GlitterShip

Cooking with Closed Mouths

by Kerry Truong

A gumiho could run faster than shadows spread, but since Ha Neul doubted that Americans would take kindly to a nine-tailed fox streaking down Los Angeles’ busy streets, they opted to walk to the bus stop in the falling darkness after work.

The cool night air was a relief after the hot confines of Mrs. Chang’s restaurant, where Ha Neul had spent the day carrying heavy dishes and enduring customers’ complaints. Mrs. Chang’s mediocre food attracted few customers, and her refusal to use air conditioning made those who did come disinclined to be generous. Ha Neul never told her this, of course, because what was the point of trying to change people’s ways? For this silence they were rewarded with meager wages and leftovers that turned to ashes in their mouth.

Full transcript after the cut.

----more----

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 35 for March 22, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is a GlitterShip original: “Cooking with Closed Mouths" by Kerry Truong.

Kerry Truong writes about many things, including folktale and horror. Their hobbies are futilely trying to train their dogs; tearing their hair out while reading comics; and eating good food. They like their meat rare, and if a story doesn’t mention food at least once, it wasn’t written by them. You can follow their queer firebreathing on Twitter @springbamboos.

We also have a guest reader!

R Chang hails from a small valley on the West coast, where they moonlight as an artist. Their dearest wish in life is to quit their day job and establish a farm for dogs.

Cooking with Closed Mouths

by Kerry Truong

A gumiho could run faster than shadows spread, but since Ha Neul doubted that Americans would take kindly to a nine-tailed fox streaking down Los Angeles’ busy streets, they opted to walk to the bus stop in the falling darkness after work.

The cool night air was a relief after the hot confines of Mrs. Chang’s restaurant, where Ha Neul had spent the day carrying heavy dishes and enduring customers’ complaints. Mrs. Chang’s mediocre food attracted few customers, and her refusal to use air conditioning made those who did come disinclined to be generous. Ha Neul never told her this, of course, because what was the point of trying to change people’s ways? For this silence they were rewarded with meager wages and leftovers that turned to ashes in their mouth.

Today was no different. After mediating between Mrs. Chang and angry customers, Ha Neul was finally left in peace, a bag of banchan the only payment for their troubles. They stood at the bus stop in a crowd of other commuters, careful to remain at the edges where they could go unnoticed but still hear the conversations around them. There was chatter about everything from peace in Viet Nam to some boxing championship or another. Ha Neul didn’t understand the voracious interest humans showed in things that would only fade from memory or repeat themselves in a matter of years. Still, they liked listening. There was something comforting about the way humans kept going, as full of energy as if they were the first to experience these things.

When the bus arrived, Ha Neul boarded in a stream of other passengers, shouldering their way through until they could find a place to stand. Proximity filled their nose with the tang of everyone around them and made their stomach clench. They ignored it, used to the hunger. Instead of thinking about it, they studied the people closest to them.

An older woman stood next to them in the aisle, her eyes drifting closed as if the lurch and stop of the bus were a lullaby. A pair of students on their other side consulted each other in urgent voices about what songs to put on a mixtape for a crush. Ha Neul listened with amusement. It must be nice, they thought, to be caught up in the rhythm of falling in and out of love; to hope over and over that warmth could be found in the clasp of another person’s hand.

At home, Hana was waiting for them, her homework fanned out on the kitchen table. Their one-bedroom apartment was too small for a proper desk, and neither of them had much use for the kitchen’s traditional function, so Hana had claimed it as her study room. The table was often strewn with books and papers and half-chewed pens. Ha Neul had given up on putting the mess into any kind of order. No matter how hard they tried, the table would be cluttered again within the day.

Hana waved when they came in. “Took you long enough to get home! Did Mrs. Chang give you food again?”

Ha Neul nodded, searching for an empty spot to set the bag down. After a moment they gave up and simply handed it to Hana.

“All mine, and none for oppa,” she sang.

Ha Neul sat down next to her as she searched through the bag, their body heavy from exhaustion. They relaxed in the warmth of the kitchen, watching as Hana tasted each banchan in turn. She was eager to try them all, which was why Ha Neul always accepted Mrs. Chang’s leftovers. It didn’t matter if the food couldn’t make her full. It reminded her of home, of a life where she’d had family and people to belong to.

Ha Neul’s stomach clenched again. They went to the refrigerator and opened it. It was nearly empty, except for the large plastic bag dominating the center shelf and several plastic cartons arranged in neat rows beside it. Ha Neul brought the bag to the table.

“Oppa, don’t you dare get blood on my homework,” Hana said as they stacked books and papers to clear a space on the table.

“I would never sully the homework of a top student.”

Ha Neul took a package wrapped in butcher paper out of the bag and set it on the table. The paper was damp in spots, its white color stained pink by the blood that seeped through it. The tang that Ha Neul had smelled on the bus filled their nose again, this time richer and deeper. Hana stopped eating to watch, her eyes intent. She could smell the blood, too.

They unwrapped the paper to reveal hearts, kidneys, slices of liver, and other organ meats, raw and glistening. Ha Neul ate a heart, ripping the muscle with their sharp teeth. It was savory, satisfying them in a way Mrs. Chang’s food never could, making them crave for more. They reached for a piece of liver as soon as they’d finished the heart. It was good to be home.

Hana was still watching them. They thought they could see the hint of a fang beginning to protrude in the corner of her mouth, but when they offered her a kidney she waved it away. “I’m not into solid food.”

Ha Neul raised an eyebrow, looking at the banchan.

“That’s different. I eat that for fun, not to get full.”

“Can you really taste it?”

“A little. It’s really faint though, like when you have a cold and can only get an aftertaste.”

Ha Neul didn’t understand, having never had a cold. They nodded anyway. “Do you remember what human food tastes like?”

Hana looked wistful. “I think I’m forgetting. I know that hotteok are sweet and kimchi jjigae is spicy, but even though I know the words I don’t remember the taste.”

She must be nearing forty, but time hadn’t changed the smoothness of her skin or the roundness of her face. If there was one thing that aged her, it was her eyes. They were too knowing. It was only now, with her longing so apparent, that she seemed exactly the high school student that she pretended to be.

Ha Neul had known that longing. It had been food that first drew them to humans, after all. So many colors and textures: thick, greasy noodles coated in black bean sauce, kimbap dotted with yellow, green, and orange vegetables, cream-colored crab meat marinated in soy sauce. They supposed it was harder for Hana, though, having actually known what human food tasted like. Reaching over, they squeezed her hand.

Hana squeezed their hand back and smiled at them. “How’s your food, oppa?”

“Delicious.”

“It’s still weird to me how you eat cows and not humans. Isn’t it unsatisfying?”

“It’s a good enough substitute.” When reduced to their innards, humans and cows weren’t very different, Ha Neul thought, and offal was easy to get from the butcher for no more than a few cents.

Hana trailed a finger through the blood that had congealed on the paper, then licked it off. “You know you’re welcome to come find dinner with me any night.”

The food soured in Ha Neul’s mouth. Being hungry around humans was one thing, eating them was another. Thinking about it made them feel ill.

“I don’t eat humans anymore,” they said, allowing their voice to get sharp.

Hana bit her lip, looking chastised. Ha Neul felt guilty, but they’d told her often enough that they didn’t want to be goaded about their eating habits. They’d tried living as a human long ago, hoping to discover the taste of other food. But a gumiho is a fox at heart, its human appearance a mere illusion, and Ha Neul’s hunger had only grown with each dish they’d eaten. It was all ash. In the end, they’d given into their hunger, only to be horrified by the uniform redness. They’d stopped eating humans by the time they met Hana. She should have known better than to tease them about it.

Ha Neul worried that she would sulk, but instead she rummaged through her backpack and brought out a flyer.

“Here,” she said, sliding it across to Ha Neul. Her voice was light, the previous subject waved away. “Talking about food reminded me of this. I don’t think I can wiggle my way out of it.”

Ha Neul chewed on a piece of liver and read the flyer. It was printed on daffodil yellow paper, the words on it thick, black, and followed by multiple exclamation points. Cartoonish pictures of rice bowls and tacos surrounded the text.

“A cultural diversity lunch? What exactly are the students supposed to learn from that?”

“How to appreciate other people’s cultures, I guess. Mr. Hanson says we should start learning about diversity in high school.”

“I understand that, but why food?”

“Because people like food, obviously. We’re all supposed to bring in one dish from our culture.”

“What do you want to bring in?” They stared at the pictures of rice bowls. Did her teacher expect her to bring in rice? Even Ha Neul knew that plain rice didn’t make a meal.

Hana answered without hesitation. “Kimchi fried rice.”

They couldn’t help laughing at her confidence. “And where in the world are we going to get that?”

Hana smiled. She was prettiest like that, which was exactly why she smiled widest if she needed a favor. “I was going to ask if Mrs. Chang could make it.”

Ha Neul’s answer was as ready as hers had been. “Mrs. Chang is busy and has no money to make kimchi fried rice for free.”

“She doesn’t even have to make that much. There are only twenty students in my class.”

“Isn’t that still a lot?”

