GlitterShip

Graveyard Girls on Paper Phoenix Wings 

by Andrea Tang

The flyboy crash-landed into Magdalisa’s life on a Wednesday, just before mid-afternoon prayers. More specifically, he crash-landed into the spindly stone watchtower over Dalaga Cemetery, and really, that amounted to the same thing. Magdalisa, for her part, probably wouldn’t have noticed if the flyboy’s spectacular nose-dive hadn’t so thoroughly disturbed the ghosts.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 51 for March 3, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is "Graveyard Girls on Paper Phoenix Wings" by Andrea Tang.

Graveyard Girls on Paper Phoenix Wings 

by Andrea Tang

The flyboy crash-landed into Magdalisa’s life on a Wednesday, just before mid-afternoon prayers. More specifically, he crash-landed into the spindly stone watchtower over Dalaga Cemetery, and really, that amounted to the same thing. Magdalisa, for her part, probably wouldn’t have noticed if the flyboy’s spectacular nose-dive hadn’t so thoroughly disturbed the ghosts.

Tita Shulin, naturally, was the ghost tasked with telling Magdalisa, who’d been dozing off over a half-swept catacomb beneath the graveyard proper. The blast of icy air across Magdalisa’s ears put an abrupt end to the nap. Yelping, the girl scrambled awake. “Tita Shulin! I’m sorry, I’m on my way to prayers, I promise—”

“Sod the prayers,” said Magdalisa’s tita. Those three words, more than anything, alerted Magdalisa to the fact that something serious indeed had happened. Sleep-fog fled her mind. Twisting her hands together, Magdalisa leaned forward, until she was practically nose-to-nose with Tita Shulin.

“Tita,” said Magdalisa, more quietly now, but a good deal more urgently. Her words bounced off the catacomb walls. Tita, tita, tita. “What’s the matter?”

Tita Shulin’s mouth pursed. Ghosts were funny creatures. Tita Shulin didn’t glow, or go dramatically translucent, or otherwise give much indication that she was dead. She looked nearly the same as she had in life: square-shouldered and square-jawed, with golden-brown skin, her hair—dyed stubbornly black well into her seventies—close-cropped in a fashion that had supposedly scandalized the family when Tita Shulin was still a young woman, and not yet a tita at all. Tita Shulin, as a ghost, turned the air around her cold, and when particularly exasperated with Magdalisa, sometimes floated a few inches off the ground and telekinetically bandied objects about. Still, given that Tita Shulin, when living, had been a veteran of the Corrazon Witches’ Corps, death had done little to change her.

Now, invisible forces tugged Magdalisa upright from the catacomb surface, and smoothed down her collar with perfunctory sensibility. “A sky-sailor has crashed his paper phoenix into the tower.”

“What?” shrieked Magdalisa, scurrying after Tita Shulin. The ghost floated up the grimy stone stairway with alarming speed. “Is he all right?”

Smooth Stones and Empty Bones

by Bennett North

There’s a skeleton in the chicken coop. It’s some bare collection of abandoned bones, maybe a former fox, and it’s slishing through the pine needles and bumping liplessly against the gate. The chickens, for their part, don’t look concerned.

Mom is still in the house, folding laundry. I take a watering can from where it’s sitting next to the potted mums and haul it out to the coop. When I dump it on the skeleton, it shivers like a wet dog but doesn’t retreat.

I glance over my shoulder at the house again, then open the gate to the coop. The skeleton doesn’t appear to notice, so I get behind it and shove it out. The skeleton stumbles around like a dog with vertigo.

“Shh,” I say when it clacks its teeth. If Mom sees this, I’m in so much trouble.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 50 for February 20, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm back with a reprint of "Smooth Stones and Empty Bones" by Bennett North.

By day, Bennett North maintains computer labs at a local university. By night, she writes both short and long format speculative fiction (when she’s not too busy playing Minecraft or Fallout 4). She likes to think of herself as a runner and a rock climber, although she doesn’t do either of those things nearly as often as she’d like. She lives somewhere between Providence, RI and Boston, MA.

Smooth Stones and Empty Bones

by Bennett North

There’s a skeleton in the chicken coop. It’s some bare collection of abandoned bones, maybe a former fox, and it’s slishing through the pine needles and bumping liplessly against the gate. The chickens, for their part, don’t look concerned.

Mom is still in the house, folding laundry. I take a watering can from where it’s sitting next to the potted mums and haul it out to the coop. When I dump it on the skeleton, it shivers like a wet dog but doesn’t retreat.

I glance over my shoulder at the house again, then open the gate to the coop. The skeleton doesn’t appear to notice, so I get behind it and shove it out. The skeleton stumbles around like a dog with vertigo.

“Shh,” I say when it clacks its teeth. If Mom sees this, I’m in so much trouble.

Its vertebrae are sharp and don’t look to be held together by anything tangible. I haul the thing out of the yard, stepping over the low stone wall that rings my mother’s property and marching out into the pine forest until I can’t see the house anymore.

The further from the house I get, the less the skeleton moves, and by the time I’m down by the river, the skeleton is shedding bones like breadcrumbs. I drop it and it doesn’t get up again. I rub the indents on my palm left by sharp bone-points and hunch my shoulders a little.

I hope it was the only one.

When I arrive back at the house, my mother is hollering out the door for me. I shout a reply and then collect the eggs I’d originally been sent to get.

My mom is a witch, or at least that’s what the people in town call her. She dyes her frizzy hair black and when she’s working she gives herself full drag-queen makeup, with the blood-red lips and glittery green eyelids. Right now, though, her face is washed clean of makeup and she looks old. She’s sitting at the table, the newspaper spread in front of her. Coffee is perking and strips of bacon sizzle in the pan. I put the basket of eggs on the counter next to the open bag of ground coffee.

“How do you want them? Over-easy?” I ask, hoping she won’t ask why it took me so long.

Mom hums. “Poached,” she says. “I’m watching my weight.”

I fill a pot with water and put it on a burner. The bacon is crawling with white foamy grease.

“How late are you working today?” Mom asks.

“Just until three.” I dash some vinegar into the water and don’t look at her. “I think I might hang out with Mariposa after work, though.”

My mother beams. “I’m glad you’ve found a friend,” she says. “I was afraid you wouldn’t meet anyone new after you dropped out.” She rises from the table and plants a kiss on the top of my head, then grabs some tongs to flip the bacon.

My name is Helena. I’m seventeen years old.

Tonight after work I’m going to show my girlfriend how to raise the dead.

I work in the local Gas ’n’ Go. Business is pretty slow, so I mostly spend the day reading the newspaper. The local news headline is about the continued search for a nine-year-old boy who went missing in the woods a few days ago. It’s been cold these last few nights, nearly down to freezing, so it’s becoming less and less likely that they’ll find the kid alive.

Quarter to three, one of the high school coaches comes in. I vaguely remember him from back when I still attended school, although I was never in any sports. He picks through a rack of cookies for a few minutes and I continue reading my magazine until he comes up to the register and tosses a pack of Oreos on the counter in front of me.

“Forty bucks on number nine,” he says. I ring up the Oreos and the gas as he roots in his back pocket for his wallet.

“That’s forty-two ninety-nine,” I say.

He fishes a couple twenties and a five out of his wallet and nods at the newspaper rack. “They come by to talk to you yet?”

“What?” I glance at the rack, too.

“That missing kid. Fucking suspicious, if you ask me. Kid goes missing, I say to start with the Satanists in the woods and their animal sacrifices. ”

“We had nothing to do with it,” I say stiffly.

He snorts and waits for his change. Once I give it to him, he adds, “If another kid goes missing, I think a couple of us might take matters into our own hands. You tell your mother that.”

He leaves the store. I stare at his retreating back and wish I were a witch like my mother. I’d make him piss sugar ants.

The mental image keeps the sick feeling in my stomach at bay until Geoff shows up for the next shift. I try to wash off a bit of the stale coffee and gasoline smell in the bathroom, then head outside. Mariposa’s car is just pulling into the lot and she waves at me as I approach her.

She’s borrowing her mother’s car, which is a teal Ford Taurus that’s probably as old as me. There’s a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror between two pine-scented air fresheners. I slide into the passenger’s seat and close the door.

“Hi,” I say giddily. I reach across the seat and she grabs my hand. It’s the most I dare to do within sight of Geoff in the gas station.

“Missed you,” Mariposa says.

“It’s been ages,” I say, and we both laugh. We’ve spent more time together in the past week than we have apart.

She exits the lot and onto Reservoir Street. Technically we shouldn’t be driving together since we’re both under eighteen, but I don’t think anyone’s going to catch us.

“How’ve you been?” I ask as she drives. “Any . . . news?”

Mariposa shakes her head and her mouth tightens. She’s got lots of glossy black hair and perfectly plucked eyebrows, and even when she’s upset, she still looks like a movie star. I can’t comprehend how someone can be so attractive.

“Nothing,” she says. “My mom’s arranging a vigil. She still thinks they’ll find Javi alive.” Her breath hitches. “And I mean, I do, too, but I think . . . I don’t know. It’s like some kind of nightmare.”

I squeeze her hand tightly. She squeezes mine back.

“I don’t want to think about it,” she says. “Every time I do I just feel helpless. Distract me.”

I tell her about work, although I don’t mention the high school coach. I don’t have many interesting stories, so I make some up and get her to laugh. By the time we arrive at her house, the two of us are giggling.

Mariposa’s house borders the woods just like mine does. The same woods that her little brother has disappeared in. A bunch of cars are parked in the driveway and along the side of the road.

“There’s a group of local guys looking for him,” Mariposa says. “They leave their cars here.”

I think of the coach and then look down into my lap. “Um, want to go somewhere else?”

“Like where?” She looks at me. “Oh, Helena, it’s fine. They’re not going to be jerks to you.”

I’m not so sure. “I just sort of wanted to go somewhere . . . private?”

She looks at me and her cheeks turn a little pink. “Okay,” she says.

“The reservoir,” I say. “Let’s go there.”

There’s a kayak launch on the reservoir behind a row of houses. Mariposa parks there nearby and then we pick our way along the shore until we find a little rocky beach. There’s a ring of scorched stones here where some teenagers lit a beach fire. The fire pit is filled with a couple half-burnt potato chip bags and broken Heineken bottles.

We sit on a patchy bit of grass at the edge of the beach. The air is sun-warmed but has that mid-autumn chill to it that means tonight will be cold, too. The trees towering behind us are all red and yellow. A damp burnt smell lingers over the fire pit. Mariposa huddles under my armpit and clasps my hand between hers, trying to warm it up.

“I feel like . . . like television lied to me,” she says, and then sort of laughs in a way that doesn’t sound happy.

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever bad things happen on TV, it’s because someone was doing something wrong.” She laces her knuckles between mine. “Like the kid goes missing because his older brother was smoking pot while babysitting. The girl gets raped because she was underage drinking. And it’s always some moral lesson. If you don’t do anything wrong, bad things won’t happen. If you do something wrong and apologize, you get a second chance. But it doesn’t really work like that, does it?”

“People don’t want to hear about bad things harming good people,” I say.

She’s silent for a moment, looking down at my hand. I can see that her lashes are wet.

“Do you think this happened because we slept together?”

I hug her tightly against my side. “No! Of course not. Real life isn’t like that.”

“If my mother knew about it, she’d say I was responsible for this.”

“She’s dumb. Sorry. But that’s just . . .” I shake my head. “It’s so stupid. There’s nothing wrong with us being together. It’s not like we’re going to get pregnant or diseased or anything.”

“But we’re both girls,” she says quietly.

I feel shaky and cold. “I know that,” I say. I want to take my arm off her shoulder, but she’s still holding my hand.

“Do you think it’s wrong?” I ask.

She shakes her head and then lets out a sob. “No, but I’m so afraid that they’re not going to find Javi.”

She rests her head against my chest and falls silent. I have a knot in my throat like I might cry. It’s not as if I haven’t had these thoughts before. Most of my life I’ve been told that being queer is wrong. Maybe it’s becoming more acceptable in the world at large, but I live in a small town and they have small minds around here.

“I don’t regret it,” Mariposa says finally. “I just . . . I get scared sometimes when I’m praying with my mother.”

“I want to show you something,” I hear myself say.

She lets go of my hand and I disentangle myself. The box is in my purse. I fish it out and then just clutch it in my hands for a moment. Shit, shit, shit. My stomach clenches. There’s no going back.

“So, um,” I say, my mouth dry. I swallow and tongue the welt inside my cheek. “So you know how my mom is a witch?”

Mariposa nods. Of course she knows. Her mother started a campaign to have mine evicted after my mother set up shop in town. There’s a strong Catholic community in town and they don’t like it when people claim to read fortunes and inflict curses.

“Mostly she just reads palms and stuff,” I say. “She makes charms and things. That stuff’s not usually real. But sometimes it is.”

I look up at her. Her dark eyes are serious.

“Okay,” she says cautiously.

I’m still clutching the box. It’s just an old cigar box, water-stained and dirty. I’d mostly brushed off the clumps of soil when I dug it up in the yard, but it had been buried for so long that the dirt had gotten into the grain of the soft wood.

Maybe I can back out now. Make up some story. But I want to tell her. I like her a lot. I’m still not sure about that other L-word, but I think this relationship is pretty serious. She should know.

“Do you believe in magic?” I say, stalling for time.

After a pause, she nods. “I think so.”

I set the box down. “You have to swear to never tell anyone about this. Ever. My mother would kill me if she knew I was showing this to you.”

“I swear.”

I flip open the lid of the box. Mariposa stares inside, a frown creasing her brow. It’s filled with maybe a dozen smooth river stones, each the size of my thumbnail.

“These can raise the dead,” I say.

She looks from the rocks up to me, waiting for me to explain. I swallow.

“If someone dies, you put one of these in their mouth, and it will bring them back to life.” I close the lid of the box again. “It’s not . . . not real life. Not completely. They’ll be conscious and able to walk and talk and they’ll even have a heartbeat, but it’s temporary. The stones are like batteries—they keep someone alive for a year or two, but then you need to put in a new one.”

She looks down at the closed lid of the box, then up at me again. “Prove it.”

I chew my lip. “I don’t really want to waste them. Once we run out of these, they’re gone for good. Just think of them as . . . a second chance.”

Her eyes widen slightly. “They would work on Javi?”

“It depends on how long he’s been—” I don’t want to say the word “dead.” “If he’s too . . . far gone . . . these won’t work that well. The stones can only do so much.”

Mariposa claps a hand over her mouth. Her eyes are shiny and wet. “So if they find him soon—”

“I don’t want to make any promises. He would only live so long. He’d need a stone a year, and I can’t give you all the stones. My mother would notice.” She’ll notice if I even give away one stone, but Christ, I’m willing to take that risk.

Mariposa rubs roughly at her cheeks. I can’t read her expression. Something scrapes over the rocks to my right. We both look and then Mariposa shrieks and leaps to her feet. Half of a chipmunk is sitting up on the rock, sniffing the air. It’s matted with dirt and blood.

“The box . . . leaks,” I say.

“Holy fuck,” she says, backing away. “It’s dead.”

“That’s not like how he’d be,” I say. “It’s just because the box is here. It’ll die again as soon as we leave.”

She’s making little gasping noises, hunched over and hugging herself. I get to my feet and then stand there awkwardly. I think she might scream again if I touch her.

I shouldn’t have shown her the box. For all I know, they won’t find Javi in time. And how will I even get access to him if the searchers find his body?

“So what do I do?” she says. She sounds like she’s having trouble breathing. “How does this work?”

I pop the lid open and remove one stone. I hold it out to her. “I don’t know. It might not even work. Just take this in case you get a chance.”

She doesn’t reach out for the stone. “I can’t take that with me. It’s witchcraft, Helena. If my mother knew—I mean, fuck, we buried my dead dog in the backyard. Is that going to get up if I take this stone home?”

It might. I close my fingers over the stone. “Well then, um. If you hear news, call me? I could try to get there quickly . . .” It’s not going to work. It’s so obvious now that this was a mistake. But if it does work, and Mariposa gets her brother back, she’ll be so happy. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than to make Mariposa happy.

Mariposa continues hugging herself. Her face is wet. She’s staring at my closed fist. She slowly nods.

“Okay.”

I put the stone back in the box and bury the box in my purse. Something splashes in the water, a fish, and I wonder if that’s dead, too.

