family, and to be honest the grand scope of politics and all its many, many nuances somewhat intimidates me. From an ideological perspective, I'd like to believe that societies are within their rights to demand certain things from their citizens, kings and leaders included. Octavia Butler's Parable novels put forth the idea that "Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals." I like that idea—specifically, that for a group to survive, society itself has to be leveraged to the benefit of the group. Leaders are ideally put in place in order to facilitate that. But at the same time, I don't like the idea that the freedom and rights of individuals are automatically discarded in the face of the needs of society. I don't think you can escape the fact that any society is ultimately composed of individuals, and a society which disregards the needs of its individuals in order to focus purely on the abstract "society" is just as problematic as one in which it's every individual for themselves. It's a balancing act, as are a lot of things in life, between extremes. Within the scope of the story, mutilating one child in order to save an entire people might be justified as a necessary evil, though we never see if other options were even considered. I do wonder if the Odad king who sacrificed three-quarters of his people wasn't missing the point a little, though.

“Of Men and Wolves” was one of your Clarion West stories, and you’ve since revised it several times. Could you tell us about the process of writing it? Did it differ from your other work or do you have a usual process that you follow?

Clarion West was a brilliant environment in that it allowed absolutely no room for excuses. I had to have a story in once a week, every week, without the luxury of a trunk to pull anything but ideas out of. What happened there was that my usual writing process—a long, random process of accreting ideas, expelling them, writing noncontiguous bits in a jumble and trying to tie them all together at the tenth or eleventh hour—got compressed and hyperaccelerated. I had to turn from a literary collage hobbyist to a literary MacGuyver. "You have a character conceit, a compelling turn of phrase, a novice-level grasp on wolf ethology, and a third-act twist. You need a viable story. GO!" In my natural habitat, these take months if not years to resolve themselves. At Clarion West, seven days. I remember that I was researching wolf ethology for something completely unrelated, and I think this was after one of my brilliant colleagues had turned in a story where a sorcerer had turned his tribe into a desert. The first image from the story I jotted down in my notebook was the fable of how this city came to be, but in that first imagining, the king had lost all of his people—a quarter turned into wolves, a quarter turned into stars, a quarter turned into a river, and the last quarter turned into the city by the river. At which point the wolves moved in and I guess the king just went "Wait, crap," and was never seen again; the rough fable in my Moleskine didn't explicate. Maybe he got eaten. The next bit I wrote down was the "God will eat you" proverb. This was a story which definitely came about as a result of playing with the cultures invented, rather than the characters or plot. There were going to be three tribes, and there was going to be an entire plot about how the City was dying and the stars were going out, and of course the political marriage between the Sal and Odad, and Ishur originally just pitied the main character, which of course raised the question of why he'd agreed to marry her in the first place. Over time, and with the encouragement of my classmates to "find the heart of the story," I narrowed the scope down to the main character and her relationship with herself and the paradoxes around her. For all that the fate of her people is at stake, "Of Men And Wolves" is a very internal story. Revising was, as it usually is, a matter of cutting, tightening, and pushing more impact into what I'd already written. The first draft of the story was somewhat self- indulgent and very wandering, not to mention a little too vague on most of the important details. I had to go in and strengthen the parallels, cut down on the time spent at loose ends in the city, ratchet up the tension. This was Connie Willis' week, and every day we were being given access to her grand expertise on matters of plot. One of the big takeaway lessons was that "The reader will not be able to stop if they haven't had their questions answered." Other points: "Raise interesting questions," and "Don't answer all your questions before you raise others." In the first draft I went too far in that direction, and I had to go back and give people some solid ground to stand on. All told, it took five drafts to get "Of Men And Wolves" out into the world. The least it's ever taken me is two. Three or four seems to be most common, but I'm also someone who does a lot of rewriting in the initial process of writing, as well.

In addition to writing, you also sketch. Do you sketch scenes from your own writing? If so, do you have any for “Of Men and Wolves”? If not, do you have a usual subject for your art?

