Copyright © 2018 by Kerrie Seljak-Byrne, Alexander De Pompa, Mado Christie, Terese Mason Pierre, and Amy Wang

Copyrights to story, poetry, and graphic fiction content remains the property of its respective creator(s). This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright holder except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published in Canada.

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Augur Magazine www.augurmag.com augur t.o.c.

where the city ends 9 Senaa Ahmad

juniper’s ashes 19 Helen Tran

stay 20 Davian Aw

pledge the depth 25 Joseph Dandurand

lasciare suonare 27 Andrew Wilmot unwashed, reused 39 Daniel Maluka

concussion 40 Dominik Parisien

gwen stacy 41 Amy LeBlanc

42 at night i watch wonderful shows Courtney Loberg

you can go anywhere 43 Jen Neale

lume 52 Grace Teoh

the god of small chances 53 L Chan

of stories and futures Kerrie Seljak-Byrne

Stories for the futures we need. When we launched our kickstarter, this was the tagline we chose. After all, we believe that literatures—stories, storytelling, reading, translations, experiencing, rereading, sharing—affect everything about the futures we can look forward to. We know that every new story is tied up in the political; in futures already being shaped today. Stories are important. And we need to acknowledge the power that they hold over us. We deserve better futures. And we deserve the stories that will give us those futures. That’s why we chose the name “Augur”: with each new story, we perform some small reading of things that could be. Augur is indebted to others, of course, for the life’s blood of this tagline. To theories of futurity in queer theory and disability studies. To decolonial literatures like magical realism, afrofuturism and indigenous futurisms. To the work of the many who have come before us, and who continue to do work today. Who create movements with their intellect, compassion, rightful anger, and/or drive that push us to know better; think better; listen better. Be better. This is why we have our three dominant goals: first, to publish creators from the space currently known as Canada and around the world, highlighting Canadian and Indigenous writers; second, to explicitly bring

5 together speculative fiction and just-barely-realism (what we call “dreamy realism”); and third, to focus on intersectional feminism, promoting marginalized and/or underrepresented voices whenever we can. These are the goals that speak to what we want to see in our stories, our worlds: these are the goals that we will aspire to meet with each issue. We look forward to learning how we can better achieve this with every publication. Augur opened to submissions for the first time about a year ago. We were overwhelmed, at the time, by the response. With little but a new Twitter account and a dream, we received more than 500 reprint options for our Preview Issue. We thought that Augur was a publication that needed to happen. Those numbers proved to us that we were right. So we are also indebted to those who’ve believed in us and supported us, whether you’ve been with us from the start or only heard of us a week ago. Whether as a kickstarter supporter, a social media follower, or a supportive name in our inbox. We had the idea: you are the ones who helped us make it happen. A publication is a community, and we wouldn’t be here without ours. Since April 2017, we’ve received a grand total of 2100 submissions from writers around the world, and have had the opportunity to read more fantastic stories from great creators than we know what to do with. We are honoured to have received this trust. We have enough content that our third issue is already taking shape, and we have been able to pay our creators rates that are competitive with the Canadian literary magazine market. For us, that’s phenomenal. Thank you. We can’t say it enough: thank you. Thank you for joining us in showcasing these stories; digging into these future-telling mechanisms. This issue, our first official issue collecting previously unpublished work, is larger than we expected—just like this magazine project, it blossomed before we knew it. So we’re thrilled to invite you to explore not eight—nor nine!—but twelve pieces, by twelve creators from the space currently known as Canada and around the world. We love them all, and hope you will too. And, once you’re done, let us know what you think. What stories you know our futures—your futures—need. We’re listening.

6 Illustration by Ann Sheng

where the city ends Senaa Ahmad

Who knows why our grandparents built a city beneath the sea. Maybe they woke up one day with saltwater coming out of their ears and eyes. Or maybe when they stood on the shore they felt the city’s glow like a phantom limb, a bubble of honey at the bottom of the sea, and they shed their human skins in search of something as old as instinct. I imagine them, wind-whipped and water-logged, clutching the rims of their boats. I imagine them diving into the sea in those old-timey diving suits: orbed, otherworldly, the cords of their throats throbbing silently as they try to remember how their primeval cousins used to breathe underwater and swim across hemispheres. Along the slope of a continental shelf, they built the city themselves, an upside-down fishbowl. The entire weight of an ocean seethes above us. Somewhere beneath the pressure the glass ceiling is starting to splinter along faint hairlines, infinite cracks radiating along the top of the sky, and somewhere above the city my dad slips along the slick slope, gumming the

9 seams with a sealant gun. One day we’ll look up and the last thing we’ll see is the sky splitting open and the ocean plunging in to claim us. Hameed says I’m a ghoul. He says, You’re kind of obsessed with experiencing death, don’t you think? And I say, If you’re not obsessed, then what’s even the point of being alive? Usually this is when Ada will go, Jesus, please can we not do this and Hameed turns it into a dumb joke, like, Gertie can’t help it, her parents basically doomed her with a name that sounds like a dead nun’s. And at this point, it’s all I can do not to point out that, if he calls my thing with death an obsession, then what’s his thing with Ada? A one-person cult? Outside in the electric city, the streetlights have dimmed to a hum. It’s one of those dreamy nights. The kind that swallows you forever, so that in every lovely night in the years to come, you’ll find the smudged imprints of this one. My mother is spread on the bed like a starfished angel, gurgling softly to herself in her sleep. My dad’s out late working again. He comes home at one or two in the morning, his boots filmed with granular ocean silt, as if he’s been walking upon the surface of the moon. Underneath the single flickering bulb in the kitchen, he fixes himself a modest dinner of buttered bread and eggs. I wake up almost every night to it, egg whites bubbling in the pan, fragrant toast crisping in the burner. I have another theory about us. It’s that our ancestors never reached the place they were going. That somewhere in the middle of the choppy waters, their boats halved beneath them and the ocean clutched them hard and wouldn’t let go. Dragged down into the deep, their lungs filled with water until they flickered out, one by one, still tangled in each other’s hands. My theory is that they drowned, down to the last person, and that we’re not really here in this place that they built, but dreams of the dead, the ghosts of what could have been.

•••

We meet by the fizzed-out marquee of our high school, the words See you next year! slipping from summertime neglect. I squint at the sky, looking for the ocean. In the lamplight, it’s impossible to see, but you can still hear it, thudding in your ears. When I think of the summer I think of every summer, in an endless loop: the four of us stuttering through time, from moon-faced adolescents to Frankenstein’s teenagers, all gangle and no manners, selling cheap candy door-to-door back when parents were still charmed by our lispy entrepreneurial spirit, tinkering with bicycles and clocks because one of us thought she was a mechanic, watching any black-and-white movie we could find, whipping tufts of popcorn at each other as if it could hide our own stupid guilelessness. Only this year snags; only this year skips. This year, we did none of those things, and I don’t know how it happened—if it was some petty fight Ada and I had, or something Noam did, or if we had

10 just finally filled up on each other, the way everyone does. It was like we all took a vow of silence and forgot to tell each other. Noam shows up first. “Did you get the keys?” he asks. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” I say. “Let me see.” I draw away. “No, thanks.” “What?” He looks at me like he’s this innocent kid, like I don’t know him better than that even if we haven’t seen each other in months, and that yanks at me. “You don’t trust me?” “They’re just keys,” I say, tense. Then Ada, and, last of all, Hameed. We’re finally back, all of us. “Gertie’s having a panic attack about the keys,” Noam says. “Sounds like Gertie,” Hameed says, but he smiles in a way that means, Just kidding. Over the months his face has become a grown-up’s face. It’s gone angular and whiskery, like someone’s been shapeshifting him into a cat. “You look old,” I say, without meaning to. Ada laughs. “It hasn’t been that long, Gertie.” “She’s right,” Noam says. He squints at Hameed. “Can you grow facial hair now?” Hameed flames up. “Well, great,” he mumbles. “I didn’t know I was going to be court- martialed.” “Don’t we have someplace to be?” Ada says. “Thank you, Ada,” Hameed says. “And if you must know, my people are a hairy people.” We walk down the street, shuffling against each other to feel, briefly, the warmth of another person. Something in this part of town makes us go quiet, maybe the way the brown paper in the storefront windows is peeling away, revealing the smoky, stripped interiors in small triangles, or how the fused-out filaments of streetlamps look like drowning stars, wasted and cut loose. Ada says, “Do you think people do this all the time?” “What, leave the house?” Hameed says. “Everyone but you.” “Hilarious.” She rolls her eyes. The way he looks at her, he’s so obvious. “Maybe we’re the first,” Noam says. “We’re not,” I say. “Sorry. I think they used to send, like, scientists out there.” “Let me guess,” Hameed says, “They were looking for a Yeti and that’s how they found Noam.” “Yetis don’t live underwater, genius,” Noam says. “Joke’s on you.” “You’re the joke,” Hameed says. “Good one.” “You know,” Ada says, kind of snippy, “I didn’t miss this part.” And we all go quiet.

11 Where the sidewalk disappears, we walk on the road. The only sounds in the world are our shoes scuffing the asphalt. Here, the streetlamps have burnt out completely, and when we cast off their glow we walk amongst the corpses of old homes. I have a crawling feeling under my skin that, all this time, we’re brushing past our younger selves. Unseen, they are still here, stuck in that endless loop—still hunched over marbled sundae glasses at the ice cream counter in Tony’s, still flying homemade kites in the phantom hours between midnight and morning, still drinking brackish wine out of boxes on the edge of the road, so luminous with laughter they might float to the top of the city and touch the flaws in the warped glass. I wonder if they would be disappointed to see us now, if the laughter would burn up in their throats. If I look up at the right time, I think I’ll see them, a hundred ghostly visions of ourselves, young Gerties shouldering baby-faced Hameeds, whispering Here they come, here they go. Starved for any glimpse of what they will become, nostalgic already for the future. And I wonder, do normal people think like this, or only when they’re really drunk? We pass a liquor store, ancient fishing tackle hung in the grimy windows. “I could jimmy the lock and get in,” Noam whispers. “No one will ever know.” Hameed says, “Being arrested is not on my bucket list.” “That won’t happen,” Noam says. “I don’t think that’s your best idea,” I say. He exhales. “Didn’t realize you’d become chickenshit.” “Well,” I say, “I’m evolving.”

•••

Back then, we are seven, Noam and I. He says, It’s okay, I do this all the time, hauling the wriggling fish onto the kitchen counter with a wet thump. From the window, we can see them on the porch steps, his mother with a cigarette, picking tobacco flecks out of her ambering teeth, and ym mother, arms on her knees, like she’s trying to shrink herself. We dangle from long-necked stools, looking at each other. He says, Are you old enough to use a knife? And I say, We’re the same age, dummy. He says, That’s not what I mean. The kitchen counter is grooved deep with scars from years of abuse; the stove is scabbed black with dinners of days past. He cleans the fish with a toothy knife that slips and slides in his hands, leaving slivers of glittering skin in smeared comets on the granite. The fish looks like it’s been scalped by a seven-year-old, because it has. You’re going to get in trouble, I say. My mom’s not like yours, he says, sullen, but he drops the knife on the counter. His fingers are slick, oozing. He twists the brown threads of his sweater, working them beneath his scummed fingernails, looking suddenly

12 forlorn under the bare fluorescents. Outside, his mother is talking, flinging her hands. Mine nods: yes, yes, yes. Yes to infinity. I am seven years old. Who knows why I do the things I do. All I remember is, I grab his lonesome face with the flat heels of my hands and I rock his head back and forth until we’re staring at each other, eye-to- eye. I say, Hello? Hello? Are you even in there? And, even then, he looks at me like, Why am I stuck with you?

•••

Where the city ends, there’s a sealed cabin in the wall. The water- suits are in a shed warped with long turquoise streaks of oxidized metal. I unlock the shed with my dad’s keys, which he leaves on the kitchen counter every night along with sudsy frying pans and greasy plates, like he doesn’t have a teenage delinquent for a daughter. We slip oxygen masks over our faces and tug gilled rubber over our torsos. Noam’s is the only suit that fits right. He flexes his arms like there’s anything to flex and when he says, “Cool,” his voice crackles with static. “Ready?” I say, and I can’t help the way my voice sounds, as if we’re about to invent a cure for cancer or something. Hameed’s answering smile is so brilliant, it beams right into my brain. “Ready,” he says. I press my body against the ocean door and water heaves in, swallowing us in its craw. We plunge into the blue. In the ocean, we are pinned. For a moment, we have nothing but the fear and the wonder, the force of an entire aqueous hemisphere dragging us somewhere unfathomable. And then we have each other. Our lungs remember. Our chests shudder. In the ocean, we become something new, older than ourselves. In our suits, gilled like fishes, we swim. In our old, new, weightless bodies, we see seagreen grenadier fish nosing their way along the ruined shoulder of an extinct volcano, endless kelp forests pulsing along the ocean floor, veiny corals latticing up a seamount’s humped back. The city dwindles behind us, a buried molten globe, glowing like a mirage in an unholy blue desert. We fly. All the way to the shipwreck Hyperion, banked steep on its spine at the bottom of the ocean.

