GlitterShip

Sooner Than Gold
By Cory Skerry

I tug on clean underwear in case I get arrested, paint my makeup perfectly because there's nothing sadder than a grown man in badly applied eyeliner, and climb out my apartment window, onto the fire escape.

I can't be late to this assignment, and if I go through the lobby, there's a strong chance the night doorman will have a thing or two to say about the video footage of our card game last night. I forgot there was a camera pointed at the lobby desk.

The asphalt below reeks of garbage and piss; about half of the latter is probably mine. Don't judge. If I'm drunk enough, there's not even any point in aiming for the toilet.

My boots land softly as I hit the ground, but the ladder clangs as my weight slides off. I look back up at the enchantment, where it strings out from my leg to the trunk in my apartment.

[Music plays]

Hello, Welcome to GlitterShip episode nine for June 4... ish... 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

I don't know what the weather is like where you are, but in Seattle it's gone from kinda-warm-May to high summer death heat— which probably doesn't really count as that hot for pretty much anyone else but ugh. I mean, we're talking like 85 degress Fahrenheit. So I know that yes, that does mean I'm a wimp, but that's really hot for me. And I'm probably doomed as I move over to New York at the end of August. So hopefully I don't just end up melting into a horrible puddle.

Anyway. Since our last episode a couple things have happened, at the beginning of the month, the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed Magazine is out. You can read the first two stories for free now, or buy the issue to read the whole thing right away. I think some of the content is going to remain ebook only but more of the stories will be made available for free as the month goes on.

The 27th annual Lambda Literary Awards have also been announced. The winner for LGBT science fiction / fantasy / horror is Chaz Brenchley for his short fiction collection Bitter Waters. The other nominees included Daryl Gregory for Afterparty, Lee Thomas for Butcher's Road,

Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass

by Penny Stirling

The seasick lover becomes a saltwater cistern

She built her first lover out of glass.

"I was often disappointed," she said as she showed her creation around her gallery, "that the things I make with such skill cannot admire my handiwork.  Now at last I have made something that can look on itself with wonder."  But, she had to admit, she liked it even better when the lover looked upon her with wonder.

Her lover's skin was glass, her lover's touch was soft.

The nights were fine since she was skilled enough at glassblowing to give her glass lover skill enough, but soon she began to dread the mornings.  More often than not when the sun had risen and they roused from their sleep, her lover would turn to her and say something like, "I dreamed the ocean bore down on me, rubbing and grinding me down until I was nothing but the finest fragments scattered all around the world."

A full transcript appears under the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode eight for May 28th, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is "Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass" by Penny Stirling.

Penny Stirling edits transcripts and embroiders pixel art when she's not writing the speculative. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in Lackington's, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit and Heiresses of Russ.

She also has work coming out in the next few months in Interfictions Online, Lackington's, and Liminality.

As a brief head's up: this story does involve descriptions of domestic abuse which may be upsetting to some listeners.

Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass

by Penny Stirling

The seasick lover becomes a saltwater cistern

She built her first lover out of glass.

"I was often disappointed," she said as she showed her creation around her gallery, "that the things I make with such skill cannot admire my handiwork.  Now at last I have made something that can look on itself with wonder."  But, she had to admit, she liked it even better when the lover looked upon her with wonder.

Her lover's skin was glass, her lover's touch was soft.

The nights were fine since she was skilled enough at glassblowing to give her glass lover skill enough, but soon she began to dread the mornings.  More often than not when the sun had risen and they roused from their sleep, her lover would turn to her and say something like, "I dreamed the ocean bore down on me, rubbing and grinding me down until I was nothing but the finest fragments scattered all around the world."

One morning the smith entered the kitchen to find her lover holding a mug to one of the ears she had so painstakingly carved and polished.  "I pretend it is a seashell," said the glass lover with a smile the smith had often seen while her lover was asleep.

When she realised she had only ever seen it so, she took the mug and dashed it upon the ground.  I can do the same to you, she did not say, but her lover was quiet that day and recoiled from her touch that night.  She never caught the lover listening to mug-echoes again, but suspected it still happened.

The lover’s voice was melodic, tuned exactly to A-minor.  The glass-smith began to hate it.  She offered her lover a tongue piercing and, though the lover's mistrust was as plain as the smith's intentions, after many days of coaxing the lover acceded to the accessory.

When the smith's fingers twitched and the chisel slipped the lover knew it was neither her skill nor her attention that had waned.  Ever unable to cry tears and now unable to voice contempt, the lover screamed and lunged at the smith, trying to tear out her flesh in reprisal.

But the glass-smith had skill enough to easily kill what she had ceased loving.  She shattered the glass lover’s limbs, filled the corpse's chest with seawater, and used it as a fish tank.

Metal deals welts

She had a friend who worked metal.  She beat her lovers into shape in the forge and then they would whip her into submission in her bedroom.

She offered the smith sterilised metal with which to adorn her flesh, but she was a lover of glass and thus preferred her skin smooth and unbroken.  She gifted her friend with glass beads and rods to sit beneath her skin after she promised that they would not be shattered under the caress of her lovers.

"Just because glass is fragile," said her friend, "doesn't mean it must break."

A pre-abused becomes post-rebelled

She built her second lover out of glass as well.  But she had been burned and she had learned.  There would be no room for home-longing or sand-lusting or sea-dreaming.  There would just be her and her glass lover.

The smith sourced factory-made sand so that her lover could remember nothing before her.  She used broken shards for her lover’s eyes so her lover could see nothing other than her.  She chipped at the whorls in her lover’s ears so her lover could only hear her voice's pitch.  She fused her lover’s ankles and knees rigid so her lover could not leave the basement.

But her glass lover still learned that they were not a glass lover loved, and the glass lover’s mouth could argue and despise as well as it could love, and the glass lover’s hands could scratch and slap as well as they could love.

She who had made the glass lover might not have loved but she could break as well as she could make.

The second glass lover housed freshwater fish.

Wood suffers wounds

She had a friend who shaped wood.  Ey carved and sanded eir own lovers and would then tell her of fire or warping or splinters.  In the end ey found lasting happiness with her help:  she crafted glass genitalia, orifices and fingers for eir lover to wield.  Without the constant anxiety of injury their relationship blossomed like the maple trees of the mostly-wooden lover's childhood did every spring.

As thanks ey carved a gumtree heart for her next lover.  The smith was polite but though glass appended had bettered her friend's life, dilution could not improve her own.

"For all its beauty and versatility, glass is too transparent and empty," said her friend.

The violet-stained becomes a lover disdained

Her third lover she also made from glass.  She didn’t have patience for a new craft.

Sometimes she said it was an accident.  Sometimes she said she was drunk.  Some other times she said she’d experimented, despite the glass lover never asking why.  This lover would neither speak of the ocean or emotional desires, nor ask for explanations of their purple body, for the smith had been clever this time and given the glass lover’s mouth only the option of pleasure.

Still, there were problems.

It was like trying to make love to someone with hypothermia.  Even if she warmed the glass lover over fire--or turned out the lights or put red and orange quilts on the bed--it still felt wrong, like a corpse gone to cold instead of glass blown to come.  She tried painting the glass lover a shade closer to life but the paint flecked off as they fucked and left too much mess.

"I can’t," she said as the glass lover stared.  It was dark; she could neither see her lover nor help but see her lover as bruised, bloated flesh rather than glass.

Her lover's skin was blight, her lover's touch was bilious.

"I have no more room for fish," she said, and sold the glass lover to a fetishist.

Clay gives copy

She had a friend who turned and pushed clay into all manner of household and handheld goods and fired and glazed them into works of art and tools of love.  They often exchanged vases, offered excuses to stay and watch each other create.

He helped the smith make an asymmetrical mess of a bowl on the pottery wheel.  While it sat in the kiln she helped him make moulds from his body and wheelchair with wax and quick-drying clay.  Carefully, slowly, she prised and slid them from skin and prostheses and wondered whether he did this for the clay reflections or the clay embrace.

"I think it's more fun together," said her friend.

Praise and compromise brings an apprentice's peace

She gained an apprentice when the woman who delivered her groceries did not return home.  "Please teach me your craft," she said and spoke of the wonderful works--conscious and inanimate both--she had heard of, the desire to heat and mould and blow she had cultivated, the services she could trade for the experience.  The smith heard the fervour but saw that while the woman spoke of glass and mastery, it was the smith and not her work that was observed and caressed.

Her skin was not glass, her touch was not cool.

But she was pleasant and crafty in her own appreciable ways.  In appraising this diversion from her despondency the glass-smith allowed reluctance to be overcome as she came and buckled under the woman's pressure and persuasiveness.  While the new apprentice attended to the smith in the bedroom she also proved attentive in the workshop, learning first the methods of fusing and slumping and then, as skill and pride and the smith's admiration grew, delight of the trade.

As well as her workshop and her bed, the apprentice filled the glass-smith's life with distractions from love and house with delicate glass fish modelled after her favourites in the aquaria.

Paper bears patience

She had a friend who folded paper and gave her bright decorations and lanterns every holiday.  He made his lover from thousands of sheets of paper.  Unlike most crafted lovers, his came to be in stages and was conscious even when only a head.  He added to his lover's body as his lover watched:  torso, arms and beyond.  The origami lover's body was fragile and often he had to re-attach some limb or digit.  Going outside or strenuous movement was forbidden, as was any physical expression of love beyond light, dry, touches.

Her friend commissioned sets of stained glass windows and glass songbirds to keep his lover entertained.  She offered to make cages too but he preferred to let them fly free around his home, alighting wherever and singing whenever, as long as they did not make a nest from his lover.

"Sometimes," said her friend, "you are a bit abusive and demanding."

One given free will to love becomes one finally given leave

She next made not another glass lover, but a glass being who could choose love.  The smith crafted every inch of the glass body as carefully as she had her previous lovers, but instead of the cruelties and frailties she had worked into them, this time she gave freedom and control.  She let the apprentice watch but not touch, and though she said the glass was no replacement, her apprentice saw how she touched it.

She finished the glass being while the apprentice slept.  It was difficult not to caress the glass skin she had spent so long perfecting.  She kept her distance and smiled.

"I made you," she said to the glass being, "but I will not make you do anything.  You are free to love or hate, to live or destroy yourself."

The glass being was free to speak as well but it was many days before the smith was answered.  Her fingers twitched and her smile glazed as silence lingered.   She kept patient distance from her creation and filtered her frustrations through the apprentice's ministrations.

But one morning finally:  "If you did not make me for a purpose then I am meaningless and may as well not exist, but if you did make me with a purpose then I am obliged and might never differentiate choice and duty," said the glass philosopher, and then said many things more.

All the smith had wanted to receive was consent and sweet nothings, but every day she was given metaphysical questions she couldn't answer and theoretical conditions she couldn't comprehend.  All she had wanted was a lover as keen as her apprentice and as sleek as her work, but every day she watched apprentice and philosopher talk near her fish tanks.  She wondered about the closeness she at first thought polite, what had been shared when her creation only listened.

Her creation's skin was glass.  It was not touched.

Every day the glass philosopher's musings became deeper and broader, the look in their eyes needier, the pitch of their voice and the curl of their hands full of more and more yearning and desire.  But their attention and demands lay not in lying with the glass-smith, neither in playing with her skin nor plying her with flattery.  The philosopher lived only for answers, loved only epiphanies.

The smith could not give what the philosopher needed and she would not receive what she wanted.  She could have taken many things from her creation, but the glass-smith chose to provide supplies, maps and directions to the nearest university.

That night the apprentice comforted her, as she had every night the philosopher had not, and the smith did not tell her she was no replacement.

Paint begs perfection

She had a friend who painted landscapes for the walls of the wealthy.  Their watercolour fields and lakes and sunset wharves brought them fame and took them further and further afield, clients funding their supplies and travel for them to bring them back a beautiful scene as if sliced from the world and fixed on a canvas.

Her friend relied upon her to cut glass sheets for their frames, perfect and clear to protect but not obscure the art.  After a time the smith had commissioned a large triptych of the nearby seaside to brighten her kitchen.  When her friend visited to install the art and thought her walls too bare there began the frequent deliveries of paintings--mostly small or unfinished pieces, practice for their grander works.

"Nothing that we say will make you happier or better," said her friend.  "You have to do that yourself."

A downgrade attempt begets tactile regard

She missed her apprentice more than she'd guessed she would, but she had grown used to the woman and poor assumptions both.  If the apprentice kept her word and if her family kept time she would return before the smith could complete a glass lover.  Yet the smith's lust would not rest while her apprentice was away so she crafted something less than a lover, thick and curled with carefully charted bumps and ridges.

Hours she poured into its construction.  Hours more she spent working over herself, hunched then stretched taut, rhythmic then mindless, expectant then harried.  She was too attuned to the apprentice's touch; stubborn desire could not usurp it.  Boredom was the only thing that peaked, wrists the only flesh exhausted.  Her screams were of frustration rather than from finishing.

But she was a glass-smith and she had mastered and outsmarted glass many times before.  She redesigned, no less carefully than before, as snugly fitting as before.  Her yearning was strong but her wrists were weak so she crafted something that was even less of a toy, something crooked and supporting.  It went where she aimed it, angled when she twitched.  Though still no true rival to a lover, it helped her convulse and conclude.

Afterwards she would lie, exhausted and content, with the glass of her tool slick and cooling against her skin, encircling wrist, holding fingers, resting on her stomach as she recovered.  At first she thought it the lack of company, but the simple touch of the glass across and around her flesh was as fulfilling as being filled or felt by her lovers.

Rope takes purpose

She had a friend who made temporary art from flesh and ropes.  Whenever in need of a new glass eye she would invite the smith over to strain against her cord, twist through the air and shudder atop certain knots.