Hana pouted. “Please, oppa? I don’t want to be embarrassed. What if everyone else brings something fancy and I don’t have anything?”

There was that longing again, not as obscured by the pout as she thought it was. Ha Neul didn’t understand. Food was food, so what did it matter if she brought banchan or kimchi fried rice? But they could see how happy this simple thing would make her, and that mattered. She was their sister by choice, the only person who wanted to share the partial life they led.

“All right, I’ll ask Mrs. Chang. Even if she says no, we’ll figure something out. Does that sound good?”

“Oh, oppa, I knew I could count on you!”

She threw her arms around Ha Neul, startling them. After a beat, they remembered to lift their own arms and hug her back. They held her close, taking comfort in the gesture that was at once strange and warm.

Many years ago, on a warm spring night in Korea, Ha Neul had heard a cry of despair. If they had ignored that cry, they might still be living in Korea, trying to find a way to fit into the jumbled new pattern that the war had created. But they had listened, and that was how they’d found Hana, blood on her shirt and two bite marks on her neck. They couldn’t abandon her to that despair. Instead, they had held their hand out and said come, there is still a way to live.

So the two of them had lived, as best as they could, side by side for more than twenty years. When they had decided to go to America, it made the most sense to claim that they were siblings. They’d argued about who should be the elder. Ha Neul had won her over by pointing out that if they were her older brother, they could support her while she went to school.

The papers had been made, and the two of them had moved to Los Angeles to join the number of Korean immigrants building a new life along Olympic Boulevard. While Hana finished her last year in high school and dreamed about college admissions, Ha Neul waited tables and lifted boxes, letting Mrs. Chang speak to them as if they were a child.

It didn’t matter to them whether Mrs. Chang’s food was good or not. They couldn’t taste any of it, after all. They were content seeing the variety of colors in her kitchen. She, in turn, was grateful for someone who stayed in spite of her temper and the customers’ insults. Ha Neul hoped that her gratefulness would soften her to their request. They made sure to be of extra help in the restaurant the day after Hana showed them the flyer, lifting heavy pots off the stove and chatting with customers until the bad food was forgotten.

The restaurant was never busy, and once the lunch hour had passed it was empty. Mrs. Chang used the time to eat her own late lunch. Ha Neul joined her, choking down the rice and drinking cup after cup of tea. They waited until most of the food was gone before saying, “Mrs. Chang, can I ask you a favor?”

Her eyes narrowed. Perhaps she thought they would ask for money. Still, her voice was not unkind when she answered. “What is it?”

“My sister’s teacher asked her to bring in a dish from her culture for a class project. I was wondering if you could make the food.”

“What kind of food?”

“Kimchi fried rice.”

Mrs. Chang sighed and shook her head. “I don’t think I have the time for that, Ha Neul.”

It was the answer they’d expected, but they were still disappointed. “It’s not too difficult to make, is it? I’ll even work extra hours in the restaurant in exchange for it.”

“After a whole day of cooking, do you think I’d have the energy to make more food for a bunch of children? I have my own family to take care of once I’m done here.” She stood up and stacked the empty dishes to take back into the kitchen.

“Mrs. Chang, please.”

“I already said no!”

Ha Neul stood up as she started walking back to the kitchen. “Then at least teach me how to make it.”

She turned around. “What was that?”

Food is food, Ha Neul thought, and food was only ash in their mouth. But they’d promised Hana that they would help her. “Teach me how to cook, Mrs. Chang. If I learn, then I can help you in the kitchen, too.”

She studied them for a moment. They wondered if they looked desperate, if it was that or the promise of help that made her say, “All right then. But I don’t want to hear any complaints because it’s too hard, understand?”

“Oh, perfectly,” Ha Neul said, and followed her into the kitchen, already questioning the wisdom of learning how to cook without taste.

Hana’s luncheon was in a week, and in that week Ha Neul dedicated themself to learning how to cook. The radio in the kitchen played Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder songs as Mrs. Chang showed Ha Neul how to make galbi and gamjatang, kimbap and gyeranjjim.

Although she wasn’t an unkind teacher, she was also not gentle. Ha Neul disliked the way she grabbed their hand to show them how to chop vegetables, or how she would take the ladle from them to taste soup. They learned quickly, however, and their dishes soon looked the same as Mrs. Chang’s. They began to take their own pleasure with food, relishing in the clean crack that split an egg and the feel of rice grains slipping through their fingers. Taste was lost to them, but they could still see, and hear, and feel.

The first dish they brought out to customers, however, fared no better than any of Mrs. Chang’s.

“Do you call this samgyetang?” asked a middle-aged woman with tightly permed hair.

Ha Neul had known she would be trouble the moment she’d walked in. Something about her pinched mouth had foreshadowed grief. Putting on a practiced smile, they said, “I’m sorry if the soup isn’t good. Should I bring you something else?”

“Nothing you brought is any good. The banchan isn’t even seasoned well!”

Ha Neul bit their tongue, even though their hands ached from chopping meat and mixing seasoning. Before they could regain the patience to smile, however, the woman sighed. “Forget it. I’m sorry. It’s just been a long time since I had a good meal, and I thought I’d find it here.”

Ha Neul studied how deep the wrinkles on her face ran, how calloused her hands were. They wondered how long she had been in America, and what kind of dishes she had the energy to make after a long day of work. Did she have family to care for? When was the last time she’d eaten something someone else made for her?

The woman got her wallet and began counting out bills. Before she could set them on the table, Ha Neul said, “I’m sorry, but could you tell me how you’d like the food to be seasoned?”

Later, Mrs. Chang told them that they had too little pride. “You listen too much to other people’s complaining.”

Ha Neul just laughed, and she looked at them as she often did, like something strange and half unwanted. Still, they kept listening to the complaints. They memorized how much sesame oil to add and how long meat should stay in the pan. They noted the exact shade of orange that carrots turned when they were tender but not limp, and the translucence of onions that would be just sweet enough. The complaints lessened and more customers began to come to the restaurant, brought in by word of mouth.

Mrs. Chang talked of giving Ha Neul a raise. They heard the hesitance in her voice and declined. It was enough to spend time in the kitchen while Mrs. Chang served the customers, her temper improved by their praises. Soon, Ha Neul became the kitchen’s only occupant. They preferred it that way, with only the radio to keep them company. This much of human food they had mastered, and they were content to stay in the confines of the kitchen for a long time, basking in its vivid colors.

The day before Hana’s potluck, Ha Neul stopped by a supermarket on the way home. They returned to the apartment laden with plastic bags. The kitchen table was as messy as ever, but there was no sign of Hana. No doubt she was out getting food. They cleared the kitchen table, making room for the ingredients they’d bought from the supermarket.

The stove, which had been untouched since they moved in, flared to life without protest. They made rice, and while the water bubbled and spit, they sliced kimchi and diced Spam. They didn’t like Spam. Its sickly pink color reminded them of red watered down, and it slid out of the can with a slither that made them shudder. But it was cheap and Hana liked it, so they tipped the diced ham into the pan without looking at it. Steam filled the air. Ha Neul made more than enough kimchi fried rice for Hana’s classmates, then set aside a little extra for her when she came back.

It was dark when Hana returned home. She was wearing a green polka dot dress, her hair in a ponytail. There was blood on her. Ha Neul could smell it as soon as she walked through the door, and their stomach clenched.

“I’m in the kitchen,” they called out to her.

She walked in, the scent of blood following her. It pervaded the kitchen, making Ha Neul forget, for a moment, the food on the stove. Their stomach growled and their mouth ran dry. They hadn’t eaten all day.

“Oppa, you’re cooking!” Hana said, coming up next to them.

They focused on the rice in the pan, stirring it to mix the kimchi and Spam evenly. The Spam had darkened to a deep pink.  “Of course I am. Unless I’m mistaken, your potluck is tomorrow.”

“You look like a professional chef.”

They smiled in spite of the smell of blood in their nose. “Your compliment is appreciated. Now go wash your hands. I made some for you to eat tonight.”

Hana clapped her hands and ran to do as they said. By the time she came back, the scent of blood had eased, and Ha Neul could hand her the bowl of kimchi fried rice without their hand trembling.

“How is it?” they asked as she began to eat.

She closed her eyes and chewed. Ha Neul knew she could barely taste it, but there was happiness on her face. “It’s delicious, oppa. I know it is.”

They couldn’t smell the blood anymore. Ha Neul felt the warmth of the kitchen again, the steam in the air. They watched Hana eat, a little longing mixed with their pleasure in her enjoyment. The two of them would have made a proper family if only Ha Neul could sit down and eat with her. But if Hana was content with only the hint of flavor, then they were content with only this, its reflection.

They turned back to the stove, and shut it off.

On the morning of Hana’s potluck, Ha Neul carried a tin foil tray of kimchi fried rice to her bus stop, handing it to her carefully before running to catch their own bus. A disheveled man with a hoarse voice harangued passengers about sinning as the bus crawled its way down Wilshire, and the couple in front of Ha Neul argued in whispers, almost hissing as each accused the other of infidelity. Ha Neul listened with half an ear, looking out the window at the Ford Pintos inching past and the dusty haze that made everything outside glow.