•••

Up close, the unhinged jaw of the Hyperion looms, bearded in barnacles, blurry around its moldering edges. The bristling ruins of the naval steamship look something like a black-boned whale skeleton, sinking into the ocean floor. The lone mossy spire of an ancient gun points at us in impotent fury. “Do you think it still works?” Ada whispers nervously as we drift past. “Don’t be stupid,” Noam says.

13 We clamber aboard the deck, the wood crumbling beneath our fingers. Fish flicker past us like phantoms, striped in azure. We are keenly aware of each other, as if we are the last survivors of the world. If I closed my eyes I would still know where they were, my three luminous friends. We float above the deck, careful not to touch the soft, peeling floor. “Do you think they all drowned?” Hameed asks. I almost say, At least our ancestors made it where they were going. And I almost say, Now who’s obsessed with death. Instead I swim toward the bridge, away from them. Everywhere the ground is mossy with algae or lichen, but I can imagine the boat slick with water, pitching from wave to wave, men flung from one side to the other. One foot in the water, one foot in the grave. “I bet we’ll find their skeletons downstairs,” Noam says. “You’re being stupid now,” Ada smirks. Hameed says, “We’re losing Gertie.” “She’s already lost,” I say. Trying to sound spooky, instead sounding morose. Noam swims over. “Hello, melodrama,” he says. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” I say. He shrugs. “Suit yourself. I’m not your shrink.” From here, Hameed and Ada look like shadows webbed in the grid of the ship, the water warping the distance between us. What I would give to know they were endless, my beautiful friends. What I would do to keep us all here in this moment. I say, “You think we’ll ever do this again?” Noam looks at me in that incredibly serious way that only he does. He says, “Don’t let yourself ruin this.” “I thought you weren’t my shrink,” I say. He smiles. “More like your guidance counselor.” This close, I can see his features are morphing into an older boy’s. As if he, too, finally got the memo about being a teenager. “You know,” I say, “I’m pretty sure you can grow facial hair, too.” “Oh, yeah.” His smile sprouts into a grin. “But Hameed takes it so hard.” We watch Ada and Hameed float towards us, a shoal of tiny saffron fish feathering around them like a wandering halo. I say, “Why haven’t I seen you this summer?” He calls out to them, “Hey guys,” and for a moment I think he’s just going to pretend I didn’t ask. But when they’re almost close enough to hear, close enough that the yellow fish nip past us, he says, “Are you serious?” He says, “You know how old people say, It takes two to tango?”

•••

Ada reaches us first. “No skeletons so far.” “The night is young,” Noam says.

14 “This was a good idea, Gertie,” Hameed says. Ada nudges him. “What would we do without her?” “Fall apart, I guess.” “Stop it,” I say. Noam is staring intently at something behind my ear. “Have you tried the cabin?” “No,” Hameed says. “Let’s team up.” We swim over, him and I. This close, the walls of the cabin are scabbed with speckled mollusks that sink into the porous wood. “Yuck,” Hameed says. “Don’t touch them,” I say, grossed out. “Curiosity runs in my blood,” he says. He tries the door but it doesn’t give. “So,” I say, as we both put our weight into the door. “How’s Ada?” He makes a grunting noise. “The world doesn’t revolve around Ada, you know.” “I know,” I say. We both let go. Before I know what I’m doing, I say, “I’m glad you finally realized that.” He rattles the doorknob, like that will do anything. I think, when did I become the world’s biggest clown? “What do you mean?” he asks. I look at his face, and I know he understands, and that I’ve trapped us both in this. “I don’t know,” I say. “No, come on.” “I’m an idiot,” I mumble. “Never mind.” “Say it,” he says. “I want to hear.” I say, “You used to be like, obsessed with her. It was kind of weird to watch.” “I didn’t know you felt that way,” he says, formally, as if he’s aged twenty years in five seconds. If I were him, I wouldn’t want to see me all summer, either. “I don’t,” I say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.”

•••

I take off so that I don’t have to look at whatever his face is doing. I go down below. My heart plastered somewhere against the glassy pane of my chest, thudding to get out. Down here, their voices are muffled. They don’t seem to care that I’ve drifted into the bowels of the ship. A cloud of clownfish swarms past me, the fish fluttering against each other in their haste to avoid me. I know how you feel, fishes, I want to say. The ship moans softly to itself, as if it is remembering older days, a life beyond this one. And I feel like I am walking amongst ghosts of people who once were. In the watery haze, I can see the ruins: the grey snouts of Bedford army trucks, a gutted traincar, rust blooming in bloodstains along its creased sides, armoured car wrecks. I feel like I am walking backwards in time. Ada is calling my name, somewhere above me. Her voice distorted by distance and static. She says to someone beside her, probably Hameed—

15 Illustration by Maybelle Leung

“Where did she go? Did you see?” I wrench the green, slimed door of an army truck open and crawl in. The hinges groan, leaden. Everything inside is white with age and sediment. Like being on the surface of a snow planet. “She’s fine,” Noam says. “She’s probably just sulking.” “Do you always have to be such a goon?” Hameed asks. They are coming down, but draped in the extraterrestrial flora of the truck’s interior, I am too entranced to call out. They move like mermaids into the hangar, Noam at the front, the others trailing behind, transforming out from the deep water into those people I have known. “Wow,” Noam says, squinting at the war machinery. “Look at this.” I am invisible to them in the dark of the truck. I’m also filthy—sitting here, flakes of white rust falling on me. In the window, I can see myself, wild-haired, snowy-faced, the troll under the bridge. “These must be worth a lot of money,” Noam is saying outside. “Yeah, right,” Hameed says. But Noam hasn’t even heard him. He’s wandering off along the gloomy aisles, touching the sides of corroded steel motorbikes and spongy wooden crates.

16 “Gertie?” Ada calls. “Hello?” “I’m here,” I say at last, waving a ghostly hand so they can see me. Ada and Hameed crowd around the truck. Hameed peels open the door, huffing water bubbles. “What are you doing in here?” We look at each other, and I wish I didn’t look like a goblin. “I just wanted to see what it was like inside,” I mumble, hating how stupid that sounds. From across the hangar, Noam’s voice rescues me. “Guys? Guys, look.” In moments of happiness all I can see in him is the boy I’ve known since I was seven, swallowed in his father’s scuffed leather jacket, the sleeves tenting around him, his face so anxious with joy, he is vibrating with light. Only now he is sixteen, skinny in all the wrong places, his hair curling wetly around his ears, the grin beneath his mask as dopey and self-serious as ever, paddling towards us. Holding out in his hands a hundreds-year-old musket, and on its end a bayonet.

•••

We are all transfixed in the moment. Each to their own. “Noam,” says Ada. “Put it down.” He says, “Don’t worry. It’s been in the water too long.” “But what if it, you know, explodes?” He makes a face at her, like, Come on. And Hameed and I, each in our separate worlds of discovery: Hameed bobbing in the water like a buoyed cork, his hair floating around him, his face doing its own loopy thing. And me, my face still streaked with the fungus from the ancient armoured truck, looking back at him to notice that his hand is clutching Ada’s, that a tributary is formed where their hands meet, the water rippling around their grasped fingers; that he’s holding her hand, that she’s letting him, and that he’s over the moon on his way out of the galaxy. And Noam, looking at all of us, the light in his face going out, as if we showed up at his birthday party and stomped all over the cake. At first, we don’t even notice it, ensnared as we are in our own private moments. We don’t say anything to each other, we just become aware, gradually, that we are not alone. It emerges slowly, curiously, from the cavernous heart of the ship. First a shadow of a wrecked lizard face. Then, unwinding its long sea serpent neck, its squat reptilian body. Like something our ancestors dreamed of until it came true. Its eyes are filmed white with age. A dinosaur of the sea. The reptile swivels on its impossible neck. It looks at Noam, and then at us goggling behind him. Hameed whispers something, so quiet it comes out as a spit of static. “Maybe we should go,” Ada says slowly, like she’s trying not to spook it, or us. But Noam, foolish Noam, drifts closer. Even crouched uncertainly, it’s almost his size.

17 He says, “I’m not scared.” The creature doesn’t move. It watches us with rimy eyes, half-hidden in the dark corner of the ship’s hold. Its body is disintegrating, as if it is shedding its skin or coming apart. “Please don’t be a moron,” Hameed says. “Let’s go.” Noam waves the musket at the thing. “I bet you know this doesn’t work,” he says. “Noam,” I say. He flinches, like I’ve reached across the water and touched him. The thing, the sea creature, opens its mouth again and retches. Nothing comes out, but the sound is from the bottom of its stomach, like it is trying to vomit out a lung. As if it’s trying to learn to breathe beneath the water, as if it’s trying to become one of us. Noam lifts the blade of the gun and rams it into the thing. There’s a low, wet thump. For an instant, we’re back in his kitchen and he’s fighting a salmon, but here it is different, here it is awful. Here, we are all separated by something more than a blunted kitchen knife. Ada makes a quiet, strangled noise like she is crying. “Stop it,” I say. “This is sick.” Noam yanks out the musket and turns around. He doesn’t even look at me. “I’m done,” he says. “You guys are no fun anymore.” Behind him, the sea creature quavers, a thin plume of scarlet seeping from its side. I look at my friends, and they look at me, and we don’t know what to say. Ada’s shoulders convulse. “Let’s go home,” Hameed says quietly. Their fingers still entangled in each other’s. We leave it floundering in the belly of the ship and swim up, up to the light. We are all of us silent. Someone has finally reached up into our throats and yanked out our cords. Someone has taken pity on the rest of the world. On the way home, an ancient, grey-backed baleen whale passes us. It swims far above us, but still, even after everything we’ve seen, it’s as vast as anything we can imagine. We slow down—out of fear or awe, it’s hard to say, only that for a moment we are briefly linked in that eternal way again, banded by an invisible thread that runs all the way through us and down the rest of our lives. The whale is a shimmer of grey against the blue. It looks bigger than our lives, but beautifully slow. Like it is unfolding, moment by moment, clouding into the ocean. We are hooked, surrounded by ourselves and the sea. Noam still clutches the gun in his hand. Hameed and Ada still cling to each other. And I, I wish I was back on my own in that alien truck, that desert planet, suspended in time. As far away from them, and this, and everything else, as I can possibly ever be. The shadow passes by us and so does the moment. We swim home.

18 juniper’s ashes Helen Tran my love, my fragile bird I’ve been given an empty house that only echoes with mindprints not my own are those voices or is that myself cracking, bending my faults to fit everyone’s fireplace? my love, where is your seat by the hearth, and where is my head these days? my love, my fragile bird plant me a tree with roots like a mother’s arms give me a living thing that only I can name carve me a bed in a piece of coal to keep me warm to keep me sane my lovelorn my lostwing my sweetmeat if you were to ask me —when are you coming home?

I would say:

I’m still somewhere inside those empty hollows, counting the storms that pass silently through my eyes.

