GlitterShip

And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score

By Gary Kloster

I had a frat-boy stretched out on the table, a pink slab of drunken meat just itching for ink, when Huck blew back into my life and brought the blood trade with him.

"Dead gods, Woody, this is the shit-hole you crawled into?"  The shop was damn small, Huck was damn big, and the perfectly tailored black ass of his suit pants leaned against my desk before I'd even raised the humming needle from frat-boy's hide.

"I'm busy, Huck.  Back off."

Full transcript appears after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 19 for January 5, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

It's been a while since I ran a story for you, so I hope you've been well in the past few months. Before we get started today, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that I've decided to shift GlitterShip back to two episodes a month instead of four. This is mostly because with moving, and grad school, and trying to do everything else I need to do, I was having trouble sustaining a 4 episodes per month. The good news is that this means that GlitterShip's funds will last until April 2017 at the very least, and that I will be able to showcase more guest readers.

I also have some original fiction lined up to start in April 2016, at which point GlitterShip will finally shift from all reprints. Instead, each month I'll bring you one original and one reprint story.

If you're a writer or reader and are interested in getting involved, check out the submissions guidelines at glittership.com/submission-guidelines.

Our story today is "And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score" by Gary Kloster.

Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial artist, and stay at home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His first book, Firesoul, is out now.

Eureka!

By Nick Mamatas

Adam hadn't worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn't bring himself to put it in the box he'd set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.

There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear's on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now.

Full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 18 for October 13, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is Eureka! by Nick Mamatas.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law, The Last Weekend, and the forthcoming Lovecraftian murder-mystery I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best American Mystery Stories and Poe's Lighthouse, magazines including Tor.com and Asimov's Science Fiction, and in the recent collection The Nickronomicon. Nick has written about Edgar Allan Poe for Weird Tales, The Smart Set, and Wide Angle.

Eureka!

By Nick Mamatas

Adam hadn't worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn't bring himself to put it in the box he'd set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.

There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear's on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now.

No, not now. Then. Then Adam was just another baby bat, because eyeliner and bad music is what nerds thought cool was. And everyone in New York's goth scene was at least bi, or at least self-identified as bi despite never sucking a cock or doing more than kissing another girl on the dancefloor. So it was something to do.

Was it New Year's Eve? Couldn't have been…no, it must have been. What was his name? Adam remembered everything about the man from Poe's house, how he kissed with his eyes wide open and searching, his snickering during the long subway trip up to the Bronx, how his breath somehow didn't steam out of his mouth on the walk through the park, but what the hell was his name? Something old. Maybe, Josef with an f but it's not like Adam asked for an ID or saw a pile of junk mail for the park ranger on the old cottage's stoop.

"I need your assistance," Josef—that was good enough a guess for now—had said. He was tall and dark and thin and shined somehow under the lights of the nightclub, like a crane that had pulled itself out of an oil spill.

"Hmm," Adam said, his lip still on the rim of his glass.

Josef leaned in and shouted into Adam's ear to be heard over the music. "I've seen you here before. I want you come home with me. I've met many people in my time in this city. To put it delicately, I've seen the inside of many tastefully decorated apartments." His breath smelled of cloves, which Adam liked then, and still liked now. Now, in the present, he brought the shirt to his face and hunted for a whiff. Nothing but dust and the scent of cardboard.

That night, Adam felt sweaty, very suddenly, and itchy. But he stood on his toes and, for a moment concerned about his own breath, shouted back, "You sound like a serial killer. It's not as enticing as you think!"

Josef laughed, and Adam was relieved that it was a human laugh, complete with a smile you might see on television. So many goths were so affected that you never got to meet the fleshy little man pulling the levers in the brain of the giant bombazine-enrobed homunculus.

Josef shouted back, "It gets better. I'm a park ranger!" He held up a long finger and dug into his pocket for his wallet, then flashed his work ID. Adam snatched the whole wallet from Josef's hand and waited for one of the stage lights to spiral around to the edge of the bar where he and Josef stood. The light flashed and in those two seconds, the NYC identification card sure looked authentic.

Of course, the ID! Adam thought as he struggled with a packing-tape gun. But he was only sure for a moment.  I didn't ask, he offered it! Was that the name on the ID, or did I put it on the ID now, myself, through the act of trying to remember…? He sealed the box of cast-off clothes shut.

Adam handed the wallet back. "You don't look like a park ranger," he said.

"I wear black leather knee-shorts in the summer, and a velvet kerchief," Josef said. That jack-o-lantern smile again.

In the now, Adam turned to his bureau and to the small hand mirror balanced between its top and the wall. He tried to mimic Josef's smile. Nope, still too fat. Christ, did he get old, just over the last few days it felt like.

Josef was a very special park ranger. He said he was the sort of park ranger he knew Adam would like. Josef was in charge of the Poe house, in Poe Park.

"And with what do you need my assistance?" Adam asked. He pressed his arm against Josef's arm. This was all so easy. A Christmas miracle, a week after the fact?

"Two things. The band that goes on at midnight—Creature Feature?" Josef began.

"Yes?"

"They're terrible!"

"I know," Adam said. "Everything is dark and terrible." He shifted away from Josef's gaze, took what he hoped was a sophisticated sip of his drink, and then added, "but those guys are truly awful. So what's the second thing?"

"I've been with many men," Josef said. "Many women. But never where I live. I've always been to their apartments, or just cruised around."

"You're back in serial killer mode!"

Josef pushed his lips against Adam's ear, so Adam could feel the words on his flesh. "I live in the Poe house."

There was packing to do. So much packing. And unpacking. Adam snorted—a flashback within a flashback? Why not? Why was he folding clothes to give away? Adam was nervous, he needed to keep his hands busy. He couldn't smoke anymore; nobody smoked anymore. So, even further back, into the era from which he had kept no clothes. High school Adam was just another suburban brat in Dockers and polo shirts. He didn't read, he left MTV choose his music—and this was before Nirvana, when 120 Minutes was on too late to watch regularly. But Poe, in tenth grade, changed everything. Weird little stories that barely seemed to be in English, and in them anything could happen. A slow and careful murder with no hero to save the day. A detective that solves a crime, but with no sense of justice. "You can't send an ape to prison, and even if you could it wouldn't mean much more to the ape than a zoo"—Adam actually wrote that on the essay exam for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and enjoyed a rare 99+ from Mr. Goldstein.

And that was that. Adam would be a writer, though he knew better than to tell anyone, or to even engage in any writing. Even diaries could be discovered. Adam would keep it all in his head. He'd be an English teacher, and he'd study in the city, at Eugene Lang, to get away from his parents and experience a little bit of life during the week before taking the Metro North back up to Danbury with a load of laundry. Then he found the goth scene, and made a point of keeping his stranger garments back in the dorm, stuffed under the bunk.

It would have been too perfect for the old Poe paperback to be at the bottom of Adam's closet now, as he packed his little room on a sunny North Beach day. The complete works, which he never made it through, were on his smartphone anyway. Came bundled with the e-reader. The towel Adam had been using as a curtain was already packed, and it was hard to read off the phone screen with the sun's rays coming through the window unimpeded. Only a few more boxes left.

Adam was a naïf back then—he had heard of the Poe House that NYU owned, and figured that the subway ride from the Lower East Side to the border of the West Village would be short and convenient in the snowy night. Clearly, Josef was somehow responsible for Washington Square Park. Cleaning up the syringes, or polishing the cement chessboard tables or something. City work, union work. It's all supposed to be money for nothing. But at West 4th, Josef led him on to the D train.

"Now you'll discover my problem," Josef said, snickering. The train was packed with drunks. Mostly lots of Long Island girls with high hair and wobbly heels and their fat Italian boyfriends with rings the size of human eyes yelping and guffawing their way to Times Square, but there were a selection of quieter locals lolling about in the seats. Josef hugged one of the poles for straphangers and shouted in Adam's ear. "The Poe Cottage is in the Bronx." All the blood left Adam's face that moment and Josef smiled. "That's right," he said.

"I…don't mind," Adam shouted back. He tried to smile, but his lips felt blue and dead. He'd never been to the Bronx. Had never met anyone from the Bronx. It was a strange little island—no, it was the only part of New York City that wasn't an island, the Bronx really was part of mainland America—that so far as Adam knew was comprised of 100 percent raging crack addicts and black street gangs who breakdanced on flattened cardboard boxes all day and mugged old ladies at night.

Adam sucked on his teeth now, thinking of his old idiocy. College and moving to the West Coast had beaten most of the casual racism out of him, and that was a good thing. "But all I got in exchange was guilt," he said, aloud, to himself. Then he huffed and returned to sorting the socks with holes in them from the socks without holes in them.

"What's your favorite Poe?" Adam had asked Josef that night. He almost said, Mine's "The Masque of the Red Death", but didn't want to sound stupid and obvious, so he said nothing more.

"Eureka!" Josef yelled, but nobody turned. "I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical," he said, each adjective louder than the last. "Of the Material and Spiritual Universe:— of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny."

"Oh," Adam said.

Josef smiled and leaned down and brushed his lips against Adam's. Adam waited for someone to scream Fags! or just for a knife in the kidney, but neither was forthcoming.

"It's okay; it's not on the usual syllabi," Josef said, keeping his mouth close and voice down. The train had stopped at 42nd Street, and let out a bunch of confused bridge and tunnlers who didn’t know how far Times Square was from Bryant Park, so the car was a bit quieter now.

"Okay," Adam said. He wanted to get off the train and go home. And do what? This was his first time staying in the city instead of watching the ball drop on TV with his grandmother.

"Let us conceive the Particle, then, to be only not totally exhausted by diffusion into Space. From the one Particle, as a centre, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically—in all directions—to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space—a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms," Josef recited, smiling and pleased. He drew himself up to his full height, leaving Adam to contemplate the nipples visible through his black mesh. Those would need to be warmed up later, Adam decided, with his very own tongue.

"Previously vacant space," Adam repeated. "That doesn't really sound like the Big Bang theory to me." Josef frowned, so Adam quickly added, "but not bad for a poet from the 1840s. Sheer literary insight, and he almost got it right."

"No," Josef said. "He got it all right. It's the modern world that's got it all wrong. You'll see."

Adam wasn't quite sure at what stop it happened, but at some point he and Josef became the only two white people in the train car. They'd passed through some sort of racist mesh, a geographical sieve. He hoped he would see everything Josef had to offer. It had better be worth it.

It was nearly 2 am when Josef led Adam up to Knightsbridge and the Grand Concourse. Adam heard the voice of his old grandmother saying how nice everything in the city used to be before those people started moving in. It was depressing now, but not dangerous. Just dead. Everyone had watched the ball drop on their shitty little televisions, then turned off the lights and went to bed. Josef walked quickly, with determination, a prize tropical bird again.

"Do you like Public Enemy?" Josef said, seemingly out of nowhere. Adam walked through a puff of his own steaming breath, to catch up.

"What?"

"You know. 'Fight the Power.' Chuck D and Flava Flav? I saw them a couple of years ago, with Sisters of Mercy."

"Oh, no," Adam said. He'd been in high school a couple of years ago, and only knew what little Sisters of Mercy MTV played. "I missed that show."

"It was great. Gang of Four opened—old school punk, that is. And nobody came; Radio City was practically empty, just like the streets up here are tonight. That's what reminded me," Josef said. He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered, finally playing human again for a moment. "I got a great t-shirt. It says, it's a black thing. you wouldn't understand. I should have worn it tonight. I'm freezing my tits off." Josef ran his palm over Adam's velvet top. "You're a smart lad," he said.

Adam was smart enough not to ask how Josef actually lived in a tourist attraction. Did he stow everything in a closet, or have to take all his meals out?  Poe Park was small, but bright thanks to the blanket of diamond show on the ground. A stone tablet on the walkway read eureka! and went without snow. There was probably something with the relative temperature of the tablet versus the modern concrete Adam thought, then he realized that everything he'd been thinking—the fear, the trivia, had all been to put aside his wonder and craving for the taste of Josef's cock.

The cottage itself was a small little two-story number with a porch. It wouldn't have been out of place in Danbury, with some old cat lady or poor family with seven kids stuffed into it. Josef trotted ahead again and waved Adam around the corner. "The digs are in the basement. You can see my problem, yes? I made a New Year's resolution to have sex in my own bed, in my own place, sometime this year."

"Well, it's already next year," Adam said. He flashed a crooked smile and pointed to his watch. "See?"

"Oh, in that case you'd better just get back on the train and go home." Josef stood straight as a rod and waited. Adam puffed out a breath and smiled. Then Josef smiled back. They tumbled joyfully down the concrete steps and into the cramped studio.

Josef's hair was long and chaotically spiked. One of the wayward points practically scraped against the low ceiling. There were milk crates stuffed with books and CDs along one wall, a futon on the other, and a laptop blinking away in the corner. No real kitchen, but there was a sink and a hot plate and a microwave and a coffee maker. Not much closet space either, if the puddles of black clothing on the floor were anything to go by. It smelled a little moldy, a little tangy, like old sex.

Even now, Adam can taste the next morning's coffee on his tongue. Part of why he had moved to North Beach was that one of the little Italian dives served coffee that almost tasted like Josef's.

Josef ran his hand along one of the walls. "The cottage was originally down the block," he explained, suddenly professional. "It was moved here when the subway came in. This basement is modern, and serves as the foundation for the cottage in its new location right over our heads. Had it been a nineteenth century basement, the walls likely would have been of hewn stone, plastered over…" He trailed off, seemingly unsure of what to do next.