Was this what it was like, the smith wondered, to be one of her glass lovers?  To look upon the one who has fashioned such art, to see the care in which she has been shaped, to realise the pleasure in her crafting, to trust her lover and moulder so completely?

"The difference is that you never once feel fear," said her friend.  "I never give you reason to flinch from my touch or mistrust my actions."

Haggled affection hides hungry infatuation

She watched her apprentice grow in glass-mastery and watched her glee when she writhed under her grasp.  The glass-smith found herself content if not happy, found for herself purpose if not keenness.  The nights when the apprentice fell asleep with a smile, the moments when they seemed to connect rather than coincide, the mornings when the glass-smith did not mind waiting for the apprentice to wake up and untie or roll off her:  they aroused in her something.

But her skin did not squeak, her touch did not thrill.

Whatever the woman's attempted taming kindled in the smith, it could not match the fire she felt whenever a glass lover or glass tool embraced her.  And though she taught everything she knew of glass and relented to the apprentice's appetite, she too learned and played with her own hunger.  The apprentice's confidence bloomed and commissions and business boomed; the glass-smith tried to pin down what she pined for.

She created restraints and gags, corsets and stockings, dildos and chastity belts, contoured supports and toys:  all from glass, all handed over to her apprentice so she could be fondled and handled.  The smith spoke of embracing submission and growing beyond crafted lovers to keep her happy and willing to indulge, but however much she might pretend it was her apprentice's controlling hands that thrilled, her apprentice's slow tongue and insistent fingers that slid her shaking and breathless to climax, she knew it was the glass that pressed and caressed between them.

Sometimes, increasingly, when her apprentice was out the smith would stretch out on undulating sheets of glass and feel it against her back, her elbows, her neck, her thighs.  She thought of love and regrets, and glass--always she thought about glass--and she more often sent the apprentice for errands and appointments.

Leather shares living

She had a friend who cured and cut leather then tied together the pieces with metal links and corded rope.  She made inhuman lovers piece-by-piece with phalli instead of limbs, lovers monstrous with tentacles fully automated, lovers abstract of nothing but breasts and toes, lovers fanciful with wings and harnesses.  She didn't make them for herself, but said she found delight in seeing others finally happy.

The smith made eleven glass goat eyes for one of her contracts and her friend offered to make a lover for her.  Leather could do what glass could not, leather would not break against her, leather absorbed instead of reflected.  The glass-smith declined.

"Glass is too rigid," said her friend.  "Don't restrict yourself.  Craft exactly who you want to do exactly what you want."

Dreams beyond lust become a passion beyond love

She kept her secret as long as she could.  As contentedness and respect was only so satisfying, her apprentice so alluring would only be so accommodating.  Bound by promised exchange she did not begrudge, the glass-smith did not confide that she wished to be confined and crafted.  Stifled by attraction stagnated, she told herself that only glass governed by her apprentice's will could suffice.  For a time, it helped.  For a while, her belief made it better.

She was a glass-smith, though, and glass had been her first and truest love.  After skill differences between the two had dwindled, was judged negligible, and the smith ran out of excuses, could no longer wait patient or fail to forget her longing no matter how pleasant or devoted the woman could be, she tasked her apprentice with helping her obtain a happiness less suppressed.  She had asked for so little, given so much.  Surely what she asked now was still so little, what she offered was still so much.

Her skin was ready, her touch was pensive.

They argued and bartered.  The smith spoke of oaths and compromises she had tired of, love that she was wearied of deferring.  This time it was the apprentice who conceded.

They started with the smith's legs.  The glass was hot but she had worked with fires hotter.  The glass was heavy but she had worn protective clothing heavier.  The glass was fragile and difficult and stiff but she had conquered practices tougher.

Her skin was agony and bliss, every new inch of it more intoxicating than any lover.  Her touch was distracting, torrid and almost delirious as the glass seared and ascended her body.

The smith could no longer craft herself when it came time for her right arm to be clad.  She trusted her apprentice.  The woman had failed to dissuade her from the glass and now she encased her in it.  Soon would come her shoulders, her neck, her head, her face.  She could scarcely breathe for impatience; she could scarcely breathe in for glass tight around her chest.

"I think I can hear the sea," she whispered as glass trickled into her ears.

Maps lead musing

She had a friend who made maps with paper and ink.  He showed the smith the coastlines of a far-off continent, the migration paths of well-tracked birds, the probable rings of sea-dragon nests and the detailed town plans that were his daily work.  She brought postcards as they arrived and together they plotted the glass philosopher's meandering journey.

Her apprentice commissioned a chart of her teacher's body, having painstakingly plotted every sensitive spot.  When they presented it to the smith she mulled over its shadings and symbols until finally she touched an area with dense contour lines and traced the raised ink.  The apprentice fondled one of her breasts, keeping time.

For her friend she made a glass globe with raised mountains and dyed terrain.  He gently spun it, letting the contours and engraving slide beneath his fingers, and spoke of all the maps he had copied but never created, the towns he could navigate but never visit.

"You will always live with regret," said her friend.

An apprentice's graduation proves tender

She broke her only lover out of glass.

There was too much.  She wasn't enough?  She had been everything.

"I can't, I can't," she cried and struck the glass she had helped prepare.

At first her teacher screamed to see skin cracking and flesh exposed.  With a bottle's whistle the lover of glass begged the smith to leave her so.  But though she loved her teacher and loved glass, she could not love her so.

This was too far.  She had tried so much--but not everything.  She had learned more than how to craft and love glass.

"You can't, you can't," she cried and attacked the woman she had failed to mould.

Her skin was cruel.

The glass lover screamed shrill, vulnerable even while shielding herself.  The smith cried still and struck wild and wailed and soon her lover started to shatter and bleed.  But what could break off one could take on the other and just as the smith tried to rid her lover of the extra skin, the lover struck back with shard-ridden arms.

Her touch was ruin.

Soon they lay entangled and exhausted, a single figure of flesh and blood and glass and breath and pain, pinned and embedded into one another.  One dragged and slid her arm along the other's body with cries and screeches, gasps and cuts.

"I love you," said the glass lover--lover glassed--and stroked her lover's cheek, grated glass coalescing glazed skin.

"I love you," said the glass-smith--glass smitten--and kissed her lover, hot lips rough with slivers against cold glass slick with blood.

No one filled them with fish.

END

“Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass” was originally published in Aurealis in 2013, and was reprinted in Heiresses of Russ 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 May 28th.

[Music plays out]

Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass

by Penny Stirling

The seasick lover becomes a saltwater cistern

She built her first lover out of glass.

"I was often disappointed," she said as she showed her creation around her gallery, "that the things I make with such skill cannot admire my handiwork.  Now at last I have made something that can look on itself with wonder."  But, she had to admit, she liked it even better when the lover looked upon her with wonder.

Her lover's skin was glass, her lover's touch was soft.

The nights were fine since she was skilled enough at glassblowing to give her glass lover skill enough, but soon she began to dread the mornings.  More often than not when the sun had risen and they roused from their sleep, her lover would turn to her and say something like, "I dreamed the ocean bore down on me, rubbing and grinding me down until I was nothing but the finest fragments scattered all around the world."

A full transcript appears under the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode eight for May 28th, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is "Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass" by Penny Stirling.

Penny Stirling edits transcripts and embroiders pixel art when she's not writing the speculative. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in Lackington's, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit and Heiresses of Russ.

She also has work coming out in the next few months in Interfictions Online, Lackington's, and Liminality.

As a brief head's up: this story does involve descriptions of domestic abuse which may be upsetting to some listeners.

Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass

Stalemate

by Rose Lemberg

He wakes to warmth. The floor beneath his head. He stares at the spider-patterns etched into the ceiling, tiny and dense, gray against darker gray. No power runs through them. Inert now. Unneeded.

He wants to make the patterns work again.

—how could anyone survive a descent through Calamity storms?  Above him, someone’s shiny dark shirt smells of static, a faraway storm passing. How are they still alive?

Alive, forever, trapped inside this loneliness.

A full transcript appears under the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode seven for May 21st, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is "Stalemate" by Rose Lemberg.

Rose Lemberg is a queer bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction anthology, and other venues. Rose co-edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. She has edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press). She is currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find Rose at http://roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, and support her on Patreon at patreon.com/roselemberg.

Stalemate

by Rose Lemberg

He wakes to warmth. The floor beneath his head. He stares at the spider-patterns etched into the ceiling, tiny and dense, gray against darker gray. No power runs through them. Inert now. Unneeded.

He wants to make the patterns work again.

—how could anyone survive a descent through Calamity storms?  Above him, someone’s shiny dark shirt smells of static, a faraway storm passing. How are they still alive?

Alive, forever, trapped inside this loneliness.

—where is their ship then? The Machine detected nothing—

Two people. A dark face leans over.

Who are you? Can you understand me?

Oh, yes. The language is familiar—like the warmth of meals shared between friends unknown, like the glinting of the tall glass domes, their shadows trembling in the heat of double suns. The memories dance and reflect off the polished blank steel of his mind, then scurry away.

“I remember,” he says, curling his tongue to make the clicking sounds this language requires.

Your name, they ask. He knows one: Kabede, but it is not his. He rolls his tongue around it, shakes his head—a no.

They take him away on a gurney. His eyes latch again onto the inert designs on the ceiling, and hold, and hold.

A room. The person from before is here. The serial number stitched upon their sleeve reads 050089. This person—Eighty-nine—fiddles with the displaywall.

Who are you? they keep asking. What is your number? What is your Q? Are you a miner? Did you fall from some other Habitat?

Some other habitat? The displaywall shows only one, this one, Neriu Habitat, the single rotating sphere encapsulated in light—but he knows of a hundred siblings, spheres of metal free-floating in Calamity season. Upon the displaywall the storms come together and break, toss the Habitat upon the face of the ocean. Under the wave the storms are snakes of green that spit and lash their tails; above the wave the storms are dense gray columns that funnel up and consume the sky.

Nothing can land on Gebe-2.

Who are you? What is your number? What is your Q? Do you know this interface?

Does he know this interface? His fingers trace a glyph in the air. The storms on the screen disappear, are replaced by an engineer’s dissection of the sphere along the vertical, showing the habitat’s levels—residential, control, mining, the engines with their clever navigating and locking mechanisms. He makes another glyph, flips the display to perimeter—the habitat’s receiving cavities and the inverted protrusions that are there to join seamlessly with—he counts—five other habitats, which, in turn, will join with others during the brief period of Convergence.

Someone enters the room, and Eighty-nine turns away from the display. There’s a sewn badge upon Eighty-nine’s tunic—a grebe, a diving bird. Security commune? He’s not familiar with the sigil.

They used the interface. They must be ours.

No. The new person is squat and powerful, with wiry hair and piercing eyes. Their skin is dark like Eighty-nine’s. No, they cannot be ours. Their memory has been erased. They had to pass through the atmosphere for that. And that offworld suit—

His eyes seek the newcomer’s badge out. Cormorant, for Control commune.  No, they will not let him hook up to the Machine until they know more. He could be dangerous to the Machine.

If they are ours, the Machine will recognize…

Shut up, Eighty-nine. How will the Machine recognize an off-worlder?

But so much of it is familiar. He must have been here before. Will the Machine return his name? But he doesn’t want to know it.

He doesn’t know why, but he had wanted this. His name is an empty cavity after a rotten tooth has been drawn. Will the Machine put the pain back?

He feels its humming all around him. The Machine maintains the grass-cloth patterns of the display-free walls. It spreads warmth through the brick-patterned floor. It is in the displaywall, and in the silent ceiling grid. It waits for him now, an embrace of empty light.

The two argue about his Q now. The Machine must assign it. How will he work if they don’t know what commune he belongs to?

“Engineering,” he mutters. “Just put me in Engineering.”

They take him back to the room, nothing more than a detention cell, where he spent the last night. Eighty-nine settles him into the hammock. The person’s hand briefly squeezes his. On Gebe-2, being alone is a punishment beyond measure.

“I won’t be lonely here,” he says to the closing door, not sure what moved him to say it. On a ship full of people he is a stranger, but the place makes him feel like three hundred years of companionable silences. Not a ship. A habitat. He tries to adjust to the hammock, his body too broad and too pale in the artificial half-light. The coarse brown strands in the hammock’s weave smell like basket reeds, but they too must be artificial.

—Dream with me.

He dreams of Gebe, a city paved with reinforced cinnabar and etched with mazes, a city of soaring spun glass and masonry coffeeshops—but now its beauty’s been smothered under the red skies marred with streaks of black fume. Dead engines hurtle from the sky like bugs sprayed with insecticide, and he barely dodges to avoid the smoldering, screeching debris. He runs, choking on the smell of burning meat and charra oil, resin and feces. He screams at the sharp cries of wild birds released from their protected wildspaces, the crashing glass spires that only a short while ago danced gracefully into a fearless sky.

Kabede. He must find Kabede.

The university. How they’d cursed the architect who slapped a utilitarian concrete rectangle in the middle of blown-glass dreams, but the engineering school is the only one left standing. It is whole on the inside as well, and softened by age-old Gebian crafts; thousands of people, students and faculty, crowd here on embroidered lotus carpets, argue loudly under chandeliers of blown glass shaped like ibises. They grab his hands, smile up his face and ask for news, but he doesn’t have time. He smiles back, pushes past them to the stairs. Downward. Each level is plainer than the one above —no hand-loomed carpets or chandeliers here, and even the ebony stairs give way to metallic railings painted in pale green. Kabede must be here. It’ll be all right.