19 stay Davian Aw

You were every guest on the fourteenth floor: none of you alike, a host of strangers across ages and ethnicities, genders and histories, but I knew it was you from the look on your face, and your eyes—your eyes were always the same. “Stay,” you’d say, a plea steeped in sadness, sometimes desperation, anger, loneliness, or lust. Nothing else stayed the same. Not me. Not the rooms, each one different from the ones that I saw through each door, for when I went through, they became other rooms in strange other hotels in impossible places—baby unicorns nursing on a sunny carpet, furniture carved out of iridescent candy, a star-washed vista spilling bright darkness past the sterile edges of an expansive viewport. “Stay,” you’d say, or cry, or shout, and the trolley of fresh linen I’d left in the hallway would suddenly seem a distant, unimportant thing. So we’d chat through the night till you fell asleep, an old professor too

20 long starved of conversation; or I’d be a sounding board for ideas for the script you were writing for that big break you were positive was coming your way. Some nights I held you as you sobbed, a runaway teenage girl pouring out her heart to the cute bellboy. Some days we were two kids building a blanket fort or giggling over glasses of cold chocolate milk. Once, you were a starlet and I had a camera, and you made me stay just long enough to watch it be smashed to pieces. “It’s the grief,” they tell me. “It plays tricks with your mind.” They show me the lift: there is no fourteenth floor. They show me your obituary, trying to be gentle, but they don’t understand there are other worlds than these. “Tell me,” you said that first time, that first room, as I entered with a stack of fresh towels to see you lounging casually on the bed with a crossword in hand, “What’s a six-letter word for something hidden? It’s got a ‘C’ in the middle. Ends with a ‘T’.” “Secret,” I said. “Ah, yes.” You smiled. “Thank you.” There were twenty storeys to the hotel when viewed from outside. The lift went up to twenty-two. Both four and fourteen were missing—unlucky numbers—but it was luck every time the lights blinked out and the doors shuddered open to show me your floor. It was so quiet there, lamplight muted in the hallway, soft shadows on the walls as I made my way down. I never could visit all of you, though time moved slower outside, for I had tasks to complete and hours to account for. In some rooms you were gone, and the door merely opened to a room that could have been any room in this hotel, if not for the fog outside the windows or television sets that played nothing but dramatic readings of pasta recipes. But soon there would be a new guest, new you, new invitation to stay and redeem myself for the time it mattered most and I couldn’t. Last Tuesday, I opened a door to find you the bassist in a hot new boy band, and I your stalker fangirl wearing a t-shirt with a funny tagline and your face on it. Your people yelled at me to leave. “I’m sorry,” I rambled. “It’s all right,” you said. “You can stay.” I often said I was sorry. I tried to, whenever I could, whenever I didn’t get distracted making out with you in a charred tower beneath the harsh beauty of a nuclear sunset, or by the sight of you, widowed and down on your knees, begging forgiveness from the ghost that I was in that world. It made debts seem arbitrary—universe-shackled things—non-transferable to worlds outside their own, telling me it was meaningless to apologize to any other version of you; but still. But still. They suggested counselling. I stopped talking about the fourteenth floor. Here’s my darkest secret: a part of me always hoped to discover a room in which you were dying. Perhaps then it would end—having seen your

21 last moments, being able to hold you and love you until you were gone. Perhaps, in that world, they would let me attend your funeral. Perhaps, in that world, they would let me say goodbye. I must have said a hundred goodbyes to all the yous that were not you. Yet the pain still remains, like the void you left behind when you vanished through that door on that day three months ago. I remember the room where we were each other, and wearing your body made me too self-conscious to stay. “I’m sorry,” I said in your voice to my face. “I’m sorry. But I’ve got to go.” “No,” you cried, wrapping my arms around me, weeping my tears into your shoulder. “Please. Don’t go. Just stay with me—” “I’m sorry,” I said, pulling away from your embrace the same way that you had pulled away from mine, and rushed out onto the path of the same oncoming car amidst the sound of my voice screaming out your name. That was the most difficult of all the rooms. It was harder even than the one where we grieved our dying child and I thought of all the children that our bodies could never make. Perhaps that’s why I walked more slowly back to the lobby that day, and that was the first time I saw the sign, up next to a window with muslin curtains letting in the foggy light:

We are upgrading to serve the Elder Gods better. During this period, you may experience intermittent anomalies in reality. We apologize for the inconvenience.

There was a number to call for further enquiries. I turned back to an empty room to try it, but all I heard was a solemn voice reciting confessions in Chinese. Perhaps it was a clue to the mystery of the rooms. I had to solve the mystery of the fourteenth floor, and then everything would finally make sense, unlike how nothing has made sense since the paramedics wheeled you through the doors of the ward and only let your family in. But all these doors would let me in, and the next day, in the next room, you were a very pretty woman tutoring me in high school physics, and my teenage boy attention span kept wandering off the subject. “What do you know about other worlds?” I asked. You laughed. “That’s not part of the syllabus,” you said. “It’s all just a theory, really. Why do you ask?” I shrugged. “I wanted to hear the science behind it.” “Your parents aren’t paying me for this,” you said. Still, you relented, and we spent the evening discussing quantum superposition and undead cats, and that puzzling loyalty we feel to the world we were born in—as though it matters more than others, as though it is more real, as though that world is the real reality and everything else but whimsy, as though the

22 first version of each person we come to know is the truest manifestation of their soul. After the funeral, your family wouldn’t let me back into our house. They said it was theirs now, for they were your closest kin. They threw out a few boxes of my things and nothing more, and, just like that, I have nothing to show for our fourteen years together, a stretch of time excised from my life as though it never were. “Where do you keep disappearing to?” my supervisor asked, but she was angry and didn’t believe me when I told her the truth. “I don’t care if you were stuck in a magic closet,” she said. “You can do that when you’re off the clock, not on it.” I never liked going back, but I always did. Reality is compelling—a form of self-punishment, perhaps, the thought that we don’t deserve the fantasy. Or perhaps something inside us always pulls us home, no matter how glorious the other realms may be. There’s no other reason I can think of for going home, every time, treating your floor as just another on the natural route from thirteen to fifteen, instead of refusing to leave and spending forever weaving my way through an extravagance of you. This time, we were an elderly couple who had bribed our way onto a colonizing spaceship, just for the chance to take our final breaths a thousand years hence on alien soil. The planet now lay before us, majestic out the viewport, but our lungs weren’t strong enough to adapt to the atmosphere of that brave new world. “I know it’s too much to ask,” you whispered, as noisy able-bodied youth boarded shuttles in droves. “But... could you—” “I’ll stay,” I said, and together we made that deserted spaceship into a home, orbiting forever in a universe of us. I assume we did, for I left when you slipped off into sleep, your hand in my hand, your tired smile warmed in the glow of an alien sun. The sign by the lift was gone the next day. It was the last time I found myself on the fourteenth floor. I was a midwife and you were being born. You grasped my finger. Your eyes told me to stay. Your father came and carried you away. The next day, and all the days after that, the lifts went straight from thirteen to fifteen. I missed you. I miss you. They say it’s a good thing—that I’ve acknowledged you’ve gone, and moved on to the depression stage of grief. It doesn’t feel like a good thing. I cry every night, for in my dreams I see a crowd of you begging me to stay, and I didn’t; I didn’t. I’ve barely been able to sleep since you left, haunted by the memory of your eyes as they raised you onto the stretcher. You reached out to grasp my hand with a grip weaker than I had ever known. “Stay with me,” you

23 whispered, and then they took you away, and those were the last words I ever heard you say. What did they tell you, when you asked for me? Did they say I had forgotten, that I did not care, that it hurt me too much to see you this way? Did you call for me, right at the end? Are you still calling for me? I’ve been compulsively riding the lifts between thirteen and fifteen. Guests have complained. I might lose my job. I sneak off to the stairwell each lunch break to drill through the cement landing of the fifteenth floor. I broke through last week: just a tiny hole, but the coin I dropped in didn’t land on the thirteenth floor. I look at it glinting there in the light of another sun, and know it was real. All of this was real. I’m coming back tomorrow with larger tools. I hope I can get in before they catch me. But I’m going to find my way back to you, just one last time to that realm where I might wander through the beautiful multitudes of you for eternity and a day; for this time, when I get back, I promise: I’ll stay.

24 pledge the depth Joseph Dandurand

they gather the abusers the users the deviant and I lead them to the edge of this place and I tell them they have a choice to jump or be turned to stone. a million stones sit on the edge waiting for the young the pure to come and skip a stone across the

25 freedom. I walked away in search for all the true evil of this place and I found him and he told me that he had been forgiven and that his god understood his desires to destroy young minds and I told him he had a choice and as he jumped he looked back to me and said: I forgive you. you see that from time to time: the evil and their belief that they will live forever and they never do and I walk on to another edge of a place up river from here and I again gather all the abusers and they stand there looking over the edge and they become stones and they sit there as a small child comes one day and builds a wall of stones and the wall sits there as the edge of this place slowly erodes to the wall and one by one the stones fall into the emptiness of eternity as the words: I forgive you fade like the memory of an abuser.

26 lasciare suonare Andrew Wilmot

The world screams day and night as villages, towns, entire cities are wiped clear from its surface. The extinguished souls are, in death, condemned to a realm of anti-sound. They form an ever-present wail, a white noise the shriek of catastrophe, as if the Earth’s tectonic plates are scraping against one another like the vertebrae of a spine fusing into an incapacitating knot. The world screams, and Xian listens. Now, at this moment, it’s the sounds of industry she hears: artifice coloured the grey of a construction site, the shade of mathematical precision and cost analysis at the backbone of any population centre. It is the thrum and rattle of cars; wind; birds chirping and dogs barking and people squawking but not actually saying anything. Their voices are a muddled slew of vowels creating the illusion of life, like the background movements of people on a busy street—extras in a film. It feels unreal, just

27 a soundstage reproduction, drafted and compiled from another place, another time. She continues up the narrow dirt path, a filthy cloth sack in her left hand, and heads toward the cacophony: thunder and rolling seas, voices vibrant and piercing, like hard rain through the tops of waves. The clamour intensifies. Xian reaches up and switches off the hearing aid behind her right ear. Doing so immediately lessens her discomfort, quieting the chaos somewhat, though it muddies what she now hears with her good ear. She stops then. Despite only hearing out of one ear, the sound has reached its apex, becoming bedlam, a wall of noise. She shuts her eyes, envisions a rainbow shattered into shrapnel several thousand times over, like prismatic static. Opens them again to see it there, just a few feet away, off the side of the path and in front of the pieces of a “Welcome to . . .” sign, and half-sheltered by overgrowth: the marker. It stands five feet tall, a tapered rectangular spire like an elongated headstone. Forged from granite, it has a metal faceplate inscribed with the name of the village and those who’d lived there at the time of its destruction. Surrounding the base of the spire, angled upward, are eight circular speakers inset into its surface—two on each side. The marker, she reads, is from ten years past. It was erected weeks, maybe a month, after the Altro came through, smearing every surface with the remains of the villagers. Painting the town red, so to speak. The noise crackles loudly, unpleasantly, like glass crunching underfoot, amplified a hundredfold. Xian kneels at the marker’s base, and clears leaves and dirt off the lower speakers. The change is instantaneous—the sounds come through clearly again. To Xian, though, the effect remains unconvincing; the aural construction rings false. Too much a soundtrack, not enough of a score. The town is a corpse, its memorial insincere. She pays her respects and hurries on her way.

•••

It’s hours later and many miles more when Xian comes upon two travellers—a woman and a man—coming down the dirt path. The woman looks to be in her mid-thirties, with short black hair, and is dressed in military garb. She carries a rifle in her hands. The man beside her is more comfortable, wearing jeans and a dark jacket, with a large duffel slung over his shoulder. His face hides behind a patchy grey-and-black beard, but Xian can see his sour expression and sickly green-tinted complexion. He stares at the ground as Xian moves between them. The soldier, passing on the right, says something to Xian, but her words are lost underwater. Xian switches on her hearing aid. “Say again?” “I said you don’t want to go up there.” The soldier nods in the direction from which they’ve come. “Nothing there you want to see. The Altro didn’t leave much.”

28 “It’s fine,” Xian says, and continues forward. The man looks up. “Don’t you know you’re ’bout to walk into a—” He pauses to consider Xian: skin like ash-dark wood, hair a set of thick braids knotted at the back, the ends tucked into a kerchief around her neck. Clarity dawns like awe. “Christ, you’re her, ain’t you?” “Her who?” the soldier asks. “This here’s the Gravedigger. Xian.” “She’s a Foley?” “She’s in the trade, yeah. Practically a legend. Only, I ain’t had the pleasure.” The soldier regards Xian, unimpressed. “Never heard of her.” “It’s been less than a day,” says the man. “Horror’s still fresh.” “I know what I’m doing.” Xian proceeds up the path. She hears the soldier start to say more, to warn or perhaps chide her for not taking them seriously, but she switches off her hearing aid again and trudges onward. The response wasn’t as severe as she’s come to expect. Most soldiers and brigands have at least heard of her—enough, anyway, that they know to keep their distance and just let her do her job. It’s always worse when crossing paths with other Foleys, especially ones who consider themselves artisans and auteurs, who arrive on scene with their sounds pre-selected, as if every village, town, or city were the same, made of pieces that could be swapped out freely and with little repercussion to the accuracy of the scene. To Xian, their approach is inauthentic to the experience of documenting places as they’d been, before the Altro razed them. The Foleys have made the destruction into industry. They’ve made it artifice. Xian had been twenty-three—fifteen years younger then—when the Altro first appeared. A junior Foley artist in the film industry, she had watched helplessly as the first wave of invaders swept effortlessly over the eastern nations, who were unprepared for the onslaught. She watched, too, as others like her—Foleys, all—developed the roles they would later play in the changed world. How they could take from their skill sets and histories, personal and professional, and adapt them. How they could go from creating illusions of the living world to memories of a dying one. Yet they remained only illusions; Xian wasn’t satisfied by their uncanny valley. She wanted more—she could do, can do more. She crests a short hill and her destination comes into view: Sulchet. Once home to nearly two thousand, and emptied not a day earlier. Notice of the town’s destruction is spreading rapidly through back channels. Most Foleys prefer to wait upwards of a month before entering dead towns, allowing time for stagehands to clean out the worst of the viscera before starting work on their reconstructions. This also affords them time to investigate their locations, readying soundscapes like selecting puzzle pieces from a bin, sticking them together in hopes that the image created will serve, to someone, as adequate memory.