I'll occasionally sketch from my own writing, but not consistently. Most of what I draw are studies of animals, and usually of animals that don't exist—my fondness for science fiction and fantasy creatures notwithstanding, there's a lot less pressure, that way. I don't have to make them recognizable. When I was in middle school, I had a game where I'd design fantasy animals for people based on a set of questions: Are the animals carnivorous, omnivorous, herbivorous, lithovorous . . . Do they live in the sea, in the sky or on land . . . so on, and so forth. Once they had answered all of these questions, I'd try to imagine what an animal which had all those characteristics would look like, and then draw it. That was how I interacted with a lot of my biology lessons; you'd have predators with forward-facing eyes, and omnivores with very specific teeth structures; short, stocky things that came from high- gravity worlds and long, thin animals optimized for heat dispersion in desert environments. And so on. I've also had a lot of fun in art exchanges—basically, get a lot of novice artists together, have them all submit descriptions of characters, and then randomly assign descriptions to artists. Sort of a Secret Santa for custom artwork. The most fun I ever had there was when I got a request to draw a dragon character inspired by Vivaldi. I was quite happy with how it had turned out until I noticed I'd drawn his violin and grip entirely wrong. Art is something I do more for fun than for the sake of the craft. Every once in a while I think I'm going to put in the time to become really good at it, and then I realize that I have more stories to write. And writing usually clamors a lot louder for my attention.

Thank you for your time. Before we conclude, could you tell us what is next for you?

"What's next" is always a dangerous question, because any time I answer it, I put the lie to it three days later. I wander through the body of my work in the same way I wander through individual works: Scenes or stories here or there will catch my eye, and I'll work on that until something else catches my eye, and sooner or later, something will be finished and I'll be pleasantly surprised. I have a YA novel in the works; I have a bevy of short stories all clamoring for attention; I've been thinking about the logistics of doing a wiki-based work of hyperfiction, loosely inspired by Flightless Hummingbird's Synthetic Journal; I have a probably-ill- advised venture into the land of literary fiction lurking somewhere on my USB drive. Which of these will eventually be finished? Will any of them? I haven't the foggiest idea. I do know I have a lot more to write on the subject of sex and gender, and especially using characters with transgender identities. The trouble with writing any minority population once is that you run the risk of people reading that one work as the sum of your opinions on the population. It would be easy to read "Of Men And Wolves" and take the message away that "Oh, the main character was born male, and still wanted to be male after he was castrated, so that means you're going to be what you were born as no matter what," which is all sorts of incorrect. So barring anything drastic like the collapse of speculative fiction, I'd count on seeing more works on those themes.

Jennifer Konieczny hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An alumna of Villanova University, she now pursues her doctorate in medieval studies at the University of Toronto. She enjoys working with fourteenth-century latin legal texts, slushing for Fantasy Magazine, and scanning bookshelves for new authors to read. Author Spotlight: Gio Clairval & Jeff VanderMeer T.J. McIntyre

How would you describe the genesis of “The Lizard Dance?” What inspired this piece?

JV: It was somewhat unique. I had wanted to collaborate with Gio and gave her a book of my flash fictions, Secret Lives. Many of the stories were more like little portraits of people. One included dancing lizards. She took that, discarded the structure of my original story, and wrote a story.

GC: Jeff had this strange book of his, and he suggested that I pick a story I liked. He had already used several cool ones, but when I stumbled across the lizard one, I couldn't resist (I've always loved lizards). I spent hours playing with lizards in my mum's garden.

JV: Yeah, so she took that image and made it her own. Then she gave me the draft and I added some to it, edits, etc. Then Gio ignored most of my edits and revised. Then I looked at it again, made comments, Gio ignored most of them, and we were just about done. I have spent hours wondering why Gio spent hours playing with lizards. But we do have geckoes and anoles that live on the outside of the house.

GC: I've always thought that lizards could be tamed, and I chose one in particular and used the Little Prince's method: Sit beside your lizard and keep still. Lizards have eyes like foals. Ever notice?

JV: But foals don't have eyes like lizards. Odd, that.

GC: They do, but foals have bigger, horsie-sized eyes.

JV: Anyway, so it was an interesting process, of inspiration-counter inspiration. Yes, Gio, if lizards had horse-sized eyes they'd have to roll around on their pupils.