His friend is at the bottom level, pacing in front of a huge black surface covered densely with blueprints and reading-screen files. Their eyes lock—Kabede’s pupils dilate, and their gaunt dark face splits into a grin. They embrace fiercely, then push away from each other. Kabede speaks, their words disjointed in a way of dreams and scientists. I must take them away from this war, from all wars, I must hide them away in a world without riches, a world undesirable to conquerors, a world stripped of all decoration with only what’s necessary to survive, like the Engineering building survived…

Help me, my friend. Help me.

He frowns back at Kabede. “You’d strip them of beautiful things just because other people would strip them of beautiful things?” It is, after all, what they are. The people of Gebe are artists, scientists, poets, craftsmen, yes, artisans, makers—it is because of this beauty that they are now hunted.

Kabede’s arms fly, accompanying the frantic flight of their speech. A commune where everyone is together and everyone is needed, without trinkets or petty obsessions, without possessions, nothing to distract from the threefold purpose of efficiency, survival, refuge—

“You will unmake them.”

But Kabede won’t listen. We’ll measure people’s aptitude, and each will be assigned to a commune according to their Q—

“You cannot take anybody off-world, Kabede. It’s a fantasy.”

Build me a ship, Kabede pleads. You’ve been working on something— but it isn’t anyone’s business what he’s been doing out on the asteroid belt for the last thirty years.

“No. No. I’m sorry.”

He offers Kabede a game of chess; they’ve always played before parting. But no, there is no time today, and Kabede’s hands curl into fists.

This war must end.

He hangs in the hammock, neck bent like a trussed bird’s, while shadows regard him across the threshold. The Control person, and a visitor, a frail and ancient darkness against the door’s bright light. More ancient than he is? Impossible.

The Keeper of Neriu Habitat gestures the light on and enters, but darkness steps in with them—a face mashed and old like a dried plum, eyes bright but crackled with a minute spiderweb of red around pupils the color of congealed blood. They speak, they praise the Control person’s caution. He is an unknown entity, possibly dangerous, but they are stretched thin and cannot waste workers, not with the Convergence only a month away. If there is danger, I trust the Machine can take it. Plug them in. 

More people come to take him to a room as faceless as the others, painted a different shade of rough tan, with the same spider-maze ceiling and warm floors. He doesn’t even try to memorize the faces, sounds, smells of the people that surround him. They aren’t his friends. And like with people everywhere, he cannot afford to become attached. Like the savannah blooms they will wither and die, and even when these people’s speech reminds him of someone he misses with every breath, it’s not the same. He cannot become attached.

They clip the headset to his head. His eyes roll back.

He is in a brown cube without smells or sounds, a space defined by grid-like shining walls. The middle of the room flares up with a projection of three transparent pails. The first is filled with some substance, darker than water.

A disembodied voice speaks. Two miners are friends, but one got sick. The healthy friend had mined eight liters of gillium. The healthy one has two empty vessels. One vessel holds five liters, and the other three. How can the miner equally divide the fuel, so that both friends meet their quota?

That voice—it hovers on the edge of recognition. It speaks of friendship. Does this Machine have a friend, one it would share everything with, equally, if it could, if it knew where to look?

Solve the puzzle.

He has no voice here, no hands, no body, no eyes. He cannot touch the jars, but when he wills them to move, they do. He solves the problem in seven turns. It cannot be done in less.

The room flickers, and the amount of pails increases by one. The large vessel holds twenty four liters of gillium. The empty ones can hold five, eleven, and thirteen liters…

Good-naturedly he finds a solution, and the pail puzzle is replaced by an equation exercise, and after it, another. He remembers how to solve such problems by solving them, but there’s disappointment growing inside him. He opens his mouth to speak.

“Do you know Kabede?”

The room flickers, displaying now basic trigonometry problems. He solves one, two.

“Where is Kabede?”

The room blurs, reforms around holographic engineering designs—an airflow node first, then some complex console wiring, then a mining chute, all with nontrivial, tricky repairs. Lovely work. At last, his mind pulls reluctantly back.

“I want to speak to Kabede.”

The room is extinguished. He is expelled back into his long sweaty body sprawled on the floor.  They drag him up, slap a bird-badge upon his left shoulder. An ibis. He’s been assigned to Engineering commune.

At night in the Engineering dormitory he tosses and turns in his hammock, stumbling into dreams. He dreams of Gebe, a city once paved with reinforced cinnabar and etched with mazes, a city of soaring spun glass and masonry coffeeshops—but now its beauty’s been erased, drowned in shrapnel, reformed and erased again under the perpetual red skies choked with toxic fumes. There is no sign of spun-glass spires. The museums have been leveled long ago, their contents evacuated, fought over—so many sacrifices to keep the treasures safe, but now they’re lost. Forgotten. He looks up, but the sky is empty of birds; no avian species are left on Gebe. No animals of any kind, not even insects. Only the humans survive.

The university is a compound, the concrete rectangles of buildings crouch low to the ground. He remembers the poetry buildings, and history, art practice, music—but the arts and humanities had long ago been razed. Anthropology’s gone, too, once the most beautiful structure of all, with ornamental spires like cottontail reeds. The hot air smells of smoke and tar, fried canned meat and coffee. He doesn’t bother locating the cafeteria.

Engineering is crowded, but the students are all silent, all crouching on the concrete floor, working on small electronic tablets. The carpets are gone, and the glass chandeliers had been replaced by military-grade lamps. Not a single student lifts their head as he passes through to the staircase.

Kabede paces in the basement, room and person untouched by the two hundred years that elapsed since their last meeting. His friend’s always been here, framed between the concrete and the smoky air. Behind Kabede, on the table, a holographic image of a dome-like structure breaks into a hundred polished metal spheres that hurtle away from each other and join again. And have you built the ship for me, old friend?

The ship, yes, a vast entity of metal mined from the asteroid belt by his bots. The ship—his ship—all complex designs and warmth, always incomplete, always growing. His home.

“I haven’t promised you anything.”

But this coming war will be the fifth, Kabede says, and the world has been drained of solutions. I need to take them off-world now, my friend, or this war may well be their last.

“What are you trying to save?” Whatever’s been beautiful and sacred about Gebe has been destroyed by the wars, or by the Gebians themselves. “There’s nothing left here, Kabede. What value do your people have now, how are they better than millions of others dying on thousands of different worlds? Humans kill each other.” Or else they live small insignificant lives, and only the art they create will remain as they pass, only the art will matter long after they go.

But of course, Kabede doesn’t believe in art. Art creates commodities desired by others. They come to trade for it first, then they come to steal, then they come to destroy it because we have too much, and then they come because they always came. It is a mistake to think that art survives death. You can’t survive your death, unless you choose not to die.

“We may not die, my friend, but we are the children of loneliness.”

I am not lonely, Kabede says. My people are with me. You do not see them, but I do. They are my family, my living, breathing people—and they are everything to me. As you are, old friend. And you are my friend. So help me.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Kabede nods, produces an ancient ebony-and-ivory chessboard. They sit down together at the table.

Engineering brings his memories back, slowly. He’s always been good at making things work. As a child, he fixed the broken toy trains for the dimly-remembered children next door, he flushed toys down the toilet to see how much the drain would take before clogging, and then unclogged it again using a very long stick and an improvised drill. He fixed the grandfather clock silent since his grandfather’s youth. He cannot quite recall his grandparents, but he remembers how the cogs shone inside the clock, silent first, then shrill in hurried, disbelieving reawakening.

He knows that even if all the memories return, the faces of his family won’t be among them.

‘We may not die, my friend, but we are the children of loneliness...’

How long ago? He remembers now how a scholarship took him away from his homeworld and brought him to Gebe, Kabede’s home—a world famous for its arts, a world illustrious with science. He’d learned so much there—engineering, of course, but also other things. The beauty of glass and groove and light. The Gebian language, with its seventeen emotions to experience art, that marked no genders in speech or custom.

He remembers Kabede at the university, bent over some antique flimsy-display reader. Kabede couldn’t make it work again, being always far better at new designs. He remembers repairing the reader for Kabede, bits of century-old diplastic warped and soft like clipped-off fingernails. They learned about the Boundless from that flimsy—the most talented scientists chosen somehow to discard death forever, chosen perhaps by the older Boundless always secretly on the prowl, always searching.

They found more information about the Boundless at the great library of Gebe, and a mention of a hidden meeting-place, a planet of wonders. But they have never met a single Boundless other than themselves, not to recognize. Death-lack seemed splendid at twenty, doubtful at best at four hundred or so.

Four hundred years. Long enough to unlearn about love if one didn’t pay any attention to it in the first place.

He shakes his head. People do not matter. Work matters. Work and art— those things that can be salvaged after the people leave you. Tangible things. Except, of course, Kabede. There’ll always be Kabede.

Neriu Habitat is painfully small. The forty three engineers in his commune do not talk much, but sometimes they nod at him. Work matters—repairing the ailing Habitat, with never enough workers to direct. Always repairing, never expanding. Again he asks about Kabede. You must wait for the Convergence to see him, they say. Just do your work. He does—and it is soothing, like the air that circulates through the habitat, purified but always the same, never changing. They make nothing here that is beautiful. Only bland warmth. How is it better than pain?

Eighty-nine comes to visit him in the dorms one evening, to play a game, like everyone does here. Eighty-nine teaches him games from Security commune, first simple and then increasingly elaborate clapping games that require coordination and quick thinking. He loses cheerfully to Eighty-nine, engrossed until his fellow dorm-mates intervene. Engineers don’t play such games, they say. “Chess?” he asks, but they don’t know the word, even though he speaks their language. They do not use any game-pieces, no frivolous objects shaped into arbitrary designs that serve no immediate purpose. Too much like art. Instead, they teach him games that require only the mind—language puzzles in which every letter is assigned a numeric value, and the value of whole words is calculated through complex equations. These he enjoys, but Eighty-nine doesn’t, and he does not want Eighty-nine to feel left out.

“Let’s play something else,” he says.

There’s an old game they play here that the people of Gebe played also. The questioner asks a quick question, any question, tricking the players into responding with the word yes; if they do, they lose.  Are you from here? Eighty-one asks him, an easy question. Then, is your Q higher than mine? Question after question, round after round in rapid succession to trick the players to respond with a short truthful yes in response to a trivial query. One after one, his Engineering fellows lose, and leave the game. Nine out of twelve remain. Seven out of twelve. Do you like it here? The yes is frozen on his lips. What’s not to like? The warm air, calculated to the perfect pleasantness he remembers from his university days, never changes here to a winter storm’s intensity or the sun’s summer scorching; fascinating detailed work; the Machine everywhere, comforting on the edge of his senses. Even the lack of adornment seems soothing now. What’s not to like? Only himself, his returning identity that’ll spit him out in the end, back into the vacuum of loneliness. He can unlearn it with these people. But they… The old Gebians—the people he came to love are burned, are buried, forgotten under the rubble of dreams. He cannot allow himself to become attached again.

“I do not like myself,” he says.

And us? Do you like us?

“Yes,” he lies. Loses.

His dreaming drains him further into memory. Ten thousand people on a ship that could hold thirty thousand more. The ship is huge—in the two hundred years since Kabede’s first question he’d perfected his miner bots and dismantled a few small moons. His modular designs for it are genius. Immodest, but true enough; after all, only geniuses become Boundless, only geniuses are punished for their competence with this unending pain.

Forty thousand people could fit here easily, but the fifth war really is the last. Only ten thousand survivors, wounded and bleeding. Adults clutch emaciated children, elders crouch quietly, their toothless mouths open; those who still can walk around, frantically trying to be useful to someone, somehow, anything to escape the staring stillness. And Kabede—Kabede is not among them; his friend lies stretched out under the medi-dome, dying from a head wound that cannot possibly be repaired. A Boundless cannot die, but a Boundless can still be killed.

It was a mistake to agree to Kabede’s request. They should have left the war behind, gone away together like he wanted. But instead he’d said yes. He’d found a world, a watery planet plagued by storms—increased by Kabede’s designs to such vehemence than nobody would bother to come here. The storms would hide Kabede’s world from curious eyes, prevent the colonists from leaving. Forever, peace—sheltering the people from all wars, taking them away even from themselves.

He remembers wondering if the people would find a way to make art, but the walls of the engineering dorm are bare. The reeds of his hammock are woven into uneven patterns that dig into his skin and signify nothing.

The ancient Keeper of Neriu Habitat comes to see him once more, in the Engineering dorm. The Convergence is coming, and Kabede, the keeper says, will see him in three days’ time.

His eyes trace the spiderweb patterns of the ceiling. He designed them for his ship, just for beauty. Lit up, they were thin lines that rotated and danced, forming an imaginary starmap of the universe, with confirmed constellations warming up to an orange and the unconfirmed to a shimmery gray. Once he’d thought it Kabede’s mistake to believe that art doesn’t survive death, for if he were somehow to die, this ship of his, these minutely patterned ceilings would survive.

He is alive yet, but his art, his ceilings are not in use here. Kabede would never approve of something so frivolous.

Three days’ time.

He remembers most of it now. Kabede gave him the memory leecher, to be installed in the upper atmosphere. If strangers came to Gebe-2 to wage their war, intent and knowledge would be drained of them before they fell into the storms.

Once you have the habitats defined, transfer me, Kabede asked, back when they’d made their plans. I want to be embedded in my world. He begged against it, when Kabede was alive. “You won’t have a body anymore…” But his pleading didn’t matter. Kabede was dead now. There wasn’t enough left to exist when the hundred specified nodes were separate. Kabede would only be whole and aware when the habitats came together, briefly, once every three or four years, to synchronize their memories and share mined fuel. The rest of the time Kabede’s mind would be divided into a hundred pieces and scattered across the ocean, memoryless, friendless. A hundred habitats, Kabede had insisted—even if war were somehow to find this world, the people would be divided, easy to hide, safe.