29 Xian doesn’t like to wait. She wants to capture what’s left of a location before its echoes vanish. Echoes remain like footprints in sand, fading slowly, until swept over by the tide of time. The military spent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars investigating the auralstatic residue left behind after every attack only to discover, to their horror, that what endured in the wake of each assault wasn’t a key to understanding who the Altro were or what they wanted. What endured…the auralstatic residue that remained was the people they left behind, or their imprints, anyway. The last moments of the dead smudging the air. As she approaches the homes on the town’s boundary, Xian spots the piecemeal remains of towering steel shield generators resembling enormous antennae, once having arced high over the town. Now they’re shattered slabs of skin from enormous mechanical serpents, which had flattened homes and other buildings when they’d fallen. The ground in and around their bases is hollowed out—the townspeople hadn’t imbedded the generators deep enough into the earth to withstand an attack from below. The Altro would have had no difficulty toppling them, digging down just far enough to crack the town’s outer energy shell. Xian climbs over the broken shaft of one of the generators. The stench of mud, gunpowder, and scorched flesh is overpowering. She lifts the kerchief from around her neck and covers her mouth before proceeding past a row of houses, shops, and a general store abuzz with flies and rats and other vermin. Xian suppresses the urge to peer inside as she passes. She continues on. Around the broken fountain at the centre of town, bodies rest atop one another in various states of obliteration, their positions indicating the font as the origin of the Altro’s null-sonic detonation. The blast shredded the bodies of the townspeople in an ever-widening circle, orbiting the point of detonation. In the near-silence, only the sounds of running water—and blood, likely some blood—trickling into and around the destroyed fountain can be heard. Xian opens her cloth sack and removes a micro SD card. She takes off her hearing aid, pops open a small slot at the top, and inserts the card. Next, she takes out a svelte black rubber glove with electrodes sewn down the length of each finger and across the palm. She slips it on, then takes a wire extending from the motherboard at her wrist and connects it to a port along the top edge of her hearing aid, which she places back behind her ear and switches on. Sound rushes in, but a different kind than what came from other Foley’s speakers. Atop the rustling of nature and the soft pfft of sparks from the decimated shield generators, she can hear a low purple hum like a clothes dryer digitized. She raises her hand and the noise sharpens, becomes pink, then red. She lifts it above her head and hears voices rising from the ether, oranges and yellows crawling up out of the dirt they lie buried in.

30 They speed up and stop with the pitch and yaw of her movements, as if scrubbing an audio file. Xian inhales deeply, her fingers twitching. Every motion causes her insides to rattle as the echoes of the dead surge through the glove like verbal electroshock. The fear of their last moments barrels in, transforming the world around her into a livid, neon bruise. Circling the fountain, and careful of the flood of gore at her feet, she hears individual words vibrating above the din, voices and people murmuring from their own spatial-temporal pockets. She walks toward them and, gradually, words become sentences, paragraphs…entire conversations cohere like aural kaleidoscopes. She pinches the air, selecting individual tones, tugging at threads of conversations. They are rendered clearer and more opaque the farther she walks. She moves from the centre of town to its western perimeter a hundred yards away, to a small house situated there, at the edge—the point at which all lines appear to intersect.

Illustration by Mari Zhou

31 At the house, Xian is positive she’s discovered the source of the town’s entanglement—the axis around which its populace had revolved. She opens the door and is forced back as dialogues soar past her, flying off in all directions. She shuts her eyes, watches the vibrations—words, lives—of every colour and shade that thread the bruise, a scar stitched along the open wound of the townspeople’s terror. She enters the house, her hand treading the air, searching, making a fist around each unique voice until she’s able to discern the clearest in the room. Located two feet above the seat of a short wooden chair at the kitchen table, the voice is bright like daylight. Xian pulls from her sack a telescoped metal rod. She flicks a switch and a stake extends. She drives its daggered base through the seat of the chair and a light atop the Schlieren Wave Net starts blinking red. Like the glove, the Wave Net had been created to harness something from the Altro that the governments of the world could use to defeat them. Now, its primary use is to record sound waves from the strongest point of entanglement—the echo to which all others were once drawn. Xian removes the glove and yanks the cord from her hearing aid, and the town dies a second death as everything goes dark and quiet. She presses her palm to her left eye to still the rhythm section in her head. The migraine is blossoming, tremorous, as if tinnitus were somehow pressurized. She leaves then. Others will find her beacon, the Wave Net recording the echoes of the dead for as long as they remain. That’s where they’ll build their false monument and bid their farewells. For now, she lets the echo ring.

•••

They had come not from above, as was expected of any known invading force, but from between. The Altro streamed out from crags in the sides of mountains and up from cracks in the Earth like arterial structures flowering the broken soil. The schisms between the two realities glowed hot until their armies burst forth, spreading like the scatter of millions of baby spiders from a dying mother’s insides. They raged across the land, saying nothing, demanding nothing, but destroying, without pause, whatever life they could find. All sound—voices, mechanizations, sound waves that blanketed the planet with the musics of life—were anathema to their existence. They covered their ears with ornate helmets of thick, padded metals. When those failed or were cracked or stolen, they used whatever they could to shelter their hearing—their impossibly delicate hearing—from devastating, skull-erupting consequences, as they marched from one city to the next. Their null-sonic weapons were devastating as nothing Xian’s world had ever seen, overwriting the notes, chords, and choirs of existence. By the time the Earth learned of its sister world, twinned and hidden, the Altro had already risen up and slashed the throat of their echo.

32 The Altro’s forces were met with the best the world had to offer, but it was never and would never be enough to stave off destruction at the invaders’ hands. Their radical weaponry tossed aside tanks and artillery and whole platoons of soldiers like ragdolls flung round by a malfunctioning physics engine. They flattened townships, whole gatherings of people carved out of this world silently, as if they’d never existed at all, but viscerally and with unspeakable gore, reminding the world all too clearly that they had. It was three long years before anyone learned the truth: the invaders’ weapons stitched the dead into the fabric of the world. Pieces of them, at any rate—their final words to one another, captured in situ as if in an aural Limbo. The monuments, when the Foleys started building them, were not about keeping the Altro out. Nothing could do that now. No, the monuments were about keeping memory alive. And not just memory, but the sounds of memories—the voices of the world, the very thing the Altro sought to eradicate wholecloth.

•••

“What if everything we do, they hear ten-fold?” Quinn had asked Xian once. They had been hunkered down in a mobile shelter, going through community forums to find more cities or towns in need of commemoration. Quinn’s family had died a month after the Altro first appeared. After their deaths, Xian had crossed paths with them here and there—at waystations and shelters following the trail of the Altro’s destruction. Quinn gleaned, from their very first encounter, Xian’s intense preference for working alone—a capacity for understanding for which Xian remained quietly grateful. “What if all they ever hear where they’re from are echoes of our world, like giant church bells sounding off constantly? It’d be torture.” “Who cares about them? All that matters is what they take.” Quinn raised an eyebrow at her. “Play the cold fish all you want. You care about what you do.” Xian only shrugged. Quinn was right: she did care. Probably more than most. Just not about the whys of the job. It didn’t matter why the Altro did what they did, only that they did it. It was easier to not get bogged down in rumours and ideas, or to hear what other Foleys thought was going on, and to just let them think of her how they wanted. She was a gravedigger; a ghoul who’d sooner work with corpses than construct a passable simulacrum. Quinn was like the others and worked from the ground up. They and other Foleys employed everything from old radio techniques like stomping boots through kitty litter and slamming doors and windows, to archiving and cataloguing sounds taken from films and television shows and cities still standing—supposedly crafting an ever-better illusion of the voices the Altro silenced.

33 But their quixotic artifice wasn’t enough for Xian. There was no music in the idea of what was lost. Reality was far messier, and too unpredictably symphonic to ever be so coolly constructed. She used what was left of her savings and inheritance to purchase the prototype military-grade synth glove on the black market. Scientists had been iterating on the tech for years with little luck as they attempted to decode the auralstatic residue left behind by the Altro, but in their failures and misgivings, Xian saw neglected potential. Once she acquired the glove, Xian had taken it on her next assignment: constructing a memorial for a small fishing village just off the east coast. What she discovered when she arrived, what she heard as she moved her gloved hand through the air, had chilled her to the core: the voices of people speaking, conversing with one another like decaying ghosts, faint and fading but still clearly, intrinsically, human. After the next attack, she rushed to ensure that she arrived ahead of any clean-up attempt. The devastation was almost too much for her, with bodies eviscerated and redistributed about town. Still, she steadied herself, put on her glove, and swept the air. The sensation was instant, electric, as the ghosts of the town moved through her in medias res. She could hear them, even see them—the imprint of their final moments invisible but vibrant all the same. She trailed their voices like she would a line of breadcrumbs, until she found the brightest, clearest one to which all others were tied—the strongest point of aural entanglement, where the orchestration reached its peak—and drove her stake through its heart.

•••

Ten miles west of Sulchet, in a tent city for travellers and refugees, Xian enters the long tent of a mobile way station filled with those escaping the horrors of their world. They take in a drink; a shred of much-needed conversation; or a chance to scream loudly and without judgement. She approaches the makeshift bar—a rectangle of card tables set up around a glimmering hodgepodge of salvaged liquor bottles. The place is chaotic, full of laughter and stories that she can’t make out but is regardless glad to hear. There’s even a group of special effects engineers and set designers at a table near the back—the hands responsible for constructing each town’s monument to the dead. Like Foleys, they’d found new purpose in the changed world. All storytellers still. The bartender’s burly beard offsets his shallow, emaciated features. From a chain around his neck hangs a flat, diamond pendant containing a micro SD card—an impression of the neighbourhood in which he grew up. He glances at Xian. She nods, and he immediately makes her a cup of tea. He places it on the bar and scooches it in front of her as she sits. “It’s green, I think. Smells like lawn clippings.” “No Earl Grey?”

34 He shakes his head. “Last battalion came through here cleaned me out.” He leans forward, whispers. “Your five o’clock. Woman in the red dress.” Xian looks, spies the woman in question sitting fifteen feet away, who’s watching her right back. She’s older than Xian usually sees on the battle trail—sixty, sixty-five maybe. The woman motions for her and Xian goes over. “The woman with an entire orchestra in the palm of her hand,” says the lady in red as Xian sits across from her at the low table. “What?” “It’s what they say about you, dear.” Xian flinches. “Does that bother you?” “I just turn up the volume and let others do the talking.” The woman in red watches Xian, who stares right back. Neither looks away. “I’ll get right to it then,” she says. “I understand you performed a service earlier today at Sulchet. I’d like to make you an offer for the aural impression you took of the town.” Xian raises an eyebrow. “An aural impression? I’m afraid I—” “Don’t.” Xian clears her throat. “What you’re suggesting is against regulations set forth by the International Federation of Professional Foley Artists, not to mention, of course, highly immoral. No Foley artist owns or can lay claim to the aural footprint of the dead. Our job is to mark their passing, not document it for ourselves.” The woman sighs and places a thick roll of bills on the table. Xian stares at the money. “That won’t do me much good out here.” The woman unveils a stack of paper wrapped with a rubber band—meal tickets—which she adds to the cash. Xian hesitates, then reaches for both. The woman is quick, though, swiftly clamping her hand atop Xian’s. “The impression,” she says, low enough that no one around them would hear. Xian reaches up with her free hand and removes her hearing aid. She runs her finger along its top, presses in, and pops out the micro SD card. The woman takes her card and Xian takes her payment. “I’ve seen you before,” Xian says, replacing her hearing aid. “An auction last month, at an outpost not far from here. You walked out with another impression, didn’t you?” The older woman stares at the micro SD card pinched between her thumb and index finger, and doesn’t answer. “You Collectors confuse the hell out of me,” Xian says. It’s not enough for you to remember the dead; you want to own their trauma.” “Is that what you think?” “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even with the rest of the world falling apart, you want to be able to look at everyone else’s special brand of suffering and whisper, ‘well, at least it’s not me.’” The woman glares at Xian. “Colla Voce,” she says. “It means to follow the soloist’s lead.” “I know what it means,” spits Xian. “Before . . . I was . . .” She reaches for her hearing aid, and stops herself mid-motion.