GC: So Jeff's flash about a lady who could make lizards dance struck me as prophetic. But it was a middle- aged lady. I can't reason like a middle-aged lady, yet. Never will, probably.

JV: Just to be clear, there's not a word from my original in this new collaboration. GC: False. I took entire paragraphs, but Jeff has no memory of what he writes. So he crossed out a couple of his paragraphs. As I was never a fat girl, getting inside Mai's head was a bit of a challenge. But I was given a few insights by a person next to me. This person, who used to be fat when she was a girl, told me what happened inside a girl's head, what happened with her schoolmates. It was nothing like what happens in the story, but it inspired me.

I found "The Lizard Dance" to be an interesting meditation on the purpose and role of fantasy in our lives. What do you feel is the purpose of fantasy?

JV: Imaginative play, whether in crisis or in times of happiness is just incredibly important to all of us. We all create aspects of the world around us, out of necessity or out of a kind of deep-seated joy and curiosity. So fantasy is kind of a direct manifestation of that. Fantasy doesn't have to serve a purpose, really, any more than any kind of fiction. It's often "just" a deep exploration of what it means to be human, what our world is like, to try to capture some kind of truth about the world, I guess. And to entertain, which is often the same thing. Art and entertainment aren't actually in opposition to one another.

GC: I think Fantasy, because it doesn't "explain" as much as SF does, helps us to keep in touch with our dreams and our subconscious minds. Our heroes battle and solve (or not) our archetypical conflicts, and when I say "archetypical," I mean that they belong to the collective subconscious, as Carl Jung called it, the ensemble of fears and desires that the individual must battle to become a person. Those are the elements that make humanity what it is. In this regard, Fantasy is as important as Science Fiction in exploring the human heart and psyche, only in a different way.

JV: I don't actually see any difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy, myself. Just science fiction writers who like to pretend they're not writing fantasy.

GC: I don't quite agree on the idea that there's no difference. While Science Fiction "explains" the events and phenomena that occur in an imaginary word in a rational way, Fantasy accepts the unknown. Of course word-building should create a consistent setting in a Fantasy story, too. The setting should be believable, given certain premises, but when you explain an event with magic, have you explained anything? So, Fantasy demands an acceptance of the unexplained. Rudolf Otto called "numineux," the unnatural and the supernatural, something that is both fascinating and frightening. But I don't think "The Lizard Dance" is Fantasy (now that Fantasy Magazine has bought it, the truth can be revealed.)

JV: Oh dear. Now we're screwed. I think I have a more absurdist view of science, my father being an entomologist. There are lots of magical belief systems there, too.

GC: I think it's more of a slipstream story. We never know whether Mai is actually seeing things or imagining or hallucinating them.

JV: This is why I don't really engage in classification discussions, though. Is it relevant, whether she is or isn't imagining them? Does it matter either way?

GC: And about the absurdist view, I agree. I know a couple of physicists who ramble on about philosophical meanders. But science is supposed to find rational explanations. It comes with the territory. Fantasy does not. Besides the internal consistency of a setting.

JV: Eh. There are always constraints. What form those constraints take doesn't seem particularly important to me.

GC: I am interested in that debate because I've been a researcher, and I think my head works both ways: the rational and the unknown.

JV: Of course. But what we're really talking about are two writers' separate constructs of the world, and of the world of fiction. Each construct is equally useful--to the writer who believes in it. Because it's that person's entry point into the fiction.

GC: Absolutely, Jeff.

JV: Which is why I usually don't engage in these conversations or debates on the blogosphere anymore, because it tends to become tangential to the actual work. It's interesting here because I'm fascinated at the idea we interpret this story rather differently because of the constructs we're using in general in our work.

GC: . . . And don't forget I was trained as a clinical psychologist . . .

JV: I think that's clear from the story. I was trained in history, creative writing, and B.S.

GC: I don't care either about the "reality" of Mai's internal world, but it's important (to me) to state that it isn't a magical setting.

Okay, going back to Jeff's statement about fantasy being important as a kind of "imaginative play," wouldn't "The Lizard Dance" count as an exploration of "imaginative play" and therefore be an exploration of fantasy by default? That's the way I read it.