Adam walked right up to him. "You're a park ranger, not a serial killer. I believe you. Kiss me, stupid," he said, and Josef did indeed kiss him stupid, sucking on Adam's tongue softly, like it was a half-hard cock.

The basement was cold, and the boys were cold too—their limbs were more like a quartet of icicles looking to melt than anything else. The winter had never left Adam's bones, not even after fifteen years in California. He shivered in the middle of his empty room, only now realizing how closely he had arranged its layout to match Josef's basement studio. Back in 1993, belts slid off, knees all pointy and white rose up, and Adam buried himself in Josef's lap, mouth open wide.

Josef leaned back and muttered something. First it was the usual—good boy, my little facecunt, more more.

Then, something odd. "Especially attractive Adam…"

No. Especially attractive atom.

Then some more muttering Adam didn't catch, as he was busy trying not to use his hands on Josef's cock, but just his mouth and lips and tongue and jaw.  "I propose," Josef said turned on to his side, his fingers seeking out the crack of Adam's ass as he said the words.

Adam jerked upright. "Wait, what?" He smacked Josef's hand away. "What?"

If I propose to ascertain the influence of one mote in a sunbeam upon its neighboring mote, I cannot accomplish my purpose without first counting and weighing all the atoms in the Universe and defining the precise positions of all at one particular moment. If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger, what is the character of that act upon which I have adventured?

Adam looked at the boxes on the floor of his bedsit. Seven to keep, three to donate, one just to fling out the window, but he didn't have the balls for that. San Francisco wasn't that kind of place anymore. The Imp of the Perverse had left the world, it seemed. It was a small life he had. That was the character of the act upon which he had adventured, Adam realized.

Josef was stronger than he looked. He had a wiry strength to him, arms like rebar. But his face was suddenly soft, so soft, like a child. Like Poe's little virgin wife, Adam thought, dying of consumption. "Please don't tell me to stop," Josef said, practically whimpering. "Please don't." He kissed Adam's shoulder, took his cock in one hand and pumped a finger into Adam's ass with another. "Please don't tell me to stop."

Adam didn't say anything. It was dark in the basement—everything was black on black, and when he turned his head he couldn't even see the little green light from Josef's computer. He couldn't see the white knuckles wrapped around his dick, or the edge of the wall, or anything. The world fell away from Adam, and the dark grew ever longer in every direction.

The futon was gone.

No. Adam's legs were gone, his thighs were. The world was gone. Adam was a point, floating in infinite black space.

No. Not space either. The previous vacancy. Adam was terrified—the little ripple in the velvet of the night that he was quivered, and the universe shook with him. Then he sensed them. The other men. The men that Josef had brought down here. The man that had brought Josef down here for the first time to suck and fuck, years prior. Decades of men, with thick hands and huge round shoulders. Little men, willowy like girls, their fingers tracing at what were once the borders of his body. Toothless grins and soft soft gums around his cock. Terrible bloodshot eyes, the pressure of blood pushing through the capillaries. Then the man himself, with his head huge like a white pumpkin's, scrounging for winter roots in the field across from his home, and finding only the previous vacancy in the dirt between his desperate fingers. Adam could eat that agony, feed off it for years. And before Poe, men in wigs, then breeches. Brown men with smooth chests and nipples like chestnuts. And before them, men of vintages of yet unknown, or types that could never be forced to fit into the taxonomies of the species.  Adam didn't see them, he wore them like a snake slithering back into a strange discarded skin.

Thus, according to the schools, I prove nothing.

Adam gulped something older than air. But he could feel his tongue again, his teeth, and Josef's as well.

There is no mathematical demonstration which Could bring the least additional True proof of the great Truth which I have advanced—the truth of Original Unity as the source—as the principle of the Universal Phaenomena.

Somewhere, miles and eons south of his brain, Adam felt his body experiencing an orgasm. It was distant and remote, like listening to a tinny radio through a closed door.

I am not so sure that my heart beats and that my soul lives:—of the rising of to-morrow's sun

And he was cold again. Bare feet on concrete and scraps of cloth.

I do not pretend to be one thousandth part as sure -- as I am of the irretrievably by-gone Fact that All Things and All Thoughts of Things, with all their ineffable Multiplicity of Relation, sprang at once into being from the primordial and irrelative One.

"Do you see?" Josef said. "Did you see it?" Only now was steam coming from his mouth as he spoke. He nestled closer to Adam and asked again, and again. "It's us. It's the whole world. Created from one, not two. Just one. We are all that we ever need, see? Did you see?"

Adam said the worst kind of truth—the literal sort of truth that burns hotter than the worst of lies. "I didn't see anything."

Josef pulled himself away, sticky crotch peeling from sticky crotch, and hugged himself on the far side of the futon. "I'm not sure I believe you, but I know what you mean," he said. "Well, think about it."

Adam did, all night, not sleeping, trying to listen for Josef's breathing, trying to hear the sunrise and the morning frost melt in the grasses over his head. When Josef finally woke up, he was reasonably chatty in the way a goth boy would be. He asked after Adam's dreams and if they had been twisted and nightmarish. Adam had none he remembered. Josef then made coffee, followed by apologies for having no cream for it.

He smoked a clove cigarette—the smell filled the little room instantly—and nudged at his clothing with a precise and subtle foot when trying to decide what to wear for the day. "New Year's Day. The cottage is closed, so I can wear black on the outside." Adam wanted those toes jammed down his mouth. "The way I feel on the inside!" Josef finished, then guffawed loudly at himself like a cartoon donkey. Adam drank his coffee and realized that he didn't have to make excuses for an early exit. The cup in his hands was a farewell.

One of the local homeless guys hooted as Adam shouldered the last of his boxes into the hatch of his Zip Car.

"Yo, they rent out your room yet?" he asked.

"Of course they did!" Adam said, louder and angrier than he wanted, but he didn't turn around. "It's the Bay Area."

"Where you going off too?"

"Storage warehouse in Oakland."

"And after that?"

Adam did turn around at that question. He didn't even recognize the guy, and he thought he knew all the homeless guys and all the SRO bottom-feeders on the block. North Beach was no Castro, not with the families grazing at the restaurants and the straight strip joints, but the neighborhood was still pretty cruisy. "The airport," he said. "One way trip, for the time being at least."

"Going to New York or somethin'? You sound like a New Yorker?" the guy said. He scratched at his balls absently through his ruined jeans. "Stawrije wear-haus" he said. "That's Noo Yawk."

No, that's not it. Never New York. Never ever. Adam walked around the car, got in, started the ignition, rolled down the window, pulled out of the parking lot, looked at the homeless guy—whose hand was still on his own crotch—and said, "Connecticut, sorry. My mother is getting old. I have to care for her."

"You are sorry," the homeless guy said. He smiled, planted his free hand on the car door, and showed off three teeth.

"I am sorry," Adam said. He thought about swinging the door open hard and getting rid of the guy that way. But he didn't do anything.

"I know you is," the guy said. "Just remember…" he stopped to chew on his furry bottom lip. "Uh…that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness."

"What!"

The homeless guy opened his mouth again, his voice loud and strange. "That Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah!"

Adam stared at the homeless guy, his eyes wide. The homeless man was as surprised as anyone else. Behind them, someone impatiently honked their car horn, so Adam revved the engine and when the homeless guy lifted his hand Adam slid the car easily into traffic. It didn't even occur to him until an hour later, when he was standing in the security line at Oakland International, that he could have said something to that homeless guy. Something like, I bet you say that to all the boys.

END

"Eureka!" was originally published in "Where Thy Dark Eye Glances" edited by Steve Berman, and published by Lethe Press in 2013.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on October 13th.

[Music plays out]

Eureka!

By Nick Mamatas

Adam hadn't worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn't bring himself to put it in the box he'd set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.

There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear's on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now.

Full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 18 for October 13, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is Eureka! by Nick Mamatas.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law, The Last Weekend, and the forthcoming Lovecraftian murder-mystery I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best American Mystery Stories and Poe's Lighthouse, magazines including Tor.com and Asimov's Science Fiction, and in the recent collection The Nickronomicon. Nick has written about Edgar Allan Poe for Weird Tales, The Smart Set, and Wide Angle.

Eureka!

By Nick Mamatas

Adam hadn't worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn't bring himself to put it in the box he'd set aside for Out of the Closet either. And no

Minghun: Unlikely Patron Saints, No. 5

by

Amy Sisson

A whisper of excitement echoes through the cave, or what I think of as a cave. She is coming, the minghun broker is coming, I hear or perhaps feel, like soft butterfly wings brushing my face. I strain to catch a glimpse of one of the others I know to be around me, but it is difficult to see faces. A flash of sleeve, whether plain or fancy, or a pale hand laid briefly on my arm is more likely.

When she arrives, the minghun broker is far more tangible than the companions I sense around me, and her face seems familiar. She has been coming as long as I've been here, which may be months or years. It is whispered that she comes to us in her dreams, that she belongs to the world before. The others are always happy to see her because she offers something they cannot find for themselves.

Full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello!

Welcome to GlitterShip episode 17 for October 7, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Before we get to the story, I wanted to mention that the 2015 edition of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy is now out, and among other awesome stories, it includes short stories by two authors who have previously appeared in GlitterShip! Cat Rambo's "Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable" was picked up, as well as A. Merc Rustad's "How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps," which you may remember from the first episode of GlitterShip.

A quick glance through the table of contents also showed that while some of the stories came from fancy magazines like Tor.com, Asimov's, and Lightspeed Magazine, a few of the smaller magazines like Shimmer Magazine and Scigentasy had some awesome stuff come out last year. I hope that this encourages people to check out the rest of what Shimmer and Scigentasy publish!

In terms of GlitterShip news, I'm still swamped-busy with a variety of things. You know, the move, grad school, scientific research, reading for the Tiptree this year, etc. This unfortunately means that a lot of GlitterShip related things have been dropped by the wayside. My top priority has been getting episodes out, since that's what you're all here for, but in the rest of October, I plan on:

A) getting through the desperately outdated submissions that I still have because I'm a slow, slow, slow one person operation.

That said, if you're a newer listener to GlitterShip and enjoy what we do here, I've put up a Patreon account at www.patreon.com/keffy. The milestone goals right now are the maximum amounts needed to keep going after the Kickstarter funds run out next May. As I find other sources of funding, the milestones themselves may become easier to reach. We are still fully funded through May 2016 (episode 48) but I thought that it would be a good idea to start looking forward to the future.

Anyway, if you enjoy GlitterShip and have a few bucks to spare per month, your patronage is much appreciated. However, the number one thing that we love is just more listeners, so please recommend us to your friends if we put out stories that you enjoy.

Okay, on to the story:

Our story today is "Minghun" by Amy Sisson, read by S.Qiouyi Lu.

Amy Sisson is a writer, reviewer, and former librarian. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Sybil's Garage No. 7. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her NASA spouse and a large collection of ex-stray cats.

We also have our awesome guest reader from episode 15 back to read to us again!

Our reader this week is S. Qiouyi Lu. You can visit their site at http://s.qiouyi.lu/ and follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu.

Minghun: Unlikely Patron Saints, No. 5

by

Amy Sisson

A whisper of excitement echoes through the cave, or what I think of as a cave. She is coming, the minghun broker is coming, I hear or perhaps feel, like soft butterfly wings brushing my face. I strain to catch a glimpse of one of the others I know to be around me, but it is difficult to see faces. A flash of sleeve, whether plain or fancy, or a pale hand laid briefly on my arm is more likely.

When she arrives, the minghun broker is far more tangible than the companions I sense around me, and her face seems familiar. She has been coming as long as I've been here, which may be months or years. It is whispered that she comes to us in her dreams, that she belongs to the world before. The others are always happy to see her because she offers something they cannot find for themselves.

So far the minghun has not sought me, and I am both sad and relieved. This time again, she glances at me with sympathy in her eyes, eyes that I know can actually see me, even when I cannot always see my own hand held up in front of my face. Then she moves on, calling softly until she finds the one she seeks.

It is Chen Yinlan this time, and the others sigh with envy. The minghun stands before Yinlan and speaks, the waves of her voice spreading like ripples in a pond.

"I bring tidings from your parents, who wish me to say: 'Beloved daughter, you died very young and did not experience the unity of marriage. You are alone in the dark and we weep to think of you longing for companionship. We have come to know that Yang Xingwu and his wife have recently lost a son as they might lose a strong young leaf to the blowing wind. They have asked for betrothal so your souls might meet; we have consented, and have chosen this auspicious day for the marriage rites and feast. Please come share this celebration with us so that we might rest, knowing your soul to be united in harmony with that of your husband.'"

The minghun pauses, and by this I am puzzled. In life such decisions do not belong to the bride, so why does the minghun ask the bride's blessing here? But ask she does, and the answer is always yes.

I do not hear Yinlan's answer, but I know she has assented because I see her spirit flare briefly into something more vital before disappearing altogether. I feel Yinlan's absence for a time, before the press of spirits closes the gap.      The minghun too goes away, fading back to her world, and the cave seems more restless for a time before it settles down as much as it ever does. Always the spirits move among each other, searching and waiting and searching some more.

Some of the spirits whisper that the minghun comes less frequently now, although how they can tell I do not know. In the old days, they say, parents understood the need for minghun, but modern views discourage the practice. Only in the rural provinces do grieving parents still act on behalf of their lost children, even if they must do so surreptitiously. I do not quite know where or when I am from, a city or a village, back then or just now; all possibilities seem equally improbable, as if this place is all I have ever known.