Such a waste. They should have left Gebe together to search for the hidden planet of the Boundless, on his ship. This ship.

He remembers now how he broke it down. Unmade his home. Reforged it into a hundred Habitats for his only friend.

Neriu Habitat screeches in joining others, like a flock of birds pressed together into a ball. Eighty-nine is there when they come to transfer him from Neriu to Deselin, but there is nothing to say.

Deselin Habitat corresponds to the medical wing where Kabede had died. Most of what’s left of them survives here, and now, joined with other bits of their scattered cognition, Kabede is as whole as they will ever be. There is no need to don the headset—a hologram appears to him in the room recreated to be identical to the Gebe basement. It is Kabede as they were in death, tall and gaunt, their dark face glistening with projected sweat, but there is nothing to embrace. Only bits of colored light. “It’s good to see you.”

I am glad you visit me, Kabede says.

“How many times have I done this?”

This is the third time. Every sixty years. Every twenty Convergences. Kabede’s image flickers. I’m sorry about your memory, old friend, but I have to protect my people. I will return it to you when you leave, and erase you again from the system. I wish…

“Don’t say it, please.” But there is no need to speak. They know the dialogue by heart.

I wish so much you’d stay.

‘But nothing changes here, Kabede. Nothing evolves.’

My people—

‘—are ghosts.’

They survive. It is peaceful, efficient—

‘There is no hope.’

Yes, he remembers now. They played this game before, went through the same moves over and over. And I will come again, and lose my memory, to see you. But no matter how we play this, it’s a stalemate, Kabede.

There are no chairs for them to sit. They squat on the floor, with the holographic chessboard between them.

END

"Stalemate" was originally published in Lackington's issue 4, 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 May 28th.

[Music plays out]

Stalemate

by Rose Lemberg

He wakes to warmth. The floor beneath his head. He stares at the spider-patterns etched into the ceiling, tiny and dense, gray against darker gray. No power runs through them. Inert now. Unneeded.

He wants to make the patterns work again.

—how could anyone survive a descent through Calamity storms?  Above him, someone’s shiny dark shirt smells of static, a faraway storm passing. How are they still alive?

Alive, forever, trapped inside this loneliness.

A full transcript appears under the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode seven for May 21st, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is "Stalemate" by Rose Lemberg.

Rose Lemberg is a queer bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction anthology, and other venues. Rose co-edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. She has edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press). She is currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find Rose at http://roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, and support her on Patreon at patreon.com/roselemberg.

Stalemate

by Rose Lemberg

He wakes to warmth. The floor beneath his head. He stares at the spider-p

AND OUT OF THE STRONG CAME FORTH SWEETNESS

by Lisa Nohealani Morton

After the Collapse and the Great Reboot, Lila moved into the city and opened a barbershop.

Great things were happening in the city: spaceports and condominiums and public works projects outlined their soon-to-be-erected monuments to great men and women and superior city living in holographic glows. Angels patrolled the sky, resplendent with metal wings that sparkled in the sun when they banked for a turn. Everyone seemed to be full of exciting plans for the future, but Lila came from a long line of barbers and her humble shop only seemed fitting. She called the shop The Lion’s Mane, because there were lions, once.

A full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode Six for May 14th, 2015. I’m your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Not a lot of news to give you this time. I’ve prioritized getting the podcast running so that you all have something to listen to each week, but there’s a lot of odds and ends that I hope I’ll be able to pick up soon.

Our story this week is “And Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness” by Lisa Nohealani Morton.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Fireside. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton.

And our reader this week is Marguerite Kenner, who is the host and editor at Cast of Wonders, a YA audio fiction podcast, which you can find at www.castofwonders.org.

AND OUT OF THE STRONG CAME FORTH SWEETNESS

by Lisa Nohealani Morton

After the Collapse and the Great Reboot, Lila moved into the city and opened a barbershop.

Great things were happening in the city: spaceports and condominiums and public works projects outlined their soon-to-be-erected monuments to great men and women and superior city living in holographic glows. Angels patrolled the sky, resplendent with metal wings that sparkled in the sun when they banked for a turn. Everyone seemed to be full of exciting plans for the future, but Lila came from a long line of barbers and her humble shop only seemed fitting. She called the shop The Lion’s Mane, because there were lions, once.

At first she only had a trickle of customers. After all, they had machines for what she did, now – cunning booths that let you try a hundred different cuts and styles on their screens until you settled on just the one for you, then produced it on your head in a flurry of laser-precise snicking. The booths even had presets for a wide selection of celebrities, for when you cared enough to imitate the very best. Only those too wealthy or old-fashioned to submit to the booths’ impersonality, or too poor to live in a neighborhood that had them, bothered with the time and expense of a human barber.

Soon enough, though, as she cut and styled the neighborhood’s tradesmen and women, her hands began to regain a little of the strength she had lost in her years of hiding and fleeing from one place after another, and she could feel the old magic returning. Word then spread, and her appointment app began to fill up with trims and foils and updos. If any of her customers noticed a certain lassitude filling them as she chattered and clipped, they chalked it up to the relaxing sensation of having their hair washed for them. And at any rate, it all grew back.

“It’s so much more tiring than the booth,” a middle-aged woman said to her companion, as she wrote a check for a modest amount (plus tip). She patted her hair with limp satisfaction. “But it’s worth every minute.”

“Come back soon,” Lila said cheerily.

When closing time came (early, because it was Sunday, and she had obligatory services to attend like everyone else), she swept the day’s clippings into black garbage bags and carried them into the cellar, where they joined the modest pile at the back. She smiled at the sight of them, lifting up onto her toes and bouncing, experimentally. Then she went out to do her errands before services.

On the way home, she made sure to stop and say hello to Wylie. Wylie was a homeless man who slept in the stoop three doors down from her own. He had been there as long as anyone could remember, and it was rumored that he’d had some kind of run-in with the Angels. Lila could feel the strength in him, both like and unlike her own, and knew him for a sorcerer or a magus of some sort. The Angels didn’t suffer witches; they made the witches suffer instead, and something had brought Wylie to their attention. Whatever they’d done to him, it hadn’t cut away his strength, but it had left him too little mind to do anything with it. Lila tried to make sure he had enough to eat and a warm place to sleep, because of that near-family feeling as much as her own fear of the Angels.

This morning Wylie was more active than usual, rocking back and forth and muttering to himself. She bent and placed a few coins in his cup.

He straightened suddenly at the rattle. “Witch-woman!” he shouted, and she flinched, looking around to see who might have heard before remembering that no one took any notice of Wylie.

“I’m not a witch,” she told him for the third or fourth time. None of her line were, even if the Angels wouldn’t appreciate the differences.

He glared at her with yellow-hazel eyes. “Flashes in the sky,” he muttered. Then he looked up and seemed to see her for the first time. “Lions around you,” he offered, in an almost conciliatory tone.

Lila gasped. She dreamed of lions, sometimes, but she’d never told anyone. “Lions? Do they…” Her voice dropped as she realized she was questioning a madman about her own dreams. “Do they…lie down for me?”

Wylie didn’t answer for a long time. “Lasers,” he said at last, looking sadly at her feet. He looked up at her face again, and his own face contorted with pain. “Laser eyes!” he shrieked, pedaling backwards with his feet until he hit the wall, then scrabbling on the ground with his hands. “Laser eyes! Laser – ”

Lila backed away slowly and hurried down the street. As she rounded the corner, she could still hear Wylie screaming, “Witch-woman! Laser eyes!”

A woman stood outside when she came up from stowing away the results of her errands in the cellar.

“I was hoping to get a haircut,” the woman said, her hand stealing up to pat at her shoulder-length red hair. She looked strong and uncertain in a pretty sort of way that left Lila completely tongue-tied. “Are you Lila?”

Lila came up the last few steps and closed the cellar doors, glancing behind herself nervously. “Yes,” she said, “but we closed at -” Her throat closed at the disappointed look the woman gave her, and she couldn’t continue.

A hand rested on her arm; she stared at it mutely, and swallowed. The woman smiled. “My name is Rebecca,” she said. “I’d like to cut it short, if you can help me.”

With an effort, Lila tore her eyes away from the hand on her wrist. It hadn’t budged. She cleared her throat and her gaze locked with amused brown eyes. “Why don’t I make some coffee and we’ll talk about it,” she said.

Coffee became regular and turned into brunch on Sundays. Lila started jumping at shadows, found herself distracted at key moments by mental images of the two of them necking on a bench in the park, and generally couldn’t get thoughts of Rebecca out of her head. Rebecca drove her mad with little touches – a hand brushing the hair out of Lila’s face, a head resting momentarily on her shoulder – but never quite crossed the line, and Lila didn’t know how to cross it herself. In the meantime she cut hair and grew strong. She never did cut Rebecca’s hair, though, no matter how many times Rebecca asked.

“Not now,” she said, glancing up at the skies. A glint of metal answered her look. “Your hair is so beautiful like this, why do you want to cut it?” Daring greatly, she reached out and stroked it, letting the ends run through her fingertips.

She closed her eyes when Rebecca said, yet again, “I just want to know when you’re going to work your magic on me.”

Never, she thought, and felt her lips smile, falsely.

“Sometime soon,” she said.

“You haven’t been here that long, have you? In the city.” Rebecca eyed her.

“What gave me away?” Lila kept her tone light, but questions about her past always made her tense. It wasn’t that far from “where did you…?” to “what did you…?” and “how are you able to…?” And not long after that usually came the pitchforks. She didn’t understand what got them so upset. It all grew back, after all, unlike what some of her other family members did. But in the end, it always came back to pitchforks.

Rebecca didn’t give any sign that she noticed Lila’s sudden tension. “Little things, mostly…like the way you flinched when I mentioned the Angels just now.”

She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep from flinching again. Thou shalt not suffer a witch… She forced a little laugh. “City people don’t find them a little frightening? The wings, the laser eyes, and, well, everything?”

“Why should we? The Angels protect our city,” Rebecca said, her chin coming up stubbornly.

“But what if they decide you’re what the city needs protecting against?”

Rebecca frowned. “What do you mean? The Angels defend against intruders.”

“I’ve heard things,” Lila said, struggling to keep her voice from shaking. “People rounded up, dragged out of their homes in the dead of night, things like that.”

“We defend the city from all threats,” Rebecca said steadily.

Lila, for her part, choked on her coffee.

Rebecca leapt to her feet and came around the kitchen table to pound on Lila’s back as she coughed. Her hand stayed on Lila’s back, warm and heavy, as Lila managed to get enough breath to wheeze out, “We?”

“I’m one.” Rebecca’s tone was casual, but there was an undercurrent of worry just beneath the surface of the words. Her hand lifted off Lila’s back for a moment, leaving the spot where it had lain cold. After a second it dropped down again, stroking almost defiantly over her shoulders.

Lila shivered and closed her eyes, desire and fear warring inside her. After a long moment, she felt in control enough of her voice to say, with false cheer, “So you don’t suffer witches, then?”

“Don’t be silly,” Rebecca laughed. “There’s no such thing as witches. It’s just an old superstition, from back before the Collapse, even. Besides,” her voice dropped, becoming something more intimate, caressing, “you must have cast some sort of spell on me, and I haven’t arrested you yet.” Her fingertips traced up the side of Lila’s neck and into her hair, making Lila shiver again.

Lila swallowed, hard. “Are you making a pass at me?” she managed to ask at last.

Rebecca laughed again, a sound that tinkled like the door to Lila’s shop. “Only because you didn’t make one about, oh, three weeks ago,” she said, bending to whisper the last words in Lila’s ear before dipping her head to kiss along Lila’s jawline to the corner of her mouth. She hovered there, nearly but not quite touching her lips to Lila’s, as if waiting for permission.

Lila turned her head sharply, bringing their mouths together. She heard Rebecca give a small, muffled chuckle before they were too busy kissing for anything else.

“Good morning,” Lila said to Wylie. He ignored her. She dropped some money in his cup, as usual.

“Flashy in the sunlight. Flash like wings.” He looked up at her. “You be careful, girl. She’s a flashy one.”

“What do you mean?” Lila asked.

He shook his head irritably. “Blood will out,” he said. “Her kind will be coming for me soon, mark my words.”

“Whose kind? Wylie, who’s coming for you?” Lila asked, knowing the answer.

“I give you my power willingly.” He gave her an oddly proud look, and then lapsed back into muttering. Lila backed away before he could start screaming again.

That night Lila dreamed of lions and Rebecca. She was surrounded by the beasts in a little clearing, and Rebecca was looking on, terrified. “Lila, come away,” she called. “You’ll get hurt.”

Lila ignored her and went on shearing the lions’ manes. Golden hair piled up in her lap as lion after lion lay down before her to be shorn, and she felt herself fill up with power until she was shifting in her seat, barely able to contain it all. As she finished with each lion, he moved a short distance away and went to sleep. Rebecca began to weep, quietly, but Lila went on ignoring her, although inside she was screaming with the need to go and comfort Rebecca.

The last lion approached, but instead of lying down to be shorn, he roared in Lila’s face. Rebecca screamed and the lion turned around, saw her, and crouched to spring. “No!” Lila screamed as it pounced, and lasers began spearing down out of the sky.

“Laser eyes and all, huh?” They were lying in Lila’s bed above the shop, letting the afternoon breeze dry the slickness of their lovemaking.

Rebecca snorted. “They’re not actually our eyes,” she said. “Though we do control them that way. They’re attached to our helmets, like this” – she wiggled her fingers at the sides of her head like antennae – “and the helmet tracks where we’re looking and fires if we squeeze our eyes the right way. Tons better than aiming by hand.”