We both stand there in silence a minute, and then she creeps forward. She wraps herself around me. Surprised, I hug her back. She presses her face into my neck.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

When I get home, Mom has a client. The living room of the house is where she does her work. The walls have been painted dark purple and the windows are hung with lacy black curtains. The furniture is all old, dark wood and the room is lit with antique lamps. People wouldn’t believe my mother’s fortunes as much if all the furniture came from Ikea.

She’ll be busy for a while, so I go out into the backyard. Our yard is always in twilight because of the tall pines that surround it. In the back, by the stone wall, there’s a flat piece of slate with a potted lily on top of it. I move the slate aside and look at the soft, freshly turned dirt.

My mother keeps the box in here because the dirt muffles the power of the stones and stops dead things from crawling out of the woods. I scoop a hole in the dirt with my hands. It’s still loose from when I dug out the box last night. When I get down about two feet, I shove the box into the hole and push the dirt on top of it. I put the bit of slate on top of that and sit back on my heels.

I brush the dirt off my hands and look around. My stomach is still tight. I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing. I suspect that I haven’t.

That night, Javi comes out of the forest.

I hear the noise through my bedroom window, which is open a crack to let in the cold air. I’m reading a book, my head propped up on a couple pillows. There’s a scritch-scratching in the yard, which catches my attention immediately. I’m afraid it’s another dead fox or something and I don’t want my mother to notice it.

But when I step out the kitchen door and into the yard, I can see the hunched form of a little boy. He’s squatting in the dirt by the wall, pawing at the pine needles. He doesn’t appear to notice me.

“Javi?” I whisper. My mother’s bedroom is on the other side of the house, and I’m grateful for that.

He stops pawing in the dirt. I can see pine needles and leaf mold all over the back of his shirt, as if he’d been laying down recently. The only light I have to go by is what’s spilling from my bedroom window, but I think his dark skin might be mottled and bruised.

“Javi, are you okay?” I inch forward, knowing he isn’t. When I touch his arm, his flesh is glacial. He turns his head blindly to me and I see more dirt caked on one side of his face. His eyes are opaque white. He’s been dead for days. The hypothermia must have got him the first night he went missing in the woods. My carrying the box around must have woken him.

He makes a distracted humming noise, just air flowing over vocal cords with no intent behind them. I pull back, feeling a surge of horror in my throat. It’s one thing to see animals like this, mindless puppets of the stones, but it’s different to see a child I once knew.

I back away. He doesn’t follow, not even when I run to the piece of slate with the potted flower on top.

It takes me five minutes to dig up the box. The whole time, I’m composing text messages in my head. I’ve found him. He’s okay. Mariposa, sobbing, thanking me.

My fingers hit wood and I scrabble the box open. The rocks clatter inside in my haste. I pull one out and toss the box on the pile of dirt, then jump with a tiny yelp when Javi bumps into me. His face nuzzles against my arm, but only because I’m in the way. He’s drawn to the rocks.

“Open your mouth,” I whisper and touch his cheek. “Shh. Open it.”

He doesn’t know enough to obey, so I push my thumb between his teeth and shove the stone in. I can almost feel the power behind it. It pulls at me as much as it pulls at him. I hear it clack against the back of his teeth. He sways a little on his feet and shakes his head.

“Javi?” I whisper.

His cold fingers clutch at my arm. He wheezes, a dead tongue moistening his lips.

I wipe the dirt and leaves from his face. “Javi, do you remember me? Can you hear me?”

His eyes move in their sockets but they’re still blind-white. I poke my fingers up under his chin, searching for the pulse in his neck. There’s one dull thump, and after a pause, another, but then nothing.

Too far gone. He’s been dead too long.

I can’t tell Mariposa. But . . . I can’t report finding him, either. Me, finding the missing boy when half the town is convinced my family is behind his disappearance?

I found him but the stones didn’t work. I can almost taste the sickening disappointment of that. Mariposa won’t forgive me for offering her hope and taking it away.

I sit down on the ground and hug my knees. Javi stumbles away from me. It makes me feel physically ill to watch him.

What if I just hide his body? The rescuers might not find him. Mariposa and her mother won’t know what happened to him. Is it worse to find his corpse, or never find him at all?

My mother might know what to do, but I have a feeling she’ll just contact the authorities. She would lose business and maybe even face police harassment, but I don’t think that would stop her. She wouldn’t want another mother to go through the horror of not knowing what had happened to her child.

I tongue the welt inside my cheek and watch Javi make his slow way in circles around the yard. The stone will keep him in a state of suspended animation, never growing, never needing to eat or sleep. Never getting worse, but never getting better, either. He’ll be nine years old forever . . . or rather, for as long as the stone lasts.

What if it were Mariposa who had gone missing? Would I rather she not be found? Or would I want a chance to say goodbye?

Mariposa arrives half an hour after I send the text. She must have parked down the street and walked because she comes through the woods. I can see the bobbing light of her cellphone flashlight through the trees. I take Javi by the hand and wait for her.

She steps over the wall into the yard and spots me, then comes to a dead stop. She keeps the flashlight pointing down at the ground, and I think it’s because she’s afraid to look at Javi directly.

“Is he . . . ?” she says. “Is it . . . gruesome?”

I look down at Javi. Apart from his eyes, he just appears to be sleepwalking. The few beats of his heart have cleared a bit of the bruising away, forcing his sluggish blood to circulate.

“No,” I say.

She raises the flashlight a little. The light dances over my feet, then up a bit until it’s shining on Javi’s face. He doesn’t respond to the light at all; doesn’t even seem to notice it.

There is a long pause, as if Mariposa is steeling herself. Then she comes forward. She reaches out and touches his cheek, then flinches back.

“He’s cold,” she says. Her voice is tight, as if she can barely force the words out.

I say nothing. She reaches out again. He turns slightly into the touch, maybe responding to the warmth of her hand. She catches her breath at the movement and then pulls him into a hug.

“Fuck,” she whispers. “Oh fuck, oh fuck.”

He stands in her embrace with the patience of the dead. He doesn’t hug her back, but he doesn’t try to move away, either. Is there something in him that recognizes her? I can’t tell.

“I’m so sorry, Javi. So, so, so sorry.”

Mariposa rocks, pulling him into her arms like he’s a rag doll. I watch, wishing I could do something, but there’s nothing I can contribute here.

“Is it cumulative?” Mariposa asks quietly.

“Pardon?” I say.

“The stones. If you gave him more, would they help? What if you gave him the whole box?”

I hesitate. She sees it and goes alert.

“Would it be enough?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t think so.” I don’t know. It might. Each new stone, erasing a little more of his death.

“Let’s do it. Where are they?”

I don’t look toward the box. “We can’t. Fill his mouth with stones? One’s hard enough to carry around.”

“He’ll be alive, Helena.” She gets to her feet, sweeping the light over the grass. “You keep it outside, don’t you? I saw the dirt on it.”

“What happens in a year or two? Use them all now and they’ll all run out at once.”

“Can you make more?” She pulls Javi by the hand as she stalks through the grass. “Where did you get them?”

“There aren’t any more. This is it.” I chase after her. “Mari, please. You can’t.”

She turns to me. “He’s my brother. I can’t leave him like—” She shakes his hand in her grip.

“I know,” I say helplessly. “But you can’t fix him, either. You have to let him go.”

Her eyes flick over my shoulder. I tense.

She lets go of Javi’s hand and darts around me, sprinting for the box. It’s still laying on top of the pile of dirt where I left it, the wood pale against the dark mud.

I run for it, too, and we both arrive at the same time. Her hand knocks the box over and it spills into the dirt. She scrambles to pick up the stones but I just go for her hands, trying to grab her wrists.

“Mari, no,” I beg. “I can’t spare them all. I need them.”

“I’ll scream,” she says. “I’ll tell everyone I found Javi at your house.”

“Mari—”

“I’ll—” She stops and looks at me. “Need them for what?”

“We don’t have many left,” I say.

“Helena. What do you need them for.” Her voice is very flat because she already knows.

I tongue the welt inside my cheek where the stone has rubbed my flesh raw. “I was only gone for a couple hours,” I say. “I had a heart condition. My mother found me.”

Her wrists lie still in my grip. She’s not fighting me anymore. She’s just watching me, her eyes wide.

“These are all the years I have left,” I say.

“Please let go of me,” she says.

I do.

She opens her hands and lets the stones fall onto the dirt. Her expression shifts slowly from shocked to angry, and then to cold.

“Why do you get a second chance and he doesn’t?” she asks quietly. “What makes you deserve that?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

She rises to her feet, leaving the stones on the ground. Javi has wandered halfway across the yard. She goes to him and takes his hand.

She doesn’t say anything to me as she leads him out of the yard.

My mother finds me sitting at the kitchen table the next morning, resting my head on the smooth wood surface. She rubs my back and then goes to the percolator to start a pot going.

The TV is on mute. The news flashes back and forth between pictures of Javi when he was alive and footage of an ambulance moving slowly away from the edge of the forest. The words “Body of missing boy found by search team” scroll at the bottom of the screen.

“Hard night?” she says.

I roll my eyes up to look at her.

“I heard a bit of it near the end, when you two got loud.” She looks over her shoulder at me, pulling a new filter out of the bag. “I’d have come out if I thought it was necessary.”

“I didn’t want to tell her like that,” I mumble.

She sighs. “It wasn’t the best way to go about it, no.”

For a few minutes there’s nothing but the sound of cooking breakfast. Mom hums as she works, fixing her coffee just right.

“Why did I deserve a second chance?” I say finally.

She pauses in the middle of spooning grounds into the filter. “Oh, hon,” she says. She puts down the spoon and sits in the chair next to mine, wrapping an arm around me. I lean back against her shoulder.

“You deserved it because you’re a good person and I love you,” she says. “And because I’m selfish and didn’t want to lose you. I had the option of bringing you back. Most people don’t.”

“I could have given her Javi, if she’d taken all the stones,” I say.

“I’m not willing to give you up yet,” she replies. “I know you love Mariposa, but I don’t think it would have been doing her a favor.”

“She’ll never speak to me again.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s a good thing, learning to let someone go.” Her voice is sad. She rubs her hand through my hair. It hasn’t grown since I died two years ago. My nails are stubby and short and will never get any longer. I’m stuck in the same body I was in when I died. “I never did have the knack for it.”

END

"Smooth Stones and Empty Bones" was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine and is copyright Bennett North, 2016.

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.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original by Andrea Tang.

Smooth Stones and Empty Bones

by Bennett North

There’s a skeleton in the chicken coop. It’s some bare collection of abandoned bones, maybe a former fox, and it’s slishing through the pine needles and bumping liplessly against the gate. The chickens, for their part, don’t look concerned.

Mom is still in the house, folding laundry. I take a watering can from where it’s sitting next to the potted mums and haul it out to the coop. When I dump it on the skeleton, it shivers like a wet dog but doesn’t retreat.

I glance over my shoulder at the house again, then open the gate to the coop. The skeleton doesn’t appear to notice, so I get behind it and shove it out. The skeleton stumbles around like a dog with vertigo.

“Shh,” I say when it clacks its teeth. If Mom sees this, I’m in so much trouble.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 50 for February 20, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm back with a reprint of "Smooth Stones and Empty Bones" by Bennett North.

By day, Bennett North maintains computer labs at a local university. By night, she writes both short and long format speculative fiction (when she’s not too busy playing Minecraft or Fallout 4). She likes to think of herself as a runner and a rock climber, although she doesn’t do either of those things nearly as often as she’d like. She lives somewhere between Providence, RI and Boston, MA.

Smooth Stones and Empty Bones

by Bennett North

There’s a skeleton in the chicken coop. It’s some bare collection of abandoned bones, maybe a former fox, and it’s slishing through the pine needles and bumping liplessly against the gate. The chickens, for their part, don’t look concerned.

Mom is still in the house, folding laundry. I take a watering can from where it’s sitting next to the potted mums and haul it out to the coop. When I dump it on the skeleton, it shivers like a wet dog but doesn’t retreat.

I glance over my shoulder at the house again, then open the gate to the coop. The skeleton doesn’t appear to notice, so I get behind it and shove it out. The skeleton stumbles around like a dog with vertigo.

“Shh,” I say when it clacks its teeth. If Mom sees this, I’m in so much trouble.

Its vertebrae are sharp and don’t look to be held together by anything tangible. I haul the thing out of the yard, stepping over the low stone wall that rings my mother’s property and marching out into the pine forest until I can’t see the house anymore.

The further from the house I get, the less the skeleton moves, and by the time I’m down by the river, the skeleton is shedding bones like breadcrumbs. I drop it and it doesn’t get up again. I rub the indents on my palm left by sharp bone-points and hunch my shoulders a little.

I hope it was the only one.

When I arrive back at the house, my mother is hollering out the door for me. I shout a reply and then collect the eggs I’d originally been sent to get.

My mom is a witch, or at least that’s what the people in town call her. She dyes her frizzy hair black and when she’s working she gives herself full drag-queen makeup, with t

Episode 49 is part of the Autumn 2017 / Winter 2018 double issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Granny Death and the Drag King of London

By

A.J. Fitzwater

Monday, November 25, 1991.

Lacey James had been working for Redpath Catering for three months when Freddie Mercury died.

"Fuck," she mouthed around her fist and bit harder into her numb flesh. The news was hours old, but still her oesophagus made odd wheezy hiccups, and she couldn't swallow past the perpetual lump of granite in her chest. "Fuck fuck fuck."

All going terrible, the weird black sparkles that invaded her vision at a whiff of death would arrive soon, the awful memories of helping nurse Stevie and Toad would nail her, or the creepy old lady that haunted funerals on her catering beat would turn up. Or all at once.

Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Now Freddie. Not another one. Not Freddie. No. Hold it together. Big bois don't cry.

[Full transcript after the cut]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 49 for February 13, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

I'm sorry that it's been so long since I last brought you any fiction—to make it up to you, this episode is part of a double issue, which means that there are six originals and six reprints coming your way as quickly as I can get them out for you.

I would also like to officially welcome Nibedita Sen as GlitterShip's official assistant editor. She will be helping out with keeping the Ship running smoothly... and hopefully more on time than it has been in the past.

Today we have a poem and a GlitterShip original for you. The poem is "Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting," by Bogi Takács read by Bogi eirself.

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person currently living in the US as a resident alien. Eir speculative fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in a variety of venues like Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons and podcast on Glittership, among others. You can follow Bogi on Twitter, Instagram and Patreon, or visit eir website at www.prezzey.net. Bogi also recently edited Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016, for Lethe Press.

Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting

by Bogi Takács

Try it now – guaranteed enjoyment or your money back!

The classic original: Shapeshift to a surface color the inverse of your environment [reverse chameleon]

To make a somewhat mangled political statement: Shapeshift into an object whose possession is illegal in the state and/or country you are entering [no human is illegal] [weaponize your thoughts / fall under export restrictions] [make sure to read the small print]

To receive blessings: Shapeshift into a monk when in the 500 m radius of a Catholic church, respond to Laudetur [nunc et in æternum – practice] [works well in combination with previous]

The GlitterShip original short story is "Granny Death and the Drag King of London" by A.J. Fitzwater, also read by the author.

Amanda Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press's "At The Edge" anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater

There is a content warning for slurs, homophobia and a lot discussion of AIDS deaths.

Granny Death and the Drag King of London

By

A.J. Fitzwater

Monday, November 25, 1991.

Lacey James had been working for Redpath Catering for three months when Freddie Mercury died.

"Fuck," she mouthed around her fist and bit harder into her numb flesh. The news was hours old, but still her esophagus made odd wheezy hiccups, and she couldn't swallow past the perpetual lump of granite in her chest. "Fuck fuck fuck."

All going terrible, the weird black sparkles that invaded her vision at a whiff of death would arrive soon, the awful memories of helping nurse Stevie and Toad would nail her, or the creepy old lady that haunted funerals on her catering beat would turn up. Or all at once.

Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Now Freddie. Not another one. Not Freddie. No. Hold it together. Big bois don't cry.

The brick wall of the east end church (where the hell am I today?) didn't do its job of holding her up and she slumped behind the rubbish skip. She didn't care if that bastard Rocko docked her pay for a wet and dirty uniform. She didn't care about the latest job rejection letter crumpled in her pocket. She didn't care if the cold bricks made her back seize up; there'd be no sleep tonight.

The back door pinged on its spring-hinge, banging off the scabby handrail, and Lacey sprang to her feet.

"Oi!" Rocko Redpath barked, all six foot two of his dirty blondness. "How long does it take one to take out the rubbish. Move one's dyke arse."

Not a dyke, arsehole.

Lacey let her square ragged nails do the work on her palms.

"Coming."

"You better be."

The stagnant scent of cabbage and wine biscuits gusted out as the door banged shut.