The minghun has not yet come again since taking . . . Yinlan? -- I can't quite remember her name -- from us. And because there has been no sign yet of the minghun's return, I am startled to hear a voice, clear and strong, behind me. I turn to find eyes shining from the pale outline of a face. "Who are you?" the face asks.

"I am ... I am Liu," I say. "More than that I do not know."

"It will come back to you," she says. "When you've been here a while it will start to come back."

"What is a while?" I ask. "Who are you?" But she is already gone. I think of looking for her, but instead settle down to ponder her words. I try hard to remember something of the world before, and it is tiring, but finally I am rewarded with the memory of a baby gripping my finger with surprising strength. My nephew, I realize, my brother's son, an infant already so full of life that I know he will not depart too quickly as I did. I feel the squeeze of his tiny fingers again, and I rejoice still further when I am able to envision the weave of his blanket and hear my mother's kind laughter at the rapt adoration on my face.

"Someday you--" she begins, but I am wrenched back here and I do not hear what she says. I am consumed with sorrow over the things I have lost, and even more for the things I never had and never will. I think of Ping, my friend in the village, whose beauty was incomparable. She had looked at me in a special way, I thought, or perhaps I imagined it because I wanted it to be so.

This time I feel the stranger's spirit before she speaks, and I turn to her.

"You begin to remember," she says. "I am Yan Lianghui."

"I am Qin Liu," I answer. "I am from the village Qinjalao in the Shanxi Province. I am . . . I was only fifteen when I died, of illness because there was no money for a doctor. But my family loved me and I loved them and I am not ready to be dead." Suddenly words are spilling from me as fast as my lips can form them. Lianghui listens patiently, occasionally prompting me with a question or commenting with a smile that becomes more substantial as our conversation goes on.

Time passes as Lianghui and I get to know one another, although I still do not know whether it is hours or weeks or months that unfold. She tells me delightful stories yet holds something back, something I sense she wishes to say. I am fascinated by her, and in spite of my shyness I find myself telling her of my sorrow that I will not see my nephew grow up.

"There are babies here, Liu, did you not know?" she asks gently, and suddenly I do know, and wonder how I could have been unaware. They do not cry as babies do, but I can feel them around me, waiting, puzzled, longing to be claimed by a family without knowing what a family is. I want to cry their sorrow for them, because females so young will not have parents arranging minghun for them. Indeed, some of the baby girls were almost certainly discarded by their parents.

When the minghun comes again, I am surprised, for I have been distracted by Lianghui and the thoughts she has inspired. For the first time I realize that this is a different broker, that they have not always been the same person. Like the other ones who have come, this minghun moves among us, seeking the young woman whose parents have sent her, then reciting the greetings and invitation she has been asked to convey.

The lucky young woman, Aimei, is about to consent.

"Wait, please," I say, to Aimei or the minghun or both. The minghun is surprised, and makes a sign as though to protect herself. She is accustomed to approaching spirits, not to being approached by them.

"I respectfully address you," I say, bowing my head. "Aimei has been fortunate that her parents have found a husband for her. But there are babies here, little girls whose parents cannot or will not make such arrangements. Can not Aimei take a baby with her to be part of her family?"

Lianghui speaks softly from beside me. "And perhaps a boy child as well?"

I am ashamed, for until now I have not thought of the little lost boys, who do not seem to reside with us here.

The minghun stares at us in astonishment, her lined face unbelieving. "The parents have charged me with uniting Aimei and her betrothed, who will be buried together so that they may share the afterlife. How am I to locate the remains of the little ones if their parents do not come to me?"

"Please," I say. "Is there something you can do?"

"Yes," Aimei whispers. "I should like a child to care for."

The minghun vanishes and Aimei cries out. I feel wretched, thinking that I may be responsible for preventing Aimei from finding her peace.

"Courage, Aimei," says Lianghui. "The minghun is wise and she will--"

The minghun reappears, looking more translucent than usual, perhaps from exhaustion. "I have done as you asked," she says to Aimei. "I have found a family who mourn a baby girl and approached them with this most unusual request. Your parents were frightened but your mother pleaded with your father for his consent. I must find the child." She moves off and I see small vague lights in her path. Minutes or hours later she returns to us, holding a small bundle that begins to take shape. She offers it to Aimei, who cradles it in her arms. I tentatively reach forward and place my finger in the baby's hand, and feel a ghost-tear run down my face as the baby squeezes my finger and vanishes with Aimei. My hand is surrounded by emptiness, until Lianghui squeezes it in understanding.

From that time on, Lianghui and I are seldom apart.

The next time the minghun comes, she pauses before me. I am about to ask about the children, but she bows her head and speaks my name, which I had not told her upon our last encounter.

"Qin Liu," she says. "I bring tidings from your parents, who wish me to say--"

"My parents," I whisper in wonder. "My parents ... How long have I been here?"

"Two days, Qin Liu. You have been here two days and your parents are anxious to lay you to rest next to your betrothed, a young man also from the Shanxi Province who was snatched from his family only two weeks ago. They wish to bury you beside him so that you may have companionship in your afterlife--"

"No," I answer softly. "I have found my companionship in the afterlife." Lianghui catches her breath beside me but does not speak, and I go on. "I have found Lianghui, honored minghun, and I wish to stay here with her. We will help the girls and the women, and the babies who need a family. And if ever a time comes when no more need our help, perhaps you can lay my bones to rest with those of Lianghui."

"I will do my best," she says, and bows her head once again.

"Please," I say. "Please tell my family that I love them. Tell them--" I cannot go on, but I do not have to, for the minghun smiles at me and I know she will find the words that escape me.

Later -- hours, days, months -- I ask Lianghui how it can be that only two days had passed before the minghun came for me.

"It is only time, Liu, in a place that does not trouble itself with such things. It is only we who concern ourselves so." She is silent for a moment, and then she says softly, "I have waited for you for almost three hundred years."

"Did no one else come?" I ask.

"Once before, I thought one had come. But though she loved me, she left when the minghun came for her, and I cannot blame her for that." Lianghui looks at me in wonder. "But you stayed," she says.

"I stayed," I answer. I take her hand, and I feel it become more solid every moment.

END

“Minghun: Unlikely Patron Saints, No. 5” was originally published in Strange Horizons in September 2007 and is also available to read at QuarterReads.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on October 13th.

[Music plays out]

Minghun: Unlikely Patron Saints, No. 5

by

Amy Sisson

A whisper of excitement echoes through the cave, or what I think of as a cave. She is coming, the minghun broker is coming, I hear or perhaps feel, like soft butterfly wings brushing my face. I strain to catch a glimpse of one of the others I know to be around me, but it is difficult to see faces. A flash of sleeve, whether plain or fancy, or a pale hand laid briefly on my arm is more likely.

When she arrives, the minghun broker is far more tangible than the companions I sense around me, and her face seems familiar. She has been coming as long as I've been here, which may be months or years. It is whispered that she comes to us in her dreams, that she belongs to the world before. The others are always happy to see her because she offers something they cannot find for themselves.

Full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello!

Welcome to GlitterShip episode 17 for October 7, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Before we get to the story, I wanted to mention that the 2015 edition of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy is now out, and among other awesome stories, it includes short stories by two authors who have previously appeared in GlitterShip! Cat Rambo's "Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable" was picked up, as well as A. Merc Rustad's "How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps," which you may remember from the first episode of GlitterShip.

A quick glance through the table of contents also showed that while some of the stories came from fancy magazines like Tor.com, Asimov's, and Lightspeed Magazine, a few of the smaller magazines like Shimmer Magazine and Scigentasy had some awesome stuff come out last year. I hope that this encourages people to check out the rest of what Shimmer and

They Jump Through Fires

By Gabriela Santiago

“They jump through fires, you know.”

We were behind a glass window and at least ten feet off the ground, but Sam’s voice startled the rabbit that had been standing frozen on the asphalt, one large brown eye twitching as it stared up at me. Its ears jerked up and it twisted away, hopping into the underbrush.

I kept looking out the window. “They what?”

“Jump through fires. Instead of running away.”

“Did you read that on Wikipedia?”

She changed the subject. “You going to be all right here by yourself?”

“Of course.”

“I left my number on the kitchen table, if, you know, you need anything—”

“Thanks for helping carry her. You can go now.”

Full transcript appears after the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 16 for September 22, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story today is "They Jump Through Fires" by Gabriela Santiago.

Gabriela Santiago lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, a mere twenty minute walk from a store whose awning reads AFFORDABLE COFFINS in large friendly letters. She is a graduate of Macalester College and the Clarion 2013 writing workshop, and her fiction has previously been published in Betwixt and Black Candies. You can follow her at writing-relatedactivities.tumblr.com. Or you can follow her at @LifeOnEarth89 on Twitter, if for some reason you don't want to follow Katy Manning, but do want to read a retweet of everything that accomplished Doctor Who actor and beautiful cinnamon roll has ever said.

Before we get into the story itself, a little advanced warning: the story is horror and has some description of a decomposing corpse.

They Jump Through Fires

By Gabriela Santiago

“They jump through fires, you know.”

We were behind a glass window and at least ten feet off the ground, but Sam’s voice startled the rabbit that had been standing frozen on the asphalt, one large brown eye twitching as it stared up at me. Its ears jerked up and it twisted away, hopping into the underbrush.

I kept looking out the window. “They what?”

“Jump through fires. Instead of running away.”

“Did you read that on Wikipedia?”

She changed the subject. “You going to be all right here by yourself?”

“Of course.”

“I left my number on the kitchen table, if, you know, you need anything—”

“Thanks for helping carry her. You can go now.”

In Minnesota they let you do open-casket funerals with unembalmed bodies. Actually lots of places let you do that. There’s not much bacteria at all in a fresh corpse. It’s just the funeral homes that will tell you embalming is necessary.

The rabbit did not come back after fifteen minutes, so I made myself a sandwich and ate it. Then I stood in front of the coffin. Funeral home directors do not like it when you say “coffin.” They would prefer you to say “casket.” They would prefer you to say “the decedent” instead of “the body.”

I rocked back and forth on my feet a little and looked at Mikayla’s body.

She had been dead for thirty-one hours and twelve minutes, so the bacteria and enzymes in her body had not started breaking it down yet. Her skin was not discolored and there was no bad smell. There was no good smell either. She did not smell like Mikayla. She smelled like things that were around Mikayla when she was alive like oil paints and tuna fish, and she also smelled like a hospital, but she did not smell like a person anymore.

I touched her skin. It was cold and spongy. I did not like the feeling. I rocked back and forth on my feet, and hissed air through my teeth.

I went to the window again. The rabbit was back. There was another rabbit too. This one had horns behind its ears. Horns on rabbits are tumors caused by papilloviruses. This was discovered by Richard Shope in the 1930s. I had never seen a rabbit with horns before.

Both rabbits froze and looked at me. They had such big eyes.

I went to get the mail. The door was unlocked and I had to close my eyes and count and count and count because Sam always forgot to lock the door. When we were girlfriends I would tell her every day and every day she would forget.

There was a letter from my Great-Aunt Teodora. Letters from Great-Aunt Teodora are very hard to read because she writes in cursive which my eyes have a hard time following. It is also hard because even though she speaks English very well, she has a hard time remembering the rules with writing. It is like the opposite of my problems.

The letter was stamped for overnight delivery, so I took it inside and set it on the table and made a sandwich. I ate the sandwich and then I read the letter. It said she had read about Mikayla on her Facebook and that she was keeping me in her prayers. I pictured her prayers like the big wooden dresser with claw feet in her bedroom, with me bent and tucked and folded into the middle drawer next to her flowery blouses and T-shirts with sequin butterflies, all smelling of baby powder. Baby powder is a calming smell. I went to the bathroom and shook some over my hands; held it to my face.

On the way back from the bathroom, I stopped by Mikayla’s body. Her eyes were closed. They had glued them closed at the funeral home. I let them do that. I also let them close her mouth and fold her hands and plug her anus. Mikayla had said not to let them do anything like that.

Sam had said she looked like she was sleeping, but Sam never saw Mikayla sleeping. Mikayla slept all sprawled out with her mouth open. Mikayla’s body did not look asleep now. Mikayla’s body looked dead.

I went back to the letter. Great-Aunt Teodora had signed it with a long string of Xs and Os. Then she wrote a P.S.: “I remember you were so interested in the Family Folklore so I am attaching a ‘Exciting!’ story I remember from being told as a child. I am thinking of getting it Published!!! Maybe it will help to keep your mind busy and ‘occupied.’”

I tried to read the story but Great-Aunt Teodora does not really understand quotation marks and capitalization so it was even harder than cursive usually is for me. It started out being about how unlucky it is to kill rabbits, and then she started talking about how her mother was called “the Mexican Annie Oakley.” It was making my head hurt, so I put it down.

I did not want to look at Mikayla’s body so I went to the window again. The rabbits were gone.

The reason people sit up all night with a dead body comes from the days before they could know for sure that somebody was dead and not just in a severe coma. These days they were very sure. It was very easy for doctors to explain how a ruptured brain aneurysm killed my girlfriend.

There started to be a bad smell. It was like rotten eggs. This should not have happened for a few more days. Possibly Mikayla’s intestines were hosting abnormally potent or numerous bacteria and enzymes. I opened a window and lit one match from Mikayla’s box of matches in the junk drawer. The sulfur dioxide in match heads deadens the sense of smell. Then I went to look at the body.

There was light green bruising on her skin. This also should not have happened for a few more days.

I worried about being able to smell the bad smell even after they took the body away tomorrow.

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven—

I got to three hundred and ninety-seven, which is a prime, and I stopped.