The restaurant was dark and cool, not yet overheated by the stoves. Ha Neul put the chairs in place and wiped the tabletops while Mrs. Chang chatted with her sister, who had joined them for the day. The sister had arrived in America only the week before, and Mrs. Chang was eager to have someone who knew the same people she did and shared the same hopes for this new life.

Ha Neul didn’t interrupt their conversation, dreaming instead about the food they would make that day: the chill of the soy sauce on their skin, the true red of gochujang dark against the silver of the spoon, the steam beading their face in sweat whenever they lifted the lid off a pot.

No customers complained that day, and Mrs. Chang sent Ha Neul home with more galbi and banchan than usual. Ha Neul had made the food, but they chose to feel kindly towards Mrs. Chang for her generosity.

At home, Hana was waiting for them. The tin foil tray sat next to her on the table, still burdened with its food. It was bent slightly out of shape. Bits of rice flecked the tabletop around it. Hana’s mouth was pursed tightly, but it quivered when Ha Neul asked her, “What’s wrong?”

“They said it smelled bad and made fun of me for eating Spam. What do they know? I could eat them instead!”

Ha Neul knew she would have cried, if she could. They sat down next to her, some vice grip squeezing their chest. For Hana’s sake, they smiled. “I’d advise against it. They probably don’t taste good.”

“They’re ungrateful punks. You worked so hard to make this and they wouldn’t even eat it.”

“I am hardly insulted by the bad taste of children a fraction my age.”

Hana wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a habit she still hadn’t unlearned. Whenever she was angry or upset, her hand went to her eyes as if there were still tears to stem. Ha Neul took her hand and squeezed it.

Her skin was dry and smooth, eroded by neither time nor care. In that respect, she was different from her classmates and everyone else around her. It was hard to remember that difference, however, when she was squeezing Ha Neul’s hand so tightly, looking for comfort after a hurt that should have been slight.

After a moment she said, “I wanted to eat this fried rice.”

Ha Neul squeezed her hand again. “You can eat all of it now, if you want.”

“No, I wanted to really eat it. I wanted it to taste like kimchi fried rice should, to make me full.” Hana stomped to the drawers and came back with a plastic spoon. “Even though those little ingrates can eat, they won’t make use of it.” She dug into the rice hard enough to bend the flimsy plastic and began eating.

Another layer of sadness settled over Ha Neul, heavy and thick as the smog that pervaded Los Angeles. They should have listened to their own advice from the beginning: food was food. How could it teach people anything? Perhaps for Hana’s classmates, the kimchi fried rice was not a sign of comfort and family, but of something else entirely. Perhaps some of their fox’s nature made its way into the dish, marking it as something fearful.

“I’m sorry.” They felt useless with only those words for comfort.

“It’s not your fault, oppa.”

The two of them sat in silence as Hana ate. Ha Neul knew she could finish the whole tray. It wouldn’t make her full, after all. They sat and watched her, trying to imagine what it tasted like and only remembering the crunch of the kimchi under their knife, the splash of red over white rice, the Spam glistening pinkly before they’d thrown it in the pan. Things which were only parts of the whole, not enough to fill the quiet of this kitchen.

Ha Neul wanted, as they hadn’t in years, to take a spoonful of food and taste it. But they knew, even before they finished the thought, that it would be nothing but ash. All they could do was say, “I’ll make you as much food as you want.”

Hana smiled, and though the corners of her mouth lifted, her expression didn’t brighten. She looked her age. “Even if I’ll never be able to tell how good it is?”

“Of course.”

They thought about the colors of different ingredients, the textures under their hands. No matter what other people thought, they didn’t want to forget any of that. As long as Hana wanted food they would cook, and the two of them would keep trying, again and again, to discover taste in the warmth of this kitchen.

END

“Cooking with Closed Mouths” is copyright Kerry Truong, 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 I’ll be back soon with a reprint of "How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War” by Rose Lemberg.

Cooking with Closed Mouths

by Kerry Truong

A gumiho could run faster than shadows spread, but since Ha Neul doubted that Americans would take kindly to a nine-tailed fox streaking down Los Angeles’ busy streets, they opted to walk to the bus stop in the falling darkness after work.

The cool night air was a relief after the hot confines of Mrs. Chang’s restaurant, where Ha Neul had spent the day carrying heavy dishes and enduring customers’ complaints. Mrs. Chang’s mediocre food attracted few customers, and her refusal to use air conditioning made those who did come disinclined to be generous. Ha Neul never told her this, of course, because what was the point of trying to change people’s ways? For this silence they were rewarded with meager wages and leftovers that turned to ashes in their mouth.

Full transcript after the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 35 for March 22, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is a GlitterShip original: “Cooking with Closed Mouths" by Kerry Truong.

Kerry Truong writes about many things, including folktale and horror. Their hobbies are futilely trying to train their dogs; tearing their hair out while reading comics; and eating good food. They like their meat rare, and if a story doesn’t mention food at least once, it wasn’t written by them. You can follow their queer firebreathing on Twitter @springbamboos.

We also have a guest reader!

R Chang hails from a small valley on the West coast, where they moonlight as an artist. Their dearest wish in life is to quit their day job and establish a farm for dogs.

Cooking with Closed Mouths

by Kerry Truong

A gumiho could run faster than shadows spread, but since Ha Neul doubted that Americans would take kindly to a nine-tailed fox streaking down Los Angeles’ busy streets, they opted to walk to the bus stop in the falling darkness after work.

The cool night air was a relief after the hot confines of Mrs. Chang’s restaurant, where Ha Neul had spent the day carrying heavy dishes and enduring customers’ complaints. Mrs. Chang’s mediocre food attracted few customers, and her refusal to use air conditioning made those who did come disinclined to be generous. Ha Neul never told her this, of course, because what was the point of trying to change people’s ways? For this silence they were rewarded with meager wages and leftovers that turned to ashes in their mouth.

Today was no different. After mediating between Mrs. Chang and angry customers, Ha Neul was finally left in peace, a bag of banchan the only payment for their troubles. They stood at the bus stop in a crowd of other commuters, careful to remain at the edges where they could go unnoticed but still hear the conversations around them. There was chatter about everything from peace in Viet Nam to some boxing championship or another. Ha Neul didn’t understand the voracious interest humans showed in things that would only fade from memory or repeat themselves in a matter of years. Still, they liked listening. There was something comforting about the way humans kept going, as full of energy as if they were the first to experience these things.

When the bus arrived, Ha Neul boarded in a stream of other passengers, shouldering their way through until they could find a place to stand. Proximity filled their nose with the tang of everyone around them and made their stomach clench. They ignored it, used to the hunger. Instead of thinking about it, they stu

for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her

by Agatha Tan

You watch from your corner booth as she settles down in the other corner booth, across the room.

It’s not the first time you’ve seen her around here, but the girl still manages to capture your attention. She’s tall and lithe and god, but those arms (you live for the day she wears a tank top, because) and you think she’s probably a dancer or a gymnast, because she moves with a grace that proclaims she knows her body well.

After the crazy week you’ve had at work, seeing the cute girl is pleasant. Today, her brown hair is topped by a maroon beanie, and her nose, which is sharp enough she could use it as a letter opener, is tinged red. You glance out the window as you take a sip of your tea. The world outside is a gorgeous snow globe, complete with the inconvenient white flurry. Still, you’re not complaining. You figure that if it’s this cold, even the girl dedicated to foiling all your business ventures won’t be flying around, so your employees might actually get things done.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

 ----more----

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 34 for February 28, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story for today is "for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her" by Agatha Tan.

Agatha Tan is a first year student at Yale-NUS College. She writes fantasy and sci-fi fiction and occasionally also pens poetry. In her spare time, she dabbles in fanfiction, modular origami, and video games.

for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her

by Agatha Tan

You watch from your corner booth as she settles down in the other corner booth, across the room.

It’s not the first time you’ve seen her around here, but the girl still manages to capture your attention. She’s tall and lithe and god, but those arms (you live for the day she wears a tank top, because) and you think she’s probably a dancer or a gymnast, because she moves with a grace that proclaims she knows her body well.

After the crazy week you’ve had at work, seeing the cute girl is pleasant. Today, her brown hair is topped by a maroon beanie, and her nose, which is sharp enough she could use it as a letter opener, is tinged red. You glance out the window as you take a sip of your tea. The world outside is a gorgeous snow globe, complete with the inconvenient white flurry. Still, you’re not complaining. You figure that if it’s this cold, even the girl dedicated to foiling all your business ventures won’t be flying around, so your employees might actually get things done.

Thinking of work dampens your mood quickly. At the rate things are going, when the end of the year rolls around, you’ll have achieved maybe half an item on the to-do list you created in January. All because of a girl who waltzes in at the most inappropriate times and wrecks all your work.

(You consider cancelling bring-your-kid-to-work day because she’s always exploiting the relatively more relaxed security, but family is important, even in this business, and you don’t want your employees to forget that.)