Why do I have to keep putting up with this git? Because I can't get a serious job in this town. No one wants a dyke import. Loser.

Lacey knuckled her dry eyes and straightened her ill-fitting jacket best she could. The darts under the arms made it too tight across the chest even though she'd bound up with a fresh Ace bandage that morning.

Come on, loser. Be the best king Freddie'd want you to be.

Inside, the strange blast of cold concrete and oven heat sunk claws into Lacey's flesh. She bit her lip hard to hold back another dry heave sob. Breathing deeply sometimes delayed the black sparkles. But this was a funeral. They were bound to come.

Stainless steel clanged. Ovens whooped. Crockery clattered. Scones hunkered everywhere. Girls in too tight skirts bickered with too young chefs in too skinny pants.

Rocko Redpath lorded over it all. Redpath sounded like a lad but he dressed Saint Pauls, pretending he was James Bond on a Maxwell Smart budget.

"Jesus, you kiwis are all so bloody lazy." He sneered, the perfect villain. "What's the matter, Lace? Who took a dump in your cornflakes?"

Only my friends call me Lace, arsehole.

"Got the news a friend died," she mumbled as she swung towards the door with a tray of finger sandwiches.

Was that a flinch from Rocko?

"Aww, poor widdle Wace all boo hoo. You gonna cry, widdle girl?" He clicked his fingers in front of her face, blocking her path, sunshine breaking across his craggy, broken-nose face. "Wait, wait. I think I heard it on the news. That rock star fag you like. That who you mean?"

That...feeling. A tickle on the back of her neck; it was how she imagined if the black sparkles were made flesh. All jokes about gaydars aside, she was one hundred percent dead on (dead. on) at picking them. She knew some closeted gay guys had massive internalized issues, but Rocko?

One of the girls whipping cream flinched, her pink mouth popping open in shock. "But Freddie only announced two days ago..."

Rocko snapped his fingers in her direction and pointed, finger quivering slightly. "Quiet. Lace. That homo with the mo. That who you cut up about?"

Shut up I need this job shut up. Good girls don't get into fights.

"Ah forget it. One less virulent motherfucker clogging up the NHS." Rocko flipped a hand. Lacey flinched away. Rocko's eyes were red like he was on another bender. "Do yer job. Go say hello to your favorite funeral-loving geriatric."

"What?"

"Eff-day Granny-yay," Rocko stage whispered as he whisked aside dramatically and held the door open.

Fuck. Now this. Granny Death.

Parishioners were doddering into the hall while bored kids played in the dusty blue velvet curtains. Ancient radiant heaters fizzed and popped, and Lacey dodged along the walls from cold to heat. She needed a new pair of brogues as desperately as she needed a haircut, but neither was in her next pay day.

The black sparkles arrived. The languor of death clung tight to church walls, its nails scraping along the gravel lodged in her chest like on a blackboard.

Freddie Freddie Freddie's dead that fucking virus who's next you's next DEAD.

Lacey swung with the sandwich tray through waves of evil-smelling olds. Sure enough, there she was in all her silver coiffed, green-pink-cream-yellow floral glory. The scent of lavender smacked Lacey in the face clear across the hall.

Fucking Granny Death. An emotional vampire. An ever moving shark in necrophiliac waters. She was worse than the front page of The Sun.

"Excuse me, dear. Could you tell me where the powder room is please?"

Fucking hell!

She was Right There. Her face wrinkled by a smile and expectation, but still oddly smooth. Her eyes weren't blue like Lacey had expected but a very light green.

God, I spaced out again. Concentrate. They'll send you right back to the loony bin.

"Umm." Where it always is in these cold concrete pits of 1950s hell, you creepy old bat. "Down that ramp by the kitchen, then straight ahead."

"Thank you, dear."

Granny Death's walking stick thumped a death march on the heel-scarred floor.

Lacey bit her free fist again, squeezing her eyes shut. They made a liquid pop when she opened them. The black sparkles parted just enough.

In between the strands of perfectly set silver hair on the back of Granny Death's head, a gold eye stared out at Lacey, bloodshot, like it had been crying.

What the...?! That's it. They said this is what happens to girls who wear too much black. I've got that fucking virus and it's made me batshit.

The idea of some loony old lollypop lady going round churches scaring the beejus out of mourners weighed heavy.

If she turned up at Freddie's funeral, I fucking swear...

The stench of ammonia and cheap soap hit Lacey full in the face as she pushed into the ladies toilets.

Granny Death leaned against the cracked sink, hands folded primly before her.

"Well, this is interesting," she said.

"What?" Lacey pulled up short. The finality of the door boom sealed her in.

Oh shit. What if she's some sort of serial killer?

"You can See."

"What?"

Granny Death sighed and rolled her eyes. Lacey shuddered, imagining that third eye doing the same. "Come now, dear. I know you're not stupid. I don't have all the time in the world. There are other funerals to get to today. What did you See?"

Freddie, help me. That fucking virus is eating my brain.

"Uh. I get black sparkles," Lacey stammered, wriggling her fingers beside her temples. "But you...you've got an eye in the back of your head."

"Hmm."

Granny Death's stillness disturbed Lacey.

Come on, this is absurd!

"What do you mean 'hmm'?" she demanded, hands on hips in an attempt to make herself bigger. "You have an eye in the back of your head, lady!"

"I mean 'hmm' because usually they see horns—" Granny Death twiddled her fingers above her head. "—or hooves. Or wings. Sometimes just bloody stumps of wings, depending."

"On what?" Lacey glanced behind her, but no one came in.

No rampaging horde of hell beasts?

Granny Death chuckled as if she could hear the noise constantly taking up space in Lacey's head. "Whatever they gods pleases them. Whatever they think lurks under the skin of a harmless old lady."

Lacey backed up two steps. "Lady, there is no god in this world if AIDS exists. There's an explanation for everything. I'm having a meltdown coz it's a bad day. You don't seem harmless to me. What are you? What's with all the funerals?"

"Hmm. So you've seen me before." Granny Death stroked a beard that wasn't there.

"Damn right. I see you stuffing sandwiches in your handbag at least twice a week." Now it was Lacey's turn to fold her arms, but it didn't have quite the same effect as Granny Death's quiet poise. "Is this how you get your jollies? Knocking off the catering staff, scaring them into not reporting you to the police?"

Granny Death didn't stare at Lacey like she imagined a whacko would size up their prey.

"You have questions. You deserve answers." Granny Death scooped up her walking stick and took an assured step towards towards Lacey. "I take the sandwiches because I like them. No, I don't like scaring people. Funerals are hard enough places as they are. And people who See—" Granny Death scratched the back of her head. "—do so because they are close to the end of the line."

Oh god, I do have that fucking virus.

Despite her tiny stature, Granny Death came face to face with Lacey. She continued: "You have lost someone very dear to you recently. That agony slices through The Templace. We feel those cuts."

Lacey flinched, but Granny Death didn't pat her on the shoulder awkwardly in comfort. She didn't even say she was sorry.

What's the point of saying you're sorry to the bereaved, anyway?

The black danced close around Lacey's vision again.

Granny Death nodded. "When you're ready for the full truth, we'll be ready for you. We'll find you. We need more good people."

Granny Death pushed out through the toilet door, her lavender scent obscuring the dankness.

"Wait!" Lacey called. "Who is this 'we' you speak of?"

The third eye winked, and Granny Death glanced back. She didn't smile or grimace, sneer or raise her eyebrows.

"Death," came her quiet reply. "I work for the entity you know as Death."

Tuesday, November 26, 1991.

Even the tube couldn't lull Lacey into a desperate rest.

Calling in sick allowed Rocko a hysteria-tinged rant about lazy kiwi dykes. The tea-bags her flatmates had left for her—what she had stolen from the Redpath pantries had run out—gave her no sense of comradeship. Throwing the letter from Gore, New Zealand unopened in the rubbish extended none of the usual satisfaction. Wrapping herself around a hot water bottle in her dank Hackney flat didn't bring any comfort. The impossible backwards lean, open lips, and microphone as extension of self of her Queen: Live at Wembley poster was a constant reminder.

I'll never see darling Freddie live, see him alive, now. I'm two years too late. Did you know way back when, dear Freddie? Did you have that fucking alien in your brain, and you were just ignoring it? Don't look don't look don't look don't look death in the eye.

The crowd on the tube did their best to ignore the girl in a cheap suit, though her pride and joy was the only thing holding her together. The granite lump in her chest grew too large, the mountain of its pressure almost choking her. The younger ones eyed the AIDS posters like they'd leap out and bite them.

Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. All Gone. All invaded. All stats. Maybe I picked it up off the shit piss blood vomit. Maybe it's been dormant in my mattress all this time.

She'd had no experience in nursing, but she did her best when the families of her friends shut their doors, ignoring their wasting away until it was time to play the magnanimous heroes and return their soul to where it didn't want to be.   

A strange thought grabbed her: Had Granny been there? Had she witnessed?

A too skinny guy in a too big trench coat coughed, and Lacey swore everyone in the tube car flinched.

Never going to eat going to die emaciated and covered in lesions never going to fuck again. Would Granny Death come and laugh at my funeral?

She'd be the only one I'd want there.

Where had that come from?

Logan Place would now be packed with, but a crowd meant touching. A crowd meant all new sorts of pain, a public display of grief she couldn't face yet.

Old Compton Street felt the safest place to be. The girls there knew when to touch and when to not. It would be a shitter of a wake, but at least she could bum free alcohol off Blue.

Someone behind her barked a laugh just like Rocko's and she had to turn to check it wasn't him. He'd been his usual self on the phone, but his nastiness had sounded forced. Judging tone of voice, pitch, weight of the words had been a skill she'd honed over her years to avoid the knife tip slipping under her ribs.

Questions. Granny said she had the answers. What a load of horse shit. No one has answers to anything. Not a yes for a good job. Not to this virus.

"STOP WHINING," said her mother, thousands of miles and years ago. "Why can't you just wear a dress like all good little girls? You'd look so much prettier."

I don't want to be pretty. I want to be handsome.

The walk from King's Cross looked the same. The tourists, the red buses, the yuppies in their Savile Row suits, the casuals in their too clean Adidas trackies yelling slurs at the too tired girls in their big wigs and small skirts. Some caring Soho record store blared out Bohemian Rhapsody. Street lights flickered up, too bright for the street, too dim for the faces.

How can you all carry on like nothing has changed?

It had taken Lacey an entire year to work up the gumption to walk back on to Old Compton Street after a disastrous first visit to the Pembroke in Earls Court. Even three years on she often had to stop and take a moment to check if she was allowed on the street, but women in suits or ripped jeans and plaid either ignored her or offered small up-nods.

Lacey shivered, resisting the urge to touch-check the mascara on her upper lip and sideburns. Her chest binding and suit were alright, but just alright. She didn't have the money to keep up with Soho.

I like my suit. My suit likes me.

The door to The Belle Jar was propped open. Lacey watched a pair of kings enter the black maw before working up the courage to approach. Flipper sat inside the stairs on a slashed up chair, licking closed a thin rollie. The muscled bouncer stood up when she saw Lacey, but didn't offer a hand.

The girls round here knew how things went.

"Fucking sucks, man," Flipper grunted, her blue eyes more steel than sea.

"Tell me about it," Lacey sighed.

"You're taking it well." Flipper undid the two buttons of her Sonny Crockett jacket, then did them back up.

Lacey shrugged.

"You want in? Blue says no cover charge tonight and tomorrow."

"Good of her. Might ask for a shift."

"Yeah. The girls have been crying into their Midoris since the news broke. It's like a fucking morgue in there." Flipper offered Lacey a drag of her cigarette, but Lacey shook her head. More down-in-the-mouth kings, queens, femmes, and butches passed by (just for once all moving in the same direction; marching to or from death?). Flipper blew out a long trail of smoke. "Funeral is tomorrow. Private thing."

"Yeah, saw that on the news." Lacey couldn't look at Flipper in the eye. The big girl had tears forming (no no don't please fuck what do I do).

Lacey barrelled down the stairs. The sticky-sweet stench of years of liquor trod into the carpet, sweaty eye shadow, weed, and clove cigarettes rose up to greet her. Bronski Beat throbbed gently from the speakers. Girls lounged over every upright surface, too many glasses scattered across table and bar top.

None of them were anywhere near old enough to be Granny.

Have you ever seen an old drag queen? An old dyke? Where do they go?

Two shot glasses banged on the bar.

"How the fuck is Maggie Thatcher still alive, and Freddie Mercury isn't," growled Blue, sloshing tequila.

Lacey accepted the offering without complaint despite her bad relationship with tequila.

How is anyone alive while Freddie isn't?

"We only just get the country back from the old witch, now this." Lacey tried on a joke for size.

"God fuck the Iron Lady," Blue growled.

They tugged the bottoms of their waistcoats, saluted with their glasses, and slammed.

"Next one you'll have to pay for, darlin'," Blue said after they coughed it down.

"Don't worry. I 'spect tonight will be easy selling the top shelf." Lacey took a long hard look around the bar. It was already too full. When girls got all up in their liquor, tears and fists tended to fly.

"Great, we're short-handed. I'll give you six percent, cause I'm feelin' generous." Blue slid a glass of water towards Lacey.

"Ten." Lacey grimaced at the DJ who had just put on Adam Ant. It was too early for Adam Ant. No one got up to dance. Lacey gave the DJ the fingers.

"Seven and a half. Final offer."

"Tally carries over if I don't use it all tonight."

The DJ gave Lacey the fingers back and lit a cigarette.

Blue sighed. "Fine."

"Tell that dick to play better music."

"Oh god, shut up," slurred some girl at the bar with bright red lipstick. "I happen to like Adam Ant."

"Lacey. Drop it," Blue said in a low voice. "Go sell something to table five. They've got dosh."

The lipstick girl's top lip curled up and she whispered something to her friend.

A flash of silver caught Lacey's eye as someone slid onto an empty stool.

"What's the best whiskey you would recommend?"

Lacey's tongue went numb. "You!"

"Hello, dear."

"Hey, Blue! You see this old bag here?" Lacey pointed at Granny Death smoothing out her gloves on the sticky bar top.

Blue gave a don't-care shrug and turned away to serve Lipstick again. "Sure. I see her round here all the time. Her money is good as any other girl's."

All the time? Oh my god, not Blue no no no NO.

Lacey sat, blocking Granny's view of the rest of the bar. "This funeral bloody well isn't for you," she growled.

"Perhaps not," Granny replied. Her eye shadow was a green twenty years out of date. "But I go wherever I'm needed, and tonight I am needed here."

Lacey leaned to get a better look at the back of Granny's head. Sure enough, the red-rimmed gold eye blinked at her. She gestured at Blue to pour out a couple fingers of whiskey. Granny smoothed out a note, Blue pinged it into the register without comment, and made the first mark on Lacey's tally.

Lacey drank without salute. "Come to get your jollies off a pack of miserable kings and queens, huh?"

"I get my jollies off a good cup of tea and watching Star Trek," Granny replied, sipping delicately at her drink. "I get no joy from seeing people in pain. I'd take it all away from all you lovely dears if I could. I like your clothes. I like your faces." Granny sighed. "It's not fair. He was a very nice chap."

It's not fair.

Lacey grimaced and helped herself to another measure. She didn't care she was drinking too fast. "Then what's with—" She circled a hand. "—doing Death's dirty work tonight? Freddie's funeral is tomorrow."

Granny dabbed her lips with a paper serviette. "Mister Bulsara does not get just one funeral, my dear. There are many funerals, big and small, happening all over the world. The unmarked ones are just as important. There's no quality control on this particular passing. Mister Bulsara's essence has well and truly passed through a Rift to the next dimension. A stable Rift in the Templace is simply a random, if rare, occurrence."

Lacey rudely crunched ice through the speech. "Nice line, grandma."

Granny placed the glass carefully on the bar. "I am no one's grandmother, let alone anyone's mother. This is a calling, not a job. And besides, despite what this form may allude to, I could not procreate if I wished to. Which I do not."

Bloody hell.

"I have another, more important reason to be at this particular funeral," Granny continued. "I am here for you."

Lacey slid backwards off her stool, hands up. "Woah now there, whack job."

I AM dead, I just don't know it.

Granny sighed. "I am here with a proposition—"

"You got to be shitting me. Our age gap has to be illegal." Lacey backed up further until she bumped into Lipstick, who cussed her out for spilling her drink.

"—of a position within our administration. Death wants you to apprentice to me. You can See me. You talk about the black sparkles. That's a prelude to being trained to see the Rifts.."