35 The woman narrows her eyes. “You used to sing?” Xian doesn’t respond. “You know, I think I understand you better now, Miss Xian.” “Do you?” Xian snaps. “You seem like the type of person who likes to be in control of their own destiny, who doesn’t like having things taken from them.” She pauses, eyeing Xian. “Believe me, I know how that feels. Contrary to what you might think, it’s not trauma I’m collecting.” “What, then?” She pats her purse. “I’m following my children. I’m bringing them home.” The woman in the red dress rises and leaves without another word. At the tent’s edge, she gives a brief pause and Xian wonders if she might turn back. She doesn’t, though, and makes her exit, leaving Xian alone with her meal tickets.

•••

Xian dreams of a city larger than any she’s ever known. Its skyscrapers pierce the heavens in chrome multitudes, arranged in tidy rows, ascending and descending like a frequency graph. She walks the streets, observing department store window displays: row after row of giant glass urns filled with swirling colours, shouting all manner of hues. She presses her face to the glass and watches as the gaseous phantoms inside attempt to serenade her with the memories of their former selves. Her attention’s torn by a wave that emanates out from the city’s centre, rippling the streets and shattering every window with a throng of brilliant white cymbal crashes. Xian drops to the ground and clamps her hands over her ears. Her hearing aid’s gone and her right hand is wet. She stands and checks it, sees her palm painted the red of her insides. Wonders why her blood is so quiet. The tinkling of broken glass stops. She hears them fully, then: the voices of the metropolis’s dead. They stream from the smashed façades of every building—a technicolour maelstrom. She instinctively raises her right hand to the sky to shelter herself from the storm and the voices coalesce above her, forming a sphere that grows in size as ever more phantoms gather. Even as Xian drops her hand and scuttles away from the undulating mass, the voices swell and the sphere bursts, growing legs and then arms—hundreds of them, thousands, before raising itself into a lumbering millipedal colossus of so many tones and shades and pitches that as its gaping, dissonant jaw cracks wide, preparing to devour her, she imagines this is what a god must sound like.

•••

The attack comes in the middle of the night. Xian is thrown from her cot at the first blast. She sees tents, hers included, like shredded kites floating through raining blood and viscera. Around her, the people who weren’t

36 killed by the blast are rising to their feet again, staggering then sprinting away. She hears only tumult as she searches in the dirt for her hearing aid, which had been flung through the air when her cot overturned. She finds it a few feet away, pressed into the mud beneath the sack that held her glove. She wipes it off and slides it home over her right ear. The aural pandemonium clears like a switch being thrown and she hears screams from the far edge of the camp—desperate survivors running for the woods. Then there’s the sound of an inverted eruption, like artillery firing in reverse as the Altro’s second blast passes right over Xian’s head. She sees the last of the escapees blown outward, their bodies twisting and stretching around a clear, fluid sphere that expands and then contracts again in a surreal breath—a reverse sonic boom, weaponized. Xian remains still, lying on her stomach. Footsteps approach from behind, feet squelching in the mud, in the blood and gore, through the remains of the settlement. She desperately wants to switch off her hearing aid so the audio of her demise could be made less real, but she doesn’t dare move. In front of her, two narrow stalks appear in the night: spindly legs clad all in black, hidden but for the way the blood splatter on their boots gleams in the moonlight. Xian wonders if, despite their hardshell soundproof headgear so tight it appears to meld with their heads, the sound of her heart is pounding as loudly in their ears as hers.

•••

Xian lies for hours in a pool of mud, rigid with terror. Eventually, it begins to rain. Slathered in mud, she rises to the destruction that surrounds her, and her insides sink into her feet. She stands to the left of the first blast’s epicentre. Beneath her, soldiers, Foleys, and wayward travellers have been reduced to their base materials, strewn together as if in a blender. She retrieves her glove and a wave-net stake from her sack, and follows the echoes of the dead to their apogee—a patch of dried dirt and entrails that, maybe, once belonged to the kindly bartender whose name she never got—and drives the stake into the ground. A familiar sensation buzzes through her, and she turns away to follow it across the battlefield. At the settlement’s perimeter, she finds the body of the woman in red, resting in the muck. The memories of Sulchet are crushed under her. Caught by the edge of the blast, the woman‘s left side has been scooped away, while the rest of her remains more or less intact. Xian ponders silently, curious if the woman’s children had been the axes around which their homes had spun—if they’d been people of some note or recognition, or if, like their mother, they’d been effortlessly tossed aside when the Altro came and stole their voices away.

37 She yanks the cord from her hearing aid, removes it from behind her ear, and drops her glove to the ground. She pops out the micro SD card recording the destruction she managed to survive, and drops it too into the mud, next to what’s left of the woman in red. Xian turns away and finds herself face to face with the creature she’s only ever seen clearly in her nightmares. A lone Altro, standing not even a body’s length away. At its feet, the cracked halves of its soundproof helmet. In its hands, a cylindrical device with a trigger on one side. The weapon widens toward its end, an oversized blunderbuss, but more geometric. Slowly the Altro moves its hand to the trigger as Xian, equally slowly, replaces her hearing aid. The mouthless creature watches her. Its skin is light blue, its eyes wide and far apart, and larger than a human’s. Otherwise they are not unlike Xian or any of the people lying dead at their feet. The Altro shakes, its lithe body fabric caught in a breeze. Xian switches her hearing aid on. The Altro hears it: the almost impossibly low hum of the device. Without its helmet, its nose and eyes register excruciating pain. Its face scrunches, the migraine an octopus unfolding inside its head—tentacles wrapping themselves around its vulnerabilities and squeezing. The Altro raises its weapon and Xian imagines the echo she will leave. She wonders if her impression will register as anything more than background distortion, a phantom gust of wind cast as an extra in the settlement’s memorial, if at all. She wonders if she’ll ring.

38 unwashed, reused Daniel Maluka

seventy percent water thirty percent false hood that’s what we are through arteries and veins rocks and ravines gravity pushed us down further. at the impasse we separated speak now, wave current whisper across a distance: without you all skies are second hand twice worn, unwashed, reused.

39 concussion Dominik Parisien

I would call you, but my head is a balloon and the cellphone light is a needle. A needling light. I need light, but I don’t think you want me to pop. Then again, I don’t know what I think. A pop might do me good. I would write you, but my balloon is only tethered by a spinal string, and now it’s caught up in a corner with the cobwebs and the dust. The oxygen is thin here and I might be high from being high. Still, I wish I could tell you a story. I can’t, while my head is a balloon. Balloons aren’t very good with words—we’re nothing but hot air. If the air left my mouth I might come down, but I don’t think I have a mouth. You should know—my elastic skull is wearing at the ceiling. It is bumpy, sort of misshapen—the ceiling—I mean, my head too, probably. Got shoulders white with dandelion stuff— no, that isn’t right—with ceiling fluff like dandruff. Dandelions are for a world beyond the windows. At least I can fly. Or maybe float. Flies fly. Flies don’t wear through ceilings like balloons though. That’d be ridiculous. We’d see the sun through our roofs if they could. Needling sunlight piercing through, popping us balloons. You know, it doesn’t feel healthy, a balloon trapped inside this way. Do we balloons even have eyes to be needled, or do we just think we do? Maybe that’s really how balloons end, not with a sunlit pop, but with a whisper. Just that low sound of a balloon wearing through a ceiling, until it reaches sky, floats/flies away and someone, maybe you, looks up and whispers: Hey, I could see my house from there. Not that I could hear you—we balloons have no ears. I think all balloons have are thoughts. And that’s all we can do. Think.

40 gwen stacy Amy LeBlanc

The night Gwen Stacy died, a blanket covered my bare shoulders with chrysanthemums and cloves shaking thoughts of collisions beatified.

The night Gwen Stacy died, the Bow River flooded and knocked over signs, taxi cabs, dog leashes along the tide.

The night Gwen Stacy died, we found grit in our eyes from broken tea sets and spoke of women in refrigerators, turning blue with formaldehyde.

The night Gwen Stacy died, we considered a homestead, a twilight never seen, the backs of cereal boxes, and shipwrecks we’d find lakeside.

The night Gwen Stacy died, I picked you up off the pavement as your glasses fogged, and droplets formed under your nose. The moisture you left behind could be me but is unverified.

41 at night i watch wonderful shows Courtney Loberg

Most people don’t know. I found a dry well at the bottom of the field-pond. This in September. After pushing Michael’s quad in the lagoon. Michael is the type of guy who is a guy. Who I always hate.

I stayed down until November and by then I couldn’t get out. Of course the pond had frozen. An albino moose waded down the night it happened. Three of its hooves froze over my head, the fourth one too high to see except as a clouded brown moon in the ice.

The dry well fit my small portable TV. There are more things to eat than you would guess. Dry and plump like nuts. Fermented saskatoons. Drinks of water made by melting ice above with the imagined warmth from a portable TV. All of this can be possible.

At night I watch wonderful shows. About the health of the soil around the pond, and divinations of your future, in which you wash dishes alone and realize you’ll always love me.

The quad-voices roar around the fields for hours. For weeks. Through the ice and the trees of the wood it sounds like through a telephone. I wish I could call you on a telephone like in the old days. Through the line. Actually hearing you through the line. There’s an ochre telephone in my well with its cord into the congealed leaves. It might be broken. When I’ve been lonely I’ve held it to my ear and listened to long, pearled worms moving through the loam or sometimes a type of voice in the ice.

42 you can go anywhere Jen Neale

THE QUAKE

Our teeth chatter in bed. The earthquake has been going on all night, not strong enough to knock pictures from the walls, but dust drifts from our ceiling and coats our arms like moths’ wings. Moneek is awake. As we lie under our duvet her eyelashes bat the back of my neck. Of course she’s awake. She doesn’t sleep well on a normal night. Our legs roll forward and back over the mattress. It’s in its fifth hour. When the quake started Moneek sat straight up, turned to me, and by the whites of her eyes I could see she blamed the shaking on me. Then I saw it dawn on her, and it poured from her mouth. “I never should have left Toronto. I never should have left Toronto, Audrey.”

43 She said so on repeat until I told her she was right, even though it would mean never having met me. Vancouver is a mistake. But it’s been mine for three decades, and I’ll never leave. I’m clinging on. When something goes on long enough, eventually you have to lie back down. Our water glasses have long walked off the bedside tables. Moneek’s childhood stuffed giraffe wags its head like it’s deciding between two perfect desserts. As the daytime is resuscitated in dull blue, we see the trees outside shaking their leaves, worked up enough for a church revival.

THE ALLEY

Between 20th and 21st Avenues is the alley Moneek and I inhabit, decorated with garbage bins and strewn with shattered glass, a misplaced frying pan coated with burnt rice, wires crisscrossing overhead like a child’s messy drawing, wood fences weighted by morning glory and leaning away from this strip of broken pavement I call home. Fifty or so other human beings live in this stretch of laneway homes. Mini houses, reformed garages, in the backyards of genuine two-storey homes. I won’t say we are our landlords’ dolls—they never dress us up, make us tea—but you know how people build doll houses (or bird houses or mailboxes) that replicate their own home in miniature? We enhance the bloated incomes of the families living on 20th and 21st Avenues proper. Our lives in this alley are an afterthought, a stilted diminutive of single-family-dwelling. We are always looking out our laneway windows, staring from our Juliet balconies, stiff-limbed and smiling at their dinner scenes. Our own tables, Formica and wobbling, display our feasts of soup and garlic bread. Okay, we eat all right, but it’s easy to feel affronted seeing your overlords eat chanterelles and smile pityingly at your efforts.