Your eyes roam from your carefully drawn out plans—you’re designing a new machine to replace the one that someone blew up last week—to the girl in the corner, and you decide that, you know what, screw this. You neatly fold up the blueprints and shove them into your bag; carrying your tea in one hand and your jacket in the other, you make your way over to her.

“Hi,” you greet, and you hate that you’re one of the most powerful women in one of the most powerful industries, and your voice still quivers around cute girls. You flash her a smile, and you’re relieved when she flashes you one in return. Granted, her answering smile is nervous and hesitant, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “Do you mind…?”

The girl is perky and a little too enthusiastic and she seems to radiate rainbows, which really isn’t your usual type. But hey, she’s cute. “No! I mean, um, no, I don’t mind.”

As you set your tea down and slide into the seat, you introduce yourself to her. Your introduction is much smoother than hers, which tumbles out of her mouth and trips over her lips. You barely catch her name—Elle. For all the grace she exudes when she walks, she’s a pretty clumsy person. Still, that only endears you more to her, and you find yourself laughing at a stupid joke—her attempt at breaking the ice— even though you’ve heard it before and yeah, it’s just as stupid as you remembered. You talk for a little, and you suspect she’s into you too because you think her pupils are slightly dilated and she keeps leaning in. (Then she’ll catch herself and sit upright again. Rinse and repeat.)

She offers up information about herself to match the information you give her. When you tell her you work in engineering—given your talents, it didn’t make sense for you to go into anything else—she gushes about how cool that is and how smart you must be before telling you that she’s a chef. You mention tennis, and she reveals she dances on the side, confirming your suspicions. Not that you’re ever wrong, of course, but the validation is welcome.

It’s going well—you haven’t screwed up, and neither has she, and you’re beginning to think you might have a chance with her when your phone rings. You don’t want to take it, but glancing at the screen, you realize it’s your second-in-command, Tommy, so you excuse yourself and go outside.

“Boss, there’s something wrong with the machine,” he says immediately, once you’ve picked up. He’s learned remarkably swiftly that if you pick up at all, you know who it is, and he shouldn’t waste your time. Your last second-in-command took weeks to learn that lesson, and he’s still paying the price for that in Reykjavik, Iceland. “It’s making this odd purring sound and shaking like it might blow.”

You have to ask him to clarify thrice which machine he means, because god knows you didn’t hire him for his communication skills, but when you finally get it, you sigh because it’s not something you know how to fix without looking at it yourself. “Fine, I’ll come in,” you say, rubbing your temple with a finger that’s gone numb already. Electricity crackles at your fingertips, streaks of white and blue. “Expect me in half an hour.”

Not waiting for a reply, you hang up and head back inside. Elle has her nose buried in the book she was reading before you approached her earlier, and your arrival startles her, but she smiles. You grin back because she’s so jumpy it’s adorable. Not to mention normal. You could use some normal. Her smile falls when you tell her it was work and you have to go, but her face lights up again when you ask for her number. She keys it into your phone and you want give her yours as well, but she tells you her phone is out of battery. Shrugging, you scrawl your number in felt pen on a napkin—you feel like a cliché, but hey, your life is probably one giant cliché—and watch the lights in her eyes dance as she takes it, accepting your promises of soon.

It’s not going to last long, you know, because these flings never do. Sooner or later, your job will get in the way; you’ll have a screaming match at one in the morning and she’ll throw you out with your stuff because we never see each other anymore and it’s like you’re not even trying when I am, I am, but she won’t hear you and so you’ll go. You’ll feel drained for weeks afterwards, yet jump in again with the first cute girl who grabs your attention.

Still, it’s fun while it lasts, and you find yourself looking forward to seeing her again even as you trudge through the bitter snow to get to the train station. You might be one of the richest women in the country, but that’s only because you’re gifted and smart as hell, and this really isn’t the weather for driving.

Three months later, things have still not gone to hell.

You’re surprised, because usually it only takes one, but you suppose that your job hasn’t been as demanding recently. Your company is exceptionally quiet because your team’s deadline to perfect that next big machine hasn’t passed, so there’s a lull in the excitement. And the lull is good, because not only does it give your employees a chance to get some of the more legitimate work done, but it also means that no one is spying on you because you’re not actually stirring up any trouble. It’s pretty relaxing.

A bonus is that you’ve gotten to spend more time with Elle. Currently, she’s curled up on your couch, playing with Jam, watching a television special on the exploits of the supervillain Black Thunder and how her rival, the superhero Summer Wind, has foiled her every time. This special focuses on the time the superhero blew up Black Thunder’s entire lab three months ago. There are other villains and heroes, but those two are the top of the food chain. You watch these specials a lot, because how else will you keep up with the community?

It turns out that the weird purring sounds the machine had been making? Yeah, a cat, which had somehow gotten into the compound and into the machinery. You took it home with you because you couldn’t have left it in the compound to get stuck in all the other machines, and the next day you found it with a paw in your jam jar, hence the name. Jam took an immediate liking to Elle when she first came over two weeks ago, which is more than you can say for yourself. The cat spent an entire week hissing and clawing at you and the scars on your arms are faint but they’re still there to prove it.

You’re in the kitchen scooping globs of ice-cream on top of strawberries and Nutella when Elle calls over. “Hey, Van? Can I take you out next Wednesday? I know it’s your birthday.”

The words startle you, which is saying something because you’re nearly never startled. Not even when the skylight shatters and glass rains down on the warehouse floor just as you’re going to perform the start sequence, which is mostly unexpected and very, very annoying. The tall girl behind the mask whose life seemed to revolve around spoiling your machines has never been known for her subtlety.

But Elle, it seems, has never ceased to surprise you from the time you met her. She’s full of delicious contradictions—she moves with grace but speaks with inelegance, smart as a button but dense as osmium. She’s a chef at one of the top restaurants in the city, yet she loves McDonald’s takeout and canned soup. She loves beautiful things—art and music, sometimes literature—but she also loves you.

She’s said it only once, when you were cuddling in bed and she thought you were asleep. But you also see it in the things she does, and the words she says: the way she holds on just a little too long when you hug (you aren’t complaining; she’s warm and soft and smells like peaches), the way the corners of her eyes crinkle when you see each other (she also smiles with her lips, but those smiles are easier to fake), and the way she’s all over you when you come back with a bandaged hand after getting burned at work while working on finding a material suitable for the power core of a newer machine (how are you such a klutz you’re usually so careful). You say it back while she examines the wound because you mean it, you really do. Elle has become an anchor who grounds you even while you’re off plotting plans on the scale of world domination, and she’s busy enough herself that she understands when you’ve got a project you can’t tear yourself away from and cancel dinner plans. In fact, she’s usually busy when you are. It’s like the universe has extended an olive branch, and you don’t hesitate to take it.

Elle is too good for you, yet you hang on like she’s your lifeline.

In the confines of your apartment and the coffee shop and the space between Elle’s hands and yours when they’re interlocked, you both draft the blueprints of a small universe that’s just for the two of you. In here, nothing else exists. You’re not one of the most brilliant minds of the century and lightning doesn’t dance on your fingers unless you need to fix something insignificant like the stove or the phone, and she’s not a chef in a top restaurant. Your universe comprises pizza from the deli down the street and Chinese takeout that delivers in fifteen minutes, tops (you know the owner well and he doesn’t dare displease you). For the first time in years, your universe doesn’t include a sun that’s about to burst and take everything with it. This universe makes you feel safe and warm and normal and you love it.

Elle tells you she loves it too. In addition to you.

You hadn’t expected her to remember your birthday. You’d only mentioned it once, in passing, but it seems it’s a detail Elle has locked into her mind. “I’ve got to work on Wednesday,” you answer, wiping melted ice-cream off the counter because you’ve apparently been lost in thought for that long. You notice the kettle’s stopped working again, and you really should get a new one, but for now you give it a light zap from your finger and it promptly fixes itself. It’ll last at least another week; you’re still working on long-term fixes. “But I’m free for dinner, if you want?”

Elle agrees. You bring the dessert into the living room—lifting it out of Jam’s jumping range so he doesn’t get his paws into it—and she greets you with a kiss.

Her lips are sweeter than any strawberry could ever be.

You ask her to move in right after you pull away for air, and she agrees. Your universe gains a hundred new stars.

It’s Wednesday. As the machine powers up, you discuss these developments with Tommy.

He listens attentively, and when you finish telling him about how Jam got into some of her boxes and ripped up a tank top, he simply asks, “Does she know you’re an international supervillain?”

You sigh, glum. Jam is struggling in your arms, so you stroke his fur; you bring him in to work sometimes because you actually like the sodding cat. “I haven’t figured out how to tell her.”

“Well, you’d better figure out soon,” he says, and you know he’s right, but all you do is tell him to suit up and supervise the rookies because they’ve got a world to take over today and your girlfriend troubles aren’t going to get in the way of that.

You put Jam down so you can don your suit. Your hand finds electric currents in the air and you drag the pieces of your suit off the table and onto you. They click into place and start to hum with power, and when you’re satisfied that everything’s where it should be, you pull the visor of your helmet down, shielding your face and transforming into the villain everyone knows as Black Thunder.