“Plus it’s really scary, right?” Lila teased.

Rebecca nodded matter-of-factly. “Plus it scares people.”

When her basement was nearly full, she took to flying around the city at night. She took care to keep low and out of restricted airspaces. There were Angels everywhere in the skies these days, with metal wings that glinted in the moonlight. If you were a descendant of Lila’s line you did best to stay beneath their notice.

She flew over the zoo nearly every time, buzzing low over the empty lion habitat. She thought she’d like to try her hand at trimming a lion’s mane, and remembered the feel of it in her dreams, rough and strong under her scissors. She pictured the awe on the onlooker’s faces as she finished, and the lion went to sleep at her feet. But she never saw any lions.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?”

“An Angel,” Rebecca said promptly. “What about you?”

Lila thought for a long time. She supposed she could have been nearly anything. Her aunt Maxine cut off people’s destinies with their hair. She was the Queen of Las Vegas these days, and while she didn’t see many clients anymore, she would have had a spare dream or three tucked away for a favorite niece. But Lila had never wanted to be a princess, or rich, or famous. She just wanted to fly. “A barber,” she said at last. At least she didn’t have to keep each client’s hair separate, like Maxine did. What a bother.

Rebecca laughed delightedly, a tinkling sound that Lila thought she could listen to forever. “So we’re both living the dream, aren’t we?”

“For now,” Lila said pensively. That morning, when she’d gone past his usual corner, Wylie had been gone. Only his cup lay there on its side, the sole testament to the fact that he’d existed at all.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Rebecca said, pulling away from their comfortable Sunday afternoon embrace on the park bench. Not nearly so many old ladies sniffed as they passed as Lila had imagined. “You’ve been tense for days. What’s going on?”

Lila considered her words carefully before she spoke. She hadn’t been able to fly for a week now, because patrols of Angels had been over her house every time she considered it. The feeds didn’t suggest any reason why they might be in her neighborhood, other than the obvious, so she was lying low, not taking more than her hands absolutely demanded of her when she cut hair.

It hurt to give up flight, though, when she’d been so long grounded, and she resented the need. If only the Angels would see that she was essentially harmless. Her ultimate grandmother’s traits had bred true, and everything she cut grew back. But the city had its rules, and under them she was a witch, and not to be suffered.

“It’s nothing, really,” she said at last, when Rebecca gave her a quizzical look. “It’s just – my rent went up last week, and I’m not sure how everything will shake out.”

“That’s terrible!” Rebecca exclaimed. She opened her mouth to speak again, but stopped, an odd expression on her face. Lila could hear a faint buzzing as Rebecca dug a phone out of her purse. “Dammit – I wasn’t supposed to have to go in today -” she muttered.

Lila laughed bitterly. So today was the day that they’d come for her.

“Lila…?” Rebecca said uncertainly.

She forced herself to give a smile that she knew looked false. “It’s nothing. Go ahead – if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” She bared her teeth even wider in a parody of cheer. “We’ll catch up another time.”

Rebecca gave her a haunted look. “I never – I have to go,” she said urgently, holding up the phone. “They’ll be wondering -”

Lila barely had an instant to register Rebecca’s weight shifting and then her arms were full of her, warm mouth soft and slightly open on her lips. She kissed back, desperately, hardly able to believe that this was happening. Not so soon, she thought.

“I love you,” Rebecca said, slightly muffled against her mouth. “I’m sorry, I have to -” and then she was pulling back, and then she was gone, sprinting towards the nearest transit stop.

A few minutes later, Lila realized she was standing outside her own front door in a daze, one hand on her lips. She gave herself a shake and hurried into the shop.

She saw them coming an hour before they got to her shop. She had that much strength and more, these days. She didn’t run, though. She was done with running. She sat in her kitchen and waited for the Angels and their laser eyes.

A sudden banging came at her door, and she started. The Angels wouldn’t knock – they’d just come in. Thinking it was an unexpected customer, she went to warn them off. The words died on her lips when she saw Rebecca standing there.

It was the first time she’d ever seen Rebecca in her Angel suit. Her wings were resplendent in the sunlight, nearly blinding as they caught and reflected the beams. Lila could see at the sides of her helmet where the lasers would emerge to burn their way through obstacles – or wrongdoers. Lila supposed she was a wrongdoer. She took a deep breath, although she didn’t know what to say.

“We have to go,” Rebecca said. Her face was white and drawn. “Lila, they’re coming, we have to -”

It only took a second to regain her equilibrium. Not a wrongdoer after all. She smiled, and felt as though she might burst. “I’m staying here,” she said gently. “I’m tired of running.”

Rebecca stared at her. “But it’s not true,” she said. “You’re not a witch, they’ve just got it wrong. We have to run, until we can prove to them that you’re not.”

Gingerly, she reached out and took Rebecca’s hand. “Do you even know how much I love you?” she asked. Rebecca just looked confused. Lila could see the Angel formation approaching in the distance. “Follow me, if you can,” she said, and took off.

For a moment she flew alone; then she heard Rebecca’s burners kick in, and she caught up, calling Lila’s name.

They flew alongside each other in silence for a while, leaving the residential neighborhoods for the park. “It’s true, isn’t it,” Rebecca said after a few minutes. “You are a witch.” She didn’t peel away, though, and Lila took that as a good sign.

“We don’t call ourselves that,” she said. “It isn’t magic, exactly. It’s just a family tradition.”

She felt the air underneath her grow less supporting, and she dipped alarmingly. “Lila!” Rebecca shouted as she fell.

At the last second Lila managed to pull herself out of the dive, and she knew the Angels had found her basement, were dragging the garbage bags out and into the light, setting them afire with lasers that weren’t their eyes. “We have to land soon,” she called. Rebecca had pulled ahead, but somehow Lila knew that her dip was agreement and not fatigue. Soon they were landing in a clearing.

The first thing Lila did was take stock of her surroundings. The high fences gave her pause at first, but then she realized where they were – it was the empty lion cage at the zoo.

Only it wasn’t empty. A lion paced the confines of the cage, watching them with his yellow-hazel eyes.

“Lila,” Rebecca said with alarm. “I don’t have much more power -”

Lila bounced on her toes a little, catching the lion’s attention for a moment. Nothing happened. “I’ve got none,” Lila said, stepping forward to stand in front of Rebecca. She dipped one hand into her apron pocket, gripping her shears tightly, although she didn’t take them out. At least she’d make the beast pay for their lives.

The lion stalked closer, and then did something inconceivable: he lay down in front of her, quiescent.

Rebecca gasped behind her. Unbelieving, Lila bent slowly to run a hand through his mane. She felt a strength in the lion that was both unexpected and familiar. “Wylie?” she breathed. The lion turned his head slightly, rubbing his mane against her hand.

Was it even possible? Lila didn’t know. Wylie had had power, but this was unlike anything she’d ever heard of. No time, she thought. She turned back to Rebecca. “It’s OK,” she said. “I think it’s OK.”

The lion made a strange groaning sound in his throat, and nudged his nose at her apron pocket. Only long practice at hiding her emotions kept Lila still. The lion nosed her insistently until she removed the shears from her pocket, then nuzzled them.

She cast a wary eye at the sky. The glint of Angels’ wings was closing in. “Do you want a haircut?” she asked the lion, feeling inane. She ran her hand through his mane again. He was so strong…

At her words, the lion lay quiet again, turning his head so that she could easily reach his mane. Scarcely daring to breathe, she grasped the coarse hair in one hand, brought the shears forward, and began to clip.

Strength like nothing she had ever felt flooded her as the golden locks fell around the great head. She knew she could fly again, suddenly, but she kept on snipping until the mane lay on the ground and she hummed with strength.

“Lila,” Rebecca said again, uncertainly.

“Sssh,” Lila hushed her. “Come here.” She held out her hand, peremptorily, not paying any attention to the propriety of it. The glints of metal in the sky were getting closer. Rebecca took her hand, but still stood apart, so she drew her closer. “Come on, love.” She took Rebecca’s hand, placed it on the lion’s head. Rebecca gasped, but stroked the shorn head gently. “You poor thing,” she breathed.

“He gave me his power willingly,” Lila said softly, still awed by the lion’s gift. “It’s even stronger for that.” Holding tight to Rebecca’s hand, she summoned all her strength. “It’s time to go, love – are you ready?”

Rebecca smiled, and it nearly broke Lila’s heart. “Of course I am,” she said.

Together, they sprang into the air. Rebecca folded her useless wings with a shrug of her shoulders as they cleared the cage and headed west. Lila blinked and used her free hand to shade her eyes as they flew into the late afternoon sun. The first of the lasers speared the air just behind them.

“Stop immediately or you will be brought down,” a man’s voice called out behind them. “Rebecca Clifton, you are wanted for aiding and abetting the flight of a witch from God’s justice.”

“We’re not going fast enough,” Rebecca said.

“Stop immediately,” the voice repeated. “This is your final warning.”

Lila reached deep, pulling power for a new burst of speed. She wasn’t used to carrying two, and it took more than she thought it would.

“Hold on,” she shouted to Rebecca over the wind. She felt Rebecca squeeze her hand in response.

Behind them, the voice called, “Fire at will.” The lasers ripped through the air.

The most uncanny thing about the chase was its near-complete silence. Lila could hear her own harsh breathing over the howl of air rushing past them, but the lasers made no sound. Only the occasional flash of light betrayed their existence.

Suddenly, Rebecca gave a cry, and her hand slipped slightly in Lila’s.

“Rebecca!” Lila shouted. She clutched at Rebecca’s hand, but it continued to slip. Twisting desperately, she brought her other hand around, locking it on Rebecca’s wrist, holding her up.

They listed wildly in the air, losing speed with every second, and Lila fought to right them. She had no idea how badly Rebecca was hurt. Her chest ached with the need to stop and find out. Instead, she screwed her eyes shut, reaching as far as she could into her reserves. Energy coursed through her and they flew even faster. At last, Lila felt Rebecca flex her fingers against her own, in the first sign of life since she’d been hit.

Lila risked a glance over her shoulder. The Angels were falling behind, their lasers no longer in range. It wasn’t a moment too soon – she felt herself burning through the power the lion had gifted her too fast.

At last, they came to the outskirts of the city, and the Angels gave up the chase. Lila didn’t stop flying, although she did slow down a little.

“Rebecca,” she called over the wind. “Are you all right? Do you need to stop?”

“It’s OK,” Rebecca gasped after a second. “My armor deflected it, but it scared me.”

Lila felt a smile spread over her face. They were going to make it. “Where to, love?” she asked.

After the chase, and the flight, Lila and Rebecca settled in a new city, where there were no Angels, and opened a barbershop. Soon they had built up Lila’s  clientele, and Lila’s strength grew again.

They called the shop The Lion’s Mane, and when anyone asked why, Rebecca smiled and said, “There was a lion, once.”

END

Outro:

Marguerite: I really love this story, I’m really curious where the mythology comes from. The only hair-related strength thing I know is Sampson and it was hair on his head, not other people’s hair. You know, the idea of stealing power from someone’s physical self, hair, fingernails, etcetera, etcetera, is a classic witch trope, but I’ve never heard this take on it. Or the lions, either. Well done, Keffy. Talk to you soon.

Keffy: And thank you for your reading, Marguerite, and thanks to Lisa for allowing me to run this story on GlitterShip

“And Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness” was first published inHellebore & Rue, Tales of Queer Women and Magic edited by Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft, and was reprinted in Heiresses of Russ 2012: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.

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 May 21st.

[Music plays out]

AND OUT OF THE STRONG CAME FORTH SWEETNESS

by Lisa Nohealani Morton

After the Collapse and the Great Reboot, Lila moved into the city and opened a barbershop.

Great things were happening in the city: spaceports and condominiums and public works projects outlined their soon-to-be-erected monuments to great men and women and superior city living in holographic glows. Angels patrolled the sky, resplendent with metal wings that sparkled in the sun when they banked for a turn. Everyone seemed to be full of exciting plans for the future, but Lila came from a long line of barbers and her humble shop only seemed fitting. She called the shop The Lion’s Mane, because there were lions, once.

A full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode Six for May 14th, 2015. I’m your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Not a lot of news to give y

THE END OF THE WORLD IN FIVE DATES

by Claire Humphrey

I: May 21, 2011 (according to Harold Camping)

Robin called it an apartment, but it was really part of an old carpet factory in the Junction: an echoing space where one of the looms used to be, furnished with a broken church pew, two wheelchairs, and the bench seat from a minivan.

The smells of paint and dust were good, banishing the phantom smells of antiseptic and latex gloves from my nose.  I leaned in the doorway of the breakroom and watched her sweep.  “Where’s everyone going to sit?”

“On the floor,” she said.  “That’s why I’m sweeping it.”

A full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode five for May 7th, 2015. I’m your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

To start off, a quick reminder for any writers who are listening: GlitterShip is currently open for submissions of both previously published and unpublished fiction as of May 1st. Check out our Submission Guidelines on the GlitterShip.com website for more information.

GlitterShip has also been accepted as a feed via iTunes, so you can now subscribe through the iTunes store. Also, if you have been enjoying GlitterShip so far, you can leave comments and ratings.”The

Our story for today is “The End of the World in Five Dates” by Claire Humphrey

Claire Humphrey lives in Toronto, where she works in the book business. Her stories have appeared in many magazines including Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons, as well as several anthologies, most recently the Locus Award nominated Long Hidden. She is also the reviews editor at Ideomancer. Her first novel, SPELLS OF BLOOD AND KIN, is coming out in 2016 from Thomas Dunne.