JACKSON BRINGS GROCERIES

We’re one day into the quake, and it’s hard to hear the knock at the door. In the cupboards the wine glasses are clinking rhapsodies. To get to the door, I shuffle with bent knees and follow support walls. The tremor upsets the backs of my arms. Moneek watches from the couch. Jackson stands in the rain holding out two fabric bags stuffed with cans. Beans, crushed tomatoes, soup. His toque, pulled over prominent ears, is sprinkled with mist. It’s wrong to suffer rain during an earthquake. Only one disruptive natural phenomenon at a time. “There was some looting at the Buy Low,” Jackson tells Moneek. Though he was my friend first, Jackson has a habit of speaking to Moneek over my shoulder. He certainly drops by more now that she’s in my life.

44 “How much looting is some looting?” she asks. Jackson laughs through his lips like he’s preserving part of his amusement for later. “Maybe only one guy was doing it.” Moneek drops her jaw, a theatrical look. I bring him in. He sits by Moneek’s feet and gives her toes a little pull. He tilts his head. “TV’s out. Internet’s out. I’ve memorized word-for-word the unprecedented geological event story playing on the radio. So, what, we play Scrabble?” I love Jackson’s hair in this quake, wobbling like a chicken’s comb. “Scrabble it is.”

BEFORE

Before signing the lease on the laneway, Moneek and I acted as harbingers of demos. Within six months of our arrival in a new suite, a building could expect to be torn down. At a suite showing, we’d join the lineup around the block, the sold sign still on the lawn, and listen to the announcement from the new owners. “For half your income this place can be yours, cobwebs and mildew, for six months or maybe even more, before the bulldozers come.” Unpacking felt like a loss. And so, Moneek and I, new in our cohabitation, chose to live amongst dusty boxes, rotating homes as the city was replaced. That was before the laneway, which we expected might last.

OVERLORDS

These early hours of the tremor, my inclination is to watch the landlords. Moneek stands beside me at the Juliet balcony, slips an arm around my waist. “It’s so hard on the knees,” she says. She hands me a coffee and with every sip some dribbles down my chin. I don’t say it to Moneek, but I believe the people on 20th and 21st Avenues will know what to do. They should. They’ll have a line on the escape routes, the evacuation plans, the tsunami warnings. But our personal landlord family—the two parents, the teenager, and the young one—they just sit at their kitchen table arguing, their mugs of tea gone cold.

THE TECTONIC PLATES

The Juan de Fuca plate, we Vancouverites should know, is in the way of progress. It is, at best, the last protruding finger of the Farallon plate, long sunk beneath our continent. Juan de Fuca is a remnant. A pest. A

45 killjoy interrupting the important business between the Pacific and North American plates. It stands in the middle and yells I’m still here! as the two negotiate their growth. The fight between the plates has always been build, build, build, break, but this time things are strangely slick. This gentle quake is constant, and the seafloor spread meets just enough resistance to make our knees ache.

WORDS WITH JACKSON

Scrabble is no good because our words are depressing. Can ENDTIME be singular? And maybe it’s two words, after all? Anyway, the tiles dance off the board. The candles are burnt down to stumps. The flames are metronomes of the quake. Jackson leans back against the wall with hands behind head and Moneek rests hers against his arm. They’re resigned. Me, I’m leaning over the board seeing how I can redeem this thing. Jackson says that planes can’t land, cars move as slow as glaciers, and good luck on a bicycle. “We might have to walk to Alberta. Freeze in the Rockies. Believe me, the helicopters are being selective about evacuees.” “At least the mayor will go down with his city,” I say. “At least there’s that.” “It’ll stop soon.” I really believe this. At any moment, this will end. Moneek, though, has already accepted this as our new reality. She complains that her head hurts. One day in, and she can’t remember life before the quake.

THE VIEW

At night, we hear a sound like a wave hitting a faraway cliff. We need to see what it is. The cemetery near our house has the best view of downtown. We choose to walk, but others are convinced it’s faster to crawl. A family of four on hands and knees leaves the No Frills, one of them rolling a water jug. Funny. Our taps are still running. Parked cars have been rattled to the centre of Fraser Street. There’s a low rumble that makes it sound like the dead cars are running. We don’t see flesh or bones, but Mountain View cemetery smells of revealed corpse. The three of us sit on a gravestone each and watch the city lights. I try to let my spine be a snake. Blocks of lights are missing in North Vancouver. We try to count the buildings, but none of us can remember the shape of this place, really. The cemetery coyotes are restless. Not enough house cats to hunt. They trot in pairs along the hedges and think about coming closer. I tell Moneek and Jackson that I almost bought a plot here. Moneek asks me why and I shrug.

46 “I wanted to show all these landowner fucks I’m here to stay.” Jackson sniffs. “And it’s only $25,000.” “You looked too?” He nods. We hear a crack of thunder. A downtown condo slumps to its knees and exhales a cloud. Jackson points out the helicopters up there, the ones that haven’t come east of Cambie. On the horizon, the nine lights that form the hovering constellation of Grouse Mountain ski hill shimmy and shake.

OVERLORDS

By the end of the week, the quake has the same amplitude and morning headaches last all day. I eat ibuprofen with toast and marmalade. Three times I try to make coffee on the camp stove before I remember all the steps. Must light the stove. Beans must be ground. And the water must first be boiling. The water must first be boiling for everything. We’ve joined the communities in Canada without clean drinking water. The difference being, for us, planes are dropping what we need. We’re on the news. Moneek doesn’t leave the bed. Jackson lives with us now. He’s upstairs, leaning against the headboard behind her, cradling her skull and trying to act as a balancing gyroscope. There’s a knock at the door. My landlord stands there with his comb- over flopped the wrong direction. He has his shirt buttoned high and is sweating like a door-to-door salesperson. He demands rent. He’s given us a few extra days, he points out. “Yeah, I’m not paying,” I tell him. He seemed prepared for this. “Do you know how much this laneway cost us?” I pat his cheek. Oh, how these tables turn. Later that night I see the overlord family in the kitchen surrounded by suitcases. The art is gone from the walls. In the morning the house is empty and the three of us enter through a window.

I FEEL

No one is homeless anymore and we all eat for free. Every night there’s a new bed to sleep in, in a new multi-million-dollar home, so the sheets are always clean. Sometimes we sleep in Sleep Country, a bed apiece. The only downside is the low-level drone interrupting the silence. I wrap myself with Moneek in this idyllic life. I can’t think of anything else but her. My thoughts are all shaken out. In these thousand vacant mansions I at last feel I am home.

47 TRANSPORT

I cross to downtown through the underwater SkyTrain tunnels. To me it feels safer than the Cambie bridge, though the collapse of either would leave my neck snapped by water. I walk through the undulating belly of a worm. I am the bolus it has swallowed. Its insides smell of burnt oil and mud, and my flashlight catches drips from the roof. I emerge in the luxury mall on the other side, affronted by advertisements of frowning men wearing watches, smiling women touching their jewelry. The goods they tout have been pried from the glass cases. All I can salvage for Moneek is a Chanel scarf. When I arrive back the next day at the Point Grey mansion we’re calling home, Jackson and Moneek are huddled on the chesterfield sofa whispering disloyalties. I know they are. I get Moneek to pull the scarf from my sleeve like a magic trick, and like a magic trick she begins to cry.

CANOE

She wakes me in the early morning. The bedroom windows face the grey ocean and sky. This home is beautiful, worth nothing, and ours. Moneek is having a moment of clarity. Her eyes are wide and the sclera catches dawn light. She holds the duvet over her chest. “I have to leave,” she says. “We can choose a new place today.” “Vancouver. You know this.” I kiss her forehead and tuck her head under my chin. “No, you don’t.” “My head.” “Don’t worry. You’re not leaving, and neither am I.” My neck is wet with her tears. I crawl from bed and fill the claw-foot tub. This house belonged to a nautical family and I find life preservers in a closet. I lay Moneek on a raft of these, and her head is finally free from the quake, though she is surrounded by the bathwater’s peaks and troughs. She sleeps with her mouth slung open. Jackson is awake somewhere in the house, rustling in the family’s office. I go back to bed. When I wake up later, I find her and Jackson in the backyard freeing the family’s canoe from its tether. Moneek holds her head with one hand as she works. Her other hand works frantically, inefficiently. She sees me standing there. “Help, Audrey.” She needs something bigger than a bathtub. It’s a steep portage to the ocean. The sand on the beach has been vibrated smooth so ours are the only footprints. When we dump it in the water, the canoe wants

48 only to stay at the shoreline. Moneek sits in the rear. I hold its nose from shore and push Moneek into the tumult. The ocean spits confused waves straight up, but to her, floating atop, their disorder is relief. Jackson appears behind us carrying two garbage bags that he dumps into the centre of the canoe. They clatter with the tenor of soup cans. He climbs in with Moneek. “What’s this?” I ask. “Give us a minute, huh?” He pushes off with a paddle and points the nose straight out. They are bounced like babies. Moneek calls out that she loves me and that she’s sorry. Jackson is looking up and down from a piece of paper. They paddle out to a nearby yacht. Soon they’re aboard, and soon the engine starts up. Most buildings across the water, on the downtown side, are still standing, though there have been casualties. A skinny West End condo has laid itself down across the beach and has been trembled apart. I can only hear myself screaming when the yacht’s motor leaves earshot.

GROWING PAINS

It’s a full-time job to feed the animals. For months there is howling and scratching. I open as many front doors and backyard gates as I can. Instead of dying alone, pets can starve in the wider world. But none of us has to starve! It may be trapped in cans, but there’s plenty of food. I slice bags of dog food in the street. A small pack follows me. A poodle, a terrier, and a German shepherd. They lick between my fingers as I lie on couches around the city. In the summer there are blackberries, apples, figs. Lots of food. I find boletes in Queen Elizabeth Park, chanterelles in Stanley. I know where the edible chestnuts are. In the winter, there is enough food in cupboards. Really, tonnes! Canned mushrooms and baby corn and peaches in syrup. There are books forever. Instruments. I have a favourite house in Kitsilano with an English garden and a rooftop haven. The den has a wood-burning stove, and I fill that room with gold from my travels. Every time I find a stash of valuables, I cart it back, toss it in my Gold Room until I have a fat, glittering carpet. I found a family with guns once, living in a gated home in Shaughnessy. I’d squeezed through the fence to look at their pond and I heard a rifle cocked. And there they were, three sunken faces in an upstairs window. I tried telling them, you can go anywhere, but they wanted me off their lawn. The koi were on the pond’s edge picked clean anyhow, food for raccoons or cats and none for me.

THE ALLEY Between 20th and 21st Avenues is the alley we used to inhabit. The wood fences are held up only by counteracting cables of shaking morning

49 glory. The raccoons have polished the garbage bins with their tongues. A pair of them sidles down the alley like a pair of drunk old friends. Overhead, like a child’s messy drawing, the wires crisscross. I crisscross. The wires sing to each other so I sing too. There are crows up there. The crows had it best at the start, eating the garbage, the dead dogs, but they see how we look at them now. Our home looks like a ghost of itself. The plaster dust coats it all. I cry for Moneek in the bathtub.

TAKING BACK

It’s been one year, two years, or no years at all, when I wake up in a basement bedroom to smoke billows caressing the ceiling. The fire upstairs is in nascent stages, maturing in the kitchen. I escape through the front. They linger, the fire-starters, on the street, laughing and smoking cigarettes. I am afraid of them. They are of all ages, but no children. Strathconians, Downtown Eastsiders, Commercial Drive dwellers. Those, like me, who have always fought to stay. They gasp to see me stumble out. A young man is taking my hand. He is talking at me. “Didn’t know anyone was in there.” He glances around my face as though looking for burns. “Don’t want to hurt anybody.” He dusts off my shoulders. None of us are ourselves anymore. They are invigorated by this destruction, tell jokes as we watch the smoke pour out. The young man tells me they are reducing the city to a size that fits the new population. My head hurts, I tell them. And they nod, You’re one of the old breed, not adapting to our new life, eyes wide and reflecting the flames fingering the sky.

TAKEN BACK

Sitka Spruce sprouts the centre of Broadway, toppled B-Line buses homes for bats. Societies of rodents rise and fall in rotating blocks. New culture here, visible from the beach. Platforms float on waves. Humans immune to headaches. Sometimes a group of elsewhere adventurers ride gyroscopic personal transport. I am one of the crawlers, but I have not died. If I lay on the beach will the sand shake over me? They see me sick and puking. I am from here! I yell after them. I was here first! The city grows in unexpected ways. Seals hunt in the harbour. Stanley Park grows outward, dark and hungry. It comes for me, but every time I look it stops creeping. One day I realize I can see Moneek perched on the branches, licking her teeth, rolling her eyes. Every time I look at her, her progress halts. She retreats sometimes into the dark cedar canopy where her head hurts less.