Keeping promises is an important part of being a functioning member of society. If you follow through on commitments to others, they are more likely to entrust you with more responsibilities. They are more likely to reward you. They are more likely to follow through on their commitments to you. This is why keeping promises is important.  [read up through here]

When a person is dead there are no more consequences to keeping or not keeping your promises to them. Mikayla was not going to shout at me or go away for two weeks if I called up the funeral home and told them to take her body away. There was no logical reason not to call them and have them take her body away.

I did not want them to come and take her body away.

The smell was so bad. It was thick in the air like sulfur mud. It stuck in my throat.

I went to the door to open it and let some air in. It was unlocked. I knew I had just locked it.

It was unlocked.

I knew I had just locked it.

I locked it again.

I went to the window. There were three rabbits now. The rabbits were increasing in primes. I rocked back and forth on my heels and hissed air through my teeth and counted one two three, one two three, one two three.

All three rabbits had horns. They had frozen the second I came to the window. They watched me, ears twitching, eyes twitching. It is important for small prey animals to maintain constant vigilance. They must always be watching for predator movements, or listening for predator sounds.

They jump through fires, you know.

I raised my hand and tapped the window. They jumped. I tapped the window again. They ran away.

It was 8:03 pm now. It was getting dark. The coffin made a wrong shape in my apartment. I could not walk around or even think about my apartment right because I would run into the wrong shape there. There were eleven hours and fifty-three more minutes until Sam would arrive with her car to take Mikayla’s body to the graveyard. I turned on the dining room light and sat down to try to read the story again.

This time I understood that Great-Aunt Teodora was talking about her mother being the Mexican Annie Oakley because later in the story her mother was going to shoot a rabbit from almost a mile away. She took the rabbit home and made a stew. All of her children came in and said they smelled something very bad, like caca or roadkill or rotten eggs. They asked what she was making. She lied and said it was an armadillo stew. They ate up the stew, and then their father went to play his guitar at a bar.

It was very hard to make my eyes keep looking at the letters that kept jumping up into capitals. I got out my laptop. I was going to Google “Mexican folk tales,” but then I changed my mind and Googled “rabbits jumping through fires.” This was what I found: a Suffolk gamekeeper reports that “they don’t go out to run with the smoke. They turn round and try to get through the fire… They seem to think… they’ll get out of the scent of it. They jump into the fire.”  This was not about rabbits, though. It was about hares. Both rabbits and hares belong to the order Lagomorpha, but there are several key differences. For instance, rabbits are altricial. Their young are born hairless and blind. Hares are precocial. Their young have hair and can see and take care of themselves.

I clicked on the Wikipedia link for hares in folklore and mythology. In the U.K. there was a lot of folklore about the White Hare who was sometimes a witch taunting hunters and sometimes a ghost haunting her lost lover. Lots of places had a hare-eating taboo like the one in Great-Aunt Teodora’s story. In Kerry, Ireland, there were only two times a year you could kill and eat a hare: Beltane and the festival of Ostara. At other times, eating a hare was like eating your grandmother.

I wondered if the taboo in Great-Aunt Teodora’s story was because of goddesses like the European ones. I decided to try to read it again. I decided that this time I would try reading it out to Mikayla’s body, because that might help me concentrate on making the cursive into words. When she was alive, Mikayla said she liked my voice. She was the only one.

I opened up all the windows and poured baby powder all over my hands and rubbed it all over my face so the smell wouldn’t be so bad. I lit two more of Mikayla’s matches. Then I took the letter into the living room. The moon was shining very bright through the window. I did not turn on the lights. I counted and rocked and breathed in the baby powder and looked at Mikayla’s body. The bruising was purple now. She looked fatter, her cheeks and stomach pressing upward. Bloating does not typically take place until later in the decomposition process.

I looked down at the story and found my place. I started to read:

“After Dinner, Merino (my father) picked up his guitar. He kissed his wife on the cheek and said, “Don’t be letting in any handsome strangers, querida (pronounced KAY-REE-DUH, Sweetheart).” “And don’t you go flirting with those pretty young ladies down at the bar, Mer,” she said. She was joking but not really joking!!! Some of those young ladies had no shame with their lipstick and long blonde hair soft as rabbit fur. And Mer was very handsome, with green eyes like a ‘Movie Star’! And when he played and sang with his voice like an ‘angel’ (pronounced ON-HELL, Angel) she knew all the Pretty Young Things would be falling in love with him. “Don’t be bringing any pretty young ladies home,” she said and her voice was all of a sudden serious so he looked up at her with one eyebrow raised like it was saying what do you mean? “I have a bad feeling,” she said. “My Rosary fell off this morning and the tortillas (TORE-TEE-YUZ, tortillas) all burnt. Lock the door when you—”

Click.

The door.

I turned. I could not see the bar crossing the gap between the door and the wall.

I went to the door and turned the handle. There were five rabbits with papillovirus horns sitting on the doorstep. Not all of the growths were horns. Some were extra ears. The first rabbit had one extra ear. The second rabbit had two. The third had three. The fourth had five. The fifth had seven.

The first rabbit only had one eye. The second had two. The third had three. The fourth had five. The fifth had seven.

I shut the door and locked it. I pulled the heavy couch in front of the door. It made the shape of the room even more wrong and my head hurt and I had to clench my fist and rock, counting by threes this time, three six nine twelve—

I got to six hundred and thought about calling Sam. Sam had a gun. She could shoot the rabbits. But then I would have to call Sam on the telephone.

I did not call Sam.

I walked over to Mikayla’s coffin. Her long blonde hair looked like straw. Her eyes were bulging under her eyelids like frog eyes.

“I am going to keep reading the story, Mikayla,” I said. I said this even though Mikayla was not there. It was just her body. “I was going to read stories to the baby. I was going to use my Barnes and Noble employee discount to buy Stellaluna and The Salamander Room and Where the Sidewalk Ends. You said those were good books. I was going to read them.

“This is how the story goes,” I said. I found my place and kept reading. “When Merino had played his first three songs, he looked up and saw a beautiful woman. She was rubia (RUE-BEE-YA, Blonde) and tall with long, long legs under her very tight red dress. She was watching him with her big Brown eyes while he played. ‘Oh, Señor (SEEN-YOR—”

Mikayla’s eyes popped open.

Eyes typically pop open when the internal pressure created by feeding bacteria becomes too great, though typically not until much later in the decomposition process. Mikayla’s eyes had been glued shut. I could see small bits of glue in her eyelashes, and parts of her eyelashes still stuck to the skin beneath her lower eyelid.

One eye was still in its socket. The other was only connected by the optic nerve and was dangling over her left cheekbone. Most people unconsciously know where someone is looking from observing the whites of their eyes. I had spent a lot of time studying this skill, so I was pretty sure that if Mikayla had been alive, both eyes would have been looking at me.

The release of gas had also opened her mouth and pushed out her tongue. It lolled down across her lips. It was purple and very swollen.

The rabbits were on the coffin now. I had not seen them there before. I had not seen them anywhere in the room. There were seven of them. They were not hares. There were several key differences between rabbits and hares that were immediately visible. Rabbits are smaller, with shorter ears and weaker hind legs. Rabbits do not have black markings on their fur. Rabbits’ summer fur turns grey in winter rather than white.

I did not move from in front of the coffin holding the rabbits and Mikayla’s body.

The rabbits kept looking at me with their big, big eyes.

They did not move except for their eyes and their ears.

Click, went the door behind me.

I counted their ears. I counted their eyes. Their extra ears increased in primes. Their total eyes increased in primes. This led to total numbers of ears that were not primes. Total numbers of ears plus eyes were also not primes. The seventh rabbit had twenty-three eyes and twenty-five ears. It had two horns. It sat on Mikayla’s chest, above her heart.

I reached my hand forward.

Click, went the windows to the side of me.

I touched her face. The skin was blistered there. It sloughed away as I touched it.

Onetwothreeonetwothreesixnine airthroughtheteeth—

Click-click, went the door and windows together.

Locked unlocked. Locked unlocked.

The smell of the body was an iron band pressing into my head.

There was a match in my other hand. I lit it.

The rabbit’s eyes all swiveled to the match. Its glow lit up my white-powdered hands.

“I am going to finish reading the story,” I said.

I promised Mikayla that I would read stories to our baby. I practiced by reading to her. Promises are an important part of being a functioning member of society.

I put the match down and picked up the story. I could still feel the place where my fingers had touched Mikayla’s cheek. I did not like the feeling. It was sticky and cold.

I read the story.

“‘Don’t leave me! You said I was pretty, didn’t you? Didn’t you say I had a pretty face? Why won’t you look back at my pretty face, Merino?’”

I was reading the story, and the story was reading me.

Most of the time I did not read stories, because it was very frustrating how most stories were not about the events that occurred within the story. There were empty spaces between the events that occurred within a story, and I could not see the shapes there. Other people seemed to see and interpret these shapes very easily, as easily as I could see the shape of the space between two numbers.

I was starting to see the shapes now.

They were starting to see me.

I was changing the shape of the story, and the story was changing the shape of me. The rabbit from the first act of the story was coming back. The rabbit was becoming the beautiful rubia. Before I read the story she did not become a rabbit. She became a different shape. The beautiful rubia who was no longer beautiful was now pursuing my Great-Aunt Teodora’s father across the Texas desert. She was weeping and screaming for her lost love. Folklore does not typically have a three or five act structure unless its tellers have been influenced by printed or visual media. I was changing the shape.

“‘MERRIIIIIIIIIIINOOOOOOO,’ she called with a howl that was more like a wolf or El Diablo (ELL DEE-AH-BLOW, The Devil) ‘himself.’ Or was it the wind? No it was not the wind. He could still ‘feel’ her eyes on his back as he ran. He dropped his guitar and he did ‘not’ care!!!’”

I was reading the story from the words on the page, but I was also reading them in the slope of the letters. The story was in the shade of the pencil. The story was in the distance between me and the coffin, the number of inches (thirteen). The story was curled in Mikayla’s tongue; it was stuck to her skin with the glue and eyelashes. The moon was telling the story, and the shadows, and me, and we were changing it.

And the story was telling me.

“Her breath was like Hellfire on the back of his neck and he ran from the fire, and the smell like ‘Sulfur’—”

It was telling me in the rabbit’s eyes, and in their ears. They were listening to the story tell me. The story was reaching down my throat. It was writing my cells. It was walking along my DNA. It was finding the beginning, the middle, the end. It was changing them.

I was on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. I was also standing in front of the casket. The rabbits were in a circle around me, looking down at me. There were eleven of them. They were also still sitting on Mikayla’s body in the casket I was standing in front of. There were thirteen.

The roof was gone and I could see the moon. All the doorways in my apartment were filled with fire.

They jump through fires, you know.

My face was wet and I could feel a pressing on my chest like a huge stone, pushing me down, crushing me. I was hollow, echoing. I could hear the wind rushing through me inside. I could hear my voice telling the rabbits things. I could not feel my lips moving but I could hear my voice. It was telling the rabbits about the day I met Mikayla. It was telling the rabbits about how she was the only one who ever said she liked my voice. It was telling them all the things Mikayla was never going to do again, like bounce on the bed or get paint on the floor or kiss me.

The moon was very blurry as I looked up at it. Down, down, down, like a concrete block on my chest pressing me down. Mikayla’s body in the coffin was very blurry as I looked down at it, and the weight was pulling me down, down, down, I was going to fall toward her.

The rabbits were very clear. Their outlines were the only real shapes. There were seventeen outlines.

The skin split down the middle of Mikayla’s body. It pulled away to each side of the coffin. It pulled muscle and fat with it, tearing. I could see the gleam of bone.

“If I were writing a story,” I told the rabbits, “in the next part her flesh would crumble to dust. And her skeleton would stand up. And it would be Mikayla and it would say hello.”

The rabbits looked down/up at me and did not move.

“What are you watching for?” I asked them. “Are you waiting for me? Are you waiting for her? I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what to do.”

Click-click went the fires in the doorway. Click-click went the flames. The scent of ash and smoke was making a spiral in my mind.

They jump through fires, you know.

There was a sticky, squelching sound, like a drain coming unclogged. I looked down/up at the coffin. The rabbits looked too. They moved their heads for the first time. They looked at Mikayla.

The fires leaped higher, the wood of the lintels cracking somewhere inside. Click-click.

From the me who was standing in front of the coffin, I could see a puddle between Mikayla’s legs. It was staining the edge of her skirt. It was her job interview skirt, the pink silk one. She hated it. I reached forward and raised the hem.

The me that was on the floor was holding a bundle in her arms. The bundle was small and soft and still.

There were three rabbit kits between Mikayla’s legs. There were only three ears total, but each rabbit had two ears. The ears were connected. I picked up the rabbit kits very carefully. Rabbits are altricial.

I stroked the blood and placenta from the hairless ears and blind eyes of the rabbit kits on my chest. They fit right into my hands. They were a perfect shape. I did not mind that they had only three ears. I held them close to my chest on the floor and standing in front of the coffin.

They were not moving.

“I will still read you Stellaluna,” I told them. “I will still read you all the books I promised Mikayla. I will explain to you about promises. They are very important.”

Was that a pulse beneath my fingertips?

The smoke was so thick now that I could barely see my hands and my girls in my hands.

The rabbits around me/in the coffin were watching us. I could not see their bodies. I could only see their eyes. The number of eyes went from one to nineteen.

The rabbits’ eyes were black and cold. The rabbits’ eyes were all around us.

Were my girls breathing or were my hands shaking?

“Please,” I said to the rabbits. “Please.”