THE END OF THE WORLD IN FIVE DATES

by Claire Humphrey

I: May 21, 2011 (according to Harold Camping)

Robin called it an apartment, but it was really part of an old carpet factory in the Junction: an echoing space where one of the looms used to be, furnished with a broken church pew, two wheelchairs, and the bench seat from a minivan.

The smells of paint and dust were good, banishing the phantom smells of antiseptic and latex gloves from my nose.  I leaned in the doorway of the breakroom and watched her sweep.  “Where’s everyone going to sit?”

“On the floor,” she said.  “That’s why I’m sweeping it.”

“And you’re cooking dinner on this thing?”  I gestured over my shoulder at the twelve-burner gas range; eleven of the burners were clotted with molasses-brown grease and a surcoat of dog hair.

“Petra’s bringing food.  You’ll like Petra.”

“No, I won’t.”

Robin threw the broom down with a clatter, and marched over to the dentist’s cabinet in the corner.  “Jesus,” she said.  “You need an attitude adjustment, stat.”

She handed me a bottle of Crown Royal, about a third full.  I poured some into one of the paint-stained mugs from the work table.  The paint didn’t come off into the whiskey, so I drank it.

“Now,” Robin said, picking up the broom again, and sweeping the pile of dust and filings underneath the work table.  “You are going to love Petra.  Know why?  Because she’s extremely fucked up.”

“Oh.  Great.”

“Shut up and drink!  She’s fucked up and she’s my oldest friend, and you can’t mess around with her.  Be good to her.  Got it?  Even if you can’t be good to yourself.”

“It’s not about being good to myself, for fuck’s sake.  If this is confirmed, it means surgery and chemo and all kinds of unpleasant bullshit and there’s just no point to it.”

“But you don’t know for sure!  What if you’re wrong?  If it really is cancer, Cass, you can’t just leave it alone–”

“Watch me.”

“Cass,” Robin said.  “I’m sorry.  Let’s talk later, when you’ve had a bit more time to get used to it.”

“Right.  Sure.”  As if.

“Are you sure you’re okay to stay for dinner?  Promise you’ll tell me if you need anything?”

I raised the mug to her, and made a face.  My knee hurt, the way it had for ages, but it didn’t hurt enough to warrant anything stronger than drink.  It only felt different because I knew what it might be, now.

The bell rang: a great big clanging handbell Robin had mounted outside the factory door.  I slugged some more of my whiskey, brushed off Robin’s hand and went to answer.

Petra, first sight: collarbones standing out from a boat-neck sweater, hair cropped in a pixie cut that made her eyes look huge.  She had three giant takeout bags from the Tikka House, and a box of red wine.

“Happy Rapture,” she said, and kissed my cheek, although we had never met before.

“I’m Cassandra,” I said to the side of her face as she slipped past me to hug Robin.

Two other women crowded in behind; Robin’s cousin Kate and her ex Laurie.  We all lounged around on the bare concrete floor and ate samosas and dipped naan in tarka daal.  Everyone  handed Petra their cups to be filled with wine from the box.

“To endings,” I said, raising my mug.

Robin frowned at me.  I ignored her.

Petra giggled, lifted her plastic tumbler of wine, and tilted it against mine.

Dinner was messy.  I got tamarind sauce on my cuff, whiskey on my arm and wine all over the floor beside me.  I watched Petra’s lips: the gloss was all licked off and replaced with the shine of ghee and a few crumbs of chickpea flour.  She smiled a lot, but in between smiles she looked sad.

When she laughed, her eyes and nose wrinkled up and her upper lip lifted off her teeth, and then she would follow it up with a self-conscious press of hand to mouth.  The third time she did it, I touched her wrist and drew her hand back down and set a pakora in it, which made her laugh again.

When everyone was stuffed we piled all the takeout dishes under the table and Robin put Patti Smith on the stereo.  I went out for a cigarette.  When I came back in, Petra was just exiting the bathroom.  She paused in the doorway and gave me a wide-open look.  I crowded her back in and pushed her against the inside of the door and said, “I’ve been wanting to kiss you all night.”

That laugh again, and then she tilted her head back, and so I pressed my lips to hers.

“Is this an end-of-the-world thing?” she said.  “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I’ve seen the end,” I said.  “This isn’t it.”

A bright purple-white light.  Newspaper sheets scattered on the floor, dated 2013.  Thunderous noise.  Pain in my knee eclipsed, meaningless.

Petra pouted.  “Does that mean I’ll have to worry about whether you’ll call me in the morning?”

I paused, hand inside her sweater, other hand at her waist.  “Assume I won’t.”

She thought about it for a second, and shrugged.  “Still in.”

I laughed against the fine skin of her belly, and I kept her there until I heard Kate or Laurie, outside, counting down to midnight.  (“It’s not New Year’s–” “Come on, bubbly is always appropriate–“)

We stumbled out.  Laurie was pouring prosecco into all of the remaining paint mugs.  I kept hold of Petra’s hand.  From the other side of the work table, Robin glared at me, and turned up the volume on “Dancing Barefoot”.

She came around and took Petra’s hand and uncoupled it from my own.  “If you’re going to hang out with Cass,” she said, “there’s some stuff I should tell you.”

“No, Robin, shut up,” I said.  “It’s not your business, shut up.”

But she led Petra away, and Petra followed, and I stood there against the wall, watching Robin’s mouth form words, watching Petra’s face change as she listened.

II: October 21, 2011 (again according to Harold Camping)

“Cassandra, good to see you,” Petra said, clearly meaning the opposite.  She was looking away from me already, at the passing cars on Harbord.  We were taking advantage of one of the last warm evenings of the year on a bistro patio.

“Her name’s not really Cassandra,” Robin said.  “Right, Chrissie?”

“Seriously?” said the other woman at the table, my date, Aminata.  “Like Chrissie Hynde?”

“Exactly like Chrissie Hynde,” I said, “only without the ‘e’,” and I showed her my driver’s license.

She laughed, wide-open throat.  “Why wouldn’t you keep a name like that?”

“Gonna make you, make you, make you notice,” Petra sang, in a nasty whine.

I tilted my chin at her.  “That’s why.”

Aminata laughed some more, to get us over the awkward spot.  I really liked Aminata.  “Why Cassandra, though?” she said.

“The vision thing,” Robin said.  “Didn’t she tell you?  She sees the future.”

“Only a bit of it,” I said, to the placemat in front of me.

“The worst bit,” Petra said.  “And it’s not even true.  Prophecies never are.”

“Case in point,” Robin put in, “did you see the news?  All the people setting up lawn chairs in Times Square?  End times tourists.  You’d think they would’ve learned their lesson back in May.”

“It’s like they’re hoping against hope,” Aminata said.

“Well, if they were right, it would mean going to heaven,” I said.

“But they aren’t right,” Petra said.  “And now they have to face the facts.  They gave up their homes and trashed their lives on this earth and now they’ve got to live in the aftermath.”  She slammed her wine glass down on the table so hard the stem cracked and the bell dropped.  Wine flooded across the table onto Aminata’s lap.

“Whoa,” Robin said, grabbing for a napkin.

“That’s a Coach,” Aminata said sadly, looking at the dull red stain across her suede bag.  She beckoned a waitress, and asked for some club soda.

Petra covered her mouth with her hand and looked away.

I saw blood on her fingers.  I pulled at her wrist and made her open her hand so I could press a napkin to the cut.

“I thought you were just mad at me, about the way we left things,” I said, low, only to her.  “But there’s something else going on, isn’t there?”

Petra shook her head.  “I’m just so sad.  I’m so sad, Cass, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Hey,” I said.  “Hey.”  I stroked her hair, across the table.

“Your date’s leaving,” she said.  I looked out and saw Aminata’s stained bag, slung over Aminata’s round shoulder, proceeding away along Harbord, in the last of the sunset.

“She would’ve anyway,” I said.  “People mostly do, when they hear about the prophecy thing.”

“That’s not why,” Petra burst out.  “Don’t you get it?  I don’t give a shit about your prophecy thing!  I just didn’t want to watch you let yourself die.”  Her eyes overflowed.  She hid her face in the bloodied napkin.

“Look, no one knows for sure that it’s cancer.  It was just a recommendation for me to follow up.  Anyway, there’s no way you’re this sad over me,” I said.  “You haven’t even seen me in how long?  Get checked for depression.  Get some meds, or something.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Petra said.  She dropped the napkin on the floor, grabbed her bag and walked out.

Robin and I sat there, empty chairs to either side, table wine-stained and scattered with shards.

“Don’t say it,” I said.

Robin shrugged, and didn’t say it.

III: May 27, 2012 (according to Ronald Weinland)

“It was what you said.  You got me thinking.”  Petra looked different.  I glanced again and again as she spoke.  I figured out she’d gained weight, all over, the frail angles replaced by sturdier curves.  Her cheeks looked more cheerful, her belly rounded a little over her belt, and I was pretty sure she’d gone up a bra size.

“What I said,” I echoed, trying to remember what we’d been talking about, and when.  We were in a Starbucks, in the rear corner; they had Jeff Buckley on the stereo, beneath the noise of the espresso machine.

“I cockblocked your date,” she said, “and you were kind of shitty about it.”

“Oh yeah.  Aminata.  ‘S okay, it wasn’t going anywhere.”  I heard the words, I heard my voice, normal and dry, but it seemed like someone else, speaking in another room.

“It never is, with you, right?” Petra said, and laughed, a little sadly.  “So, yeah.  I went and got checked for depression, and what do you know, I had it.  So I got meds.  Best thing I’ve done for myself in ages.  I figured I’d look you up and say thanks.”

“Um.  You’re welcome.”

“Did you just wake up, or something?”

I nodded, sucked at my coffee, heard the liquid whiffle through the opening of the plastic lid.

“Have you eaten?  Want a scone to go with that?”

“I could go for a scone.”  I couldn’t go for a scone.  There was no way I could eat.  My mouth still tasted of blood where I’d scored the inside of my cheek with my teeth.

Her phone call had raised me from another one of those dreams: torn pages of the Star scattered on the floor, dated next year; grinding pain in my knee, worse than now.  The flash of light, devastating.  The avalanche-roar that I thought was the whole city falling.

The day was getting closer.  I still hadn’t figured out how to live in its shadow.

I watched her return to the lineup, point to the pastry case, fumble for her wallet.  “Hey, Petra,” I said, when she came back to the table.  “I’m going to Europe.  Want to go with me?”

She raised her eyebrows.  “Bucket list?  I thought you’d already done Europe.”

I shrugged.  “By myself.  And there was a lot of stuff I didn’t see.”

“Yeah, well.  It is an entire continent.”

I tore a piece off my scone and put it in my mouth.  It tasted like ash.

“Every time I go a couple of months without seeing you, I forget what a jackass you can be,” Petra said.

She didn’t look mean while she said it, though.  I figured I was growing on her.

“You still haven’t followed up with the doctor yet.  Have you?”

I shook my head.  My knee didn’t really feel any worse than it had since I first went to ask about it.  It hurt, and I limped a bit, but I didn’t need a cane.  I could definitely go on like this for another eight months.

“Bucket list,” I reminded her.  “It doesn’t include spending the Last Days on medical bullshit.”

I was expecting her to roll her eyes.  But she just looked at me, and sat back a little, her feather earrings swinging against her neck.

“Have you ever had any other visions?” she said.

So I told her about my parents.  I’d been right about that one.  I’d even told them.  And it hadn’t made any difference at all.

At the end of the telling, my coffee had gone lukewarm, and the torn edge of the scone had gone dry.

Petra reached across the table.  I thought she was going to touch my hand, but she swept up the uneaten scone and crumpled the paper bag around it and dumped it in the nearby garbage.

“That’s kind of freaky,” she said.  “I mean, I’m really sorry for your loss, and I can see why you think the way you do.  I’m not a believer.  But… You told me to go get checked for depression.  You were right about that.”

“No.  You would’ve made the same decision anyway,” I said.  “I don’t even know why you listened to me.  You were right, I was being a jackass.”

“Look,” she said.  “I don’t really want to, but I give a shit about you.  I want you to stick around.”

“I gave notice on my apartment yesterday.”

“So stay with Robin.  Stay with me.  Whatever.  Even if you’re right, don’t you want to spend your time with the people who give a shit about you?”

I pictured eight months of concerned glances, eight months of printouts about alternative cancer treatments, eight months of scones I didn’t want.

“Even if I’m wrong,” I said, “it takes kind of a long time to see all of Europe.”

IV: December 21, 2012 (according to the Mayan Calendar)

The Prado was full of pictures and the Plaza de Oriente was full of statues and the Palacio Real, I never found out about, because I’d been to half the capitals of Europe and I was tired of sights and I just sat down at a table in a plaza and asked for wine.

The day was chilly and I was the only person sitting outdoors.  A waiter came out with my wine and a plate of pimientos, these little green peppers they fry in olive oil and then sprinkle with salt.  I ate them and drank my wine and looked at whatever architecture I could see without turning in my seat.

Another world-ending.  At home, Robin would be having a party.  She and Petra and Kate and what’s-her-name and whoever else.  It was good that I wasn’t there.  No one wanted to hear about the real end of the world.

My knee really fucking hurt.  I thought I could feel the swelling of a tumour if I pressed on the right spot, except that made it hurt more, so I didn’t do that.

Walking made it hurt more, too.  It was kind of getting in the way of completing my bucket list.

When my phone rang I was halfway through my second plate of pimientos–maybe I couldn’t figure out the big stuff, but some of those little pleasures were really great, anyway.

“Petra,” I said.  “Hey.  Hey from Spain.”

“Happy Apocalypse,” she said.  “Hope you don’t mind me calling.  It’s kind of a tradition now, you and me and the end of the world.”