"I said, you owe me another fucking drink, you ugly cunt!"

Hate that word hate it go on call me it again.

"And I said hold your fucking horses," Lacey growled.

But when she turned back, Granny Death was gone. Only the prim outline of pink lipstick on her glass suggested she had even been there.

Lipstick shoved Lacey in the shoulder. "You fucking ugly dyke cunt. Replace my drink now or I fucking swear."

"Or what?" Lacey whirled, fingernails cutting her palms.

Don't don't, be a good girl. Everyone's desperate. Desperately sad, desperately drunk, desperately afraid.

Lipstick scowled. She looked just as scared as Rocko had been the day before.

"Have some common decency." Lacey lowered her voice. "There's a funeral going on here."

Lipstick's friend tugged on her arm. "Come on, not tonight."

Lipstick shook her off. "Oh yeah? Which of these ugly trannies did us a favor and fucked off?"

Lacey's fists ached. Heat rushed from her groin to the top of her skull.

Good girls don't get angry anger is so ugly.

Lipstick's friend whispered at her.

"Oh riiight. Wah wah. One less gay white man to colonize our spaces," Lipstick spat.

"That's it, you're cut off," Blue growled.

Don't don't I've got this.

"He's not gay. He's bisexual, like me. And Parsi. He's from Zanzibar." 

"Wot?" Liptstick got so close Lacey could taste the sour sweetness on her breath. "Bisexual? You hiding a dick in there too?"

By now the friend was backing away, hands up, wanting no part in Lipstick's charade. Lacey knew the taste of a bully's fear.

"Wrong one, asshole. Bye-secks-ual."

"You a Paki loving tranny? Is that it?" Lipstick sneered.

"You better stop," Lacey said. There was something satisfying in the simple threat.

"Or what? Bisexual. Bullshit. You're either with us or against us. No wonder he died. So fucking promiscuous. Good riddance to bad rubbish."

The bar disappeared. The granite in Lacey's chest didn't so much as shatter as simply melt away. What she had imagined as meters-thick solid rock was nothing more than a millimeter thin shell that gave way beneath the lightest touch.

Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Freddie.

The names became a chant, faces whirling about, grating along her knuckles, clipping the rims of her ears, the smell of antiseptics and fresh washed sheets clogging up her nostrils. 

Infect. Rinse. Repeat.

The granite infected her fists, like she was attempting to build a wall one punch at a time.

"Lace." Blue's voice. "Hey, Lace."

Hands on her arms. Arms across her chest.

"God damn it, Lace." Flipper's voice, angry, cold, annoyed, satisfied.

Lacey struggled to shake off the infecting hands, but they held tight. Lipstick stood near the stairs, a wall of girls in suits blocking her in. Blue stared the girl down, her words lost beneath the screech of stone on stone in Lacey's head. Lipstick had a hand over her bloodied nose.

The virus is passed through the sharing of infected bodily fluids.

Someone sauntered out of the bathrooms. "Hey Blue. The condom and dam dispensers are empty," they shouted, oblivious to the tense scene.

Flipper's hands relaxed, and she smoothed Lacey's hair with a sigh.

Don't TOUCH me...

"What?" grumbled Blue. "I've refilled them once tonight already."

A figure at the top of the stairs, weak twilight framing curly hair into a halo. When they turned away, a golden point of light shrunk with each step, like a train moving back up a tunnel. Doom moving in reverse.

That's right, little virus, you better run.

Wednesday, November 27, 1991.

Lacey fingered the scratch down the side of her nose.

'Tis nothing. How much of me is left under her fingernails though?

The crowd milled about Logan Place in respectful patterns. Most were sitting, waiting for something, anything. Lacey ran her fingers along the flapping letters tacked up on the fence, catching a word here or there.

I should write something let him know but I can't I can't what are words inadequate how could I compete.

"Hello dear."

Granny Death blocked her way, wrinkled face scrunched up at the outpouring of love and grief.

Lacey hung her head. "I'm sorry you had to see that display last night. It wasn't like me at all."

"You're not sorry, and of course it was you. That was you in that moment, the you you needed to be." Granny Death didn't scold. Blue had done that enough.

"I'm banned from The Belle Jar for a month," Lacey said. "That other chick's banned for life. She's not going to press charges because that was her third strike. Caught her flipping coke in the bathroom. Blue assures me she threw the first bitch slap, but, well, I don't remember. It was pretty tame by all accounts. But I did land a good one on her nose."

"And you're very proud of that."

"First and last, Granny. First and last."

But it felt GOOD. Flick of the wrist, and you're gone baby.

Lacey looked up from her battered sneakers, raised an eyebrow. "You said you have a job for me. Some interview that was, then."

"So you believe I am who I say I am." Granny Death pressed a floral note in amongst the forest of words. Lacey didn't recognize the language.

"No. Yes. I don't know." Lacey sighed and rubbed her eyes, catching the edge of the scratch. She licked blood off her finger. "Everything's...weird. Heavy and light at the same time. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I'm having a dissociative break."

"Yes, it has been a strange few days," Granny Death replied, sounding surprised at being surprised. She pulled the shade of a tree around them and the quiet murmur dampened further.

"What do you want to believe?" Granny continued, taking out a pack of hard mints. Lacey sucked the lolly thoughtfully until the taste stung the back of her nose.

"That Freddie isn't dead," she said, voice as meek as if her mother stood over her.

"It doesn't work like that," Granny said. "We only see them to the edge of the Rift. What becomes of them after? Death doesn't even know."

"You make Death sound like a semi-decent kinda person," Lacey said.

"As far as employers go, they're better than most," Granny said. "It's a service someone has got to do. And the benefits aren't all that bad. Form of your choosing, extended life span—"

"—free lunch."

"You get to know who does the better catering," Granny admitted.

Suddenly her eyebrows lifted.

Expecting a spectral figure in a black robe come to put her blood on the dotted line, Lacey turned to follow her gaze.

Rocko Redpath slinked through the crowd, features set in a brokenness Lacey could never have imagined his rat-like face achieving. He held the hand of a handsome muscle man.

Lacey couldn't move, couldn't breathe.

Rocko was right in front of her.

He flinched, shuffled a little. Muscles said 'You right, love?'

Lacey gave her boss a nod. Rocko nodded back, fumbled in his net shopping bag. A peace offering: a packet of PG Tips.

He melted into the crowd.

"So, I'm beginning to suspect I don't just See things when it comes to Death," Lacey said. "I knew about Rocko, and it wasn't just gaydar. Not sure if I forgive him though."

"You don't have to," Granny said. "Let time do its thing. Life has a way of surprising you."

"Does Life have an admin division too?" Lacey shoved the packet of tea into her backpack, and scrubbed at her face with her palms. Her scratch caught again.

Pain is good. I can feel it this time.

"I presume so, but we don't do Sunday barbeques in Hyde Park," Granny replied, deadly serious.

"Never the twain, and all that."

"Something like that," Granny said.

A ripple passed through the crowd. People were returning to the house after the service. Some paparazzi called out, jostling for space.

Fucking paps.

"So, is a benefit one of those eyes in the back of your head?" Lacey asked in an undertone.

Her fingers tingled, and she felt like her body was rushing through a tunnel, rushing through all the spaces in the world at once but the meat of her brain stood stock still, sloshing up against the thin eggshell that held her inside. Asking for release.

Let me out, let me be.

"Dear." Granny patted the air above Lacey's hand. "We have eyes in all sorts of places."

Together, they waited out the rest of vigil in silence. Because silence felt good.

Monday, April 20, 1992.

Lacey paused in her duties of handing out red ribbons, condoms, and dams to watch in wonder as Extreme stormed the Wembley Stadium stage with a hot shit rendition of 'Keep Yourself Alive'. Seventy-two thousand people surged, thundered, cried, and laughed. It was turning out to be a hell of a funeral.

Granny Death popped up beside Lacey, one of her hideous floral scarves tied around her forehead like an aging hippy. It went well with the terrible green polyester flares, sleeveless pastel pink twin set, and pearls.

"How the hell did you get tickets!" Lacey laugh-shouted over the roar of the crowd. "This concert sold out in three hours!"

"I have a little sway here and there." Granny clapped out of time with the music.

"What, Death is a Queen fan?"

"Something like that."

Lacey squinted up into the glary Easter Monday sky. The weather held, actually pleasant for London temperatures, but the haze made it difficult to spot Rifts.

Granny followed her gaze. "Relax. This is a day off."

"You? Saying relax?" Lacey made a whip-crack noise.

"Someone else is covering our territory for the day," Granny replied, jiggling her ample hips.

That's new.

More passers-by dug their hands into Lacey's box of goodies. She'd have to go back for a refill soon.

Just like Blue had to keep refilling the dispensers in the bogs at the Belle Jar. Just like supplies had to topped up at the house. 'No rubber, no loving' had become the slogan whenever someone brought a date home to the Hackney flat. Even Blue had gone to get herself tested.

Clear. Thank the Templace, she's all clear.

Lacey carried her own letter detailing her HIV negative position like a good luck charm in a hidden inner suit jacket pocket.

Granny followed her at a trot as she took a swing through the upper terraces, getting winks and up-nods from the odd king or butch.

"That's nice dear," Granny said, sipping a beer.

"What is?"

"Seeing you smile."

"Ugh, Granny." Lacey rolled her eyes. "Don't be so sloppy."

Freddie, my darling. I miss you so hard gone away gone away.

The chunk of granite in her chest orbited once. Glittering dust sanded off, softening an edge.

Rubbing the hopeful bump on the back of her head, Lacey stared hard into the white hazy sky, forcing her eyes—all of them—to stay dry.

With a gleam like the dust from the fresh edge in her chest, a Rift pondered its way open over the top of stadium.

"Granny, look!" Lacey pointed up. "That's the biggest I've seen yet!"

"Well done!" Granny clapped her hands, bouncing in place. Lacey was sure the old bat would ache like buggery the next day, and she'd be fetching cups of tea and hot water bottles. "Goodness me, that's a pretty one!"

And it was pretty, layers of blue-shot silver with sparkling black on top, the edges curled up like a smile.

Lacey nudged Granny. "He's watching us, I swear!"

"Now you're just being fanciful." Granny danced off into the crowd. Her voice wafted back along with a teaser of lavender perfume. "You know the Rifts are only a one way trip."

The Rift stayed open for the entirety of the concert, the longest Lacey had seen. Every time she looked up at the iridescent void, the Nothing that held Everything, her voice inside quelled to a quiet murmur.

Tomorrow. I'll take my letter down to the fence at Logan Place tomorrow...

END

"Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting" is copyright Bogi Takács 2018.

"Granny Death and the Drag King of London" is copyright A.J. Fitzwater 2018.

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.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we'll be back soon with a reprint of "Smooth Stones and Empty Bones" by Bennett North.

Episode 49 is part of the Autumn 2017 / Winter 2018 double issue!
"Granny Death and the Drag King of London" is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL.

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Granny Death and the Drag King of London

By

A.J. Fitzwater

Monday, November 25, 1991.

Lacey James had been working for Redpath Catering for three months when Freddie Mercury died.

"Fuck," she mouthed around her fist and bit harder into her numb flesh. The news was hours old, but still her oesophagus made odd wheezy hiccups, and she couldn't swallow past the perpetual lump of granite in her chest. "Fuck fuck fuck."

All going terrible, the weird black sparkles that invaded her vision at a whiff of death would arrive soon, the awful memories of helping nurse Stevie and Toad would nail her, or the creepy old lady that haunted funerals on her catering beat would turn up. Or all at once.

Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Now Freddie. Not another one. Not Freddie. No. Hold it together. Big bois don't cry.

[Full transcript after the cut]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 49 for February 13, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

I'm sorry that it's been so long since I last brought you any fiction—to make it up to you, this episode is part of a double issue, which means that there are six originals and six reprints coming your way as quickly as I can get them out for you.

I would also like to officially welcome Nibedita Sen as GlitterShip's official assistant editor. She will be helping out with keeping the Ship running smoothly... and hopefully more on time than it has been in the past.

Today we have a poem and a GlitterShip original for you. The poem is "Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting," by Bogi Takács read by Bogi eirself.

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person currently living in the US as a resident alien. Eir speculative fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in a variety of venues like Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons and podcast on Glittership, among others. You can follow Bogi on Twitter, Instagram and Patreon, or visit eir website at www.prezzey.net. Bogi also recently edited Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016, for Lethe Press.

Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting

by Bogi Takács

Try it now – guaranteed enjoyment or your money back!

The classic original: Shapeshift to a surface color the inverse of your environment [reverse chameleon]

To confuse people: Shapeshift to duplicate a nearby

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 48 for September 26, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is a reprint of "Circus Boy Without A Safety Net" by Craig Laurance Gidney. Potential background dog noises are unintended, but provided by Rey, Finn, and Heidi.

Content warning for slurs, homophobic bullying, and descriptions of porn.

Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), the Young Adult novel Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013), and The Nectar of Nightmares (Dim Shores, 2015). He lives in his native Washington, DC. Website: craiglaurancegidney.com. Instagram, Tumblr & Twitter: ethereallad.

Circus Boy Without A Safety Net

by Craig Laurance Gidney

Lucifer came to him in drag. He was disguised as Lena Horne.

C.B. went to see The Wiz with his family. The movie was pretty cool, by his standards, even though he thought Diana Ross was a little too old to be playing Dorothy. But the sets were amazing--the recasting of the Emerald City as downtown Manhattan, the Wicked Witch's sweatshop, the trashcan monsters in the subway. The songs sometimes lasted a little too long, but they were offset by Michael Jackson's flashy spin-dancing. But it was the image of Lena Horne as Glinda the Good Witch that would follow him.

She appeared in the next to last scene in a silver dress. Her hair was captured in a net of stars, and she was surrounded by a constellation of babies, all wrapped in clouds, their adorable faces peering out like living chocolate kisses. He fell in love. Ms. Horne was undeniably beautiful, with her creamy, golden skin, and mellow, birdlike features. Her movements during the song "Home" were passionate. They were at odds with shimmering, ethereal-blur in which she was filmed. Indeed, she could not be of this earth. In all of his life in Willow Creek, NC, C.B. had not seen anything like this before.

He was in love, all right. He researched her in libraries, finding old issues of Ebony and Jet; he watched old movies that she'd appeared in, like Cabin in the Sky. He collected some of her records; his 8-track of "Stormy Weather" was so worn, he had to buy another copy.

But in the weeks afterwards, he began to sense that this love of his wasn't quite right. His brother and his father would tease him about his "girlfriend," who was 70 years old, and about how, when he came of an age to marry, she would be even older than that. Of how he could never have children. His brother was particularly mean: he imagined a wedding, held at Lena's hospital bed, with her in an iron lung, exhaling an "I Do" as ominous as Darth Vader's last breath. But C.B. wanted to explain that it wasn't like that at all. He couldn't quite put it into words.

Lena wasn't an object of desire, someone who he wanted to kiss or hold hands with. She was something more. She was a goddess of Beauty, an ideal. She was something beyond anything he'd ever known. She hovered above Willow Creek, an angel, looking down on its box houses that were the color of orange sherbet, lemonade, and his own robin's-egg-blue house. She wasn't someone to sleep with; she was someone to be like.

C.B. made a bedroom shrine to his goddess. Old pictures of her, protected in cellophane, marched up his wall. But the ultimate treasure lay unseen. In the unused chest of drawers in the back of his closet, he hid a Barbie doll, bought at a flea market and transformed into her likeness: painted skin, eyes blackened with a pen, stolen hair dye darkening the blond tresses. And he sprinkled lots of glitter on her dress, so it would be silver, like hers was in The Wiz. (This had involved experiments with several doll's dresses. There was a measure of discretion; he came up with a story about how his sick sister collected Barbie dresses, so that the store clerks wouldn't think he was strange. He ended up dunking a powder-blue dress in Elmer's glue, and dredging it in silver glitter. He learned it by imitating his mother, when she made fried chicken: first the eggwash, then the seasoned flour).

But buried treasure sends out signals. Especially to mothers.

She zeroed in on the spot. Oh, there was some excuse about her wanting to check out the chest, so that she could sell it at the church bazaar. Lena was exposed. His mother and father met him at the kitchen table one day after school, holding his creation in their hands. When C.B. saw them, looking as solemn as they did when they watched reruns of King's historic speech, he knew something was wrong. He thought he was going to get a lecture on idolatry. Instead, he was told, in the calmest tones they could muster, that he was not to play with dolls ever again. That was that. His mother stood up, and started making dinner. His father left the room, his head hung in shame.