The rabbits’ eyes were black and cold and there were twenty-three. The rabbits’ eyes were behind us.

I was sweating. The flames were very high. The wood click-clicked as it burned, knots popping open. Doors popping unlocked. I did not know where the doors would go.

My heart was going very fast. I could hear the sound of my heart, and it was clanging against the smell of rotting body and tangled in the choking smoke, around and around and around with the feel of the sweat and the baby powder on my skin, and I was counting by ones and by threes and by primes, and the stone on my chest was still there but I could breathe past it now because of the weight of my girls in my hands.

The fire. Red orange yellow. Leaping. Flames, leaping flames, leaping—

The rabbits were behind us and they were watching us with eyes that never stopped looking for predators. The rabbits were behind us and we could not move back or stay where we were.

I bent my head down to my girls.

I whispered: “We jump through fires, you know.”

END

“They Jump Through Fires" was originally published in So Say We All's 2015 edition of Black Candies.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on October 6th.

[Music plays out]

They Jump Through Fires

By Gabriela Santiago

“They jump through fires, you know.”

We were behind a glass window and at least ten feet off the ground, but Sam’s voice startled the rabbit that had been standing frozen on the asphalt, one large brown eye twitching as it stared up at me. Its ears jerked up and it twisted away, hopping into the underbrush.

I kept looking out the window. “They what?”

“Jump through fires. Instead of running away.”

“Did you read that on Wikipedia?”

She changed the subject. “You going to be all right here by yourself?”

“Of course.”

“I left my number on the kitchen table, if, you know, you need anything—”

“Thanks for helping carry her. You can go now.”

Full transcript appears after the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 16 for September 22, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story today is "They Jump Through Fires" by Gabriela Santiago.

Gabriela Santiago lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, a mere twenty minute walk from a store whose awning reads AFFORDABLE COFFINS in large friendly letters. She is a graduate of Macalester College and the Clarion 2013 writing workshop, and her fiction has previously been published in Betwixt and Black Candies. You can follow her at writing-relatedactivities.tumblr.com. Or you can follow her at @LifeOnEarth89

Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon

By Ken Liu

“Tell me a story,” said Se. She had changed into her pajamas all by herself and snuggled under the blankets.

Se’s big sister, Yuan, was just about to flip the switch next to the bedroom door. “How about you read a story by yourself? I have to … go see a friend.”

“No, it’s not the same.” Se shook her head vigorously. “You have to tell me a story or I can’t sleep.”

Yuan glanced at her phone. Every minute tonight was precious. Dad was out of town on business, and Mom was working late and wouldn’t be home till midnight. Yuan needed to be home before then, but if she could get her little sister to sleep quickly, she’d still have a couple of hours to see Jing on this, her last night in China.

Full transcript appears after the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 15 for September 15th, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is "Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon" by Ken Liu.

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.

Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

We also have a special guest reader this week, which is awesome.

Our reader this week is S. Qiouyi Lu. You can visit their site at http://s.qiouyi.lu/ and follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu.

Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon

By Ken Liu

“Tell me a story,” said Se. She had changed into her pajamas all by herself and snuggled under the blankets.

Se’s big sister, Yuan, was just about to flip the switch next to the bedroom door. “How about you read a story by yourself? I have to … go see a friend.”

“No, it’s not the same.” Se shook her head vigorously. “You have to tell me a story or I can’t sleep.”

Yuan glanced at her phone. Every minute tonight was precious. Dad was out of town on business, and Mom was working late and wouldn’t be home till midnight. Yuan needed to be home before then, but if she could get her little sister to sleep quickly, she’d still have a couple of hours to see Jing on this, her last night in China.

“Come on, Yuan,” Se begged. “Please!”

Yuan came back to the side of the bed and stroked Se’s forehead gently. She sighed. “All right.”

She texted Jing: Late by half hour. Wait?

The crystal cat charm, a gift from Jing, dangled from her phone. It twirled and glittered in the warm bedroom light as she waited impatiently for the response.

Finally, the phone beeped. Of course. Won’t leave until we meet.

“Tell the story about the Qixi Festival,” said Se, yawning. “That’s tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

Long ago, a beautiful young woman, the granddaughter of the Emperor of Heaven, lived in the sky by the eastern shore of the Silver River—that’s the broad band of light you can sometimes see in the sky at night, when the air is clear.

She was skilled at the loom, and so that’s why people called her—

“You skipped the part where you describe her weaving!”

“But you’ve heard this story a hundred times already. Can’t I just get it over with?”

“You have to tell it right.”

—as I had apparently neglected to mention: her works were displayed proudly by the Heavenly Court in the western sky at every sunset: glorious clouds of crimson, amethyst, periwinkle, and every shade in between. So people called her Zhinü, the Weaver Girl. And though she was the youngest of seven immortal sisters, we mortals addressed her by the honorific Big Sister Seven.

But over time, Zhinü grew wan and thin. Her brows were always tightly knit into a frown, and she did not wash her face or comb out her hair. The sunset clouds she wove were not as lovely as before, and mortals began to complain.

The Emperor of Heaven came to visit. “What ails you, my granddaughter?”

“Haha, you do that voice so well. You sound just like Grandfather.”

“I’m glad you approve. Now stop interrupting.”

“Oh, Gonggong, I’m so lonely. Living all by myself in this hut, my only company are my loom—jiya, jiya, it squeaks all day long—and a few magpies.”

The Emperor took pity on her and found her a good match. The young man tended to cows on the western shore of the Silver River, so people called him Niulang, the Cowherd. He was handsome and kind and full of funny stories, and Zhinü loved him, and he her, the moment they set eyes on each other.

“See, I’m not such a bad matchmaker.” The Emperor of Heaven smiled as he stroked his beard. “Now I know you’re young, and you should have fun. But now that you have a companion, please don’t neglect your work.”

Zhinü moved to the western shore of the Silver River to be with Niulang, and the two of them married. They had two boys, and there never was a happier family.

“Oh, no, here comes the boring part. You can skip it if you want to.”

“No way! This is the best part. You’ll understand when you’re older. Now pay attention.”

Every morning, as Niulang got up before sunrise to take the cows to their favorite pasture, Zhinü could not bear the thought of being separated from him. So she would come along. She’d put the two babies in two baskets draped on each side of an old, gentle ox, and she would ride on the back of a pure white bull led by Niulang. They’d sing together, tell each other stories from before they met, and laugh at the jokes that only they understood.

Zhinü’s loom sat unused back at the hut, gathering dust.

Sunsets became ugly affairs. The few clouds that remained became tattered, wispy, colorless. The people laboring in the fields lost the beauty that had once lifted up their hearts at the end of a hard day, and their laments rose to the Heavenly Court.

“My maritorious child,” said the Emperor of Heaven—

“What does that word mean?”

“It means loving your husband too much.”

“How can you love someone too much?”

“Good question. I don’t know either. Maybe the Emperor of Heaven didn’t have enough love in his heart to understand. Maybe he was too old.”

—“I warned you about neglecting your duty. For your disobedience and neglect, you must now move back to the eastern shore of the Silver River and never see Niulang and your children again.”

Zhinü begged for reprieve, but the Emperor’s word was as irreversible as the flow of the Silver River.

At the Emperor’s decree, the Silver River was widened and deepened, and Zhinü forever parted from her husband. Today, you can see the star that is Zhinü on one side of the Silver River and the star that is Niulang on the other, their two sons two faint stars on each side of Niulang. They stare at each other across that unbridgeable gap, the longing and regret as endless as the flowing river.

“Why did you stop?”

“It’s nothing. My throat just felt itchy for a bit.”

“Are you sad for Niulang and Zhinü?”

“Maybe … a little bit. But it’s just a story.”

But the magpies that once kept Zhinü company took pity on the lovers. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh moon by the lunar calendar, on Qixi, the day when Zhinü is at her highest position in the sky, all the magpies in the world fly up to the Silver River and make a bridge with their bodies so that the lovers can spend one night together.

This is the day when all the young women in old China would pray to Big Sister Seven for love.

Oh, I know you want to hear more about the bridge of magpies. You love this part. Well, I imagine it’s a lot of work for the birds. They probably have to go to magpie bridge-building school, and those who’re a bit slow have to go to cram school for extra study sessions …

Yuan turned out the light and tiptoed out of her sister’s bedroom.

On my way, she texted.

She made sure the air conditioning was set comfortably low, locked the door of the apartment, and ran down the stairs. And then she was in the hot, humid evening air of Hefei in August.

She biked through the streets, dodging an endless stream of cars beeping their horns. She liked the physicality of the ride, the way it made her body come alive, feel awake. She passed the sidewalks filled with people browsing past stores and kiosks filled with everything imaginable: discount electronics, toys, clothes, fancy European soups and cakes, mouth-watering sweet potatoes baked in tinfoil and fried, smelly tofu. The heat and the exertion stuck her shirt to her skin, and she had to wipe her forehead from time to time to keep the sweat out of her eyes.

And then she was at the coffee shop, and Jing—slender, graceful in a plain white dress and a light jacket (for the air conditioning), a faint whiff of the floral perfume that always made Yuan dizzy—greeted Yuan with that bright smile that she always wore.

As if this wasn’t the night the world ended.

“Are you done packing?” Yuan asked.

“Oh, there’s always more to pack.” Jing’s tone was light, breezy, careless. “But I don’t have to get to the airport ‘til nine in the morning. There’s plenty of time.”

“You should dress in layers, with something long-sleeved on top,” said Yuan—mainly because she feared saying nothing. “It can get cold on the plane.”

“Want to take a walk with me? The next time I walk around at night I’ll be in America. Maybe I’ll miss all this noise.”

Yuan left her bike locked to the light post outside the coffee shop, and they strolled along the sidewalk like the rest of the crowd. They did not hold hands. In Shanghai, perhaps no one would have cared, but in Hefei, there would have been looks, and whispers, and maybe worse.

Yuan imagined Jing walking about the campus of the American high school at night. Jing had shown her pictures of the red brick buildings and immaculate lawns. And the smiling boys and girls: foreigners. Yuan felt out of breath; her heart seemed unable to decide on a steady rhythm.

“Look at that,” said Jing, pointing to the display window of a pastry shop. “They’re selling Qixi Lovers’ Cakes now. So overpriced. And you know some stupid girl is going to throw a fit if her boyfriend doesn’t buy it for her. I want to throw up.”

“Not quite as bad as Valentine’s Day,” Yuan said. “I think the vendors are pretty restrained. Relatively speaking.”

“That’s because people aren’t into Qixi any more. We Chinese always get more enthusiastic for Western imports, even holidays. It’s a national character weakness.”

“I like Qixi,” Yuan said. She said it more emphatically than she meant to.

“What, you want to set out an altar under a melon trellis, offer up a plate of fruits, pray to Big Sister Seven, and hope for a spider to weave a web over the offering by morning so you’ll get a nice husband in the future?”

Yuan’s face grew hot. She stopped. “You don’t have to mock everything Chinese.”

Jing cocked her head, a teasing smile in her eyes. “You suddenly getting all patriotic on me now?”

“Your father has the money to pay for you to go to an American boarding school. That doesn’t make you better than everyone else.”

“Oh, lay off that wounded tone. You’re hardly some migrant worker’s daughter.”

They stared at each other, the neon lights from the nearby stores flickering over their faces. Yuan wanted to kiss Jing and scream at her at the same time. She had always liked Jing’s irreverence, the way she wanted to turn everything into a joke. She knew her anger had nothing to do with this conversation about Qixi at all.

Jing turned and continued down the sidewalk. After a moment, Yuan followed.

When Jing spoke again, her tone was calm, as if nothing had happened. “Remember the first time we went hiking together?”

That had been one of the best days of Yuan’s life. They had skipped their cram school sessions and taken the bus to Emerald Lake, an artificial pond bordering several college campuses. Jing had showed Yuan how to set up her phone so that her mom couldn’t see the messages Jing sent her, and Yuan had showed Jing her baby pictures. They had bought a lamb chuanr from a street vendor and shared it as they walked along the lakeshore. Her heart had beaten faster with each bite of roasted meat off the skewer, thinking that her lips were touching where hers had touched. And then, as they strolled through one of the campuses, Jing had boldly taken her hand: it was a college, after all.

And then that first kiss behind the willow tree, tasting the hot spices from the lamb kebab on Jing’s tongue, the calls of wild geese behind her somewhere…

“I remember,” she said. Her voice still sounded wounded, and she didn’t care.

“I wish we could go there again,” Jing said.

The anger in Yuan disappeared, just like that. Jing always had such a way with her. Yuan felt like putty in her hands.

“We can chat on QQ or Skype,” Yuan said. She hurried to catch up so that she was walking next to Jing. “And you’ll come back for visits. This isn’t like the old days. It will be okay. We can still be together.”

They had wandered off the main thoroughfare onto a less busy side street. The streetlights on one side were out, and looking up they could see a few stars in the sky. Hefei wasn’t as polluted as some of the cities on the coast.

“I’m going to be really busy,” Jing said. Her tone was calm, too calm.

“We can text every day, every hour.”

“It’s different over there. I’ll be living on my own in a dorm. I have to actually study if I want to go to a good college. My family is paying a lot to give me this.”

“Americans don’t study that much.”

“It’s not like watching American TV shows. There aren’t subtitles. I’ll meet lots of new people. I have to make a new life over there, new friends. I’ll need to be thinking, talking, breathing English all the time if I want to make it.”

“I can text you in English,” Yuan said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“You’re not listening,” Jing said. She stopped again and looked at Yuan.