The control room is entirely yours to work with. Well, yours and your cat’s. Your employees are on the ground floor, manning various power outlets and backup generators in case something happens. You get on your hover board and float around. You check the settings, and, satisfied, you’re about to hit the button that will make toast of Australia (this one Australian guy snubbed you once, and you’d never really forgotten it, so that’s where you’ll start), when lo and behold, the skylight comes crashing in and Summer Wind, her brown hair up in a ponytail and her face covered by a flimsy-looking mask (you know better—it’s actually a very sturdy but thin material she stole from your labs), comes flying in like she does every single time.

You don’t know how she does it. It’s not even a bring-your-kid-to-work day this time, but she still managed to sniff out your plot. This girl is infuriating.

“I really need to get that skylight covered with brick, or something,” you lament, throwing up your arm. Your voice comes out in a neutral robotic tone, courtesy of a small device inside your helmet. You weren’t a top-rated engineer or master villain for nothing. A metallic shield expands from your arm to protect you and Jam from the raining glass. “Can’t you let me toast Australia just once?”

“No can do, cutie,” Summer Wind says, and her voice is a robotic tone too, because she also stole one of those devices from your labs. She sounds way perkier than you do, though. Sometimes you wonder who the real criminal is, because she steals your stuff pretty much whenever she foils one of your plots. Unless, of course, she’s blown everything up, and you really hope she won’t this time because this machine was three months’ work.

She shoots down towards you. Your uttermost concern is, remarkably, to protect the cat, which has apparently no self-preservation instincts at all. It’s staying where it is and meowing like it expects to be petted. “Hey, don’t hurt the cat,” you chide, gliding over to it and scooping it up before Summer Wind reaches the ground. It’s not your usual behaviour, but living with Elle might have softened you.  “Give me a sec.”

You can’t see her face because of the mask, but Summer Wind pulls out of her dive before she can injure Jam, which is all you need. You’re about to glide over to the corner of the room where you put the cat carrier when she exclaims, “Jam?”

You freeze in your tracks. How would she know—and then it all clicks. Why your girlfriend always seems busy when you are, why there are days you both come back with scrapes and bruises and lousy cover stories. Why she doesn’t always smell like food when she comes home from work.

Elle has more than one job.

It seems to hit both of you at the same time. Summer Wind—Elle—is the first to take off her mask. “Vanessa?”

Her eyes are wide and vulnerable and she’s so open—there are so many ways you could use this opportunity to finally win. The button is right there. You could easily have Australia toasted in five seconds. You reach for the button—but no. You want to win, but not like this. You slip your helmet off, and look everywhere but at her. Because you’re not looking, you don’t see the punch coming. You guess you probably deserve it.

As her fist makes impact with your cheek, you swear you hear the universe—your universe, the one you planned from scratch and built with Elle—laughing, and the sun bursts into a supernova that blinds you and leaves a hollow ringing in your ears.

END

"for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her" was originally published in the Hwa Chong Institution literary magazine in 2015.

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 I’ll be back on March 14 with a GlitterShip Original: "Cooking with Closed Mouths" by Kerry Truong.

[Music plays out]

for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her

by Agatha Tan

You watch from your corner booth as she settles down in the other corner booth, across the room.

It’s not the first time you’ve seen her around here, but the girl still manages to capture your attention. She’s tall and lithe and god, but those arms (you live for the day she wears a tank top, because) and you think she’s probably a dancer or a gymnast, because she moves with a grace that proclaims she knows her body well.

After the crazy week you’ve had at work, seeing the cute girl is pleasant. Today, her brown hair is topped by a maroon beanie, and her nose, which is sharp enough she could use it as a letter opener, is tinged red. You glance out the window as you take a sip of your tea. The world outside is a gorgeous snow globe, complete with the inconvenient white flurry. Still, you’re not complaining. You figure that if it’s this cold, even the girl dedicated to foiling all your business ventures won’t be flying around, so your employees might actually get things done.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 34 for February 28, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story for today is "for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her" by Agatha Tan.

Agatha Tan is a first year student at Yale-NUS College. She writes fantasy and sci-fi fiction and occasionally also pens poetry. In her spare time, she dabbles in fanfiction, modular origami, and video games.

for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her

by Agatha Tan

You watch from your corner booth as she settles down in the other corner booth, across the room.

It’s not the first time you’ve seen her around here, but the girl still manages to capture your attention. She’s tall and lithe and god, but those arms (you live for the day she wears a tank top, because) and you think she’s probably a dancer or a gymnast, because she moves with a grace that proclaims she knows her body well.

After the crazy week you’ve had at work, seeing the cute girl is pleasant. Today, her brown hair is topped by a maroon beanie, and her nose, which is sharp enough she could use it as a letter opener, is tinged red. You glance out the window as you take a sip of your tea. The world outside is a gorgeous snow globe, complete with the inconvenient white flurry. Still, you’re not complaining. You figure that if it’s this cold, even the girl dedicated to foiling all your business ventures won’t be flying around, so your employees might actually get things done.

Thinking of work dampens your mood quickly. At the rate things are going, when the end of the year rolls around, you’ll have achieved maybe half an item on the to-do list you created in January. All because of a girl who waltzes in at the most inappropriate times and wrecks all your work.

(You consider cancelling bring-your-kid-to-work day because she’s always exploiting the relatively more relaxed security, but family is important, even in this business, and you don’t want your employees to forget that.)

Your eyes roam from your carefully drawn out plans—you’re designing a new machine to replace the one that someone blew up last week—to the girl in the corner, and you decide that, you know what, screw this. You neatly fold up the blueprints and shove them into your bag; carrying your tea in one hand and your jacket in the other, you make your way over to her.

“Hi,” you greet,

Curiosity Fruit Machine

by S. Qiouyi Lu

"What is it?" Alliq says.

Jalzy runs eir hands over the object. It's a box of some sort, made from metal with organic paneling; a narrow lever sticks out from one side. Ey finds emself reaching out to the lever, eir fingers grasping the pockmarked knob at the end as if working from unearthed muscle memory.

"I have no clue," Jalzy says. "But... I kinda wanna pull this and see what happens."

CURIOSITY FRUIT MACHINE and THE SLOW ONES are both GlitterShip Originals.

[Full transcript after the cut]

 ----more----

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 33 for February 14, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing these stories with you.

We have two stories this week, "Curiosity Fruit Machine" by S. Qiouyi Lu and "The Slow Ones" by JY Yang. Even better, S. narrated both stories for us!

S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, artist, narrator, and translator; their stories have appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, and their poetry has appeared in Liminality and Uncanny. They are a 2016 graduate of the Clarion West writers workshop and a dread member of the Queer Asian SFFH Illuminati. Find them online at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu.

JY Yang is a queer, non-binary writer and editor who has short fiction published or forthcoming in places like Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. Their debut novellas, THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE and THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN, will be out from Tor.com Publishing in Fall 2017. They live in Singapore, edit fiction at Epigram Books, and swan about Twitter as @halleluyang.

Curiosity Fruit Machine

by S. Qiouyi Lu

"What is it?" Alliq says.

Jalzy runs eir hands over the object. It's a box of some sort, made from metal with organic paneling; a narrow lever sticks out from one side. Ey finds emself reaching out to the lever, eir fingers grasping the pockmarked knob at the end as if working from unearthed muscle memory.

"I have no clue," Jalzy says. "But... I kinda wanna pull this and see what happens."

Alliq frowns. "Don't. For all we know, that thing could be some sort of weapon. We should probably wait for the others to catch up so we can get the engineering team to take a proper look."

Alliq's voice fades into a mumble. Jalzy presses eir nose to the glass front of the object and brushes a tight curl of hair out of eir face. Ey can just barely make out some lettering—PAY. Eir grasp of 21st-century English is weak, but this seems to be a money machine of some sort. Surely, ey thinks, bringing eir arm down, a money machine can't hurt em...

"Don't—!"

The object whirs to life, three wheels inside the glass case spinning; a few of the bulbs lining the edge buzz and spark. Jalzy jumps back. Oh crap. Ccccccclackkkclackkclackkk—didn't old-timey explosives make that sound? Or were explosives more of a tick-tock sound? One of the wheels clicks as it stops—Jalzy grabs Alliq by the wrist, drags xem to a safe spot behind a wall of heavy crates—then another click—they brace themselves—and—click!

Alliq flinches. Jalzy waits a moment—a dud, perhaps?—before peeking past the edge of the crates. The object's face shows one symbol, then two of the same symbol. The first is an oblong, yellow shape, and the next two are round, red orbs connected by an inverted green V.

"I think we're safe," Jalzy whispers. Alliq comes up from xyr braced position.

"Goddammit, don't do this to me," Alliq hisses. Xe's sweating a little, xyr forehead shining, and Jalzy has to suppress a giggle.

"Hey, we're fine, right?" Ey steps out from behind the crates and goes back to the object. Ey crouches down. There's a metal trough underneath the symbols, but it's empty. Do they need to put something in there?

"Jalzy," Alliq says from over eir shoulder, "those are—those are pictures of fruit."

"What's a fruit?"