GC: To me, the story is an exploration of Mai's dreams. That's what I said before. "Fantasy" is more free, in my opinion, in the exploration of dreams, because it isn't supposed to offer logical explanations.

JV: Yes, but at this point, I think the reader can reach an alternative reading that does make it more so. In fact, I would prefer more of that ambiguity in the story. I would like to think in certain stories, there is the account, and then there are the signs and symbols, to reference Nabokov, that tell a different story--a story of the world that occurs without us present in it, even, the kind of fantasy and wonder and horror behind the mundaneity. There's also an interpretation of fantasy versus not- fantasy that comes into play here, I think, based simply on style and approach. Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War isn't fantasy in the usual sense, but the style is fantastical, the descriptions are fantastical. Whereas certain fantasists are actually *realists* and even in writing fantasy, their prose is realistic/mimetic, their approach is mimetic.

GC: In fantasy, there's no need of kicking the rational, scientific streak in.

JV: Not to have a favorite part of a story I collaborated on, but the things she sees in the hospital take on a bit of a life of their own, in my opinion. I can't remember how much of that made it into the final draft.

GC: Again, it's more about the acceptance of the "merveilleux", as the French say. The fantastical, yes. What fills us with wonderment.

JV: . . . This is going to become a circular conversation soon, though, but I can counter with SF's sense of wonder. For example, that you could call the SFnal element is a delivery system for an epiphany, or engaging a sense of wonder. which is very similar to what you're talking about.

GC: Wonderment is everywhere, I agree.

JV: As is bewilderment.

GC: Yes. But we don't try to give (or search for) logical explanations.

JV: I also don't think this story functions to instill a sense of wonder . . . horror more like! Poor leezards.

GC: I was answering a question about Fantasy. "The Lizard Dance" is not really fantasy (runs and ducks).

Speaking of Nabokov, I found Mai to be an interesting and unreliable narrator. GC: Unreliable, yes, and yet convinced of the reality she sees, because all her world is filtered through her imagination.

Let's talk a moment about the reality of the story. Gio, you mentioned above you were trained as a clinical psychologist. How did this training manifest itself in this story?

GC: Every time I explore a character's psyche, I use what I learnt. Take Mary's hallucinations, and the way they build her world. Not saying that a writer with no clinical education can't do it . . . what I mean is that I tend to link what a character thinks to her internal conflicts.

JV: Yes, my role on this story was more or less provide the initial spark, then test it through questioning what Gio had on the page, and then finding a way to the best ending, by which I mean the wording of an ending for this kind of story is very, very important.

GC: I love those final words. In the ending, Mai steps back from her imaginary world to accept the world as the adults (and the evil classmates) see it. She surely loses something. But maybe she'll be able to come back to it when she gets older, like the protagonist of your initial story, Jeff.

I often like to ask a question taken directly from the text of a story. Near the beginning of “The Lizard Dance”–during a scene when Mai is being bullied mercilessly and sees a dancing lizard–the text asks of Mai “Why did she see nothing for so many years?”

JV: I think my original story is so different that the character in it is not a kind of psychic/symbolic extension of Mai as adult. The best fantasy, to my mind, always rejects escapism where escapism is counter-factual to the ramifications of a situation and the character's position within that situation. Usually, that's within a construct that is clearly not- Earth or not-our-Earth and thus not as clearly a rejection of fantasy.

GC: Ah, very good question! Like Jeff's protagonist in the Secret Lives story, Mai doesn't remember what she used to think and see when she was little. She had given up her dreams, to be "normal.” As most people tend to do when they grow up. Unless they're writers. JV: On the other hand, we live in such constructs of reality anyway that we are all living in a fantasy even if we reject the openly phantasmagorical. We convince ourselves of fantasies every day.

GC: You see, I don't think Mai and Claire Devereux are that different. That's what I was saying just above. Claire inspired me directly. Forgetting one's childhood dreams. And getting back again to them.

JV: And yet, because my stories in Secret Lives are reflections of real people, there is a true Devereux who is independent of my interpretation of her, so Mai is a further echo. I'm actually going to Devereux's wedding next month. One last thing I'd say is, I'm not arguing that "everything is a dream", just that we under-estimate the subjective nature of the universe. AND THEN WE WIND UP WITH CRAP LIKE INCEPTION THAT COULD'VE BEEN GREAT.