C.B. felt strange. They were treating him as if he were diseased. As if they'd discovered that he was freak of some kind. ("When your child reaches the age of twelve, his eyes will grow to the size of grapefruits..."). It was his brother that laid it out for him. He'd been listening in on the conversation.

"They think you're a faggot."

When he got to his room, the walls had been stripped. Everything of Lena was gone. The walls looked like he felt: exposed.

He didn't eat dinner that night. They didn't call him to the table.

He popped an 8-track of The Wiz into the player, and put the giant earmuff headphones on. Lena sang softly: "If you believe in yourself..."

C.B. snatched the tape out of the player. He unspooled the brown ribbon, until it lay in curls on the floor around him.

#

C.B. had a Voice. That's what everybody at the church choir said. He felt it, too. His chest would fill with warmth, the spirit of sound. And when he opened his mouth, all of that warm feeling would come sliding out, like a stream of maple syrup, rich and sweet. It would circle over the church. He could feel it soaring like an angel, over Willow Creek, notes raining down on the box houses the colors of mint-green, bubblegum pink, and pastel violet.

He convinced himself that he was singing to God. All of the ladies with their wiry hats would come up to tell him what a wonderful gift he had. For a while, he gained the pride and trust of his parents. Sort of. At least of his mother.

His father grudgingly gave him respect for his voice; but his father must've known that singing didn't really undo all of embarrassment he'd caused when he failed at various sports. Having a musician son was a poor substitute for having a normal one; but it would have to do.

Within the tiny whitewashed church, he was safe from the worst of himself. The Devil—or Lena—was imprisoned, locked away. Her smoky vocals couldn't slip in between the glorious notes of hymns. Her fabulous gowns were safely replaced by neutral choir robes.

He jumped through a hoop, pleasing the Lord. C.B. thought of God as a great ringmaster, and Heaven as a circus-dream of angels and tamed beasts. The dead could trapeze through the stars, and see the little marble that was Earth below. But first, you had prove yourself worthy. Jump through this hoop, ringed with razors. Now through this circle of fire... C.B. knew that his life would be a dazzling and dangerous tightrope performance from now on. One slip and he'd fall into a Hell of naked boys and show-tunes. The church was his safety net.

Another bonus of singing was the admiration of the congregation.

C.B. was an average student. He struggled through math and science, tolerated history and English. He didn't have any friends. Regular kids tended to avoid religious kids. Since that was his disguise, he was a loner. He avoided the actually religious kids himself—he felt that if anyone could see through his charade, they could. They would sniff it out like bloodhounds. Everyone was at a safe distance. And the holiest of music surrounded him like a shield.

He felt the most secure, when the Devil heard him sing.

He came in the form of the music and drama teacher, Mr. P. Mr. P traipsed into town in loud colors. He wore banana yellow jackets, pink shirts, and bow ties as large and comical as a clown's. In a way, he matched the colors of Willow Creek's houses. His skin was dark and smooth, like a Special Dark candy bar. He had large glasses that magnified his sad-clown brown eyes. And his hair was a mass of wild and wet Jericurls. His lisp reminded C.B of Snagglepuss, the cartoon lion. Like Snagglepuss, Mr. P was prissy and aristocratic, given to fey and archaic phrases.

Word got around school that C.B. could sing. He'd fastidiously avoided anything to do with the drama and music department. First of all, he reasoned, they played secular music. He sang for the glory of the Almighty. But the real reason was Mr. P. A whiff of his spicy cologne in the crowded school hall made him cringe; Mr. P's loud, theatrical laugh when he was a lunch hall monitor could set his teeth gnashing.

It was around January when he was approached. He left the lunchroom, walking right by Mr. P. (who wore a suit of lime-green, with an electric blue bow tie), when he was stopped.

Mr. P. spoke his name.

"Yes, sir?"

"I heard that you can sing, child. How come you haven't been around the chorus?"

"I... I guess that I've been too busy. With school. And church." He invested the last word with an emphasis he hoped wasn't lost on Mr. P.

But Mr. P flounced right by the Meaning, with a pass-me-my-smelling-salts flick of his wrists. "Nonsense. I would just love to hear you sing. Can you stop by the music room sometime this week?"

"No, sir. My course load is pretty full..."

"Any study halls?" (His sss's grated on him).

"Not this semester," C.B. lied.

"How bout after school? Just 15 minutes or so."

"Uh, this week's not too good, cause I, uh, have to help my dad with some chores."

Mr. P smiled, revealing gums as pink as deviled ham. He touched C.B. on the shoulder.

When he left the cafeteria, the nutmeg smell of the cologne tickled his nose. It wouldn't leave him all day.

That Sunday he was to sing a solo section of the hymn, "His Eye is on the Sparrow" during the distribution of the Host. Before he walked out on stage with the rest of the choir, he did a customary scan of the audience. Mr. P was there, in the pew behind his mother. His heart leapt into throat. But then, of course Mr. P would show up. The Devil can't resist stirring up souls in turmoil.

In the church basement, over fizzy punch and stale cookies, Mr. P lavished praise over C.B.'s voice, how pure it was. His mother was beaming beside him.

"Why, Mrs. Bertram—"

"Imogene, please."

"Imogene, when I heard that he had a Voice, I just had to investigate. It exceeded my wildest expectations."

C.B. kept his eyes firmly trained on the linoleum.

Snagglepuss continued: "I am casting parts for the spring musical. I'd like your son to try out."

His mother clapped her hands.

"I can't act," C. B. interrupted. He could see where this going; he had to cut it at the source.

"You don't have to act," (darling, he heard Mr. P add subliminally) "you just have to perform. And you've got that down pat." (Honeychile).

His mother pestered him into trying out for the spring musical, which was The Music Man. C.B. had enjoyed the movie, and found that he couldn't resist the temptation. It was too much. He felt Lena stirring in him. She whispered in his sleep. One night she came to him. She wore her sparkling fairy queen dress. Her chocolate star babies were grinning behind her. The only thing different about her this time was that she was in black-and-white. She'd occasionally ripple and sputter out of existence, like an image on an old television set. He took this as her blessing.

I won't give up going to church, so I'll be safe.

He landed the role of Professor Harold Hill.

The play ran four nights and a Saturday matinee. It was a success. The last performance earned him a standing ovation.

But in the back of his mind, there was always the issue of Mr. P. The jocks and class clowns of the school would always be whispering about him. They called him the Black Liberace. "Hand me the candelabra," they'd say when he passed them in the hall, or "I wish my brother George was here," in mincing voices. C.B. felt himself slipping. Movie posters of West Side Story, The Fantasticks, and The Sound of Music competed with the camouflage of his mother's hand-stitched prayer samplers and collected Willow Creek football bulletins.

The worst was gym class. He refused to take showers. But that didn't stop the boys from making fun of him. As they emerged glistening and nude from the showers, they would faux caress and grasp one another.

"Yeah baby, push it in harder!"

"Stab that shit, sweetie."

"Oh daddy, be my butt-pirate tonight."

He knew they were directed at him.

Summer came, and C.B. immersed himself in church activities. He became an aide for the church-sponsored camp for kids. He sang every Sunday, declining solo parts. It was a sacrifice that God might notice.

For the fall assembly, Mr. P put together a show comprised of songs from musicals. C.B. sang lead for "New York, New York," and "Send in the Clowns." He bought the house down. Basking in the light of adulation, he was mindful of the rot that hid behind and beneath Willow Creek's façade of cheerful acceptance: a hate that corroded the aluminum siding covered in pastel icing.

Church ladies in floral hats: "Mr. P, he's so, you know, theatrical. You know them theater folks."

And the antics of the locker-room boys.

Mr. P approached him for the lead in the spring play.

"I think you'd be perfect as the Cowardly Lion in The Wiz!"

C.B. told Mr. P he'd consider it. That night, Lena and her entourage appeared before him. And he was Icarus, tempted by her beauty. If he flew too high, she would supernova, and scorch his soul as black as the void surrounding her cherubs. He was a tightrope walker, and Lena was the spirit who watched over him, waiting to push him off, waiting for him to fall.

He could not ignore the sign that God had sent him. This was temptation.

He declined Mr. P's offer, claiming that he had to focus on his grades that semester, if he was to go to college.

C.B. did the right thing. But there was no sense of liberation.

Danger lurked, a phantom image just behind his eyes when he slept at night. He imagined Glinda turning into the Witch, snarling in frustration.

#

Manhattan spread out before him, glitzy, dirty, and labyrinthine. The architecture was as alien to C.B. as the Emerald City was to Dorothy. He was thrilled and terrified at the same time. There was no warmth, no open spaces like there was in Willow Creek. The buildings were naked and thin, and met the challenges of gravity head-on. The houses of Willow Creek were humble—modestly clothed in cheerful fabrics. C.B. wasn't so sure that he liked it. The crowds, the hurried pace, and the anorexic qualities of the landscape rejected him. The unending gray color oppressed him.

The Willow Creek Community College glee club had performed in a drab little church just outside of Harlem. C.B. swore he could hear rats skittering around the eaves. The nasty hotel the glee club stayed in had water stains on the ceiling, and the beds were hard and tiny. There had been a drunk sleeping in one of the chairs in the hotel lobby, his overripe smell and loud snoring filling the space. The hotel staff didn't seem to care.

Still, it had to be done. He had to test himself, to see once and for all if the Devil still lived in him. New York City was the perfect place to "experiment" without anyone knowing.

The first step was to ride the subway to Greenwich Village. He moved to the smelly hole in the ground. Its mouth was wide and yellow. He remembered the monsters in the subway in The Wiz. Trash cans with gnashing teeth, pillars that detached themselves from the ceiling and chased people around. What he found was a whole less interesting. The concrete floor in the subway was dirty, covered with gray lumps of long-forgotten chewing gum. He glanced down one of the platform tracks. Fearless brown and gray rats scuttled, each holding some treasure in their claws—a crust of Wonderbread, a squashed pink jellybean. C.B.'s skin crawled.

His train howled up to the platform, and the breaks squealed to a halt. He entered a drably lit car, with sour-faced people crushed next to him. He took a seat next to a blind man. The door clapped shut. His rattling trip began.

About three stops later, two men entered the subway together. Both of them wore black leather jackets, and had long beards, like ZZ Top. One man wore a tight leather cap on his head, while the other had chaps encasing his pants. When he turned away from C.B., he could see the two pockets of his ripped Levi's spread out like countries on the globe of his butt.

C.B. felt excitement wash over him. He allowed himself this one night. He had to know what he was giving up for the Lord. He stepped off the tightrope and tumbled into space.

Christopher Street was his stop. C.B. spilled out of the train and into the warm spring night. The first thing he noticed was that the Village wasn't as crowded and squashed together as downtown. There were no tall buildings. The sidewalks were thronged with people. Men, dressed like GQ models prowled the street. C.B. looked down. He made a decision; and looked up again. I'm tumbling.

He felt vertigo.

Cafes and bakeries spun past him. C.B. wandered into a bookstore. The atmosphere was thick with tension in here. Heads hunched over pornographic magazines glanced up then turned back to pictures of naked men spread-eagled and airbrushed on glossy pages. C.B. cautiously crept up to the magazine stand. He picked up a magazine, called Carnival of Men. He began trembling (tumbling).

The model's face was vacant. His body glistened and reflected the studio lights. His genitalia were objects: huge, flesh-colored fruits. Hairless and smooth. C.B. flipped the pages of the magazines. He found another picture, where a model spread the cheeks of his buttocks wide open. In the valley he created, he revealed the puckered rosebud of his anus.

If C.B. had been white, he would have been flushed as pink as Snagglepuss.

This is what it felt like, to give into temptation. What his mother hoped to destroy with church, what his father wanted to suppress with sports. The ground of Hell was fast approaching; it seethed with naked men and serpents. C.B. stayed in the bookstore, looking at magazines, for at least an hour. He was tempted to buy one of the magazines—this might be the only chance he got for a long time. But, then there was the chance of discovery, like his shrine to Lena. And it would be a visible souvenir of his shame.

He left the store empty-handed. The sky above the street was the sludge of sepia and purple-black, with the stars erased. There was a hint of humidity in the air.

He wandered the streets for an hour or more, putting off his eventual goal. He saw sophisticated men and women dressed in black. There were people with hair in colors of mint-green, daffodil yellow, and bubblegum pink. They wore safety pins through their ears, and some of them had white makeup on their faces, and tattoos on their arms. They were the clowns of hell. C.B. tried walking by them without gawking. He saw a shop that sold sex toys. He was too chicken to go in, so he looked through the windows, staring at the various tools and instruments of pleasure.

Finally, C.B. steeled himself. A couple of blocks from the Christopher Street stop he'd exited, there was a bar where men swarmed like bees. The name of the bar was the Big Top. He took a deep breath, stepped inside.

It was dark and crowded. Men perched on stools, sipping drinks, or clung to walls, gripping the nozzles of their beers. It was the sort of aggressive, ridiculous stance that the boys in the locker room mimicked. Others prowled the spaces between in cutoffs and T-shirts, leaving trails of perfume behind. The walls of the bar were paneled with some dark wood and wainscoted in a thick, red vinyl with large buttons on it, like the inside of a coffin.

Willow Creek was a dry county, and his mother didn't drink. His father did, but C.B. had little experience with alcohol. He went up to the bar, and asked for a rum and coke. The bartender wore an open vest. His chest was as smooth and built as those in the magazine C.B. had seen earlier. The bartender nodded sullenly, and gave him a full glass of rum, and colored it lightly with the soft drink.

C.B. looked at the drink doubtfully. He tipped the bartender, and wandered to the second room, which lay behind a black curtain.

He passed through, expecting a backroom, like he'd heard about. Darkness, smells of sweaty close bodies, groping hands. Instead, he slipped into wonder.

The room was decorated like his circus dream of Heaven. The walls were covered with paintings of elegant Harlequins and court jesters, their faces regal and dignified, not silly or sinister. One of the painted jesters wore a checkered garment of green and pink, and on the points of three-pronged hat were pansies, instead of the customary bells. There was a small stage at the end of the room. A circus dome capped the room, so you couldn't see the ceiling. A silver balloon rose from the back of each chair.

A man in a tuxedo walked to the microphone set up in the center of the stage. He waved C.B. to a table. When he'd taken a seat, the MC spoke:

"Tonight at the Big Top, we are proud to present the vocal stylings of the beautiful Lena Flügelhorn!"

The lights dimmed to spectral blue as a figure made her way to the microphone. She wore a dress of stars, her hair pinned up in some gravity-defying coiffure. A single white spotlight pierced the stage. The golden skin was a miracle of foundation. The likeness was uncanny, save for a huge Adam's apple. An invisible piano started the familiar chords to "Home."

And C.B. tumbled, plummeting to the floor of Hell. But the voice—resolutely male and tenor, yet somehow imbued with the essence of Lena—came and blew his poor body upwards, towards the star-babies of Heaven. C.B. found himself singing.

As he fell (or rose), C.B. felt Lena swell with him in. She rose up and held his hand. Lucifer—or Lena was there for him, as God had never been. If this was Hell, it couldn't be all that bad. It was beautiful here. A celestial circus of fallen stars. At once, C.B. recognized the anemic heaven he strove for, and rejected it.

Lena Flügelhorn's song ended, and with it, a chapter of C.B.'s life.

END

"Circus Boy Without A Safety Net" was originally published in Spoonfed and is copyright Craig Laurance Gidney 2001.

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.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with the first original story from the Autumn 2017 issue.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 48 for September 26, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is a reprint of "Circus Boy Without A Safety Net" by Craig Laurance Gidney. Potential background dog noises are unintended, but provided by Rey, Finn, and Heidi.

Content warning for slurs, homophobic bullying, and descriptions of porn.

Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), the Young Adult novel Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013), and The Nectar of Nightmares (Dim Shores, 2015). He lives in his native Washington, DC. Website: craiglaurancegidney.com. Instagram, Tumblr & Twitter: ethereallad.

Circus Boy Without A Safety Net

by Craig Laurance Gidney

Lucifer came to him in drag. He was disguised as Lena Horne.

C.B. went to see The Wiz with his family. The movie was pretty cool, by his standards, even though he thought Diana Ross was a little too old to be playing Dorothy. But the sets were amazing--the recasting of the Emerald City as downtown Manhattan, the Wicked Witch's sweatshop, the trashcan monsters in the subway. The songs sometimes lasted a little too long, but they were offset by Michael Jackson's flashy spin-dancing. But it was the image of Lena Horne as Glinda the Good Witch that would follow him.