"Seriously?" Alliq says, voice laden with exasperation. When Jalzy gives xem a blank stare, Alliq points at the oblong symbol and says, "Look, the first one is a lemon. Those two on the right, those are cherries."

Jalzy squints. "I thought 'cherry' and 'lemon' were just colors. You know, like how we also have orange nutriblocks in our sustenance packs."

Alliq snorts. "You know there used to be a fruit called 'orange', right? It wasn't just a color. Those are actually flavors. They came from these."

Jalzy straightens up and paces around the object. "So what is this, a fruit-making machine?"

"Did you never take terrabiology?" Alliq says. "History of Earth? Anything?"

"Look, I took astrophysics so I wouldn't have to deal with so much reading, okay," Jalzy says, flipping eir crown of curls over eir shoulder. "So just educate me already, O All-Knowing Alliq."

Alliq crosses xyr arms over xyr chest in a huff. "Fruit comes from seeds, not machines. I mean, we perfected the science to duplicate the flavors all the way back in the 21st century, but we never really got down how to duplicate the organic material. So the best we've got now is our nutriblocks." Xe unfolds xyr arms and circles around the object. "This—this is something else entirely. I don't think it actually has anything to do with food."

"So, if it doesn't seem to be a weapon, and it doesn't produce anything... wanna pull the lever again and see what happens?" Jalzy grins slyly at Alliq, who raises xyr hands in surrender.

"I'm going to check out the other room. If I were you, I'd just keep doing inventory until engineering gets here and can confirm what kind of object that is."

Jalzy sticks out eir tongue.

"Good thing you're not me," ey says.

And ey pulls the lever again.

END

The Slow Ones

by JY Yang

"The grass is dying."

Kira looked up from squeezing a sachet of turkey-flavored sludge into the cat's bowl. Thom was standing by the living room window in his bathrobe still, holding a chipped mug of coffee and gazing out.

"What?" she asked.

"The grass. In the garden. It's gone all brown."

She dumped the sachet in the trash and almost rinsed her sticky fingers under the kitchen faucet. But she remembered in time, and instead wiped them on the dishtowel she'd hung up.

She hurried into the living room.

"There," Thom said, "see?"

In the small rectangle of dirt they called a garden the sparse tufts of grass had shriveled and turned colorless like the hair on an old man's head. A flap of crisp packet gleamed in the far corner, silver-underside-up, chicken bones scattered around it. The neighborhood kids. Kira wondered how long they had been there. Maybe forever. Everything seemed stuck in stasis these days.

The grass had been in decline for a long time, months before the invasion began. Once upon a time Kira had plans for that patch. She had imagined cultivating flowers: Tulips, daffodils, rosebushes. Climbing ivies for the trellis. Maybe even one of those outdoor water features. But there hadn't been any time, had there?

"Hasn't rained in weeks," Thom said. "Might never rain again."

Kira exhaled and stormed back to the kitchen. The clock said five to three and she wished it didn't. She took a box of porkloin out of the freezer and popped it into the fridge.

"Might as well dig it all up," Thom said from the living room.

"Yeah, why don't you do it?" she said, louder than she'd intended.

The cat had cleaned out her bowl and now stood staring at Kira, tail stiff in expectation. Kira snatched the water dish off the floor, then gingerly ran a centimeter of water into it. "Don't waste it," she told the cat as she sat it down again.

In the living room Thom had settled into the armchair, knees apart, eyes blank. "What would be the point?"

"What?"

He turned to look at her, framed in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and shrugged. "There's no point."

"Whatever," she said, and went to put her boots on.

The cat had followed her out of the kitchen. "Come here, girl," she heard Thom say, his voice soft and charming, like it always used to be.

Kira shoved her feet into the narrow confines of her boots. "I've left pork chops in the fridge to defrost," she said. "If you have time, you could make dinner." She knew he wouldn't.

The cat settled on the windowsill to watch her as she stepped outside and locked the front door.

Kira pulled her coat around herself, and then, because she had to, like pulling a plaster off, to get it over with; because she couldn't just ignore it, she looked up at the sky.

From horizon to horizon, the sky above their street was filled with aliens. A thick layer of massive silver bodies, like cumulus rolls made of mercury, slid by over the tops of the streetlamps, the roofs, the twisted fingers of bare trees. Sunlight sometimes leaked through their bulk, but not often; the world had been in a state of weak thunderstorm dusk for weeks.

The president of the United States had called them the Slow Ones, and the name stuck. Their enormous smooth bodies slipped against one another in a never-ending parade. There were scales and faint markings on each one whose purpose was impossible to discern. Concentric discs in alternating light and dark colors, larger across than a commercial jetliner, were assumed by observers to be eyes. But the gaping maw in front of each one, leading into unfathomable darkness: That one everyone could agree on. It was a mouth. A permanently open mouth.

They were sucking up all the water vapor in the atmosphere. That was what the scientists on the proper news channels—BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera—were all saying. But even the so-called experts knew so little about what was going on that people were no worse off reading crackpot theories on the Internet. Those had sprung up like mushrooms in the wake of rain, or perhaps, in the absence of it. They offered up all kinds of explanations as to what was happening: Act of God, benign migration, hostile invasion, collective hallucination.

The first few days after the Slow Ones arrived, pouring into the sky above Alaska like reflective pancake batter until they blanketed the Earth, Thom had spent hours scrolling through theory after theory after theory, the most promising of which he served up to Kira over dinner, or texted to her while he was at work.

That was when he still had work.

The Slow Ones were aliens. This was something almost everyone—the scientist, the conspiracy theorist, the person on the street—agreed on. They were not of this world.

The prevailing theory was that these were migratory creatures and they would leave for unknown pastures in good time. And then sunlight and blue skies and rain would return to the world. Wind and weather and water evaporation, all those good things.

It was unlikely a theory as anything, but it allowed people to hold on to hope.

Kira put her hood up and hurried down the street. If she walked fast enough, she might catch the three-fifteen bus to the city center.

She missed the bus.

When Kira finally arrived at the city center, the air under the Slow Ones was still. Not a wing stirred in it, not a guttural call rang out. Gulls were a year-round phenomenon in Norwich, sailing from spire to spire and filling public spaces with their noises regardless of the season. But their numbers in the market square had been dwindling since the Slow Ones arrived, and today was the day, it seemed, they passed the point of no return.

Kira noted this with an odd trill in her belly. She, like everyone else, had grown numb to the clipped tones of a Dr. Somebody explaining to a presenter, in clinical terms, how the disruption to the Earth's water cycle was killing all the fish in the ocean. But it was another thing entirely to watch all the seabirds vanish before her eyes, relegated to an unknown fate.

She hurried through the semi-sparse mid-afternoon crowd. When Thom's agency had moved him here a few years ago, she had been struck by how many retirees she saw on the streets. It felt like a different kind of fabric had been sewn in place compared to London which she had just gotten used to, and Kuala Lumpur where she had grown up. It was a good move for them, Thom being promoted to Norfolk branch manager, but Kira had wondered about all the people here, aging in place. It put in her mind an image of people sinking to the bottom of a lake, like sediment.

Of course, at that time tourism was still a booming industry, and Thom had glowing images in his sights, futures full of holiday cottages and ski trips to the Alps. Neither of them knew what lay on the horizon: the shrinkings and the layoffs and the final collapse that awaited them. The arrival of the Slow Ones had only been a final straw.

As she walked past the market square Charles, who ran one of the fruit stalls, waved at her. "All right?" he asked.

An impulse seized her then, a screaming impulse, one which wanted to ask him how could he be so calm, couldn't he see what was happening? She wanted to grab him and shake him, point him to the sky and the shuttered fish stall next to him and the sad twisted things that were left of his wares, she wanted to do that and ask, Can't you see? Can't you see? She wanted to run at all the white-haired folk shuffling down the street getting on with their business as usual and shout it at them, shout it into their hairy wrinkled ears.

She smiled at Charles. "Yeah, I'm alright."

By the time she had gone down all the little streets that led her to the Pushcart she was half an hour late for work. As she came through the eatery's glass-paneled wooden door she caught a glimpse of Melanie's splendid silhouette at the till and her heart did that weird flutter it always did when Melanie was around. She shoved that sensation deep inside herself, where it belonged, and put on her shop-girl smile.

In the afternoons the Pushcart sold tea and scones and crepes with bacon and maple syrup. Come evenings and the menu switched to alcohol and deep-fried things served in small silver buckets. Today the sign said no tea, they were under rations, bottled drinks only please. The warm brown interior of the cafe held a handful of lethargic patrons in various states of apathy, chewing fitfully or reading the news. Some of them were watching the TV nailed to the far wall, framed by old ship ropes and seashells. They usually kept it off unless there was footy going on, but since the Slow Ones came it had been permanently fixed to BBC News. The prevailing graphic, set to an indistinct voiceover, said WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR.

(Nothing. They knew nothing. When governments and scientists sent drones and instruments up to the Slow Ones they stopped working, some kind of electromagnetic interference, they said. NASA was stumped. Everybody was stumped, grasping at straws.)