GC: I agree! They should have asked us to write the script! “Vida es sueño . . . ” - Calderon de la Barca. JV: Well, that opening scene. It has to have emotional resonance later . . . and it doesn't. I thought they must be old friends or something. But no, it's just his damn missing boss. Big deal. I'd rather go re-read Stepan Chapman's The Troika.

GC: Exactly. . . . and this went on like this for a while with myself getting lost in the ensuing discussion. For the record, while not perfect--I personally felt the romance was kind of tossed in--I rather enjoyed Inception, personally, especially from a visual standpoint . . .

One last question: What’s next? Do the two of you have any upcoming publications you would like to announce?

JV: In terms of books forthcoming, my nonfiction collection, Monstrous Creatures, is out in March, and deals with some of the same topics as this interview. In May, the coffee table book The Steampunk Bible (with SJ Chambers, Abrams Image), in June The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities anthology (HarperCollins), edited with my wife Ann (and featuring a pivotal story by Gio), and then in October from Atlantic, The Weird, a 750,000-word, 100-year anthology of weird fiction edited with Ann and featuring several definitive translations by Gio that are just masterful. I'm also working on three novels, a writing book, a book on secondary worlds, and four other anthologies. ( . . . at this point, I called Jeff a “slacker” . . . ) Oh, and this summer a Halo stop-action comic animation based on my collaboration with Tessa Kum, "The Mona Lisa," will be put out by the Halo people.

GC: Stories of mine are coming out in Weird Tales (March 2011) and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (June 2011). I'm also working on two novels, and I'm brewing up the idea of an anthology.

JV: Gio also was instrumental in conducting negotiations with various agents and estates, too. The full story of which will only be able to told when we unseal the confidential account in 100 years.

GC: Working with you was great. Very interesting. And fun, too. I wanted to commit suicide a couple of times only. T.J. McIntyre has seen his short fiction and poetry published in numerous publications including recent appearances in Everyday Weirdness, Ruthless Peoples Magazine, and Scifaikuest. He is a member of various writing organizations, including the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA), and serves as a moderator for the Lobo Luna and Western Writers writing communities on LiveJournal. Until earlier this year, he published Southern Fried Weirdness, an anthology and web zine celebrating speculative fiction and poetry with a Southern perspective. He lives in a busy household in the muggy heart of rural Alabama with his wife, two young sons, an aging Doberman mix, five tiger barbs, and three salt-and-pepper catfish. Author Spotlight: Tamsyn Muir Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired you to write about a doctor of Medieval Literature and her magical, time-distorting house?

"Sixteen Loops" was actually for my final-week Clarion story, only it started out with a worse title. But taking its separate elements: I spent some of my academic life around the Medieval Literature department, and in my opinion if there is anyone likely to live unworried by their magic house it is someone from Medieval Lit. I love the idea of places with sentience and power, and Dr. Tilly as the type of person who would swap convenience for a magical house each time. The story followed from there.

Rose “supposed the house had liked her out of pure shock.” She and the house complement each other. What quirks does your own place have that make it uniquely yours? If you had the option, would you live in 14 Arden Lane? Why or why not?

I currently live in a ranch-style two-storey house that was built in the eighties, and it's gorgeous and covered in native Kauri wood ceilings, but its only quirk is that the water pressure is abysmal. You wait half an hour to fill a kettle. However, I wouldn't swap it for 14 Arden Lane, because 14 Arden Lane would require a horrible amount of commitment. It's very needy. I get cold feet just with houseplants.

“When the house turned out to be magical Rosamund Tilly just accepted this as fact,” but it took her several loops through time to recognize and accept her love for Danny. Why, do you think some facts are easier to accept than others?

Change is, in my estimation, the most difficult thing to try to come to terms with. Rose is the type of person whose life experience doesn't change that much with a magic house, but is terrified by what a relationship shift with her best friend represents. Facts that are boring, dull and comfortable are easier than unstable, new and painful. Change is terrible, no matter how small. I personally grieve at each close of the Starbucks seasonal menu.

You are a graduate of Clarion 2010. Can you tell us about your writing before Clarion and about your Clarion experience?