She appeared in the next to last scene in a silver dress. Her hair was captured in a net of stars, and she was surrounded by a constellation of babies, all wrapped in clouds, their adorable faces peering out like living chocolate kisses. He fell in love. Ms. Horne was undeniably beautiful, with her creamy, golden skin, and mellow, birdlike features. Her movements during the song "Home" were passionate. They were at odds with shimmering, ethereal-blur in which she was filmed. Indeed, she could not be of this earth. In all of his life in Willow Creek, NC, C.B. had not seen anything like this before.

He was in love, all right. He researched her in libraries, finding old issues of Ebony and Jet; he watched old movies that she'd appeared in, like Cabin in the Sky. He collected some of her records; his 8-track of "Stormy Weather" was so worn, he had to buy another copy.

But in the weeks afterwards, he began to sense that this love of his wasn't quite right. His brother and his father would tease him about his "girlfriend," who was 70 years old, and about how, when he came of an age to marry, she would be even older than that. Of how he could never have children. His brother was particularly mean: he imagined a wedding, held at Lena's hospital bed, with her in an iron lung, exhaling an "I Do" as ominous as Darth Vader's last breath. But C.B. wanted to explain that it wasn't like that at all. He couldn't quite put it into words.

Lena wasn't an object of desire, someone who he wanted to kiss or hold hands with. She was something more. She was a goddess of Beauty, an ideal. She was something beyond anything he'd ever known. She hovered above Willow Creek, an angel, looking down on its box houses that were the color of orange sherbet, lemonade, and his own robin's-egg-blue house. She wasn't someone to sleep with; she was someone to be like.

C.B. made a bedroom shrine to his goddess. Old pictures of her, protected in cellophane, marched up his wall. But the ultimate treasure lay unseen. In the unused chest of drawers in the back of his closet, he hid a Barbie doll, bought at a flea market and transformed into her likeness: painted skin, eyes blackened with a pen, stolen hair dye darkening the blond tresses. And he spr

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 47 for September 23, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a poem by Jes Rausch, "Defining the Shapes of our Selves," and a GlitterShip original, "The Last Spell of the Raven" by Morris Tanafon. This is the last original story from GlitterShip Summer 2017, which you can pick up at glittership.com/buy if you would like to have your own copy. More importantly, however, this means that the Autumn 2017 issue is coming out soon!

Jes Rausch lives and writes in Wisconsin, with too many pets and too much beer for company. Nir fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Lethe Press. Find nem not updating nir Twitter @jesrausch.

"Defining the Shapes of our Selves"

by Jes Rausch

Book One

when we reached Fire Nest on Summit, hot

Book Two

When I stepped into the apartment I heard

Book Three

when we slid into Io Port 7 dock, powered down, cleared

END

Morris Tanafon lives in Ohio but still feels like a New Englander. His work has appeared in Crossed Genres and Mythic Delirium and he blogs sporadically at https://gloriousmonsters.wordpress.com

The Last Spell of the Raven

by Morris Tanafon

When I was very young, I watched my mother win the Battle of Griefswald. Standing knee-deep in our ornamental pool, she transformed the surface into a picture of Germany, and dripped fire from her hands into the water. I stood with my tutor in the crowd that watched, and did not understand why she gripped my shoulders until they ached, or why the people watching cheered and gasped. I saw the fire snake around the houses, and tiny people running from it. But until I was older I did not understand that it had been real.

Nobody talked to me about magic. My father never spoke of it, and my mother believed that I took after my father and had no talent for it. Still, at the age of seven I used it for the first time—a desperate child will reach for any tool. I knew that magic existed, from my mother’s conversations with her friends, and that it could be used to do wonderful things. And I knew that my cat Morrow was dead. So when I was given the body to bury it, I took her out to the backyard instead, and performed my best guess at a spell. The form was foolish, but the intent genuine, and intent was all it needed.

Morrow stirred, and my cry of delight caught my mother's attention. She looked from me to the cat, heard five seconds of my babbled explanation, and began screaming.

"Galen, you idiot!" She slapped me. "Things that come back are barely alive, and now you've wasted a spell! If you use more than four spells you die, do you want to die?"

I began screaming, convinced I was going to drop dead on the spot, and the reborn Morrow added a thin, ugly caterwaul to the din.

It was my father who ended the stupid affair, in one of the rare moments he left his study. He scooped up Morrow, plucked me away from my mother, and took us both inside, ignoring my mother's spitting rage. I don't know what she did after that. It didn't matter to me at the time, because my father took me into his study. I had never seen the interior before, and when he put me down I froze in place, afraid I’d break something. He dropped Morrow in my arms; I could feel her tiny, tinny heartbeat against her ribs. She smelled like mothballs and felt like paper-mâché, as if I hugged too tightly I'd crush her.

"I have no say in the matter," my father said, "but I suggest you never use magic again."

I must have looked ready to start screaming again, because he began speaking quickly—something he never did.

"I would never have married Evelyn if I knew she was a magician. In the country I come from, it is despised, for good reason. Who would willingly rip their soul apart?" He sat down, drumming his fingers, and watched me for a minute. I stared back dumbly—I still didn't understand.

"There's a story we tell children," he said. "Once, a raven was swallowed by a whale, and inside it he found a little house. There was a beautiful girl there, with a lamp by her side."

Morrow scratched my shoulder. I put her down but she stayed by my legs, winding around them.

"She told the raven: The lamp is sacred, do not touch it. But every few moments she had to rise and go out the door, for she was the whale's breath." I wanted to ask why the whale's breath was a girl, but my father signaled me to be silent. "And the raven, being arrogant and curious, waited until she was gone and touched the lamp. In an instant it went out, the girl fell down dead, and the whale died too, for the lamp was the whale's soul."

I pressed my hands to my chest.

"You're not going to die," my father said. "Not if you stop now. But listen—the raven dug its way up through the whale's dead flesh, and found it beached. There were men gathered around. And instead of telling them, 'I meddled with something beautiful and destroyed it', the raven merely cried, 'I slew the whale! I slew the whale!' And he became great among men, but lived a cursed life thenceforward."

The meaning was not obvious to a seven-year-old. "Am I cursed?"

"All magicians are," my father said flatly, "for that raven, greedy for the power he tasted from the whale's soul, became the first magician. Now go, and think about what I told you."

I went, and I did. To this day, that's the longest conversation my father shared with me.

Morrow perished again seven years later, despite my best efforts. I fed her bugs and graveyard dirt and tiny pieces of liver and locked her in my room to prevent her from jumping off a too-high surface and crushing her fragile front legs. But I forgot to lock the door one day, and a maid wildly kicked at the grey shape that appeared in front of her, and that was the end of Morrow.

I was angry, but the maid cried and helped me gather up the pieces, and she was very pretty. That, at fourteen, had begun to matter, and I forgave her enough to give her part in the burial service.

My mother watched from the window until Morrow was well buried.

When I wove my second spell I knew what I was giving up, and I knew my mother would kill me if she discovered what I’d done. I was to go to university that autumn, and become certified as a magician in service to the Crown, as my mother was—I risked that as well. I thought the price cheap in exchange for a smile from Asuka.

Fujimoto Asuka, the ambassador's daughter. We attended the same parties, hated them with the same passion, and exchanged weary looks over the rims of our wineglasses until I finally got up the courage to speak to her. She had come with her father to England to find a magician to change her body's shape. She was born with one wrong for her. We were a good match for that summer—she appreciated my adoring glances and felt kindly toward magicians. I was glad of admiration from one as worldly as her.

On the last day of summer, I convinced Asuka to slip away during a party. She didn't take much convincing, and it's a miracle we weren't caught—giggling like schoolchildren and exchanging significant glances anyone could read. Perhaps the other guests were humoring us. We went to the nearby lake, so well-tended it was our ornamental pool writ large, and I took off my shoes.

"You asked me how magicians first came to be," I said. "Nobody knows the full history, but I can tell you one story."

The pictures I made in the water were not real, but they looked it. Even now, with my regrets, I feel a twinge of pride thinking of the spectacle. I'd studied ravens for months, memorizing how they moved, and drew inspiration for the woman from Asuka; and like any good storyteller, I lied, adding my own spin. I transformed the raven into a man in the last moments and sent him and the whale's breath, hand-in-hand, into the crowd of gaping humans. Their descendants were magicians, I told Asuka. The raven saved the breath-girl at the last moment by lighting the lantern with a piece of his own soul.

When I was done, Asuka's eyes glittered with tears.

She promised to write to me; but the autumn was cold and long and the mail services from Japan to England not too reliable, and after a few exchanges our talk petered out.

I expected my parents to find out about it, but they never did. Instead, I had to explain to the records officer at Iffley College. Anyone who wished to register as a magician had to give an account of all magic they had used. She made notes as I spoke, and squinted at me as if she could see magic filling me to a certain point like a cup.

“From the sound of it,” she said, “you have three spells left. That’s the minimum for a certified magician—you have to give two spells in service, and one left over to keep you alive. You’d have to get through university without using any magic.”

That should have been my cue to turn away from the path of a magician, but I was stubborn and scared. I was not particularly good with mathematics, writing, speaking, or any other useful trait, and I feared my father might not leave me much when he passed away. Magic, no matter how I'd misused it, was the one thing I was certain I could do. I resolved to hoard my last three spells until graduation.

Iffley should have been the site of my third spell.

It was reasonably progressive, so male students were allowed in female student's rooms if the door remained open—as if, Amel said, girls and girls and boys and boys got up to no trouble together.

Amel Duchamps was my best friend, and one of my only friends at Iffley. Most of the magicians there had more spells to their name than I, and loved to talk about what they planned to do with their two 'extras' after the service to the Crown was given; most of the non-magician boys thought me strange and shy. Girls suspected that I only wanted to speak to them for amorous reasons, which was far from the truth—after Asuka, my heart was too raw for romance. I wanted friendship.

Amel provided that and more. She was not a magician, but she did not fear them-—or anything. When she was ten, a horse had gone wild and crushed her legs. The doctor had asked her: would you rather leave them dangling, or cut them away? Amel chose to have them cut, and she told me that all her fear was cut away with them. She had gone about taking dares after that, everything from eating bees to sticking her hand into stinging nettles, and at fifteen she volunteered for experimental mechanical legs.

They were beautiful, wide white-and-bronze things with gears winking through the joints. The ones being produced now, mostly for military veterans, are more workmanlike; but the woman who designed Amel's wanted to make her fifteen-year-old test subject smile, so she had boots painted on the feet and winding vines on the calves.

"Imagine if magic took a piece of your body, instead of your soul," Amel said to me the day we met. "Then I'd be the one who'd spent two spells. I imagine the first would take your legs up to the knees, the next would go to the hips, then your torso... and finally you'd just be a head, rolling along. Fancy that!"

She was a year older than me, but never seemed to notice. We loved each other absolutely in the way of friends, with never a hint of lust; and we both loved the boy in the room across from me with every bit of romance and lust in us, although we never dared reveal that to him. His name was Isaac; he was blind and he had the most beautiful voice I had ever heard.

"How's himself?" Amel would always ask when I came to see her, and I'd tell her what Isaac had done lately. Then we'd move on to food, magic, sympathy over the cross of races we both were—English and Inuit for me, French and African for her. Iffley was a hard school, and the deeper into our education we got the more time we spent simply talking and the more our performance faltered. I might have failed altogether and been forced back home had—had the event not occurred.

I know very little about the attacker; only that he was a magician, and had decided how to spend each and every one of his spells. The newspapers, of course, spent weeks on the matter, on the carnage from beginning to end and the inspiration for it and the attacker's history and potential madness, but I don't want to know another thing about him. I know all I need to: the third dark, wet January I was at Iffley, I had gone out into the town for a much-needed drink and was returning in the afternoon when I heard the screams. I saw the blood, splattered in haphazard patterns over the wall, like wet lace slapped against the bricks. And for one minute I saw him, the killer, in the doorway across from me. He was bright-eyed with excitement, his hands curled up near his chest as if he had been physically tearing away pieces of his soul to do this with; and he looked at me. For a moment, I saw him consider.

But, as I was to learn later, he was on his last spell, and I was just one man. Why waste your power on one man when you can run to another room and kill a crowd? He turned away from me. And I, freezing as if I were seven years old again, let him.

Someone will stop him, any moment now, I thought. Some other magician, one of the ones with all five spells. They can spare it.

A minute later he cast his last spell and fell dead. A magician in the room even managed to deflect part of it. But that last spell still claimed lives—one teacher, one bystander who had been forced into the college, four students. Amel Duchamps.

I threw myself into my work in an attempt to forget, but it didn't help. Amel should have been the magician, I thought over and over. She had given up her legs in an instant. She would have given up a piece of her soul.

But what could I do now? I graduated Iffley College and the Crown claimed me. The last scraps of my soul no longer belonged to me.

My third spell is not worth remarking on. It was a military operation, one part of a massive whole. Performing it, I felt the pain of separating soul from soul for the first time, and I wondered if the pain came with age or only with reluctance.

At thirty I spent my fourth spell in a moment's decision. I had another purpose, another spell laid out for me, although I can no longer recall what it was. Suffice to say I was accompanying a group of soldiers, police and other magicians, retrieving hostages that had been taken from the Royal Opera to the house of an art-obsessed crime lord in Liverpool.

I found Isaac among those rescued. I got up the nerve to greet him, but he only tilted his head. Then he opened his mouth and showed me that the criminal devil had taken his tongue.

I did not think about it, or even tell him what I was going to do, which in hindsight I should have. I kissed him lightly, passing the last easily taken scrap of my soul mouth to mouth, and restored his tongue. "It's the least I can do,” I said.

My superiors raged. My mother heard of it and sent a letter to tell me how stupid I was. Isaac embraced me, which was the high point of the whole affair. But I realized that I could not hear his voice without remembering Amel, and how much she had loved him as well, and so I could not be with him long. When I received orders of discharge I bid him farewell and good luck, and set off wandering.

I found work as a teacher, here and there, although what people most wanted me to do was give lectures on how greatly I had wasted my magic—provide an example to the younger generation of magicians by accepting responsibility for my foolishness. That I could not do, and sooner or later I had to move on from a place when the attention grew to be too much.

My life was lonely. But it warmed me a little to think of a piece of my soul clinging to Isaac, like a flower-petal on the back of his tongue, reverberating with the sound every time he sang.

In the summer of my thirty-sixth year, my mother died and the aggression between England and Germany flared into war once again. Newspapers made poetry of it, suggesting that Germany was given courage to attack by my mother's death. They ran photographs of the Battle of Griefswald, the side that had taken place in my old home's ornamental pool, and some reporters tried to interview me on the matter. With mourning as my excuse, I returned to my old home and locked myself in. My father had gone back to his land of birth, and wanted nothing to do with the house or me.

In time, interest died out. The war occupied everyone's attention. Sides were taken, attacks were made, and after a while I stopped bothering to read the newspapers. With a place to live and the money my mother left behind, I no longer had to go anywhere, and as the days passed I wanted to less and less. People only spoke of magic when they spoke of how it might be used in the war. I was despised, quietly, for my lack of contribution. I came to see the few kindnesses I was still shown as undeserved, and I retreated into my home completely, stocking up on food so I wouldn't need to leave for a long time.

A few people still found me. Young men and women going off to war passed through my part of the country, and some of them stopped at my door. I didn't understand why; finally, I allowed a girl named Katherine inside just to see what she wanted, and over a cup of weak coffee she blurted out that she only had three spells left.

I realized that she wanted to tell me about the first two.

That was what they all wanted, really, the people who knocked at my door. Some had three spells left, some two, but all of them had spent the first on impulse. Katherine had cursed her stepfather's vineyards. A boy called Natanael had resurrected his favorite apple tree after it had been struck by lightning. Gita had brought a patch of earth to life, and it followed her around. "It used to be bigger," she said, looking down at the muddy little golem. "I think someday it will wash away completely."

All I could do was listen, but I realized that was all they wanted.

Eventually they stopped coming. Germany was inching across England's shore near my home, and people fled the area. I stayed deep within my house, and it might have been mistaken for empty; certainly, nobody came to evacuate me. I lived in a looming house over a ghost town, with the sounds of warfare drawing nearer every day, and I could not bring myself to care. I began working my way through the wine cellar.

It was when I was down there, one day, that the bombs came down. I felt the earth shake over my head, and when I mounted the stairs an hour later my house had collapsed around me. Cavernous walls bowed in, shattered windows were obscured with earth, the wooden beams of the house creaked and groaned under the weight of rubble. It was dark and stifling and still large, like the belly of a whale, and in the center of the floor lay a bomb.