“What are you trying to say?” As soon as she asked the question, Yuan regretted it. It made her sound so weak, so clingy, like a girl from one of those Korean dramas.

“I’m going away, Yuan. I told you this was going to happen last year, when we … started.”

Yuan looked away so that Jing would not see her eyes. She pushed the image of Jing with someone else out of her mind. She cursed her eyes and told them to behave and stop embarrassing her.

“It will be okay.” Jing’s tone was now comforting, gentle, and that made it worse. “We’ll both be okay.”

Yuan said nothing because she knew she couldn’t control her voice. She licked her lips, tasting the salt from the sweat of her ride. She wanted to wipe her eyes so she could see clearly again, but she didn’t want to do it in front of Jing.

“I want to make this night a happy memory,” Jing said, but her voice finally cracked. She struggled, but failed, to keep her calm mask on. “I’m trying to make this easier. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for those you love?”

Yuan looked up, blinking her eyes hard. She looked for the Silver River, and she remembered that in English it was called the Milky Way—what a graceless and silly name. She looked for Zhinü and Niulang, and she vaguely remembered that in English they were called Vega and Altair, names as cold and meaningless to her as the stars.

Just then, magpies seemed to come out of nowhere and gathered over their heads in a cloud of fluttering wings. While they looked up, stunned, the flock swept out of the night sky, descended over them like a giant spider web, and lifted them into the heavens.

Riding on the wings of magpies, Yuan found, was not like riding a magical carpet.

Not that she knew what riding a magical carpet felt like—but she was sure that it didn’t involve being constantly poked from below by a hundred—no, a thousand—little winged fists.

The magpies would fall a bit below where they were and flap their wings rapidly in an upward burst until they collided with the girls’ bodies. The combined force of all the magpies would push them up until the birds lost their momentum and began to fall away, and then a new wave of upward-thrusting magpies would take their place. The girls resembled two ping-pong balls riding on the water spout from a hose pointing up.

In the maelstrom of wings they found each other and clung together.

“Are you all right?” They each asked at the same time.

“What in the world is happening?” Jing asked, her words jumbled together from fear and excitement.

“This is a dream,” Yuan said. “This must be a dream.”

And then Jing began to laugh.

“It can’t be a dream,” she said. “These magpies carrying us: they tickle!”

And Yuan laughed too. It was so absurd, so impossible; yet it was happening.

Some of the magpies began to sing, a complicated, trilling, lovely chorus. There were magpies of every description: some with white bellies, some with white beaks, some with iridescent, shimmering, blue wings. Yuan felt as if she and Jing were enclosed inside the beating heart of some giant, flying, alien musical instrument.

Arms around each other, gingerly sitting side by side, they peeked out at the world below from between the darting wings of the magpies.

They were floating in a dark sea. The lights of the city of Hefei spread out below them like a pulsing, receding jellyfish.

“It’s getting cold,” said Yuan. She shivered as the wind whipped her hair around her face.

“We’re really high up,” said Jing. She took off her summer jacket and draped it around Yuan’s shoulders. Yuan tucked her nose into the collar of the jacket and breathed in the lingering perfume. It warmed her heart even if the thin fabric did little against the chill.

Then Yuan berated herself. Jing had broken up with her, and she didn’t need to look so needy, so pathetic. It was fine to cling to Jing in a moment of weakness, but now they were safe. Gently, she took her arm from around Jing and shrugged out of her arm as well. She lifted her face into the clear, frosty air, and tried to shift away from Jing, keeping some distance between them.

“Reminds you of Su Shi’s poem, doesn’t it?” Jing whispered. Yuan nodded reluctantly. Jing was the literary one, and she always knew the pretty words, suitable for every occasion.

A half moon, like a half-veiled smile, loomed pale white in the dark sky. It grew brighter and larger as they rose on the backs of the magpies.

Jing began to sing the words of the Song Dynasty poem, set to a popular tune, and after a moment, Yuan joined her:

When did the Moon first appear?

I ask the heavens and lift my wine cup.

I know not whether time passes the same way

In the palace among the clouds.

I’d like to ride up with the wind,

But I’m afraid of the chill from being so high

Among the jade porticos and nephrite beams.

We dance with our shadows.

Are we even on earth any more?

The silver light dapples the window,

Illuminating my sleepless night.

Do you hate us, Moon?

Why are you always waxing just when we’re parting?

Like a dancer and her shadow, the two girls swayed, each separately, to a harmony as young as themselves and as old as the land beneath.

“So, it’s all true,” said Jing.

The magpies had lifted them above the clouds and leveled off. As they glided over the cottony mists, they could see a celestial city of bread loaf-like buildings, punctuated by spiky towers here and there, gleaming in the late summer moonlight in the distance: blue as ice, green as jade, white like ivory. The styles of the buildings were neither Western nor Chinese, but something that transcended them all: heavenly, the Palace of Immortals.

“I wonder if there really are immortals living there,” said Yuan. What she didn’t say out loud was her secret hope: she and Jing had been picked by the magpies for this trip to the heavens because the immortals thought they were as special a pair as Niulang and Zhinü—the thought was tinged with both excitement and sorrow.

And then they were at the Silver River. It was broader than the Yangtze, almost like Taihu Lake, with the other shore barely visible on the horizon. The rushing torrent roared past like stampeding horses, and giant waves as tall as the apartment buildings in Hefei pounded against the shore.

“Hey, don’t carry us over the water!” Jing shouted. But the magpies ignored her and continued to fly towards the river.

“They’re building a bridge,” said Yuan. “It’s Qixi, remember?”

Indeed, more flocks of magpies appeared. Along with the flock carrying the girls, they congregated like rivulets coalescing into a mighty river of wings. The magpies hovered over the water, with newcomers extending the flock’s reach towards the other shore. They were forming an arching bridge over the Silver River.

“I have to take a picture of this,” said Yuan, and she took out her cell phone.

The crystal cat charm dangling from the phone caught the light of the moon and dazzled. The magpies immediately surrounding Yuan trilled and dashed at it, knocking the phone out of her hand. And then it was a free for all as more of the magpies forgot about building the bridge and rushed after the shiny bauble. Even when charged with a magical mission, birds were still just birds.

Or maybe even the birds have realized we’re not such a special pair after all, Yuan thought, and the charm is more interesting.

She gazed after her phone anxiously. If Se woke up from a nightmare, she might try to call her. And if her mom got home before her, she might wonder where she was. She needed that phone back. She hoped the birds would bounce the phone closer to her so she could snatch it.

Then those worries were pushed out of her mind as the magpies that had supported Yuan dropped off to join the chase after the charm, and no new magpies replaced them. Her weight overwhelmed the few magpies that remained on task, and she began to fall. She didn’t even have time to cry out.

But then a strong hand caught her right wrist and arrested her descent. Yuan looked up into Jing’s face. She was lying down on the bridge of magpies, and she strained as she reached out and held onto Yuan with one hand while fumbling in her purse with the other.

“Let go!” shouted Yuan. “You’ll fall, too!” Her world seemed to shrink down to her hands as they clasped around Jing’s hand, around her warm, pale skin. She willed herself to let go, but she could not.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jing, panting.

The magpies continued to fight each other for the shiny charm, causing Yuan’s phone to bob up and down over the flock like a stone skipping over water. They had stopped extending the living bridge over the water.

Jing finally managed to free her own phone from her purse. She paid no attention as her purse almost tumbled over the side of the bridge, where it would have disappeared into the roiling waves below. By feel, she pressed the first button on the dial pad.

Yuan’s phone came to life and began to vibrate and buzz. The shocked magpies backed off in a panic, and the phone stayed still in the air for a second before falling, faster and faster, and finally disappeared into the Silver River without a trace.

Yuan felt her heart sink. That cat charm, the first gift Jing had ever given her, now gone forever.

“Good thing I have you on speed dial,” Jing said.

“How do we still have reception here?”

“After all that, that’s what you are worried about?” Jing laughed, and after a moment, Yuan joined her.

The magpies seemed to have awakened from a bad dream, and they rushed over and lifted Yuan up onto the bridge. Once the girls were safe, the magpies continued to extend their bridge to the other side of the Silver River, leaving the pair at the middle of the bridge, suspended over the endless water and mist.

“We almost caused the magpies to fail to build the bridge,” Yuan said. “It would be so sad if Niulang and Zhinü don’t get to meet this year.”

Jing nodded. “It’s almost midnight.” She saw the look on Yuan’s face. “Don’t worry about not being home. Nothing bad can happen on the night of Qixi.”

“I thought you weren’t into Qixi.”

“Well, maybe just a little bit.”

They sat down on the bridge together, watching the moon rise over the Silver River. This time, Yuan did not let go of Jing’s hand.

“She’s coming,” said Yuan. She jumped up and pointed down the bridge towards the eastern shore. Now that she had spent some time on the bridge of magpies, she was getting pretty good at keeping her footing over the fluttering wings.

In the distance, through the mist that wafted over the bridge from time to time, they could see a small, solitary figure making its way towards them.

“So is he,” said Jing. She pointed the other way. Through the mist they could see another tiny figure slowly creep towards them.

The girls stood up and waited, side by side, looking first one way and then the other. Being in the presence of the annual reunion of this pair of legendary lovers was exciting, maybe even better than meeting TV stars.

The two figures from the opposite ends of the bridge came close enough for Yuan and Jing to see them clearly.

Out of the east, an old woman approached. Yuan thought she looked as old as, maybe even older than, her grandmother. Her back bent, she walked with a cane. But her wrinkled face glowed healthily with the exertion of having traveled all the way here. Wearing a Tang Dynasty dress, she looked splendid to Yuan. Her breath puffed out visibly in the cold air.

Out of the west, an old man emerged from the mist: straight back, long legs, wiry arms swinging freely. His full head of silvery white hair matched the old woman’s, but his face was even more wrinkled than hers. As soon as he saw the old woman, his eyes lit up in a bright smile.

“They’re not—” Jing started to say in a whisper.

“—quite what we expected?” finished Yuan.

“I guess I always pictured immortals as being … well, I guess there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t grow old.”

A wispy tendril of sorrow brushed across Yuan’s heart. She tried to imagine Jing as an old woman, and the tenderness made her almost tear up again. She squeezed Jing’s hand, and Jing squeezed back, turning to smile at her.

The old man and the old woman met in the middle of the bridge, a few paces away from where the girls stood. They nodded at Jing and Yuan politely and then turned their full attention to each other.

“Glad to see you looking so well,” said Zhinü. “Da Lang told me that you were having some trouble with your back the last time he visited with his family. I wasn’t sure you were going to make it here this year.”

“Da Lang always exaggerates,” said Niulang. “When he visits I don’t dare to sneeze or cough, lest he insist that I go to the moon to visit Chang’E for some Osmanthus herbs. This old bag of bones can’t really take any more medicine. I think he’s more upset than you or I that his brother didn’t want to be a doctor.”

They laughed and chatted on, talking about children and friends.

“Why don’t they kiss?” Jing whispered to Yuan.

“That’s a Western thing,” Yuan whispered back. “Niulang and Zhinü are old school.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve seen Internet posts arguing people in ancient China used to kiss—but anyway, they’re standing so far apart!”

“It’s like they’re friends, not lovers.”

“It seems that we have some curious guests,” said Zhinü as she turned around to look at the girls. She didn’t sound angry—more like amused.

“We’re sorry,” said Yuan, feeling her face grow hot. “We didn’t mean to be rude.” She hesitated. It didn’t seem right at all to call this old woman “Big Sister Seven.” So she added, “Grandma Zhinü and Grandpa Niulang.”

“We just thought,” Jing said, “that … um … you’d be more … passionate.”

“You mean less laughing, and more tears and recitation of love poems,” said Niulang, a gentle smile in his eyes.

“Yes,” said Jing. “No,” said Yuan, simultaneously.

Zhinü and Niulang laughed out loud. Niulang said, “It’s okay. The magpies have been building this bridge for thousands of years, and they sometimes bring guests. We’re used to questions.”

Zhinü looked from Yuan to Jing and back again. “You two are together?”

“Yes,” said Jing. “No,” said Yuan, simultaneously. They looked at each other, embarrassed.

“Now that sounds like a story,” said Zhinü.

“We were together,” said Yuan.

“But I’m leaving,” said Jing. “We’ll be parted by the Pacific Ocean.” And they told their story to Niulang and Zhinü. It seemed perfectly right to pour their hearts out to the legendary lovers.

“I understand,” said Zhinü, nodding sympathetically. “Oh, do I understand.”

At first I was inconsolable. I stood on the shore of the Silver River day after day, pining for a glance of my husband and children. I thought the pain in my heart would never go away. I refused to touch my loom. If my grandfather was angry, then let him find someone else to weave the sunsets. I was done.

The first time we met over the bridge of magpies, Niulang and I could not stop crying the whole time. My children were growing up so fast, and I felt so guilty. So, when we had to part again, Niulang came up with a stratagem: he asked the magpies to retrieve two large rocks that were about the weight of my babies and carried them home in two baskets on the ends of a pole over his shoulder, the same way he had carried the boys onto the bridge. And everyone thought they had gone home with him. But unbeknownst to anyone else, I carried the boys home with me on my back.

And after that, every year, as we met on the bridge, we passed the boys back and forth. They’d spend one year with me, one year with Niulang. They would not have their parents together, but they would have both of them.

Each time we met, I told him again and again of the solitude of my hut, the desultory squeak of my loom. And he told me of how he took his herd to the same pastures that we had gone to as a family, to relive the happiness we shared. The grass had grown thin and bare from overgrazing, and his animals were just skin and bones.