Before Clarion I wrote just to amuse myself. I'd thought about game writing, and I still love interactive fiction. A Clarion grad friend suggested I apply, so I did, and I had one of those Clarion experiences where I finally saw a story as its architecture and not just surface. It was a breakthrough. As well as incredible instructors, I also had the generosity and talent of seventeen other writers who taught me to stop nail-biting and get on with it, and I wish I was back with them all the time. I recommend it to everyone, only I'm sorry that they won't have the Clarion of 2010, which was legendary. As a tip: Get a tea-making roommate. Mine was truly indispensible.

What is next for you?

Editing. I have a Norse underworld murder mystery that needs polishing and is taking up my current attention. 2011 for me will be the year of short fiction, and I will get on with it.

Jennifer Konieczny hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An alumna of Villanova University, she now pursues her doctorate in medieval studies at the University of Toronto. She enjoys working with fourteenth-century latin legal texts, slushing for Fantasy Magazine, and scanning bookshelves for new authors to read. Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg T.J. McIntyre

What was the inspiration for “The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois?”

My original concept for this story—and I have no idea where it came from—was the part I now think of as Antoine's subplot, the ghost hunter in search of his wife's ghost. Porphyrogene, her rambling house and lost (unnamed) lover provided a foil for Antoine and a setting, but, though I found her too fascinating to drop, I couldn't get her story to mesh with Antoine's. While attempting anything and everything to paste the two halves together—including, in the first complete draft, a marriage proposal—I saw photographs of some gorgeous earrings by Elise Matthesen called "The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois." The pair of quartz horses, with their legs folded beneath them rather than lifted mid-prance, gave me the image of a magnificent carousel standing dilapidated and rusting in Summerfall's gardens. It became clear immediately that this carousel and its builder, Porphyrogene's lover (still unnamed but now identified with the Margravine of Blois), were going to take center stage in my uncooperative work-in-progress. I bought the earrings and carried them around for two weeks, and the story, now titled, came together quite nicely.

What is the significance of the name Porphyrogene? I know this word is used in a certain poem by Edgar Allen Poe. Was this connection intentional?

Partly. The word "porphyrogene" is from the poem "The Haunted Palace," which also appears in "The Fall of the House of Usher." Before my breakthrough with the carousel, the story was swimming in motifs from Poe— beautiful lost women, destructive grief, the will to resist death, a house that strangely mirrors its owner's state of mind. Summerfall is almost literally a "kingdom by the sea." So I owe more than a few of my themes and situations to Poe, and Porphyrogene's name is an acknowledgement of that creative debt. I also picked it with a hint of irony—a colorful name for a woman for whom life has lost its color. Colors of any sort are nearly absent from Summerfall, with the exception of red and gold for the Margravine of Blois, and purple is especially "absent" in the name of the lost Violeta. For me, purple and red are the most vibrant, lively colors, and it interested me to associate them with characters who are either dead or consumed by grief.

I like to sometimes ask questions directly from the text of a story. In “The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois,” Antoine asks Porphyrogene “Why does it have to be the carousel—some unfinished business, left behind for you?” Well, why?

One of the traditional reasons for spirits to linger on earth is unfinished business. So the idea that the Margravine wanted to repair the carousel is a bit of wishful thinking on Porphyrogene's part, a justification of her hope that the Margravine has stayed in Summerfall as a ghost. To Porphyrogene, the carousel is both a physical remnant of the Margravine and a reason for her to remain in spirit. Antoine has a better understanding of the situation. He knows that the Margravine's return to Summerfall before her death was motivated by the desire to see Porphyrogene again—the carousel simply isn't important. But accepting the carousel's insignificance and the fact that the Margravine willingly left it behind means accepting that the Margravine is gone completely—no ghost, no haunting, no working carousel—and that's something Porphyrogene isn't prepared to do.

This is, in part, a ghost story. It left me with a nagging question: Which are more haunting? The ghosts you can see, or the ghosts you can never see again no matter how much you wish you might be able to do so? What do you think? Why?