It didn't seem about to go off, so I circled it at a distance and tried to remember what I'd read about German bombs. There had been an article in the last newspaper I'd bothered to look at. They were iron shells full of destructive magic, released when their metal shell was cracked or some requirements for the seething spell within were met. Every one one-fifth of a magician's life, and the Germans were beginning to drop dozens of them. I remembered Iffley, the blood on the walls and the cracked windows, and bile rose in my throat. That man had chosen to use his magic in that way, but I could not imagine that a rational magician would agree to it willingly. I felt a strange sympathy for the magician who had spent part of their soul in such a manner.

But what were the requirements for this spell? It had been dropped rather precisely here. Perhaps, ascribing more credit to me than I deserved, they thought I might follow in my mother's footsteps and kill a great deal of their people. Still, why would it be meant for me and not awaken when I stood within twenty feet of it?

A thought struck me, and I almost laughed aloud; then I remembered that nobody was here to think me mad, and I did laugh. They had meant the bomb for a magician, of course. But while my spell for Isaac had been publicized, my earlier expenditures were shrouded in mystery. They had expected a magician with at least two spells left. My one remaining scrap was not enough to trigger the bomb unless I stood next to it.

I left it where it lay and went to investigate the doors.

My bad luck held, and they were all blocked by wreckage. I was trapped and help was not likely to come. And for all that I'd willingly shut myself off from life, I felt a pang of huge and echoing terror at the thought. I wanted, for a fiery moment, to survive; or at least to know that my death would be noticed, that I would be mourned. If I had still possessed two spells, I would have used one then.

But I only had one, and the moment passed.

In two weeks' time I had run through most of my food, and had nigh-unconsciously begun spending time nearer to the bomb. It was a contest of wills, fueled by my ragged mind; it seemed to me that my own weakening instinct to live fought against the soul-fragment of the magician who wished me to die. I spoke to it, sometimes. Would have named it, if I were a little more mad. Told it the story of my life, as far as I knew it. "We haven't gotten to the ending yet," I informed it, in a conspiratorial tone, "but I know I shall die. It only remains to see how."

In my defense, I was rather drunk during those weeks, and in my further defense, my father kept a far more extensive wine-cellar than I did a pantry. Recalling my mother, I can hardly blame him.

Regardless: after two weeks, as I sat and studied the bomb and wondered how swift a death it might be to trigger it, I heard noises faint and far above me. I thought at first they were delusions—I had imagined, many nights, the sound of a cat padding through the hallways, or the creak of mechanical legs—but I kept listening, and realized they were the sounds of digging.

Someone had come.

I leapt to my feet, head spinning, and looked upwards. I could hear a voice now, shouting, but it was too far away to recognize. But as I stood there, shaking, so overwhelmed I did not know whether I felt joy or terror, I heard another noise: a slow and measured cracking.

There must be magicians in the group above. The bomb began to tremble, like a hatching egg, and in a moment it would split open.

I wished that I did not have time to think. Magic, excusing the spell I performed unwillingly, always came in a moment of impulse. But the metal egg cracked slowly, and my hands trembled, and my traitor mind said Wait a moment longer. It has not gone off yet; they might be near enough to call to, soon, and someone else—

Someone else, I knew with utter certainty, would come too late. That did not make the magic come easily, it did not spur me on without thought, but it gave me the strength to raise my hand toward the shivering spell on the floor.

"You were meant for me," I reminded it, and as the shell finally opened I enclosed it. The force was strong, almost stronger than I, and had to go somewhere, so I directed it toward the part of the ceiling which I had heard nothing from. I had to hope that was enough.

The spell was silent, save for the roar of the roof parting before it, and nothing more than a glimmer of light to my eyes. I sank to my knees, watching the ceiling split open, and saw the cloudy sky for the first time in weeks.

"I slew the whale," I said. My tongue felt thick and heavy in my mouth. "I slew the whale."

Far away, I heard a shout. I still could not recognize the voice, but it seemed familiar. Perhaps it was one of the young magicians who had stopped at my door. Perhaps it was Isaac. Anything seemed likely, in that moment. The cloudy sky dimmed before my eyes as my vision failed, but my mind's eye seemed to sharpen. I thought I saw the house from the outside, clear as day, and felt a cat winding around my legs, her purring weight incredibly familiar. The weight transformed into water and I stood, for a moment, in the lake where I wove Asuka’s spell.

Some say a magician splits into five pieces at their death, but it felt more like becoming whole.

And here—no, this cannot be death, for I find myself back in Amel's room in Iffley, where I never worked a spell, and she smiles at me so hard her eyes crease up to almost nothing. "How's himself?" she asks, and I answer, and while I do she gets up—her legs no longer creaking as badly as they did—and paces to the door to open it. Morrow slips half of her long grey body inside, but in the way of cats she can't make up her mind; as Amel and I sink deeper into conversation she comes in and goes out, in and out, in and out and in and out.

END

"Defining the Shapes of our Selves" is copyright Jes Rausch 2017.

"The Last Spell of the Raven" is copyright Morris Tanafon 2017.

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.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Circus Boy Without A Safety Net" by Craig Laurance Gidney.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 47 for September 23, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a poem by Jes Rausch, "Defining the Shapes of our Selves," and a GlitterShip original, "The Last Spell of the Raven" by Morris Tanafon. This is the last original story from GlitterShip Summer 2017, which you can pick up at glittership.com/buy if you would like to have your own copy. More importantly, however, this means that the Autumn 2017 issue is coming out soon!

Jes Rausch lives and writes in Wisconsin, with too many pets and too much beer for company. Nir fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Lethe Press. Find nem not updating nir Twitter @jesrausch.

"Defining the Shapes of our Selves"

by Jes Rausch

Book One

when we reached Fire Nest on Summit, hot
sun hanging low in the sky like an egg, biding,
the dirt streets were dusty as smoke.
So this is what the capitol of the Dragon Lands is like,
i said, and, i never dreamt i’d be here, breathe in dust
that must once have been the scales of ancients.
There, you said, and pointed out a spire among spires, the
twisting of another sculpted tail
in a sea of swirling tails and horns and There, you said,
and interrupted my awe with one of your smiles, man to me.
When we reached Fire Nest on Summit, our
pouches full of rubies, the aura of crime
marinating them to a fine delicacy, we strode
down streets dusty with smoke, smoky with the scent
of food and sounds and flashes of golds and crimsons.
We were here for a reason, a purpose, a journey, and
here we were at the door carved of real dragon bone
before the set of scale-clad guards, to bargain and banter and
barter our way into the deal of a lifetime. Said the guard
who stepped forward, He requires men and women meet
specific challenges attuned to their natures to pass, and
Step this way, to you. When we reached Fire Nest on Summit,
you walked through your designated door, and i
left behind in your dust, was told to wait when
the guard could not determine which frame fit. Said
the guard, it is better this way, after all, you cannot meet
the challenges without a reason, a purpose, a journey.

Book Two

When I stepped into the apartment I heard
the burble of the fish tank, that constant watery murmur
that gives me what little comfort it can. I turn on
all the lights today, and a little music too. The curtains
already drawn, this little home a sanctuary
where I can pee however I want to, and with the door open.
Out there in the world deemed real, I can try too hard
to talk with coworkers, meet company standards, go by
unseen. But here I can make chicken tikka. Chicken tikka
doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t care
if you live or die either, so in a way, it is
the world deemed real, and here, in my home
I can devour it.

Book Three

when we slid into Io Port 7 dock, powered down, cleared
the security scans, and disembarked after five long
hours of waiting around in the mess, prisoners
in our own ship, i was ready for a bit of fun. Ten months
out in a vacuum will do that to you. Chasing odd jobs
around stars, snagging a get-rich-quick scheme out of orbit
is a tiring way to live. Dull as an old hull, random
as a time of death. Our boots made the obligatory clank-
clank noise down the corridors, our voices blocked
them out. See, i was never free ‘til i reached for a star
and grabbed a bucket of rust, made the engines run

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 46 for September 21, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is a reprint by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, "Nostalgia."

Content warning for the good, the bad, and the ugly: sex, drug addiction, and references to stalking.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam's fiction and poetry has appeared in over 40 magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and Selected Shorts' Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize. Her audio fiction-jazz collaborative album Strange Monsters was released from Easy Brew Studio in April 2016. You can find her online at www.bonniejostufflebeam.com or on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle.

Nostalgia

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Tori takes another hit of nostalgia; the smoke is creamy mint cookie down her throat, smooth and hot. It fills her lungs, tickles, burns, and as she coughs it out she laughs, smoke pouring from her lips. Fog fills her head. The live oaks’ winter skeletons crisp into focus as the drug takes hold. Tori feels the cold on her skin as if she is a little girl in the snow, her hand in her father’s glove, surrounded by his smell of smoke and vodka. Her mother hates the cold but watches from the window. Tori’s belly is full. It hasn’t been this full for years, not since home, that word a lighthouse beacon she will never again reach without this burn of throat, cloud of mind, her parents having pushed her out once they met her first girlfriend. Tori passes the pipe to her companion.

“I haven’t done nostalgia in years,” Kay says. “Since I was in college. Homesick.”

“No pressure,” Tori says. “Just offering.”

Her new friend confuses her; she’s never been with a slate before, and even though Kay is pre-op, it’s taken some concentration not to mix up the pronouns. Shu¸ Tori practices on nights that Kay does not sleep over. Shur. Still, she’s messed up a couple of times, accidentally said she instead of shu, her instead of shur. Kay does not seem to mind these slip-ups, and it is because of this easy-goingness that Tori has let Kay into her head nearly as much as nostalgia.

Kay flicks the lighter over the blue-black herb but does not inhale. Instead shu watches the leaves char in the pipe’s bowl.

“Hey, knock it off.” Tori grabs the pipe, the lighter. “Don’t waste it.”

“Sorry.” Kay shrugs shur thick shoulders; the grey scarf around shur neck shifts in the breeze. Tori itches to bat the decorative balls which hang from it but doesn't.

Instead she remembers. When she was a little girl, she had an orange cat who batted at her scarves. Another cat in college, living with that first girlfriend, Meredith. Meredith’s skin against her own, protection from the cold, a laugh like medicine she didn’t know she needed.

“You okay?” Kay asks, squeezing the nub of her shoulder. Tori opens her eyes. She had closed them without realizing. This is sad to her, like the day Meredith moved up north.

“Fine,” she says. “Cold is all.”

Later, atop the flannel red-and-white holiday sheets, Tori closes her eyes again and imagines familiar fingers, longer and thinner than Kay’s, inside her, lets the nostalgia hum within like a tongue, lets herself dissolve into the memory of love. One day, she thinks, kissing the nape of Kay’s bare neck, shu will feel like memory, shur blank, nippleless chest a comfort of familiarity rather than this stiff newness, this gloss. Tori wants it dull like a pencil worn to the nub.

When they are finished, breathless in one another’s embrace, Tori burrows her face in the hair of Kay’s armpits, the smell of animal musk and orgasm. As the nostalgia wears off, a veil lifts on this moment, the past fogging instead like a breathed-upon window. Kay’s skin is real under her ear, the drum of shur heartbeat a surge through her. It makes her own heart beat faster, her palms sweat. She swallows her spit. To quiet the silence, she pulls her face from the sweat of Kay’s body and examines shur in the room’s dark.

“Your photographs,” she says, “they’re good.”

Kay laughs. “I know. Is that the only reason you’re with me?”

Tori lets her head fall back into place. She knows that Kay is not comfortable enough yet to push, and the question is difficult to answer. Yes, she should say, the photographs. But this would be too much. It would stress her throat, already sore from the smoke. Behind her eyes she recalls them, the photographs, dancers leaping from frame to frame like in a flip-book.

Tori had glimpsed Kay every day at the college as Kay walked past Tori mopping the same spot again and again, trying to look busy so that she would not have to catch Kay’s eye. Because she knew who Kay was, had seen shur picture in the school paper, had heard shur name repeated back when Tori was a student, back before her only affiliations with the school were the mop and broom they issued her, the paycheck they sent her monthly for cleaning the classrooms and bathrooms of the art buildings.

Whenever Tori had a moment, she stopped to stare at Kay’s photographs. Once she dared to touch them; she wanted to see if the dancer was real, some little person imprisoned in the film, forced to tango and ballet and flamenco hour after hour, day after day, year after year, but it was just paper under Tori’s finger, glossy as what would be Tori and Kay’s future bedroom shenanigans. The dancers were always slates, or disguised as slates. Tori couldn’t believe there could be so many of them in Riddle, Texas, their small college town. And the way they changed from photo to photo, like devils. Like angels. Like monsters. Like memories Tori struggled to remember without the help of smoke down her throat.

“Do you want to learn how to take them?” Kay asks. “I can teach you. I think you’d be good at it.”

The idea sends a shiver down Tori’s spine; it both intrigues and terrifies her. Too new.

“I can’t,” she says.

Tori is at the sink filling a glass with water when Meredith knocks at the kitchen door.

“Whose car is that outside?” Meredith asks as she pushes past Tori. “You better not dance for her, whoever she is.” In the time since she has been away, she’s shaved the sides of her head so that the middle patch of hair falls over two bald spots. “If you dance for her, I swear.”

It isn’t a surprise to see Meredith there, but also it is a surprise, as each time she shows up it sends a shock down Tori’s belly to her groin. A Pavlov’s bell. Tori leaves the faucet on, lets the water run over the sides of the glass and down the drain.

“I don’t dance,” Tori says, leaning against the sink, digging her hands into the pockets of her pajama pants.

“Bullshit you don’t dance,” Meredith says. “We used to dance all the time.”

“Not anymore. I only danced with you.”

Meredith's smile dimples her cheeks. She looks stronger, thicker; from her letters, Tori knows that she’s been climbing rocks, running races, cycling across mountains until her muscles quiver. “Prove it,” she says.

Even though Kay is in the other room, asleep with shur head on Tori’s pillow, Tori’s belly aches for a kiss she knows the taste of. Berries and salt. If she could bury her head in Meredith’s hair, she would smell the slick oil sweet. She knows this. She knows, too, the way Meredith will move against her in a dance of sweat, the way Meredith will not let Tori touch her. The way she will, once Tori is gasping in her arms, jump up and disappear to the bathroom, how she will emerge flushed and breathless. How she will say, “I took care of it myself.” And how Tori will accept this. She knows, too, that as they sit on the couch with their legs intertwined, Meredith will not ask about Kay.

Sure enough, it happens like that. Meredith is out the door twenty minutes later. When Tori crawls back into bed, Kay rolls over and kisses the top of her forehead.

“I don’t care, you know, about her,” Kay says. “I think you’ll find I’m pretty open-minded.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tori closes her eyes and counts the hours until she can light up again.

When she runs out of nostalgia, she calls up her high school friend, Logan. He and her other friends from that time have never left the small town where they all grew up together, Agape, where they spent weekends downing stolen vodka and imbibing a rainbow assortment of drugs until nostalgia became their drug of choice.

One hour’s drive south and Tori is knocking on Logan’s door. Logan answers, his skintight jeans smeared with forgotten food particles. His eyes are red as emergency exit letters. When he wraps his arms around her, she feels as though this moment has already occurred. Déjà vu. But of course it's happened before, at least once every two weeks for the last six years of her life.

“You have some?” she asks.

Logan leads her by the hand back to his room, where four old friends and one man Tori has never seen sit around a hookah. Inside his parents’ house everything is the same: the same black curtains drawn across every window, the same stuffed moose head mounted above the neglected fireplace, the same smell of stale smoke and semen-filled napkins left too long in Logan’s wastebasket. The coal atop the hookah smolders redder than their eyes. As Tori's eyes adjust, her chest constricts; it’s a scene straight from senior year when she didn’t yet know who she was, when she hadn’t yet grown into her own skin, was still shy and ashamed of herself, awkward in her body. This is a thought she struggles to swallow every time she comes here. Instead she takes the pipe they pass her and sucks in the rancid smoke.

Once her eyes match theirs, she feels right again. She looks from face to face in the circle. Back in the day, they used to sneak into the woods to smoke this stuff. They would break into a rundown shed and sit on a ratty couch that smelled of mildew. They nearly got caught by the cops a couple of times, but they were young. Maybe that is the difference, Tori thinks, I know now that I can crumble like charred nostalgia. There was another one of them back then, a boy Tori thought for a while that she loved. They let Daniel be their leader, clung to his every word. She let him be her first boy. The only mistake she ever admitted to.