And then, one year, when the boys were a little older and could walk on their own, Niulang held me and told me that he didn’t want to see me sad any more.

“We live a whole year for this one day,” he said. “We’re letting our lives pass us by. It’s not right that you should sit by your loom pining from morning ‘til evening. It’s not right that our sons should think our lives are lives of sorrow. It’s not right that we should come to believe that yearning for what we can’t have is what love is all about.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. I was angry, and I didn’t know why. Was he saying that he no longer loved me? I had been faithful to him, but had he been to me?

“We know we cannot be together,” he said. “We know that sometimes things happen to people that keeps them apart. But we have refused to look for new happiness. Are we sad because we’re in love? Or are we sad because we feel trapped by the idea of love?”

I thought about what he said, and realized that he was right. I had become so used to the story about us, the idea of us living our whole lives for this once-a-year meeting, that I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted. I had become my own legend. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.

“You’re beautiful when you laugh,” he said.

“We’re beautiful when we seek to make ourselves happy,” I said.

And so I went back to my loom and poured my love for Niulang into my weaving. I thought those were some of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever woven.

And then I found that love was not a limited thing, but an endless fount. I found that I loved the laughter of my children, and the chatter of friends new and old. I found that I loved the fresh breeze that brought smells from far away. I found that other young men made my heart beat faster.

And Niulang went and took his herd to new pastures, and he came up with new songs. Young women came and listened to him, and he found that conversation with them gladdened his heart.

We told each other these things the next time we met over the bridge. I was glad for him and he for me. We had been clinging to each other as though we were afraid to drown, but in fact, we had been holding each other back from moving on.

“And so we each went on and had other loves, joys as well as sorrows,” said Zhinü.

“We still meet once a year,” said Niulang, “to catch up on each other’s lives. Old friends are hard to come by.” He and Zhinü looked at each other with affection. “They keep you honest.”

“Are you disappointed?” asked Zhinü.

Jing and Yuan looked at each other. “Yes,” they said together. Then they said “no,” also together.

“Then, are you not in love anymore?” asked Yuan.

“You ask that question because you think if we’re no longer in love, then that means the love we had was somehow not real.” Zhinü turned serious. “But the past does not get rewritten. Niulang was the first man I loved, and that would be true no matter how many times I fell in love after him.”

“It’s time to go,” Niulang said. The magpies under them were getting restless. The eastern sky was brightening.

“You were together, and you’re together now,” said Niulang to the girls. “Whatever comes, that remains a fact.”

“You look lovely together, dears,” said Zhinü.

Niulang and Zhinü embraced lightly and wished each other well. Then they turned and began to walk in opposite directions.

“Look!” said Jing, and gripped Yuan’s hand.

Where the old Niulang and Zhinü had been, there was now a pair of ghostly figures: a young man and a young woman. They embraced tightly, as if Yuan and Jing were not there at all.

“They were such a handsome couple,” said Yuan.

“They still are,” said Jing.

And as the bridge of magpies broke up, carrying the girls down to earth, they looked back at the pair of ghost lovers dissolving gradually in the moonlight.

Miraculously, Yuan found her bike where she’d left it.

The sidewalks were still relatively empty. The first breakfast shops were just getting ready for the day, and the smell of warm soy milk and freshly fried youtiao filled the air.

“Better rush home,” said Yuan. “Don’t miss your flight.”

“And you need to go, too. Your mom will be worried sick!”

Jing pulled her in, wrapping her arms around her. Yuan tried to pull back. “People will see.”

“I don’t care,” Jing said. “I lied that day at Emerald Lake. I told you I had kissed other girls before. But you were the first. I want you to know that.”

They held each other and cried, and some of the passers-by gave them curious looks, but no one stopped.

“I’ll call you every day,” Jing said. “I’ll text you whenever I get a chance.”

Yuan pulled back. “No. I don’t want you to think of it as a chore. Do it if you want to. And if you don’t, I’ll understand. Let whatever will happen, happen.”

A quick kiss, and Yuan pushed Jing away. “Go, go!”

She watched as Jing ran down the street to catch the bus. She watched as the bus pulled into the stream of traffic, a mighty river of steel like the Silver River, and disappeared around the corner.

“I love you,” Yuan whispered. And no matter how the stream of time flowed on, that moment would be true forever.

END

“Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon” was originally published in Kaleidoscope, published by Twelfth Planet Press, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios in 2014.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on September 22nd.

[Music plays out]

Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon

By Ken Liu

“Tell me a story,” said Se. She had changed into her pajamas all by herself and snuggled under the blankets.

Se’s big sister, Yuan, was just about to flip the switch next to the bedroom door. “How about you read a story by yourself? I have to … go see a friend.”

“No, it’s not the same.” Se shook her head vigorously. “You have to tell me a story or I can’t sleep.”

Yuan glanced at her phone. Every minute tonight was precious. Dad was out of town on business, and Mom was working late and wouldn’t be home till midnight. Yuan needed to be home before then, but if she could get her little sister to sleep quickly, she’d still have a couple of hours to see Jing on this, her last night in China.

Full transcript appears after the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 15 for September 15th, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is "Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon" by Ken Liu.

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.

Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

We also

All That Fairy Tale Crap

by Rachel Swirsky

I was supposed to go to the ball, but I spent the night licking out my stepsister instead.

Bethesda moaned and rustled mulberry silk high up her thighs. “There, there, no, faster, come on, faster, please…”

The friendly mice put out their eyes and ran out in trios to join a different fairy tale.

Never marry a prince when you can eat a pussy.

Never ride a pumpkin when you can steal cab fare.

Never wear a ball gown when you can slink in snakeskin pants.

Never listen to a fairy godmother.

Full transcript appears after the cut.

[Intro music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 14 for September 8th, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is "All That Fairy Tale Crap" by Rachel Swirsky.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award, and twice won the Nebula Award. She's always been obsessed with fairy tales, from Shelley Duval's Fairy Tale Theatre through Datlow and Windling's anthologies of retellings.

All That Fairy Tale Crap

by Rachel Swirsky

I was supposed to go to the ball, but I spent the night licking out my stepsister instead.

Bethesda moaned and rustled mulberry silk high up her thighs. “There, there, no, faster, come on, faster, please…”

The friendly mice put out their eyes and ran out in trios to join a different fairy tale.

Never marry a prince when you can eat a pussy.

Never ride a pumpkin when you can steal cab fare.

Never wear a ball gown when you can slink in snakeskin pants.

Never listen to a fairy godmother.

Bethesda and I went clubbing. Everyone gave her the oddball eye for wearing ruffled silk with fucking puffy sleeves. I laughed back at all of them.

I seduced some refugee from the eighties who had a rainbow mohawk. Bethesda glared at us and bought herself two shots of tequila, one of which she threw in my face.

Well, what do you expect from an ugly girl?

I danced until the eighties mohawk guy got tired and went home, and then I danced until the bartender tried to close everyone out, and then I danced more until it was sunrise, and the bartender still hadn’t managed to get away because I was dancing with him, our eyes locked across the room, him swaying like a hypnotized snake to the flute of my body.

Outside, it was pink and gray over endless city. I chose a street at random.

“Eat my body,” said a house that belonged to a witch.

“Look at me,” said a mirror with a voice.

“Do you want some boots?” asked a man exchanging new shoes for old.

I pulled off my heels and traded them in for knee–high go–gos.

“You look very intelligent,” said the man. “I bet you could scam an ogre.”

I grinned and gave him a dollar I’d stolen off the bartender.

The heroes of fairy tales are straight. And skinny, too, so they’re straight and narrow.

People think this is because of heterosexism and beauty standards. It isn’t. Snow White takes a cock in her scrawny cunt because she can’t imagine how to be twisty.

You start out with three tools. You’re pretty. You have small feet. And you can do housework.

Now become a princess.

Go on. Laugh. Shatter glass class ceilings? Yeah, right. There’s a reason they call it the American dream. It ain’t gonna happen while you’re awake.

I find a hotel all lit up neon even though it’s half past five a.m. Slip inside because why not? A place still partying through dawn’s likely to have someone in it who’ll try to pick you up by buying breakfast and staring at your tits.

Inside, it’s all tattered chiffon streamers and tumbled confetti glitzing up the rug. Martini glasses are scattered on ottomans, couches, in the pots of fake rubber tree plants, half of them smashed to shiny bits.

And there: the prince. What the hell? Thought he was throwing a ball not a prom. But you can tell he’s the prince on account of the epaulettes. He’s tongue–spelunking down some girl’s throat. Grope, slip, grope, they change angle, and shit — that girl’s face! Sharp and blunt in all the wrong angles. Hell if it’s not my other stepsister, Griselda.

Suddenly, the prince’s hangover pall goes from jaundice to chartreuse. His abdomen clenches. Then comes the retching. Griselda can’t jump back fast enough. He spews puce chunks of half–digested pâté all down her mint green frills.

She shoves him off — “Fuck! You got some in my mouth!”

But he can’t hear because he’s slammed on the floor, passed out like a pine board.

Griselda gives me the stink–eye when I go over to help which I can’t blame since I’m the one who just last night threw her over for her sister. But when I turn over His Blotto Majesty so I can rifle through his pockets, one of his epaulettes falls off, and underneath there’s a label for a costume shop on 44th.

“Fuck!” Griselda shouts. “A fucking fake!”

Her rant zooms off and I’d kiss her to shut her up except for the vomit.

“You’re uglier when you’re angry,” I say.

“Bitch. Where’s my sister?”

“Jealous snit. Stormed off.”

“You’re an entitled little slut, Cinderella.”

“You want this guy’s wallet or not?”

Griselda sets her mouth in an ugly snarl. Hard to describe the kind of ugly she and Bethesda’ve got. Everything in the right place, technically, but goes together nine kinds of wrong.

She stays all frozen grimace — can’t say no, won’t admit yes — till I take mercy and throw his billfold at her. He brought enough to play prince for another couple hours. Won’t set her up for life, but it’s not nothing. She glares at me as she rifles bills with her thumb.

“You’re still a bitch, Cinderella,” she says, but her bark is out of bite.

There’s this thing happens when you’re growing up, narrative an anvil on your shoulders, when you know you’re supposed to pull yourself up by the bootstraps of your Lucite stripper heels. And that thing is: you cease to give a fuck.

Worse when everyone and her hairy–legged sister’s busy telling you what it is you mean. Smashing you with a hammer and turning the bits into symbols, grabbing a ballpoint and writing you into a hundred ink–stained girls in diamond ball gowns screaming bra–burning opposition to becoming passive, powerless, pampered princesses.

And what’s wrong with pampering? Sounds good to me. Better than wearing the daily jewels of five–fingered bruises bestowed by the cunt who calls herself mother. Better than inhaling bleach and ammonia every morning while you’re on your hands and knees scrubbing other people’s muck.

Better than the taste of coal, the real taste of it, when the char’s gone deep in your tongue, scorched every bud, turned all that supposed–to–be–pink into scalding black. After that, there’s nothing doesn’t taste of burning.

I tell you: when the whole world is charcoal, you take whatever bullshit they’re serving because even shit sandwiches are better than fire.

Deeper in the lobby, there’s a she–bear sitting on a loveseat. You can tell it’s a she–bear because she’s wearing a ruffled apron.

Beside her, there’s a passed out girl. Like last night’s champagne, she’s gone flat. Tongue lolls; limbs sprawl; hope she had a ball ’cuz today’s gonna be a long–ass haul.

She–bear opens her paw. Inside, there’s a tiny tea cup — on second thought, not tiny; her paw’s just enormous. Silver tray on the ottoman in front of her, bone–delicate porcelain tea service painted with pastel roses. She raises the cup to her snout and, I swear, her fucking pinky claw is raised.

“What are you at the ball for?” I ask. “You someone’s dancing bear?”

I shove the flat–champagne girl onto the floor and take her place. Girl grunt–snores as she tumbles onto the rug, golden ringlets flipping over her face.

She–bear rumbles disapprovingly at my incivility but won’t be rude in return. Gestures with her free paw to the other cups on the tray.

There are three. Obviously.

I grab the hot one and pour it down my throat. Hiss of steam as it hits my lips. Saliva boils. Flame sears down my gullet.

Like anything’s so hot I can’t take it.

I open my mouth so she can see the skin bubbling on my tongue. “Juuuuuust right.”

Her nose twitches with amusement. She sets down her just–so cup and grabs the oh–so–cold one. One long swallow and when she opens her mouth again, icicles glisten on her fangs. Her frozen exhalation blasts my face like frostbite.

“All right,” I say. “I grant you. That was mucho macho.”

She runs her tongue across her fangs to lick off the ice, regards me with an impatient what–do–you–wantstare.

“It’s paper–thin. That’s what gets me. It’s always paper–thin. Was to start with. Well, I guess it was voice–thin then. Oral–tradition–thin. There you are, you’re an archetype, and you get to marry a prince who doesn’t even have a name, and does either of you exist at all? Or are you just epaulettes and glass slippers? Not even good costumes. Oh, what the hell do you know anyway? You’re a bear who doesn’t even have to shit in the woods.”

Her teacup slams against the tray. Reverberation sends the dishes crashing into each other. I startle–leap back, but much as I want to, I can’t run; I’m transfixed by the smoldering black glare. Her maw gapes open. This time, I’m not fooled by the flowers and ruffles. Those fangs can bite down on cucumber sandwiches, sure, but they can also tear out a moose’s throat, seize a salmon straight out of the river.

Glass rings as her growl crescendos.

She says, “You shouldn’t make assumptions.”