50 The branches bounce and wave; the trees are jubilant with their victory over highways and manicured parkland, jubilant with their capture of my love. Every time I look it stops creeping, and so I no longer look.

THE TECTONIC PLATES

Juan de Fuca’s precarious position, so famed in textbooks, is only the last protruding bit of one long sunk beneath. At best, a remnant. It fusses as it goes under, squealing and contorting, griping about glory, but after its last yelp the world falls still. Once it is gone it never existed, and the beings trotting over its consumed body barely pause. All they see is that after the shaking stops the trees still stand, and if they don’t, that everyone is still breathing, and if they’re not, that the sun still shines, and if it doesn’t, that anyway everything keeps on.

51 lume Grace Teoh

52 Grace Teoh

the god of small chances L Chan

An met the new god on her way home, during the witching hour after the last bus left and before the morning papers arrived. The government housing estate exhaled the roar of late night eighteen-wheelers, and the streetlights blinked with the dance of winged ants. The god was halfway between the row of trees with their parasitic ferns drooping lazy fronds and the playground with the mosaic dragon erupting from the gritty sand pit. An hadn’t seen a god being born before, but there were things common to all infants—ungainly legs, gasping mouths. The god flickered in and out of phase like a badly tuned television signal. They coughed and butterflies with wings of pure light burst from their mouth. They circled the god’s head twice before making their escape, but did not get far before they dissolved into floating motes. An examined the god out of the corner of her eye, taking

53 in their sharp cheekbones and close-cropped hair. Slight of build, they mirrored An in size and emitted the soft glow of divinity. They were clearly in distress; bent over coughing, their spine pressing against the thin alabaster skin of their back. The god vomited onto the grass, the spew twisting and resolving itself into many-legged worms—centipedes made of the same bright matter as the butterflies—that wriggled away and did not return. The god writhed in pain, their dark eyes filled with the desperation common to god, human, and beast. An walked away. This wasn’t the first time she had seen a god.

•••

The train screamed down the tunnel. Commuters—sustained by phones, iPods, and newspapers—dangled from the handrails like sides of meat. An wondered if the others could smell the lingering scent of the island on her, a pernicious acridity unreduced by both her nighttime and pre- work shower. Jurong Island, a manmade monstrosity, was artificially raised from the sea bottom to play host to edifices of steel and concrete. A complex digestive system of pipe and vat, the island ingested crude oil and excreted a catalogue of chemicals. There was a stickiness to the air in the office where An worked accounts receivable. Colleagues went out for lunch while she watched the gas flares burn off of the tall refinery stacks from her window. It wasn’t the faint industrial scent that clung to her like a second skin. Commuters’ stares followed her off the train and up the platform as she headed to work. The first human instinct is to exclude the other, even if An was, to all casual observation, indistinguishable from any other office worker in her corporate camouflage. She wasn’t like them at all.

•••

The temple that overshadowed the public courtyard was—like most things in Singapore—clean, shiny, and too cold to be natural. Chilled air leaked, at no small expense, from the inch-wide gaps in wooden slats. Her father sat on a stone bench, one leg on the ground and the other folded close to his body, the cheap plastic slipper flapping against the sole of his foot as he flexed his ankle, waiting for his opponent to make the next move. Elephant took foot soldier, walnut-brown fingers plucking the lacquered plastic disc off the paper chessboard, and placed it alongside its fallen fellows on the gritty stone bench. A wiggly line described a heart on the gray stone, drawn out in the white of correction fluid. Names had once accompanied the heart, but those had been worn to a gunmetal sheen by the continuous polishing action of chess players placing vanquished pieces on the sidelines of the battle.

54 An chose not to greet her father. She stood near enough behind him that she could see the board as he did. A bottle of tea brewed from chrysanthemum flowers was sweating through a plastic bag at her side. She had bought it after work as a peace offering. Her father chewed on his lip, stroked his stubble, and glared at the pieces, which refused to cooperate with his vision of a winning game. He’d been a large man once, blessed with a warrior’s thickness of arm and thigh. Illness had long since taken that from him, consuming him from the inside out, voracious cells spreading from marrow to lymph, splitting and eating along the way. Her father had worked the temples. Not the big soulless ones that breathed cold air over the neat queues of celebrants waiting to push folded notes into bursting collection boxes. No. These were the old temples—in the small places, in the estates—where healing didn’t come from rainbow pills or little glass vials. Back then, the rickety wood of the makeshift temples was painted an auspicious red, darkened by heady incense smoke. An’s father droned chants, his eyes rolled back in his head, all the while tearing his tattooed back to shreds with a nail-studded rope. No one else saw the small god squatting beside her father, waiting for the right time to leap into his body, the two coexisting in the same space. The god took the form of a small, toad-like man, eyes gaping and set on the sides of his head; his nose a flat, vestigial flap of skin. After the god laid his webbed fingers on her father and stepped into his flesh—their union was marked by the fierce blaze of both god and human becoming something more—her father would speak prophecies or divine truths. The rest was for show, An’s father once confided in her—without it, nobody would believe anything the god said. “Hi, Pa.” An greeted her father after he had lost the game with the chilled plastic bottle of tea. “Hello, girl.” An couldn’t remember when he last called her by name; the name that her mother chose for her. It was the character for peace and had not passed his lips since her mother died. He wrapped his thin arms around her. Even when she reached adulthood, his hugs could pull An off her feet. Now she barely felt the pressure of the embrace. Pulling back, he looked into her eyes. An traced the contours of his face; he had the look of something broken and then put together again. The shape was there, but the cracks remained. “You saw one, didn’t you?” An nodded. Gods left a distinct mark on their people—a shimmer or glow on their skin, a slight palimpsest in their movements—as though they were shadowed by a stutter of themselves. The rest of the world, busy with their phones, their errands, their lives, could barely see it. Most people could go their whole lives without seeing a small god, which were exceedingly rare. “Every morning I wake up and consider that perhaps the gods are still around, that I have merely lost the ability to see them,” her father said in a mix of Mandarin peppered with the more guttural Hokkien of his forebears. An smiled, leading her father up the staircase to the hawker

55 centre that overlooked the temple. A pair of office workers shared their table of four with her. Holding up a frail old man had its own talismanic power. She knew her father hadn’t lost his ability to see the gods, merely the desire to. When she started, the words spilled from her like water from a pot boiling over. It was the most she’d said to her father in years—maybe the most she’d said to another person all year. Her father took it in, reaching up to rub at the memory of a beard taken by chemotherapy long ago. “This government hates gods. Back when half the country was swamp, and you were as likely to see food or a corpse in the Singapore river, the gods grew out of the ground like insects. They are not like you and me, different even from ghosts. To work with the gods gives virtue and character. That’s what we were taught.” He looked at the shiny edifice across the courtyard. “Virtue makes us honest, makes us value hard work. The government likes that. Character makes us question. That is not so convenient.” “Look at the temples we have, the churches, the mosques. We have no shortage of gods.” “Empty houses, gilded cages. The government smothered the small temples with its heavy love of bureaucracy. No better way to kill a god than to hollow out the hearts of the people. This country was founded on gods and strange beasts. Do you know we used to have dragons here?” An did. She didn’t tell her father but she did. This was old talk; her father recycled conversations like clothes: he didn’t have many, and they came up more often than expected. “You never told me what happened to the small gods,” she said. “You never wanted to serve the temples.” And her father never wanted to take care of his family. Again, old battles. It had been years since this particular skirmish, but An was still surprised at how narrow the distance was between old scars and fresh blood. There was a hole shaped like her mother in the space between them. A gap that neither of them had reached across in the intervening years. “Just tell me.” Sickness had taken many things from her father, including his gumption for fights. For that, at least, she was grateful. He took the remnants of his bottled tea and sprinkled droplets onto the table, which elicited side-eyed glances from the office folk sitting beside them. An glared at them until they returned to the business of eating. “Imagine these drops of tea are small gods. This world is not for them, without the nourishment of belief or the safety of a temple. What happens to the tea?” Coughing up butterflies, losing them to the night. “It dries.” “Clever girl. The new gods know this. They are dying from the second they breathe our air. Some live for a heartbeat, others...” He nudged a droplet with a yellowing fingernail, merging it with another. “How long do

56 you think a person will go without food before eating another person? If the land doesn’t kill your god, the others will. It is their way.”

•••

The stacks billowed fire; An’s breath misted the window. The office was cold enough that she wore a cardigan at all times, whereas sweat was a constant companion outside. A file was open on her computer, a spreadsheet that went into that uncomfortable territory where columns needed double letters. Invoices on flimsy paper littered her table, the thermal ink fading to nothing. Just like her small god. It wasn’t so hard to look at the hellscape of pipes, refining towers, and industrial gas tanks and think of the guts of some preternatural beast, a behemoth of petrochemicals. Yet her father had told her of a time when a dragon slept beneath the waves, in the midst of seven islands off the coast. The Chinese thought that seven was a lucky number; a homonym for rising up, fitting for a dragon. He’d heard about the dragon from fishermen with the same gift as his and An’s. Longer than the freight trains that brought cargo from Malaysia, scales bluer than the midday sky, clawed feet large enough to snap a sampan in two, the beast coiled and curled in on itself under the waves. Dragons, he explained, lived longer than nations and their sleep was deep. Sometimes he wondered if the beast had woken up when the dirt from the trawlers began to fall into the sea. The numbers blurred in her vision. Coworkers flocked and cackled over the bubbling electric kettle; the steam from their cups smelled of fake coffee and real sugar. Her own coffee was cold. A kaleidoscopic swirl formed on the surface as the creamer separated into floating oil and worse. She’d met the small god near the old playground, the one with the dragon in the sand. An hadn’t thought about dragons in a long time.

•••

Noonday at the dragon playground was An’s favourite time. With the weight of the midday glare squeezing eyes into squints, the sand hot enough to burn bare feet, the other children sought refuge at home, or queued in front of the rattling motorbike of the old man who sold ice- cream. She hated queues. Girls from her school took the opportunity to twist her braided hair, so An ate at the furthest end of the canteen, ordering a thin soup of coconut curry and vegetables from a sympathetic Malay lady. The rest of the time she kept to herself, away from the pinching hands and averted eyes of her classmates. She didn’t blame them, any more than she could blame the swarming leukocytes in her blood crowding out an invader. Nobody liked An, a girl with one eye on her schoolwork and the

57 other looking beyond to see if a stray god made their way past her classroom to the steal food from the altar in the teachers’ office. After school, she waited until the boisterous tide had rolled out, making her way to the playground where she clambered to the head of the dragon, and dangled her skinny legs in regulation school shorts over its tiled eye. She felt safe here, sweat beading on her brow, imagining the bulk of the dragon’s coils under the burning sand. Of course, the builders wouldn’t have constructed a full-scale monster for the children, but she could hope. She was still mulling this over when the clod of damp sand hit her on the cheek. Consider how long it takes to fall two metres backwards as a child. Forever and then the rest of your life. Long enough for An to see the smirking faces of her classmates turn to slack-jawed horror, long enough for the glare of the sun to turn the world white, long enough to see the sand coming up to meet the side of her head, long enough to know that the angle was wrong, wrong, wrong. It shouldn’t have been long enough for her vision to fill with the rush of scales, iridescently blue; the sweep of golden horns leading to a series of bony fins; the glint of an eye larger than her balled fist. When she landed, impossibly, on her front, with only a chipped tooth to show for it, there was nothing left but the puff of settling sand.

•••

Maybe there was a dragon under Jurong Island, entombed by the ambition of a young nation state. Maybe the gods were all gone, save for the scavenger gods and the brightly nascent newborns. Maybe her father had turned his back on everything long before the cancer chewed through his marrow and spat out blood cells by way of Jackson Pollock. The fires were quiet, the office workers popping up like prairie dogs over cubicle edges at the violence of An’s exit. Maybe she wouldn’t have a job the next day, but she was going to save a god.