She recalls his lips on her neck, his fingers tracing the necklace he slipped around her neck like a collar. This is not the way, he said, this is not the way to love you. Even though his raving words made no sense, she believed them.

Later she realized he wasn’t right in the head. He smoked too much. Took other drugs. Shot some into his veins. Back then, especially, it had been nothing more than cigarettes and booze pilfered from the bottom shelves of their parents’ vice cabinets for the rest of them. They left Daniel to his own.

“Are you staying for a while?” Annie asks.

“I don’t think so,” Tori says, taking another hit. This one tastes like day-old salad in her throat. A bad hit. She pulls her water bottle from her purse and tries to swallow the taste. “I have to get back.”

“It’s okay,” Logan says. “Big college grad, we know you’re not like us anymore.”

Nothing could be closer and farther from the truth.

At home Tori arranges the baggie of nostalgia in a cedar box where she also keeps papers and a glass pipe with a rainbow flower blown onto it. She calls Kay and asks shur to come over.  When shu arrives, shu has brought along a digital camera which shu hands to Tori like a holy relic. The camera is red and feels heavy in Tori’s palm.

“It’s neat,” Tori says, thrusting it back at Kay. “Is it new?”

Kay won’t take it back. Instead shu stands by Tori’s side and shows her how to turn it on.

“It’s for you,” shu says. Shu arranges Tori’s fingers over the buttons, uses Tori’s hand like a puppet to take a photograph of the window in Tori’s living room. “You have an eye for this,” shu says. “Don’t waste it.”

“I can’t take this,” Tori says. It feels hard and slick and smells of new plastic. She hates the smell. She tries again to give it back, and when Kay won’t take it, her fingers go limp. The camera falls to the carpet with a thud.

Kay leaves it where it has fallen. Takes Tori’s hands in shur own and kisses the knuckles. “It’s okay,” shu says. “You don’t have to.” Lets shur lips graze the hairs on Tori’s arms, kisses the mole on her neck, kisses her eyebrows. Unbuttons her. Tori can tell shu wants to disrobe all of her, peel off her skin even, see inside her body like an X-ray. But Tori won’t let shur.

Kay’s body will change after shur operation. Tori isn’t sure that she will be okay with this. Thinking of Kay’s body as something she will have to get used to twice leaves a heavy food feeling in her stomach. Although she’s familiar with the way a typical slate body looks post-op – she took a class on gender and sexuality at the university – she wishes she could have met shu once she was already complete, once shu had already grown into the new skin, the smooth Barbie V between shur legs. At least, Tori thinks as she runs her hands over the flat chest she has made a fascination, Kay got this part out of the way before we met.

“I won’t know what to do with you,” Tori whispers, “after the operation.”

Kay’s voice, usually calm, is hard-edged when shu responds. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Tori isn’t one hundred percent sure. She laughs at herself. When is she ever?

“I just wish, you know, that we’d met once you were complete.” She thinks it might help if she explains, but she can't seem to spit the words out. Not without time. She wishes she could freeze the moment and collect herself, but the world doesn’t grant wishes that way.

“Complete?” Kay pushes Tori off shur chest. “I’m just as complete now as I’ll ever be. I'll be more comfortable in my skin, sure, but I'm not incomplete. And besides,” shu says, “you’re one to talk. What are you doing with your life? You think your reason for living is so you can clean other people’s messes?” Shu stops, though Tori can tell shu wants to go on. Then shu looks away. “I’m sorry,” shu says. Shu doesn’t wait for Tori to say anything, and Tori isn’t sure she would say anything given the chance.

Once Kay has gone, Tori loads a bowl, tripping over the camera on her way back to bed. She kicks it underneath the couch like the soccer ball she and her father used to pass back and forth out in the cool green grass, tinged with dew, until the chill on her bare feet became too much and her father would carry her inside and lower her onto the dry carpet. It's a memory empty of the sound of ice clinking in a glass, empty of the alcohol smell. She scrunches her toes against the carpet, a dirty shag she hasn’t vacuumed in at least a month. It doesn’t feel the same. If the world granted wishes, she would wish that it would feel the same.

The bonfire in Tori’s yard is already blazing when Meredith skids into Tori’s gravel drive on her Harley. It has been three days since Tori’s fight with Kay, and she is surprised to see Meredith so soon after the last visit. It’s surprising not to have to reacquaint herself; it’s nice. The fire’s warmth makes her bare legs burn.

“Long time no see,” Tori says.

“I missed you,” Meredith says.

Tori has known Meredith long enough to decipher this code. What she means to say is, she couldn’t stand the thought of Tori with someone else. And so she has returned. Tori takes another hit in the hopes that she can convince herself that this time will be forever. They sit by the fire.

“Can’t believe you still do this shit,” Meredith says, lighting the bowl.

“And you don’t?”

Meredith laughs. “I didn’t say that. Just, you were always so smart, Tori. Smarter than any of us. I figured you’d grow up faster.”

Tori doesn’t want to think about it. She blows smoke from her nose. The burn makes her body tremble the way fingers will, later, when the two of them are once more wrapped in Tori’s sheets. Tori recalls that first time, when Meredith pushed her onto her own bed. Took control of Tori’s room without asking. Tori loved that she didn’t ask. She felt in capable hands. They made love to B.B. King on repeat. When they woke in the morning, the air was too hot for such closeness, but they clung to each other anyway. They turned off the music and let the noise of their breath soothe them back into fevered half-sleep.

“Where’s the old gang?” Meredith dumps the cashed bowl into the fire. “Call them up.”

Once Meredith left, there was nothing more to hold their group of college friends together, though during the five years of undergrad they spent every weekend together. Meredith had been glue, and none of them had ever noticed, not even Tori, who had felt her sticky sweat-soaked skin. But Tori still has their numbers.

An hour later, three chairs around the bonfire have filled with the warm bodies Tori used to cling to, sloppy with drink and smoke, as they stumbled home from evenings of smoke circles and study sessions, one-night stands and late-night movie marathons. When Daniel wouldn’t stop calling, even two years after the breakup, it was these friends who, never having known him, demanded he leave her alone. Only two of their old gang is able to make it; the rest, like Meredith, moved away from Riddle after graduation. Still, looking from face to face around the fire is like looking four years into the past, and Tori’s body hums, static building under skin. She wants nothing more than to run through the field surrounding her house, to float kites as Meredith scribbles poetry in her little black notebook. Always Tori used to wonder if Meredith was writing about her. Then she knew she never was; instead she wrote of the foreign places she disappeared to more and more those days. A fantastic life she hadn’t asked Tori to be part of.

Once the beer has been drained and the empty bottles tossed into the fire in hopes that they will burst, once they have finished off the last of the nostalgia, leaving only ash and a charred roach to burn, they sit back in their chairs and dream of running, though in reality none of them could summon the energy. The hum takes Tori over like an orgasm that never stops. She feels as if, for the first time since graduation, since she lost her place in this college town, she is home.

The hum intensifies. It vibrates her legs and creeps up into the space between her legs. For a moment she remembers Kay. Then forgets. Then it is Meredith again, Meredith’s dimpled smile, her soft thighs. Music that she recognizes.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Meredith slurs, clapping her hand over Tori’s pants pocket, where Tori’s phone has been ringing.

The phone feels strange in her sweaty palm, like an object that was never meant to be in this world. The caller ID tells her before she picks up that Logan’s will be the voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry,” Logan says when she picks up. “I had to tell you. Daniel killed himself two weeks ago.”

A wave of numb travels from her ear to her feet. Her stomach flops as if she has swallowed sour milk. She can feel Daniel all of a sudden. His hands like a bandage across her wrist, pulling her onto his bed while his parents were away. Refusing to let go of her hand in the night. Saying, if something ever happened to you. If anyone ever hurt you. And she knew, back then, that he was damaged. Had seen his own stepfather’s dead body hanging from the ceiling. Had heard the fights from the other side of thin walls for all his childhood. She thought he was strong, thought he had grown from these experiences. How, she wanted and did not want to ask. So she didn’t. She could feel his lips down her neck and thought of how those lips would go blue-black in the earth.

“God,” she says, as if she believes in Him. “How do you know?”

“His mom called me today. Got my number from his phone.”

Meredith’s hand grips her knee, travels up her leg. Tori doesn’t think to stop her.

“Is there a funeral?”

“No. They had a secret funeral already. But we’re having a memorial, next weekend. We’re going to the barn. We’ll say a few words about him, you know. We’re meeting at my house. If you want to come. If you can stay a while.”

“I’ll be there,” Tori says.

The phone goes quiet. Meredith doesn’t ask who it was, what it was, and Tori moves her leg so that Meredith’s hand falls away.

“What’s up?” Meredith asks, crossing her arms across her chest.

“Daniel’s dead. Killed himself.”

Meredith’s eyes widen. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Will you go to the memorial with me next weekend?”

“I can’t. I have a family thing next weekend, out of town. I already told them I’d go.”

“Right.” Tori nods, though what Meredith said seems strange, like déjà vu again. Tori remembers her grandfather’s death, how her tears made Meredith anxious, how Meredith shrugged stiffly, told Tori she had to leave. That she had a family reunion to go to. Left Tori on the edge of her bed, clutching her own shaking body. “Right,” Tori says.

Tori leaves the fire, goes inside, locks the door behind her. No one bothers her for hours, and when they do, she ignores the knocks, the pleas to please let them in to use the restroom. She googles Daniel’s name. She finds an old arrest brief from Daniel’s breaking-and-entering charge, which happened the year after college. Daniel had called her about it, drunk and sorry for himself. But there is no obituary, no news of a suicide. She searches for hours and finds nothing more, her fingers a fever on the keys, her mind a blank race of guilty thoughts. Could she have saved him? She wishes she had someone to tell her that she couldn’t have. But it sounds as if, outside, the party has moved on.

It’s the hour of nothing good when there is another knock at the door.

“Please open up,” Kay says. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

When Tori opens the door, Kay wraps shur arms around her. Tori shakes in shur embrace. “What’s wrong?” Kay asks, running shur hands through Tori’s hair. “What happened?”

Tori tells shur everything. “Doesn’t it sound fishy?” she asks. “There’s nothing, nothing at all online about him.”

“It’s weird, but maybe they just wanted to keep it secret. Don’t tear yourself up about this, okay? Listen, I’ll go with you, if you want, to the memorial.”

Tori lets herself disappear beneath Kay’s armpit. Breathes in the musk smell. She will let shur take care of her. Will let shur hold her and hide her from the light. Will let shur apologize for her and, yes, even love her.

Having grown up in the city, Kay says during the drive down from Riddle, shu has never been in a town like Agape.

“As you can see, you’re not missing much,” Tori says as she navigates the car along the one road which curves like a snake through the small town, from the high school to the diner to the post office to the elementary to the gated community of houses which could fit five of Tori’s tiny duplex within their walls. This is her past, laid bare without the itch in the throat, though Tori has brought along the last of her nostalgia for the memorial.

“I bet you could take some great photographs here,” Kay says as they pass the stone mega church. “Will the memorial be there?”

The memorial. For the length of the drive, she let herself forget, but now she must remember. Every bitter detail. There will be no turning around. For the last week she has felt on edge, always shaking in the night, looking every day for information, calling up old friends to see if they have heard. And no one else has.

“No,” Tori says. “Not there.”

To stop her shaking, and because she cannot, at the moment, go on to Logan’s, Tori stops at the town’s only coffee shop, a little place with crosses on the walls and in a jewelry case at the front counter. The young man behind the counter is someone Tori used to know, an old friend. Jaden. She wonders why, smart boy like him, he never got out of this place.

“How are you?” he asks, smiling briefly at Kay before looking back to Tori. Kay stands with shur arms in shur jacket pockets.

Tori shrugs. “Okay enough, considering the occasion.”

“What occasion?”

He doesn’t know, she realizes with cold dread. Although he and Daniel were never best friends, were never lovers, they were close. As if shu can read her, Kay grabs her hand.

“Daniel’s dead,” Tori says. “Killed himself.”

“What? When was this?” Jaden says.

“Three weeks ago.”

He laughs. The sound is a fire alarm. When he realizes Tori isn’t laughing with him, he opens his mouth, shuts it. “I saw Daniel at the general store last night. He was fine.”

Cold dread is becoming as familiar as a fever. Because this news is neither good nor bad; it moves into her gut and twists her insides.

“Excuse me,” she says, and she rushes from the coffee shop, the door’s jingle a throb in her head. Beside the car, she calls Logan. He answers on the first ring.

“Where are you?” he asks. “You’re late. The rest of the gang is here already. We’re ready to go.”

“Daniel’s alive,” Tori says. “Jaden says they saw him last night, at work.”

“That's impossible,” Logan says.

“I’m telling you, I just saw Jaden, and he says Daniel is one hundred percent fine.”

“We’re all here. Waiting for you. Just come on. It’ll be like old times. We can’t know for certain. Let’s just have the memorial, go out to the barn, share some bowls. Say a few words. In honor of Daniel. I mean, his mom called me. She called me the day it happened, a week ago. She was crying. There’s no way she was faking that.”

“A week ago,” Tori says. And she knows then not to argue. She hangs up. Kay has joined her beside the car, and without explaining where they’re going, they climb in. Tori drives. She remembers the way; she would remember it with her eyes closed. Back then she took this road out of mind. She is out of mind again, and no drug has passed through her system since the night before, when Kay watched her smoke a bowl of nostalgia to black.

Daniel’s father’s house is stone, situated back from the road and surrounded by lean live oaks. The yard is dark, and as they walk hand in hand up the gravel path Tori’s heart hyperventilates in her chest. Before they reach the door, a man emerges, his arms crossed.

“Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Daniel,” Tori says. She doesn’t know if Daniel’s father will remember her. If he knows that she was the first woman to strip him down and take him into her mouth, to crawl on top of him and initiate him into the world of lovers. That she has regretted that decision, and not only because Daniel wasn’t ready, not only because Daniel blamed her for losing himself. “I’m an old friend. I had dinner here once.” Matzo balls in broth. Toast and steamed Brussels sprouts.

“Not really, but my memory’s not all it used to be. Daniel’s in his room, up there. Do you want me to go get him?”

Tori’s body wilts. Relief. She thinks about the last time she saw him, his hair tangled, clothes baggy and torn, eyes bloodshot. The memories overwhelmed her like a drug, and it was because of him that she no longer frequented Agape unless she needed to. Unless she needed nostalgia shoved into clear plastic baggies.

“No, thanks,” she says. “I’m tired of rehashing. But he’s not dead?”

“Dead? No, Daniel’s not dead. Why?”

“A friend lied to me,” she says.

“Doesn’t sound like a friend to me.” Daniel’s father’s arms have come uncrossed, and Tori isn’t sure when in the conversation it happened, but it seems to signal some small degree of remembrance. And what else could she ask for but to be remembered?

“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks so much. Don’t tell Daniel I was here, please.”

The man nods. "I remember you," he says. "I won't."

Tori and Kay turn and walk from the driveway, slower this time, Tori listening to the crunch of their footsteps on the path. Kay’s hand in hers makes her feel safe, as if Kay could protect her, if she needed it, which she doesn’t.

They don’t go to Logan’s. Tori deletes his number from her phone, as she did Daniel’s long ago. Later she will block it, too. She is not mad at him. She understands the urge to hold on, to keep the people who were once close nearby. To relive that which you remember in a hazy euphoria. Instead, she and Kay drive home, where they sit beside the fire and look, without speaking, into the waves of heat lifting to the sky like a mirage in the air. Tori doesn’t load a bowl.

Kay snaps a picture of her in the firelight; when developed, it will show her body dark as night. She will not be smiling, though there will be a rosy fire glow on her cheeks.

“Can I?” Tori asks.

“So long as you don’t drop it.” Kay grins. Shur grin splits shur face like a crack to let light in.

The camera feels like her pipe in Tori’s palm, the same weight.

It will not be easy, Tori thinks, to stop. She will want to remember. Her photographs, then. She will capture the places she once loved, the people she will try to love in new ways. She opens the box on her desk and spreads the remaining nostalgia across a blank piece of paper. Arranges it to form a picture; a figure with no shape, no curves, no breasts, no genitals. Not too bad, she thinks. I can get used to it, she thinks.

The flash lightning cuts the room in half. Dots swim before Tori’s eyes. She hopes the picture will come out, but there’s no way to know until she develops it in the art building’s darkroom. It’s a beautiful feeling, to see and not see what the future will bring.

END

“Nostalgia” was originally published in Interzone, and is copyright Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam 2015.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original: "The Last Spell of the Raven" by Morris Tanafon and a poem by Jes Rausch.