“I’m coming home,” I blurted.

“Yeah?”  Her voice lifted happily.  Behind it, there was music, something choral and ancient-sounding.

“Yeah,” I said, and I pressed my free hand to my eyes to keep them dry in the chilly Spanish wind.

V: January 23, 2013 (according to Chrissie “Cass” Hynd)

I didn’t tell Petra it was the day.  She woke in a good mood, and I didn’t want to spoil it.  She went around the apartment humming Neko Case, making me coffee and pancakes, setting out a painkiller beside my plate.

She had something due for a client and she spent the morning on the sofa with her laptop and a headset.  I read the paper, every page, even the classifieds, and when I was done, I folded it up neatly and set it on the coffee table in the centre of Petra’s living room.

She’d made up the sofa for me at first, but the last couple of weeks I’d been sleeping in her bed.  When I had the nightmare–most nights, now–she would wrap her arms around me without waking.

I killed most of the day like any other day.  It was too late to do any more of the stuff on my bucket list.  I just wanted to drink some tea, do a crossword, listen to Petra’s half of her client call, watch the clouds gather outside.

It happened in the early evening.  Petra was in the kitchenette, making a stir-fry; she had a colander full of bean sprouts and a brick of tofu and a mound of green onions chopped fine.  I could smell sesame oil.

I was in the living room, with my leg propped up on the sofa and a beer in my hand, just watching rain on the window-glass.  Dark had fallen early on an unseasonably warm day.

I heard thunder in the distance, or something else.  I rose and stood by the window and took a deep breath.  The hairs on my arm pricked to life.

The power went out.

“What the fuck?” Petra said from the kitchen.  I heard the clatter of a knife or something falling into the sink.

“No,” I said.  “No, shit, no.”  I turned to go to her.  In the dark I smashed my bad knee against the coffee table.  Pain like a starburst.  I heard the table go over.

“Cass?  Cass, are you okay?”

And there was the light, a vast electric-purple flare, and there was the sound, a roar like the whole city falling, and beneath it I heard myself cry out.

And Petra laughed, a high surprised whoop.  “That was close!  Cass, did you see?  I think it hit right next door!”  She rushed to the window.  “Thunderstorms in January–fucking climate change, wow.  I can’t see any fire, can you?  Holy crap.  I’ve never been that close to it before!”

My eyes were dazzled still, tear-filled and blinking.  I saw her shape towering dim against the dark outside, against the city without power.

Then the light blinked on, and she was just Petra-sized again, and I was lying on the floor beside the overturned coffee table, amid the scattered sheets of today’s paper.

Petra turned and saw me there.  She came and helped me up.  She hissed through her teeth when she saw my hands uselessly clenching over the bad place on my knee, and she brought me another painkiller.

Then she figured it out.  I saw her face change.  I must have told her about the light, at some point, or maybe she could see it on me somehow.

“Today was your day,” she said.  “You didn’t tell me.”

“There wasn’t anything I could do to change it,” I said.

“I would have held your hand more,” Petra said.

“Hold it now,” I said.  “Please?”

She came and wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pressed her lips to my hair and whispered into it, “I’m so glad you were wrong.”

VI: January 24, 2013

I did not have the dream.  I did not dream at all.  I woke up with my arm gone to sleep under Petra’s weight, and weak sun angling in.

I lay until Petra’s alarm went off.  It was Thursday.  Petra kissed me and rolled over and padded to the shower.  She had nothing on.  I saw the dimples at the base of her spine, the comfortable weight at her hips, the long muscles of her thighs.

I did not have a job to go to.  I did not have a place of my own.  I had a backpack and a drawer of clothes in Petra’s dresser and a few cartons of books in Robin’s garage.

I had a terrible pain in my knee.  I had a business card in my wallet.

In the bathroom, Petra turned on the shower and began humming to herself.  Her singing voice, I had found, was surprisingly high and sweet.

I pulled on a mostly-clean t-shirt and a pair of flannel boxers, and I went to the living room.

We had left the table overturned, the papers strewn.  Yesterday’s date on every one of them.

I kicked them into a messy pile with my bare foot, and then grabbed them all up and dumped them into the recycling bin.

That part was easy.  The next part needed a bit more.  I spent a moment just taking deep breaths.

But Petra wouldn’t be in the shower forever, and I wasn’t sure I wanted an audience for this conversation.

I picked up my phone and I looked at the business card and I dialed the number there.

“Hi, yes.  My name’s Chrissie Hynd.  I got a referral a while ago and I haven’t followed up, but now I’m–yes, that’s right.  I’m supposed to schedule an MRI.  Yes, please.  For my knee.  Yes–yes, that works, I’ll put it my calendar.  Thanks.”

When I hung up the phone I felt this pressure behind my eyes, so intense I thought it was a vision coming, and I worked my hands together and hauled in a breath and waited for it.

Nothing came, though.  Nothing from outside.  Just the slow tick of the engine of logic in my brain, telling me that although the world had not ended, I could still die.  And in response, the faster engine of my heart, telling me it would beat, and beat, and beat, and keep beating.

END

“The End of the World in Five Dates” was first published in issue 58 ofApex Magazine in March 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 May 14th!

[Music Plays Out]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

THE END OF THE WORLD IN FIVE DATES

by Claire Humphrey

I: May 21, 2011 (according to Harold Camping)

Robin called it an apartment, but it was really part of an old carpet factory in the Junction: an echoing space where one of the looms used to be, furnished with a broken church pew, two wheelchairs, and the bench seat from a minivan.

The smells of paint and dust were good, banishing the phantom smells of antiseptic and latex gloves from my nose.  I leaned in the doorway of the breakroom and watched her sweep.  “Where’s everyone going to sit?”

“On the floor,” she said.  “That’s why I’m sweeping it.”

A full transcript appears under the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episod

ORDINARY SOULS

by K. M. Szpara

“This is a bad idea, Callum.” The sorceress rolled a colorful concoction of dried plants in a thin piece of cigarette paper and balanced it between her lips. “You know that, right?” The end smoldered on its own.

“Probably.” If Ethan didn’t know, would he forgive me?

I picked at a chunk of yellow foam exploding from my chair’s upholstery. She wouldn’t notice. Her whole apartment was crumbling slowly around her altar—chipped paint, smoke glazed walls, mysterious splatter on the floor. Serena was a ‘non-profit’ sorceress, one of the few who didn’t whore over-inflated skills in the private sector.

A full transcript appears under the cut.

[Music Plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode four for April 23rd, 2015. I’m your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Well, we’ve made it through the first month of GlitterShip. It’s been a bit of a learning curve on my end, but I think we’re off to a good start. As a head’s up, since GlitterShip only publishes four fiction episodes a month, we’re going to have a week off next week, although I may put up a short question and answer session about the podcast if anyone has any questions. I made a short Google form, which I’ll link in the transcript, or you can email me at kehrli at gmail dot com if you have anything you’d like me to talk about next week.

One of the Kickstarter stretch goals that we reached right at the end of the campaign was an original fiction goal. What this means is that I’m going to start putting out one original piece of fiction per month. I thought that I’d be able to start doing that in May, but the first original story will come out in June, since I have to buy some stories first!

If you’re a writer, submissions for original stories will be open starting on May 1st. This is an open call, so no previous publishing experience is necessary, just send me your best work. For more information about GlitterShip submissions, please check out our Submission Guidelines on the website.

This does mean, however, that since we’re starting two months late with original stories, there will be two original episodes in both June and July to catch up.

One last update about GlitterShip in general: I’ve started to send out Kickstarter backer surveys. Right now the $5 and $10 levels have been sent out, and the others will be coming. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. Without you, I wouldn’t be able to make this podcast.

I’ve mentioned the Vitality Kickstarter before. Vitality is a queer SF/F print and ezine that is funding its second issue. The Kickstarter ends on April 30th, so if you’re interested in more queer SF/F fiction, check it out. And, I will of course have links in the transcript.

Alright! Today’s story is “Ordinary Souls” by K.M. Szpara.

K.M. Szpara lives in Baltimore, MD, with a black cat and miniature poodle. He has a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, which he totally uses at his day job as a legal secretary. On nights and weekends, he advances his queer agenda at the local LGBT Community Center and writes speculative fiction novels. His short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed's Queers Destroy Science Fiction! and Shimmer Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @KMSzpara.

A quick note before we get into the story: this is another sad one, sorry! I’m such a goth at heart, everything is sadness and doom with me. More importantly, though, this story does contain a sex scene, so if that’s going to embarrass you, you might want to listen to it with headphones.

Ordinary Souls

By K.M. Szpara

 “This is a bad idea, Callum.” The sorceress rolled a colorful concoction of dried plants in a thin piece of cigarette paper and balanced it between her lips. “You know that, right?” The end smoldered on its own.

“Probably.” If Ethan didn’t know, would he forgive me?

I picked at a chunk of yellow foam exploding from my chair’s upholstery. She wouldn’t notice. Her whole apartment was crumbling slowly around her altar—chipped paint, smoke glazed walls, mysterious splatter on the floor. Serena was a ‘non-profit’ sorceress, one of the few who didn’t whore over-inflated skills in the private sector.

“This won’t be like the little spells I give you for headaches and—”

“I haven’t felt anything for a week.”

“Figured as much,” she said. “I won’t stop you. Just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

“I know.”

I didn’t know, really, but I didn’t care.

“Where are we going now?” Ethan said. He clutched a bouquet of asphodel in one hand as I tugged him off the beach. His nose disappeared into the little white flowers; the orange-tipped spires tickled his nose and his lips tightened in a smile.

We were going to be late for our reservation. It was already 8:15.

His hand fit inside mine. It was smaller and hardened from years of operating the same lever at the spice mill. I rubbed a finger over his calluses and he smiled up at me.

“You’re not going to tell,” he said.

“Of course not.” I winked; Ethan hated surprises. He still tried to find his Christmas present every year. I had to remind him he was almost thirty, but he always brushed me off.

I corralled him into my car and threw it into gear before he could fasten his seatbelt.

He struggled with it as I took off. “I know you think speed limits don’t apply to you, Callum, so can you at least wait till I’m buckled in? I’d rather not die tonight.”

At his words, I slowed a sudden twenty miles per hour. “Sorry,” I said.

Ethan lurched and then clicked his belt in place. “It’s fine.” He kissed my cheek. “I’d just rather tomorrow’s headlines not read, Tragic Car Crash Kills—” He paused, picking at the bouquet in his hands. “—Attractive Young Machinist and His Sugar Daddy.”

I risked our lives to glare at Ethan. “I hate it when people call me that.”

“Right.” He angled my head back to the road. “Which is why you need to slow down and pay attention.” Ethan smirked at his own wit.

He rolled down the window and a few pink pinstriped petals twirled into the night. The flowers’ light-honey musk filled the car. Ethan stared out the window, entranced by the sight. Then, I took our exit and his gaze turned to the streets.

I pulled into a parking space. “This is our stop,” I said, waiting for him to notice and remember.

Through high windows, candles glowed on black silk tablecloths. Ethan’s jaw unhinged when I opened his door. The familiar scent of hickory-smoked turkey and herbed bread reached us even outside.

“Fernando’s? This is where—”

“We had our first date,” I said, helping him out of the car. “The only time you ever let me treat you to dinner.” I gave his hand a playful squeeze. “Well, you ordered us filet mignon.” Ethan was no good at keeping a straight face. “I couldn’t—”

I curled my arms around him and stopped his stammers with a kiss. He inched onto his toes and laced his fingers behind my neck.

“Happy anniversary,” I said.

“Take this while I prepare. Little something for the nerves, free of charge. Open up.” Serena blew rose-colored smoke at my face and I breathed it all in.

“Better?” A green plastic ashtray sat neglected as Serena flicked the ash onto the linoleum.

I nodded as the magic settled into my bloodstream. “Thanks,” I said. “So, what do I owe you for the...”

We’d never talked about the dark side of her business. Some clients just never reemerged from her apartment. Serena assured me the results were worth the price. I’d never believed her until now.

“I don’t want your money, Callum, not for this.” She held another cloud of smoke in her lungs, longer this time, then puffed it out slowly. Her remedy fixed to my heart like a scab. “But I do have a trade in mind.”

We spilled into our apartment, half-drunk from dinner. The duck confit had done little to soak up the two bottles of vintage white we’d ordered. Ethan threw his keys; they slid across the counter and clanged to the floor. I couldn’t help but stare as he bent to retrieve them. He laughed and tugged unsuccessfully at my shirt. I humored him, closing the gap between us.

“You look hot in blue,” he said.

“Did you want me to leave my clothes on?” I asked, but he was already fingering the buttons.

“Fuck me,” he whispered. His tongue grazed his lips.

I leaned in and caught the bottom lip between my teeth. A soft moan escaped him as I sucked. How could I not give in to such a demand?

“In bed?” I nudged his chin aside and kissed his throat. My hand brushed his crotch. His pulse throbbed against my cheek. “Or here, against the counter?”

I waved at the growing fog of honey-sweet incense. You would have thought my lungs were hard-wired for essence of asphodel. Tears stung my eyes; Serena lit three black candles and I tried to blink away the irritation.

“You’re sure you don’t want the anti-anxiety smokes instead?” she asked. “They’ll go down easier. You know I’ll give you a good—”

“Don’t you think I’m past anxiety?” I said.

She straightened to a formidable height. “Before we start, the contract.” She left the issue behind and held out an empty palm, like I might spit gum into it. “Breathe here.”

A small yellow crystal materialized from my breath. Serena dropped it into a leather pouch, which she reattached to her hip. No turning back, now.