•••

Sunset burnt fierce auburn and russet into the dull walls of the government flats. The heat of the sky was spent, but the evening breeze still pulled warmth off the road and up An’s legs. She found her god by a block of flats, just off the playground of her youth. They hadn’t gone far. For all their power, they were only a newborn, still unsure of themself and where to go. They had manifested in a faded T-shirt and tattered shorts, and looked smaller than before, their hair only coming to the tip of An’s nose now. The god was not alone. A trio of things circled them, human-shaped but as dark as ink like shadows come to life. So they’d come for her god already, the scavengers that her father had told her about. Gods overtaken by their

58 hunger, pitch black as though light itself eschewed contact. Shared hunger pulled them into packs, but they still weren’t allies. An saw one snap at another, coming away with a mouthful of penumbral flesh. She had never thought about what happened to the god with the strange eyes from the small temple, and now she didn’t want to. The glow from her god was subdued. A night ago they’d blazed with the newness of their puissance, now they barely shone. One of the scavengers swiped at the god, coming away with a streak of their substance as the god screamed. The blow showed that the scavenger was not a flesh and blood construct hooded in shadow, but rather that its body drank in any illumination that fell on it, its obsidian skin shimmering and pulsing. An’s god leaned against a wall for support, noticeably smaller than before. The carrion gods paid An no heed as she slid by them, taking her place beside the small god and taking their hands in hers. The god stopped shivering. The scavenger gods momentarily ceased their circling at this new development, but soon resumed their hypnotic sway. There was little time to bolster the flagging strength of her god. “Name your dominion,” An said. There was no belief without form, her father had told her; definition was its own power. “You would know, An. You were the one who called me up.” The small god’s words were high and clear, a glass bell of a voice. “I am set over small chances. My celebrants are the gamblers and all others who hope.” One of the carrion gods brushed An, the touch exploratory but insistent. Its fingers sank knuckle deep into her flesh, precipitating a wave of neuralgia that rode all the way up her arm. An gasped, pulling away in pain. The gap between her and her god widened, and the scavengers tensed. An swung her body around, shielding the god with her back and arms. “Chance is as good a name as any. I need you to trust me.” An hadn’t done this before, not in all her years of watching her father from the shadows of the temples of her childhood. But she knew, with a bone-deep knowledge, how to hide a god: you hide a god in your heart. She wrapped her arms around Chance and pressed them in towards her own chest. She felt, in that space between heartbeats, a moment of transcendence. She was not a god, they were not a human, but together they were both and more. Where the carrion gods took and consumed, her god gave and gave until it seemed that An’s veins would burst. With the small god inside her, the playground and the predators fell away, and so did time. Gods did not experience time as people did; to them there was only the now, an infinitude of moments branching out. An saw her life, possibilities arrayed and stretching out into lives that might have been, futures radiating out from pasts, branching out into snowflake fractals. She moved back in her own timeline, watching that last afternoon before the screech of brakes ended her mother’s life, and seeing again how her father slowly shut himself away from temple work—from everything— until the hungry cells emerged.

59 An gulped cool air into her burning lungs, her tongue dry and her eyes smarting as Chance slid from her body and she returned to the present. Emptied of the god, the air felt a little blander, the colours of the world more muted. An knew, from decades of watching her father over-season his soup, that there was a cost for touching divinity, a debt that accrued forever. This was her life now. An’s knees hit the ground hard. The two of them were alone. The scavengers had fled, frightened off by the burst of power from the pair of them. “They’ll be back,” Chance said, dark eyes staring into the distance, helping An to her feet. “They’ll gather in numbers.” Chance seemed a little taller—fuller—after the experience. “All the things I saw, can I go back?” An asked. “You could. Many people have lost themselves to the past.” “Like my father,” An mumbled. “He walked away from everything after my mother left us.” “He would have spent a lifetime looking in through the windows of a house he could not enter. Your mother was already dead. It was not for the small gods to bring her back.” “And my father? What chance do you offer him?” Chance turned up their sharp chin and looked An in the eyes. “Five percent to two years, one percent to five. You know these numbers.” “They’re not fair.” The god of small chances put their fingertips on An’s cheek, they were cool and unyielding. “Every small chance is fair.” An wanted to pull away, but Chance’s gentle fingers held her chin like a vise. “It’s not fair to me,” she managed. “Nothing is fair on the scale of one. Pull back. There is a rhythm to the race of electrons, to the ebb and flow of disease through the populations, to the aching groans of the plates under Mount Fuji, to the whimsical blinks of the quasars in deep space. There is a dance, and I keep the beat for all the small chances.” “That doesn’t help me.” “No, it doesn’t. You can reach out to him, you know.” An could have. Should have. But time had been curtailed. Anything she did with her father could be the last time they did something together, and it wouldn’t be perfect. So she precisely, perfectly, nothing. “He left the temples, he left the gods... He left me,” An said at last, words scraping up a dry throat and spat out through parched lips. “You know why that is,” answered Chance, their piping voice steady. Even now the call of the comfortable past pulled at her: hot, clear soup at dinner, thickened with pork bones and sweetened with dried dates, never the same when her father made it; the smell of her mother’s hair, clean and rich, as An was hugged to sleep. So it must have been with her father. “Yes.”

60 “But you live as though your father’s death is already in the past,” Chance said. An had no answer. Chance watched the horizon, their lower lip dimpling under their teeth. An recognized the habit; things flowed both ways, it seemed. “More of them are coming back. Too many for the same trick to work twice,” Chance said. “Maybe you should have run,” An said. “I know my chances. I prefer it to be sooner rather than later. In any case, I am happy that we got to speak. So many gods miss the ones that call them up.” An pulled the small god along. She was done running away.

•••

The government had built five dragon playgrounds, of which only the one from An’s childhood still stood. The state hadn’t been shy about dragging the carcasses of dead ideas all over the country, so it had always puzzled An that they stopped at five. A country that hated gods and entombed a dragon may have had other plans. She ran her tongue over the jagged edge of her chipped tooth. Maybe not all the dragons were gone. “They want me. If you go now, you can get away,” Chance said as An led them to the mosaic dragon. An gritted her teeth. “I won’t leave you.” The scavengers came, keeping their distance at the rim of the playground and daring each other to strike first. An counted twelve, but there may have been more. She took Chance’s hand again. It was only the second time, but maybe it was the last, and that was the most unfair thing of all. One carrion god darted in behind An and struck Chance, taking a chunk out of their side. An screamed as though it was her own rib that had been smashed, her own flesh torn from her body instead of the shimmering stuff that gods are made of. Chance had a raw animal look on their face. Maybe they knew when the next big asteroid would hit or why the double-slit experiment worked, but their eyes showed whites all around and when they whimpered it was no different from the sound of a child. An waited, watching the scavengers with her back to the head of the dragon, because she only had a single shot at this. Chance would probably tell her that the odds of her plan succeeding were minuscule, and that it was alright—that all the small gods died or became scavengers themselves. Nothing was fair on the scale of one. When the carrion gods, with their inky skins like the wings of dark moths, decided to attack, they did so en masse—scavengers, the lot of them, and unused to the civility of queuing. Before they reached them, An took both of Chance’s arms in hers and pressed the god into her. The afternoon sun shone down on a girl with a face full of sand. The fall wouldn’t have killed an average child, but the angle was wrong. This branch of

61 the snowflake of possibilities was dark all around. All outcomes were the same, save the one where the dragon woke from beneath the ground and uncoiled its undulating length across the sandpit, breaking An’s fall and blasting grit into the faces of her bullies. Only that one. Only that small chance. The evening wind caressed the god and the woman, defiant in a circle of skulking figures. Like before, their union generated a burst of energy, but the carrion gods had already learned to keep their distance. An saw the constellations of outcomes swirl before her, each one different, each one an ending. Chance broke away first; the scavenger gods chased them down. They were ripped apart before the last one even touched them. That wasn’t right. An tried another forking branch. An held the god close to her. The shadowy figures didn’t interact well with human flesh, but interact they did. The two died with their arms around each other. So many paths, all going dark. All were the same to Chance, the curse of being a god. Sometime between a heat-blasted midday and the death of the sun itself, the dragon would likely wake again. But not in all possibilities. In some branches it died in its sleep, its nightmares and death throes setting off earthquakes in Indonesia. In others it woke too late, distraught over the deaths of its kin under the sea and buried beneath the other playgrounds. Its tears brought rain that flooded half of Singapore for a day. But it could wake at just the right time, like it had before, twisting and lashing out with the length of its body, serpentine and terrible in its raw power. An wasn’t a god. She could choose. The dragon woke. When the wind died down and the grains of sand dropped back to the ground, there was nothing to show of the scavenger gods but flopping scraps of dark matter, melting into the ground. Nothing was left of the playground but shattered masonry. The dragon had already taken flight, cutting through the air with the fluid grace of a sea serpent. It was young yet, as dragons counted their ages by the passing of empires. The winds that held it aloft were strong enough to whip the drying clothes from the bamboo poles sticking out from the windows of nearby flats. It met An’s gaze from the seventh floor, before speeding up to the clouds. And then there were no dragons left in Singapore. Maybe elsewhere in the world, because the oceans were deep and there were still valleys hidden by fog in the hinterlands of China. An didn’t think to enquire about the chances.

•••

Nobody saw the god of small chances at An’s side, but everybody believed in them. There would be other days, other battles, but they’d already won once and that was a step forward. Chance could have worn any form they desired, but they still favoured faded T-shirts and cut-off

62 Illustration by Ann Sheng shorts. Their clothes matched the weather, though they didn’t feel heat or humidity. On a whim, they sported studs down their left ear in the colours of the spectrum. Chinatown bustled: people queued to pray at the hollow temples, others cast their faith towards races or the lottery. An had more tea for her father. There would be other scavengers maybe worse, but the air was thick with incense and hope today. Maybe hope for the small chance of a cure, but there was more than one thing that could be cured in her father, and she didn’t need hope for that.

63 contributors

SENAA AHMAD lives in Toronto, where she works in film, fails to improve her Arabic, and tries not to kill all the house plants. Her short fiction appears in Augur Magazine and Strange Horizons. She is working on a short novel. You can find her, sort of, at senaa-ahmad.com.

DAVIAN AW is a Rhysling Award nominee whose fiction and poetry have appeared in Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, The Future Fire, Diabolical Plots and LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, among others. He lives in Singapore with his family and used to have a pet cactus named Arthur. Some of his writing can be found at https://davianaw. wordpress.com

L CHAN hails from Singapore, where he alternates being walked by his dog and writing speculative fiction after work. His work has appeared in places like Liminal Stories, Arsenika, Podcastle and the Dark. He tweets occasionally @lchanwrites.

JOSEPH A. DANDURAND is a member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about 20 minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his 3 children Danessa, Marlysse, and Jace. Joseph is the Director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center. Joseph received a Diploma in Performing Arts from Algonquin College and studied Theatre and Direction at the University of Ottawa. He recently published 2 books of poetry: I WANT by Leaf Press (2015) and HEAR AND FORETELL by BookLand Press (2015). His newest book of poems, The Rumour, will be published by BookLand Press in (2018)

AMY LEBLANC holds an honours BA in English Literature and creative writing at the University of Calgary where she is Editor-in-Chief of NōD Magazine. Her work has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Room, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Canthius among others. Her chapbook, “Collective Nouns for Birds” was published by Loft on Eighth Press.

64 COURTNEY LOBERG is an artist and writer living in Alberta. Her work has been published in Ink Brick, untethered and Leah Wishnia’s Happiness anthology. She’s created several mini-comics, a graphic novel and a tarot deck, among other works. She will probably never get out of the prairies.

DANIEL MALUKA is a Toronto based artist and writer hailing from South Africa. His work takes an Afrocentric approach while incorporating surrealist elements. In using his interest in the subconscious, Daniel brings what lurks in the deep recesses of the mind into the forefront of his work. His work can be found at Danielmaluka.com.

JEN NEALE’s work has previously appeared in Maisonneuve, The Impressment Gang and Little Fiction. She was the winner of the 2012 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writer. Her first novel,Land Mammals and Sea Creatures, is coming out with ECW Press in Spring 2018. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

DOMINIK PARISIEN is the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of Robots vs Fairies, and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. He is also the Guest Editor-in-Chief, with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, of Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories, as well as other magazines and anthologies. He is a disabled, French Canadian living in Toronto.

GRACE TEOH is a writer illustrator compulsively drawn to explore the gossamer veil between waking and subconscious life. Her stories breathe within Dirty Diamonds comic anthologies Beauty, Imagination, and Sex. Day-to day she lives in free-float between Sydney and Melbourne Australia, and in the abstract at gracify.co

HELEN TRAN has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her thesis project was a steampunk novel written under the supervision of Joseph Boyden. She is a professor at Niagara College and lives in the Niagara Region with her husband, daughter, and a very important housecat. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine’s Currents anthology and in Grey Borders Magazine.

ANDREW WILMOT is a Toronto-based author and editor, and co- publisher of the magazine Anathema: Spec from the Margins. His fiction has appeared in a variety of places, both online and in print. Further details at andrewwilmot.ca. His first novel, The Death Scene Artist, will be released in Fall 2018 by Wolsak & Wynn/Buckrider Books.

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