I think I would prefer to be haunted. To have some remnant of the dead remain in the world, with me. In itself, the impermanence of human life and human achievement is sad but not horrifying; but when I picture specific people, specific personality quirks, specific works of art, it becomes really terrifying to me. Writing this story was in part an attempt to wrestle with and accept the fact of that loss. At the same time, I realize that the desire to be haunted is really an unhealthy one. Wanting a remnant, a reminder, is not the same as wanting a person back in one's life; the latter acknowledges the value of the dead, the way their presence enriched the world, while the former is a rejection of reality, a refusal to really face life's impermanence. Loving someone and missing them and remembering them isn't unhealthy, but denying their absence—especially to the extent that Porphyrogene does, allowing the question of the Magravine's absence to consume her own life—is.

“The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois” is a story all about clockwork machinery. Many works of literature utilize clockworks as metaphors. The current subgenre of Steampunk is filled with clockwork contraptions. In this age where everything seems to be going digital, what is it about the idea of clockwork that make it such a fertile breeding ground for story ideas?

I like the idea of clockwork-as-metaphor, clockwork-as- symbol. I think that any kind of magic or technology— clockwork, steam engines, faerie glamour, or pixie dust— is an aesthetic choice on the part of the author that also represents a controlling mindset in the world of the story. For me, clockwork is about rationality, empiricism, cause-and-effect, and that's the association I was reaching for in "The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois." Antoine reads master clockmaker Christopher of Cloud's digression on "the religious parallels evident" in self-perpetuating clockwork; the reference is to the Enlightenment-era Deist conception of God, as the watchmaker who set the universe in motion and left it eternally to its own devices. So Antoine's Enlightenment- esque worldview is bound by reason and empirical data when he searches for evidence of Violeta and the Margravine's continued existence. If the evidence doesn't materialize, Antoine and Prophyrogene can't comfort themselves with the idea that Violeta and the Margravine still exist in an otherworldly afterlife; the only posthumous existence they look for is the one that can be verified empirically—that is, a haunting. For me, clockwork is emblematic of this worldview. I guess another reason clockwork is so attractive to fantasy writers is that it replaces the wizard with the scientist/engineer—not in the science fiction sense, but in the sense that the wizard's powers are innate and unearned, while clockwork can be mastered through intelligence and dedication. Once we accept the inherent contradiction of magical gear—somehow, little wheels locking teeth leads to sentient beings or time-travel or anti-gravity ships or immortality—once we accept the little leap in cause-and-effect, we're left with a special ability that can be studied and worked for, not simply bestowed. It makes the women and men who build clockwork more like us—they didn't get a free promotion to miracle-worker, after all—and also more impressive, more admirable. . . . and that was a ridiculously long-winded answer to a thought-provoking question. I'd love to hear other people's theories about the popularity of clockwork, and hope readers will share their opinions in the comments!

So, what’s next for Megan Arkenberg? Do you have any other stories or projects you would like to announce for your readers?

As I type this, I see from a message in my inbox that the Young Adult anthology Playings of the Gods is now available from Drollerie Press. It includes my retelling of the Ariadne/Thesus/Dionysus myth, "Naxos." Readers who especially enjoyed "The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois" might be interested in learning that it's part of a group of stories—in my head, at least—that includes "The Copperroof War," which appeared in the June 2010 Ideomancer and the January 2011 Labyrinth Inhabitant, and a number of pieces I either haven't finished or haven't found a home for yet. My works-in-progress include Biblical retellings, haunted houses, lethal sonnet sequences, man-eating lions, textualization of the reader, and butterfly gardens. If I walked into a wall right now and cracked my head open, ideas would spill out.

T.J. McIntyre has seen his short fiction and poetry published in numerous publications including recent appearances in Everyday Weirdness, Ruthless Peoples Magazine, and Scifaikuest. He is a member of various writing organizations, including the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA), and serves as a moderator for the Lobo Luna and Western Writers writing communities on LiveJournal. Until earlier this year, he published Southern Fried Weirdness, an anthology and web zine celebrating speculative fiction and poetry with a Southern perspective. He lives in a busy household in the muggy heart of rural Alabama with his wife, two young sons, an aging Doberman mix, five tiger barbs, and three salt-and-pepper catfish. About the Editors

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

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