Melanie didn't turn around as Kira stashed her things under the counter. That was an anomaly: For the past six months Kira's work routine had always begun with her warm and buttery smile. She studied her coworker's broad back, hunched over the till, noting the crooked way the apron was fastened around her waist. "You alright?"

Melanie straightened up with a speed that suggested she hadn't heard Kira come in. "Hey. How's it going?"

She looked tired, a collection of messy lines and dark smudges, as though the weekend had worn her face thin somehow. "You alright?" she repeated.

"Yeah, I suppose. The sky hasn't fallen in, has it?" She gave Kira a laugh, and it was the kind that spoke less of mirth than it did of defeat. "How's life at home?"

Kira's fingers fumbled with her apron strings. Melanie noticed her struggling and said, "Let me get that."

With her back turned Kira said, "Life goes on. Thom's still moping."

A firm tug at her waist. "He'll recover. Have faith."

"I'm an atheist for a reason." She turned around. "How's Angie?"

"Ha. Funny you should ask." Melanie sucked in a breath. "She's gone back to Sheffield."

"What, you mean—"

"Yeah. Permanently. She spent the weekend packing." Melanie was staring at her knuckles, which she kept lightly punching against the counter.

"I'm sorry. What happened?"

"Can't quite say, really. Just th— I don't know. She'd been planning it for a while, I think. She got back with her ex without telling me." She looked at Kira suddenly, eyes bright and shining. "Might as well, eh? End of the world and all that."

"I'm sorry." She reached out and touched Melanie's forearm for a brief, hot moment. "I'm surprised, honestly."

"Are you."

"I mean, I—" She wanted to say, I always thought you two had the perfect relationship. "You two seemed so happy."

"We did, didn't we?" She laughed again, and one corner of her mouth quirked upwards. In the slant of those lips Kira suddenly saw the cracking of facade and glimpsed familiar shores: the simmering irritations, the long silent nights, the cold stretches of not-arguments that thawed slowly into not-forgiveness.

"Come help me with this till," Melanie said. "Something's wrong."

They fought with the till. It was an old-fashioned one, just buttons and a drawer that popped out. It was jammed. They figured out the problem—a coin had gotten stuck, down the side of the drawer, and they fished it out with a flat screwdriver.

"There you are, you little bastard," Melanie said, shaking the coin like a misbehaving puppy. She put it on top of the till, a tiny victory.

At six a man barged into the Pushcart and slammed into the counter as Kira was ringing up an old lady's tea. "Turn your TV on," he rasped.

"It's on," Kira said, pointing. The President of the United States, looking like he had aged ten years in as many days, was speaking inaudibly. In one corner a red block declared “LIVE.”

The man was youngish, clean-shaven, dressed in clothes that were well looked-after. "Turn it up. Turn it up."

Kira looked around, but she had no idea where Melanie was. The woman by the TV stepped up and reached for the volume dial. The voice of the US president, clipped and nasal, rose up and filled the room.

"... THAT I AUTHORIZE THE USE OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST THE PHENOMENON KNOWN AS THE SLOW ONES..."

"He's going to nuke them," the man who'd burst in said. "It's mental."

Titters of conversation filled the room. What could that mean? Kira felt like the ground under her was vanishing, but she couldn't tell if it was her or the planet that was evaporating.

The US president said: The missiles would be released over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, far from any centers of civilization.

The US president said: America could no longer wait for world powers to deliberate on a unified course of action.

The US president said: America must take steps necessary to safeguard our future.

A young man near the front of house was telling his girlfriend, in loud tones, how the radiation was going to get seeded in the atmosphere and kill them all. He was a physicist, he knew. The hawks running America, drunk on their Hollywood apocalypse dreams, were going to destroy life on the planet as we knew it.

"It's war, you know," the old lady at the till said to Kira. "The Russians aren't going to like it. They're going to do something, you'll see." She declared it matter-of-factly, with utter conviction, and Kira saw the young girl she had been, bent over the radio, listening for news from the frontlines.

On impulse she said, "It's on the house," and closed the till. "Go on, everything's free today."

The man who had run in said, "Could I get—"

"No, no, we're closing." Kira walked out from behind the counter, her legs shaky but still functional, and went to the glass-paneled door. The US president was still talking. She refused to look at the sky as she flipped the “OPEN” sign over. "I'm sorry. Please, everyone, could you just leave. We're closed. Everything's on the house."

The scattered handfuls looked at her and each other, uncertain.

"Go home," Kira said. "Call your mother, hug your children. Go home."

She watched them file out onto the dark streets. When it was just her in the Pushcart she abandoned the unwashed, undressed tables and turned the lights out. Craig, the owner, only came in on Thursdays and weekends. She'd sort it out later.

She found Melanie behind the storeroom door, chest still slowly heaving in the wake of a long fit of crying. She stood up, looking embarrassed, as Kira came in. "Sorry. I—still a bit of a mess—did something happen?"

Kira ghosted towards her, fixed on her red-rimmed eyes, her lips. "The world's going to end."

"What?"

"The Americans are going to nuke the Slow Ones. They're doing it tomorrow."

Melanie exhaled. "Madness."

Madness, chaos, centers not holding. Just what was she clinging on to, anyway?

Kira reached up and kissed her.

Melanie's body reacted with surprise at first, then hunger. She had strong arms that could lift a double carton of coffee beans over her head, and they trembled around Kira's waist. As Kira sublimed into liquid Melanie closed the door behind them, so that nobody would hear.

Later, as they sat together on the floor, sticky skin to sticky skin, Melanie asked, "Why?" No modifiers, no clauses. Just ”why.”

Kira remained quiet for a while, pinching her toes inside the lingering damp heat of her boots. "Thom once told me about a theory he read. You know how they said the Slow Ones might be like migratory birds?"

"I've heard that one. Sounds like tosh. But pretty much everything does these days."

"Well, migratory birds come back every year. So why haven't we seen the Slow Ones before? Why has no-one, out of all of human history, ever mentioned them?"

"So they're not migratory."

Kira could still picture Thom's face as he had grilled her over this theory at the dinner table. How his freckled face had lit up with schoolboy excitement at the prospect of humanity's destruction, something interesting happening at last. "Well, the universe operates on a different scale, doesn't it? Billions and billions. What if the Slow Ones do come back, but so long that they only appear once every geologic age?"

Melanie made a grunting noise. Kira settled her soft hip against Melanie's bony one. "It's the extinction events," she said.

"What are those?"

"Big die-offs." She curled her fingers around one of Melanie's nipples. "Like the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. That's the one everyone knows, but it wasn't the only one. The fossil record is full of mass extinctions. Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic... Once every thirty million years, like clockwork. Scientists don't know why."

Melanie turned her head, her attention caught. "The Slow Ones?"

"The oceans are already all dead. That's how it usually starts."

"So we're going extinct."

"Probably. I don't know. It's just a theory, anyway."

Melanie blew air through wet lips. "It's not like we can get off this planet, is it?"

Kira laid her head against Melanie's shoulder and listened to the sound of her breathing for a while. "You know," she said, "some scientists think extinction events are like planetary do-overs. Evolution speeds up after each extinction event. New forms of life start to flourish."

"Like when you get left for a younger woman."

Kira snorted. Melanie caught the edge of her hand and caressed the tip of her little finger, gently feeling around the shape of knuckle. How small our bones are, Kira thought, how fragile. What if whoever comes after us never finds them? It would be as if we never existed. A blank in the fossil record.

"Are you going to tell Thom?" Melanie asked.

Kira thought of what Thom's reaction might be. The things he would say, and the things he wouldn't. The look on his face, both accusatory and triumphant. She felt tired.

"No," she said finally. "He's got enough on his mind."

She could see him now, in his bathrobe still, standing at the window, watching grass die in their garden as the sky grew darker and darker. In the fridge, untouched, a pair of pork chops slowly defrosted, waiting and waiting and waiting.

END

“Curiosity Fruit Machine” is copyright S. Qiouyi Lu, 2017.

"The Slow Ones" is copyright JY Yang, 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 I’ll be back on February 28 with a reprint of “for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her” by Agatha Tan.

[Music plays out]

The Subtler Art

by Cat Rambo

Anything can happen in Serendib, the city built of dimensions intersecting, and this is what happened there once.

The noodle shop that lies on the border between the neighborhood of Yddle, which is really a forest, houses strapped to the wide trunks, and Eclect, an industrial quarter, is claimed by both, with equally little reason.

The shop was its own Territory, with laws differing from either area, although the same can be said of many eating establishments in the City of a Thousand Parts. But the noodles were hand shaved, and the sauce was made of minced ginger and chopped green onions with a little soy sauce and a dash of enlightenment, and they were unequaled in Serendib.

Full transcript after the cut.

----more----

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 32 for January 24, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

For some GlitterShip news: coming on February 1st, we will be open to poetry submissions. For more information, check the submissions guidelines page on our website, GlitterShip.com. Also, starting with our Winter 2017 issue, GlitterShip also has seasonal issues available via our Patreon (patreon.com/keffy) or at glittership.com/buy, for those of you who would like to read the stories before anyone else.

Our story this week is "The Subtler Art" by Cat Rambo.

Cat's fiction has appeared on GlitterShip before. Episode 13 featured her story "Sugar" , way back in September 2015.