I shiver. “I didn’t know you could speak.”

“Let me give you some advice.” She leans closer, snout foreshortened in my vision, breath a humid mix of rotten meat and blueberry scones. “Female to female. From someone who’s been in the world longer than you have. Who’s borne a cub and met a thief and slept howling winters into spring.”

I rub the goosebumps on my forearms. Her ursine stare is all crags and glaciers and white water rapids.

Along the back of my neck, where the hairs are raised, I feel a sting — not just of fear, but of hope. Maybe she has the answers to questions I don’t even know how to ask.

Levelly, she stares at me. “You look stupid in go–go boots.”

Here’s the thing:

You can’t win.

You can’t win if you’re a princess. You can’t win if you rescue the prince. You can’t win if you cross–dress and become the royal huntsman. And heaven forbid you try to slip into another fairy tale by pricking yourself with a spindle — in the real world, the only thing a spindly prick gets you is up the duff.

No one else is doing better. The mice always wondering if they’re supposed to walk on two legs. The prince so vapid he can only recognize the chick he’s fallen in love with by her shoe size. Your poor, ugly stepsisters who half the time are hobbling on chopped–up feet.

Animators can come in with fake smiles and truckloads of bleach and Zip–a–Zee–Do–Dah away the blood and eye–pecking birds. Post–modern lit grads in ironic t–shirts can tear you up and stitch you into Frankenstein’s femme fatale.

Still there are a thousand girls resting their heads on fireplace stones. Still a thousand streaked with ash and spit.

Still a million going to sleep each night with the knowledge that no one gives a fuck whether or not they wake up.

Little cinder girls, we’re raised in fire.

Either you melt and become the simpering thing you’re supposed to.

Or else you temper into something calloused and unbreakable.

Ditched the hotel to search for Griselda. Was hoping I could wheedle a cut of the cash, but before I can chase her down, someone’s grabbing my arm and dragging me down the sidewalk, and she–bear is right, I am stupid to be wearing go–go boots because if I’d chosen something else — something with steel toes maybe — I could kick this fucker in the shins and get away.

Instead, I’m shoved into a swarm of people. My assailant shouts, “What about this one?”

More people grab my arms. There are women in black sheath dresses and pink pearls, and men in ponchos and eyeliner, all talking rapidly over each other. “Could be the one! Could be her! She could work!” Hands push me down onto one of those folding chairs people take camping, and there’s some guy at my feet —

Oh, look. Epaulettes again.

Gently, he tugs on my left go–go boot. Leather slips down my calf. His tongue brushes the side of his mouth as he pulls, slow–as–slow. He pants, quick and shallow. Saliva pools in the corner of his mouth. His lids lower with creepy–ass pleasure as my heel pops free. He reveals my arch and then my toes. His index finger traces my sole. “Mmmmmm.”

Whole crowd’s eyes on my bare foot. The prince’s eyes. The eyeliner–and–pearls attendants’ eyes. The eyes of the encircling ranks of morning commuters in business casual who cinch in closer so they can get a better ogle.

The prince passes off the go–go boot, and holds out his hand, impatiently. Sheath–dresses and ponchos confer. “Blue doeskin?” suggests one.

“Blue doeskin!” shout the others. “Blue doeskin!”

A ponchoed ponce presents a shoebox. Sweeps off the lid with a flourish. “Blue doeskin!”

Prince lifts out a four–inch sling–back heel. “Doeskin. Mmm.”

He leans forward to slide the shoe onto my foot. I surprise him with a kick to the stomach.

He doubles over. The pearls–and–eyeliner people flutter their hands in alarm. “Five–bow wedges?” “Studded cowboy boots?” “Gladiator sandals?”

I lurch to standing, awkward with one foot bare and the other go–go heeled, and grab Prince Droolface by the collar. “I always figured a fucker that obsessed with shoe size had to be a fetishist. Look, fine by me, okay? You want me to wear stilettos and walk your spine like a runway? Skippy. But first you tell me what you’re offering in exchange.”

He sputters. I grab one of his epaulettes.

Patty’s Party World. ’Nother fucking fake.

It’s all so clear the day before you’re supposed to go to the ball.

Walk away and they can’t make a real Cinderella out of you.

But once you’ve washed the taste of your stepsister’s pussy out of your mouth with a tequila shot… What then?

Now you’re hungover, and your eyes are bloodshot, and you haven’t slept in thirty–six hours — and still, everything you do is heading toward some kind of meaning.

All you wanted to do was run off so you could say, “Her? That’s not me. I’m someone different.”

But Cinderella’s still the center. Everything you do is bound to what she did. You’re her marginalia. You’re the commentary on her body of work.

Everything you do is going to be read in relation to her. You can’t ever really be your own.

I’m still running — well, hobbling, given the one–shoe thing — away from Creepy–Ass McFootFetishist when suddenly I spot Griselda. She’s sitting on the curb, taking coins out of the wallet once possessed by Faux Prince #1, and flipping them one by one into the gutter. They make a lonely ringing sound as they clang into the sewers.

I pause, wondering if I should set myself up with a catcher’s mitt — because wasting cash? What? — when shifting clouds change the light, and my shadow tumbles over Griselda.

She looks up. Tears streak her ugly face.

“Oh,” she says, looking sadly back toward the gutter. “You.”

“Uh. Hi.”

A big coin that looks like it might be a Susie B. clamors its way down.

“Could you stop that?” I say.

Her face snarls up. She pulls out a fistful of change and it looks like she’s going to throw it all in the gutter at once, but then she turns and hurls it in my face.

“Take it then!” she shouts.

“Um,” I say.

I can’t help glancing at the passersby who are now giving the crazy chicks wide berth. For dignity’s sake, I probably shouldn’t bend ass to collect a few dollars in change, but I pull off my second go–go anyway and start scooping quarters into it.

Griselda grunts disgustedly. “He wasn’t even a real prince. I let him feel me up and everything. And he wasn’t even a real prince.”

She bares her teeth.

“Should have known,” she says. “Thought maybe I could get some royal nookie even if you got the veil. But no. With you around, everything’s fake.”

She throws the wallet smack at my chest. It hits me then bounces to the ground. I bend down to get it. When I stand back up, she’s gone.

You’re an astute reader. So let’s cut the bullshit. You’ve read enough metafiction to think you know where I’m going. And you probably do know because basically what I’ve been saying this whole time is that everything that happens from here is going to fall into one category of commentary or another.

You’ve probably become aware that I’m not exactly Cinderella. I’m not bricked up behind the fourth wall, but I’m not driving the bulldozer either… I’m going to go with the charitable angle and call my identity complex. But I won’t argue if you want to call it confused, ill–defined, or pretentious bullshit.

For the purposes of this story, you may consider me to be any one of the following, or any combination thereof. Feel free to switch up at any time.

• Cinderella

• The metafictional compilation of Cinderellas

• A prop for anachronistic jokes

• A stand–in for the author

• The pissed off ghost of the chick who told her story to some asshats named Grimm

• A caterpillar with sixteen feet wearing sixteen glass slippers, dreaming of smashing its cocoon and metamorphosing into the black hole that will devour the universe

Not sure if wandering the streets is such a good idea given my luck so far, but I keep pounding the pavement anyway, walking barefoot, with the wallet in one hand and the coin–filled go–go boot in the other.

Come upon a dried–up patch of grass trying to pass as a park. Asleep on a bench, there’s Bethesda. Mulberry skirt torn into a mini that makes her legs look uglier than usual.

“Hey,” I say, looming.

She wakes up. Her breath smells like the bear’s but without the trace of sweet. “Shit.” She rubs her eyes to get a bleary look at me. “I should slap you.”

“Yeah. But you won’t.”

“Nah,” she agrees.

That’s the central difference between Bethesda and Griselda. Piss off Griz and she’ll punch a motherfucker. Beth runs hot for an hour or two but can’t keep grudging.

She presses her hand against her head and moans. “The fuck did you let me drink so much?”

“I’m not your mother.”

“Fuck my mother. Where’s Griz?”

“Sulking because she made out with some dude who wasn’t a prince.”

“Fuck her too, then. But not like I fucked you.”

“Speaking of,” I say, “That’s over. No offense. Was just a one–time kind of thing.”

“Figured. After mohawk guy.” She shrugs. It turns into a full–out stretch. “So what the hell’re you going to do now?”

“Been thinking about that.”

“And?”

“Not coming up with much.”

“What happened to your shoes?”

“Sold ’em for some boots.” I lift my change purse cum go–go. “Then lost one.”

“So you’re a streetwalker who can’t even keep her heels on.”

“And you’re a recently dumped, hungover ugly chick wearing a ball gown miniskirt.”

“So you done yet?” she asks. “This all weird enough for you finally?”

“Hell no…”

Cuz it’s not, is it? Not twisty. Not really.

Even if I could somehow break us out of this place where we started… chew us free from the bear trap of our story… go someplace no had ever heard of glass slippers and running away at the stroke of midnight… how would we even recognize ourselves then?

I shift foot to foot. Sun’s making the asphalt hot. I’m regretting not having made off with the blue doeskin slingbacks.

“One idea,” I say. “We should go home.”

“So you can grab some shoes?”

“Yeah, but also, I bet if we toss the place, we can figure out where your mom keeps all her valuables before she even wakes up. Live hog–high for a week or three.”

Bethesda smirks. “Kick the figuring out what to do next thing down the road a while.”

“Correct–a–mundo.”

You know what? Never mind all that shit I said before. I’m none of those things.

Unless that was working for you. Then go for it. Far be it for me to tell you what to think.

But here — this is my theory. I’m not just Cinderella. Not just. Not metaphorically.

Take my situation — you could apply it all around.

Listen. We’re all trying to escape archetypes. I’m trying to be me, not just a girl who grew up with a mouthful of ashes. I don’t want to be someone that everyone thinks they already understand. Someone everyone wants a piece of.

Bet you’re trying to escape, too. Trying to be more than just mother, wife, daddy’s little girl, big sister, little sister, baby sis, granny, daft old biddy, crone, trophy wife, castrating bitch, conniving cunt, skank, vixen, hoebag, virgin, Madonna, sweetiepie. Trying to navigate the hairpin turns between bangled bikinis, apple–pie aprons, and power–bitch pantsuits.

I bet you manage it, too. Bet you’re an ice queen exec who bakes cookies on the weekends, or a demure little preacher’s daughter who takes it up the ass, or the marathon runner who’s going to smoke the world record that dudes think belong to them by right of chromosome Y.

Feel free to fill in the blanks with whatever it is you actually are.

But all that aside, at the end of the day, where do we stand? The archetypal feminine, the ur woman with a capital W, she’s this fire we can’t run from. She’s burning constantly, devouring bits of us, turning them into herself.

Here and there, we don’t burn up completely. But even our ashes are her creations.

We always exist in relation to her, no matter what we do.

So anyway, Bethesda and I head home.

We pass the dude trading new shoes for old, and I shout at him that his products are crappy. Bethesda makes faces in the magic mirror until it begs her to go away. We break off pieces of peppermint windowsill to eat for breakfast, and when the witch shouts at us, we flip her the bird and grab extra fistfuls of pop rocks from the driveway.

Last night’s bartender is still in the back alley, smoking a clove. In a flash of remorse for stealing his tips, I toss him the go–go full of change.

Outside a salon, we run into she–bear with ringlet–girl in tow. She–bear’s smirking. Blondie’s definitely too zonked out to choose her own haircut. Wonder if she’s due for a knee–length weave or a pixie cut.

At the coffee shop next door, the sheath–dressed women and men in ponchos are lined up for lattes. His Royal Foot Fetishist stands outside the door, licking the blue slingbacks.

“What the —” Bethesda begins.

“Don’t ask,” I say, guiding her quickly past.

Couple blocks later, we see a couple on the other side of the street, gropeslurp groping. Sure enough, they change angle, and there’s Griselda. This time, she’s making out with a drag queen in six–inch stilettos, a sequined slink of a dress, and epaulettes made from the shards of disco balls. Least she knows this one’s fake.

We tiptoe on past so we won’t disturb them.

Not too long later we reach home. Bethesda grabs her key out of her bra.

She toasts. “To home sweet home.”

“Cheers,” I agree. “Let’s rob a bitch.”

And we slap each other high five.

And some of you are saying, oh look, I know what this means, it ends with female–on–female violence which pigeonholes women as jealous backstabbers, and what the hell is with the unquestioning perpetuation of the evil stepmother stereotype

And some of you are saying, oh look, I know what this means, it’s a tale of female friendship because Cinderella and her sister are forging a bond through petty theft and how often do you see stories focusing on positive female–female relationships

And some of you are saying, oh look, a wimpy ending that refuses to say anything decisive, I could tell from the beginning this was going to be pretentious bullshit.

And some of you are wondering whether there was any point to the bear scene or whether the author just thinks bears drinking tea are funny.

And look, whatever, okay? You just go ahead and take whatever you’re thinking and go think about it on your own time. Because Bethesda’s searching the house, and I’m the lookout, and I really don’t need your noisy–ass ruminations waking up my stepmother before we’re finished.

OK, fine, I’ll tell you this one thing for sure. Right now, a thousand Cinderellas are going to steal back our childhood dignity in the form of an old lady’s life savings. And then we’re going to spend it on booze and clubbing and high–priced high heels.

And when we pass out drunk, we’re going to keep on dreaming of becoming that black hole that will swallow the universe.

END

“All That Fairy Tale Crap” was originally published in Glitter & Mayhem  in 2013 and was reprinted in Apex Magazine in December of that year.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on September 15th.

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