She set a small cage on the altar. A dove poked his head between the bars and watched Serena grind herbs and flowers into crumbs. She picked up the knife and the dove beat his wings against the bars.

“Quiet, little bird. This isn’t for you,” she said and the creature stilled. “Callum, your hand.” She’d never performed a blood-spell on me before. They were high-stakes but felt like a small price now. I flexed my fingers and offered my palm.

Serena slammed it down against the table and sliced the blade across the soft flesh of my wrist. I screamed and the dove fluttered in its cage. Every muscle in my body flexed but she held me still with unnatural strength.

“Gods, Serena!” My heart quickened as blood leaked down my hand and onto the altar cloth. I’d known a sacrifice had to be made, but this much? The room twisted around me, colors wrung out like water from a dirty rag.

I could barely make out her words over the high-pitched buzz in my ears. “These aren’t the gods you’re used to, Callum.”

Ethan threw his leather shoes off like they hadn’t cost him a week’s salary. Five days of sorting out magic plants from mundane. Forty hours of the same motion, picking and sniffing seeds, then grinding them to powder.

Guilt turned in my stomach as I ran my manicured hands up Ethan’s sides. It’d taken months to convince him to move in with me. He couldn’t afford half the rent; I didn’t care.

“You coming?” He smiled—somehow Ethan was always smiling.

I pulled at my tie, kicked off my shoes. “Bet your ass I am.”

Ethan ran into our bedroom, shirt unbuttoned, pants twisted around his ankles. He danced around, trying to get them off. “Well if my ass is on the line—” I rushed over as he fell in a fit of giggles. “I hope you win.”

I grabbed the cuffs of his pants and pulled them off. “I haven’t even had a chance to play yet.”

Serena held me still until my blood soaked the altar cloth. “Relax, you’re still alive,” she said. “Would you rather I’d pricked your finger and wasted an hour while we waited?”

I dug my fingernails into my palm, shaking my head. I’d have let her slit my throat if it would’ve given me more time with Ethan.

“Don’t move.”

I slouched in my chair as she released me. Her hand disappeared into a wooden box, and returned with coarse brown thread. She steadied my arm while her needle pierced my skin.

"Asphodel root."

My lip burned as I bit down on it. Serena stitched the gash with the root-thread until a jagged brown line remained. I wriggled my fingers as their feeling returned.

She traced its length, whispering.

I grunted and yanked my arm free, examining the stitches. They'd melded into my skin.

Serena spread three pinches of her plant mixture across cigarette paper and rolled it. One end glowed orange as the other touched her lips. “Human blood. Always gives it a metallic tinge. Open up, birdie.”

The dove cooed as the sorceress drew a deep breath and released it. Smoke enveloped the cage.

"You're not going to—"

"Kill it?" When she dosed it again, the bird twitched. "What kind of business do you think I run here?"

And then it keeled over.

"Please!" Ethan arched up as I pushed my fingers inside him again.

Our bodies slid against one another, slick with sweat and saliva. I'd held off as long as I could, but the way he panted now, I knew he wouldn't let me wait.

But I relished the remaining moments. "Please what?" My lips grazed his chest as I spoke. He tasted like salt and smelled like cinnamon.

A little growl rumbled in his throat. "You're killing me, Callum."

His words prickled over my skin. "Don't talk like that."

"I wouldn't have to if my boyfriend would get inside me." He squirmed beneath me.

“Right,” I said, loosening my grip on his arms. “Sorry.”

We were lost: words reduced to syllables, the world to this bed, his warmth, my thrusts. He was a writhing, sweaty, beautiful mess of a man. Ethan’s fingers wrapped around his own cock and my eyes screwed shut. Moans and grunts surfaced like bubbles in champagne.

Then—“Callum!”

I held on as his body bucked beneath mine. My orgasm hit as his subsided. It was more of a spasm—a body out of control. My hips jerked and ground against his, stretching the pleasure as long as I could. Ethan’s lips were there as the room focused again. His calm washed over me like one of Serena’s remedies.

“What if we just stayed like this forever?” he said. “Connected.”

But I pulled away, ending his fantasy. Why did he have to say these things now?

“What if we could stop time, drain oceans, fly through space...” I said.

“I was trying to be romantic.”

I nudged him and flopped onto the pillows. “Goodnight, Ethan.”

“Night, Callum.” He curled against me, resting his head in the crook of my neck, and kissed my shoulder. This was where I wanted to stay forever.

Serena grabbed a blanket from the cupboard and tossed it at me. "I hope you brought another set of clothes."

"I did." I picked at a piece of dried blood.

"Over the sink. This is my workplace, not your bathroom."

No, my bathroom was much cleaner. But I obeyed. Warm water spewed from her rusting faucet, loosening the mess on my arm.

"Change behind the curtain. Be quick. The night doesn't wait."

I pulled on the black pants and sapphire blue shirt I'd packed—Ethan’s favorite. Serena flung the curtain open as I finished tying my shoes. "You look nice. Going someplace fancy later?"

“Fernando’s. It was our first date.”

“How’d you manage those reservations?” she asked, somewhere between impressed and mocking.

“I know the hostess. What's in the basket?"

A black cloth covered the contents. Sorcerers never disclosed all their ingredients. “Get the bird. Time to go.”

My alarm blared like it was on red-alert.

“Ugh, shut up.” Ethan swatted around, missing completely. “Callum, your alarm.”

I reached over him and slapped it right onto the floor.

“I hate that thing,” he said.

“I know, you’ve told me a million times.”

He snuggled up against me, eyes still closed. “Couldn’t you get one that plays light jazz or nature sounds?”

“Nothing says ‘time to wake up’ like light jazz,” I mumbled and tightened the covers around us.

The snooze alarm sounded its revenge.

“Gods, what time is it?” Ethan yanked the plug right from the socket, but I knew:

5:00. My stomach dropped. Morning.

“You know,” he said, voice groggy. “I took off work so that we could sleep in, make penis-shaped pancakes, then maybe lick maple syrup off one another.” Ethan buried his face in my chest, eyes still closed.

“There’s nothing else I’d rather do.” I squeezed him in my arms, trying to memorize exactly how his body felt, how his fingers grazed my back, and toes poked mine. “But we have to go. There’s something I have to show you.”

He rolled onto his stomach and watched me pull on a pair of shorts. Concern showed on his face. “What happened to your arm?”

I quickly covered the stitches with long sleeves. “Nothing.”

“Have you been going to Serena again?”

I reached into his drawer and grabbed a white tee shirt. “Maybe.”

“Do I even want to know why?” His lips tightened while he watched me get dressed.

I didn’t answer—couldn’t answer. He’d know a lie, and the truth? Not yet. I still had time.

Ethan sighed. "Come back to bed.”

I threw the shirt and it landed on his head.

“Get dressed. We’re leaving in five.”

The water looked different just after sunset, black almost. Serena sat cross-legged in the middle of a circle. She’d traced intricate patterns in the sand in preparation for the spell. I’d set up my charade, laying out a blanket with bare dishes and a half-empty bottle of wine. Now, I dug my feet into the sand to keep from running.

If the week without Ethan had felt like a lifetime, how was a lifetime going to feel?

I closed my eyes and tried to drown out Serena’s chanting. But I could still smell the incense: asphodel, again. She’d given me a small bouquet of the pink and white flowers. They rested on the blanket, waiting.

Just like me.

“I take back everything I said earlier about staying in bed,” Ethan said. “I’ll never get tired of this beach.”

“Me neither,” I whispered. I didn’t trust myself to speak any louder.

“And now I will have seen the sun set and rise here during the same night. Morning—technically, it’s morning, but you know what I mean.”

I nodded and wrapped my arms around him as we stared out at the sea. It seemed to rise with the sun in orange, red, and purple.

“Do you remember the first time we came here?” I said and cleared my throat. My voice had begun to waver.

“Yes. It was barely spring and the water was freezing. You threw me in. I don’t think I returned your calls for a week.” He laughed and leaned his head on my shoulder. “And if you’re thinking about a repeat performance, stop. I know where you sleep.”

Then, in the distance, I saw Serena coming with the unconscious white dove in its little cage. I wanted to run—wanted to scoop Ethan up in my arms and just go. There wasn’t enough time. How could she possibly think I was ready?

“Ethan,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“He’s coming!” Serena said. I sat up on the picnic blanket and looked around.

“Where?”

She didn’t have time to answer my question. Little flecks of ash rose from the sand and the sea. At first they were too tiny to notice. But then, they joined and grew, forming his familiar shape.

“Remember not to treat him differently. For him, it will be like he was never gone,” the sorceress said. “The dead don’t remember.”

I nodded, only half-paying attention to her instructions.

“Then he’s yours again...until sunrise. Use your time wisely and meet me back here.”

“Or else?”

“I will kill you both.” She showed no hint of a smile.

When the last of the ashes fell into place, they flashed white like the center of a flame. The form was no longer ash; it was flesh. I reached out and ran my fingers over the soft pink skin of his cheek.

“Ethan?”

“What?”

I threw my body against his, knocking us both to the sand. There weren’t enough kisses in the world. How could I possibly fit them all into one night?

“Nothing, I just”—missed you—“love you.”

“Someone’s had too much celebratory wine. Aren’t we supposed to be going somewhere real for dinner? Not that the sunset wasn’t beautiful, but those crackers and cheese won’t hold me over for long.”

“Yes, we are,” I said. “We’re going to have an unforgettable night.”

Serena was too close to ignore and the sun poured over the horizon. How could I tell Ethan? How could I even form the words? It was going to crush him. Serena was right. Letting him go a second time already hurt worse.

“Tonight, it—it wasn’t...” I tried to say it.

“Wasn’t what?”

“It wasn’t real. And I’m so sorry for doing this to you.”

“Doing what? Callum, you’re scaring me.” He gripped my shoulders and stared at me with those deep brown eyes.

“Last week there was an accident. At the spice mill.”

“I think I would have known—”

I pushed my lips against his, pressed our foreheads together, squeezed my hands against the sides of his face.

I shook my head.

“No.” His fingers dug into my sides, lips quivered against my neck. “Stop it. Why are you doing this?”

“It’s time.” Serena stopped beside us. The dove stirred in its cage.

“What’s she doing here?” Ethan said, recognizing the sorceress.

“I’ve come to send you back.” She said what I couldn’t. “You can’t stay with the living.”

He stilled when she touched his forehead. Realization hit him like a bomb.

“No!” Ethan screamed and I unleashed the sob I’d been holding in since we’d woken up. “No, Callum. Don’t let her take me, please!” I hugged him until my arms hurt, kissed him until my lips slid through our tears.

“Don’t worry,” Serena said. “You can’t hurt when you don’t exist.”

Slowly, little flecks of his hair and skin turned a dark gray. He started to fade as they blew away in the breeze.

“I love you,” I said. “So much.”

“I love you too,” he whispered.

And then, all I could hear were his gasps and the terrifying cries of a person who’d just realized he wasn’t even dying. He had already died.

The dove cooed and righted itself in the cage. “Can’t we just kill the fucking bird?” I shouted over Ethan’s shoulder. Why did it get to rise again? I’d strangle the thing if its death would give Ethan the rest of his life back.

Ash flew into the morning breeze. I was barely holding him anymore.

“Please don’t let me go,” he whispered, and then to Serena. “I’d rather hurt.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” she said.

It took all my strength to look into Ethan’s translucent eyes.

“Remember me.” His lips continued to move soundlessly.

“Always,” I said.

The last of him swept off into the wind. Ethan was gone.

The door to my apartment swung open. I hadn’t answered the knocks; I knew who it was. “You can’t hide forever, Callum.”

Serena pulled up a chair beside the bed, where I huddled under a pile of blankets. It had been ten days. I’d barely moved.

“Time to pay up.”

It’d sounded like a fair trade when she’d suggested it. Better, even, than living with the pain. Ethan didn’t have to, why should I?

But I couldn’t lie in bed forever, staring at the empty space beside me, reliving that night.

“You gathered his belongings?”

I glanced at a black bag on the floor. There was no use trying to keep anything of Ethan’s. Serena would sense it. She promised to hold onto the possessions I couldn’t bear to destroy—photographs, letters, the engraved watch I’d bought him for our one-year anniversary. We couldn’t risk me finding ‘strange’ things around the apartment.

“Just get it over with,” I said.

“You’ll feel better afterwards.” She plucked a cigarette from inside her cloak and put it to her lips. “You don’t really want to think about him all the time anyway. He’s dead. Non-existent. Ash.”

“I get it. What are you going to do with them?”

“Your memories of Ethan are very potent,” she said. “Perfect for love spells and collectors. I already have a prospective client lined up.”

“You’re not taking any other memories. Just him?” Tears flowed down familiar paths on my cheeks. I’d promised I’d always remember him.

“I’m a woman of my word.” She shrugged. “Now, open up. Time for your medicine.”

She breathed the enchanted smoke into my lungs and I breathed Ethan out of my life.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Serena said.

I coughed and waved at the cloud of smoke that hung in my bedroom. “What was that?” My head pounded.

“Just a little something for your aches.” She patted my forehead and then stood, gathering her black bag of supplies. The magic must have made me doze off. It’d happened before.

“Thanks, I guess.”

She set a tin on the end table before opening the front door. “Smoke one every night before bed for a week. Start tonight and you’ll be good as new.”

The door banged closed behind her. I flipped the tin open and a soft honey scent wafted out. It smelled strangely familiar, but from where and when? It would come to me in an hour when I least expected it, I was sure.

But it was only 7:30. If I left now, I could still grab a table for one at Fernando’s and be back in time for Serena’s remedy.

END

“Ordinary Souls” was first published in Shimmer issue 16 in January 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 May 7th!

[Music Plays Out]