Cat lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. 2017 sees the publication of her second novel, Hearts of Tabat.

 For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and online classes, see http://www.kittywumpus.net

We also have a guest reader this week!

Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, among other places. Their debut short fiction collection Singing With All My Skin and Bone is available from Undertow Publications. They unfortunately live just outside Washington, DC, in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.

The Subtler Art

by Cat Rambo

Anything can happen in Serendib, the city built of dimensions intersecting, and this is what happened there once.

The noodle shop that lies on the border between the neighborhood of Yddle, which is really a forest, houses strapped to the wide trunks, and Eclect, an industrial quarter, is claimed by both, with equally little reason.

The shop was its own Territory, with laws differing from either area, although the same can be said of many eating establishments in the City of a Thousand Parts. But the noodles were hand shaved, and the sauce was made of minced ginger and chopped green onions with a little soy sauce and a dash of enlightenment, and they were unequaled in Serendib.

It was the Dark’s favorite place to eat, and since she and Tericatus were haphazard cooks at best and capable of (usually accidentally) killing someone at worst, they often ate their meals out. And because the city is so full of notorious people, very few noted that the woman once known as the best assassin on five continents on a world that only held four and her lover, a wizard who’d in his time achieved wonders and miracles and once even a rebirthed God, were slurping noodles only an elbow length’s away at the same chipped beige stone counter.

Though indifferent cooks, both were fond enough of food to argue its nuances in detail, and this day they were arguing over the use of white pepper or golden when eating the silvery little fish that swarm every seventh Spring in Serendib.

“Yellow pepper has a flatness to it,” Dark argued. Since retirement, she had let herself accumulate a little extra fat over her wiry muscles, and a few white strands traced themselves through her midnight hair, but she remained the one of the pair who drew most eyes. Her lover was a lean man, sparse in flesh and hair, gangly, with long capable hands spotted with unnatural colors and burns from alchemical experiments.

“Cooking,” said the person on the other side of her, “is an exceedingly subtle art.”

“Cathay,” the Dark said, recognizing the stranger. Her tone was cool. The newcomer was both acquaintance and former lover for both of them, but more than that, Cathay was a Trickster mage, and you never knew what she might be getting into.

Tericatus grunted his own acknowledgment and greeting, rolling an eye sideways at the Dark in warning. He knew she was prone to impatience and while Tricksters can play with many things, impatience is a favorite point to press on.

But the conversation that the Trickster made was slight, as though Cathay’s mind were elsewhere, and by the time the other had tapped coin to counter in order to pay, most of what she’d said had vanished, except for those few words.

“A subtle art,” the Dark repeated to Tericatus, letting the words linger like pepper on her tongue. “It describes what I do as well. The most subtle art of all, assassination.”

Tericatus slouched back in his chair with a smile on his lips and a challenging quirk to his eyebrow. “A subtle art, but surely not the most subtle. That would be magery, which is subtlety embodied.”

The Dark looked hard at her mate. While she loved him above almost all things, she had been——and remained——very proud of her skill at her profession.

The argument hung in the air between them. They both considered it. So many words could go in defense of either side. But actions speak stronger than words. And so they both stood and slid a token beneath their empty bowls and nodded at each other in total agreement.

“Who first?” the Dark asked.

“I have one in mind already, if you don’t care,” Tericatus murmured.

“Very well.”

Serendib has no center—or at least the legend goes that if anyone ever finds it, the city will fall—but surely wherever its heart is, it must lie close to the gardens of Caran Sul.

Their gates are built of white moon-metal, which grows darker whenever the moon is shadowed, and their grounds are overgrown with shanks of dry green leaves and withered purple blossoms that smell sweet and salty, like the very edges of the sea.

In the center, five towers start to reach to the sky, only to tangle into the form of Castle Knot, where the Angry Daughters, descended from the prophet who once lived there, swarm, and occasionally pull passersby into their skyborne nests, never to be seen again.

Tericatus and the Dark paid their admittance coin to the sleepy attendant at the entrance stile outside the gate and entered through the pathway hacked into the vegetation. Tericatus paused halfway down the tunnel to lean down and pick up a caterpillar from the dusty path, transferring it to the dry leaves on the opposite side.

The Dark kept a wary eye on the sky as they emerged into sunlight. While she did not fear an encounter with a few of the Daughters, a crowd of them would be an entirely different thing. But nothing stirred in the stony coils and twists so far above.

“This reminds me,” she ventured, “of the time we infiltrated the demon city of S’keral pretending to be visiting scholars and wrestled that purple stone free from that idol.”

“Indeed,” Tericatus said, “this is nothing like that.”

“Ah. Perhaps it is more like the time we entered the village of shapeshifters and killed their leaders before anyone had time enough to react.”

“It is not like that either,” Tericatus said, a little irritably.

“Remind me,” she said, “exactly what we are doing here.”

Tericatus stopped and crossed his arms. “I’m demonstrating the subtlety with which magic can work.”

“And how exactly will it work? she inquired.

He unfolded an arm and pointed upward towards the dark shapes flapping their way down from the heights, clacking the brazen, razor-sharp bills on the masks they wore.

“I presume you don’t need me to do anything.”

Tericatus did not deign to answer.

The shapes continued to descend. The Dark could see the brass claws tipping their gloves, each stained with ominous rust.

“You're quite sure you don’t need me?”

A butterfly fluttered across the sky from behind them. Dodging to catch it in her talons, one Daughter collided with another, and the pair tumbled into the path of a third, then a fourth...

The Dark blinked as the long grass around them filled with fallen bodies.

“Very nice,” she said with genuine appreciation. “And the tipping point?”

Tericatus smirked slightly. “The caterpillar. You may have noticed that I moved it from one kind of plant to another -”

“Of course.”

“And when it eats jilla leaves, its scent changes, attracting adults of its species to come lay more eggs there.”

“Well done,” she said. “A valiant try indeed.”

The Home for Dictators is, despite its name, a retirement home, though it is true that it holds plenty of past leaders of all sorts of stripes, and many of them are not particularly benign.

“Why here?” Tericatus said as they came up Fume and Spray and Rant Street, changing elevations as they went till the air grew chill and dry.

“It grates on me to perform a hit without getting paid for it,” the Dark said, a little apologetically. “It feels unprofessional.”

“You’re retired. Why should you worry about feeling unprofessional?”

“You’re retired too. Why should you worry about who’s more subtle?”

“Technically, wizards never retire.”

“Assassins do,” the Dark said. “It’s just that we don’t usually get the chance.”

“Get the chance or lose the itch?”

She shrugged. “A little of both?”

Tericatus expected the Dark to go in through the back in the way she’d been famous for: unseen, unannounced. Or failing that, to disguise herself in one of her many cunning alterations: an elderly inmate to be admitted, a child come to visit a grandparent, a dignitary there to honor some old politician. But instead she marched up the steps and signed her name in bold letters on the guestbook. “The Dark.”

The receptionist/nurse, a young newtling with damp, pallid skin and limpid eyes, spun it around to read the name, which clearly meant little to him. “And you’ve come to see...” he said, letting the sentence trail upward in question as his head tilted.

The Dark eyed him. It was a look Tericatus knew well, a look that started mild and reasonable but which, as time progressed, would swell into menace, darken like clouds gathering on the edge of the horizon. The newt paled, cheeks twitching convulsively as it swallowed.

“Simply announce me to the populace at large,” the Dark said.

Without taking his eyes from her, the newt fumbled for the intercom, a device clearly borrowed from some slightly more but not too advanced dimension, laden with black-iron cogs and the faint green glow of phlogiston. He said hesitantly into the bell-like speaking cup, “The, uh, Dark is here to see, uh, someone.”

The Dark smiled faintly and turned back to the waiting room.

After a few moments, Tericatus said, “Are we expecting someone?”

“Not really,” the Dark replied.

“Some thing?”

“Closer, but not quite,” she said.

They glanced around as a bustle of doctors went through a doorway.

“There we go,” the Dark said. She tugged her lover in their wake.

Up a set of stairs and then they saw the doctors gathered in a room at the head where an elderly woman lay motionless in her bed.

“The Witch of the Southeast,” Dark murmured. “She’s always feared me, and her heart was frail as tissue paper. Come on.”

They drifted further along the corridor. Dark paused in a doorway. The man in the wheelchair wore an admiral’s uniform, but his eyes were unseeing, his lips drawn up in a rictus that exposed purple gums.

“Diploberry,” Dark said. “It keeps well, and just a little has the effect one wants. It is a relatively painless means of suicide.”

Tericatus looked at the admiral. “Because he heard you were coming.”

The Dark spread her hands in a helpless shrug, her grin fox sly.

“And you’re getting paid for all of them? How long ago did you plant some of the seeds you’ve harvested here?”

“The longest would be a decade and a half,” she mused.

“How many others have died?”

“Three. All dictators whose former victims were more than willing to see their old oppressors gone.”

Tericatus protested, “You can’t predict that with such finesse.”

“Can I not?” she asked, and pointed at the door where three stretchers were exiting, carried by orderlies in the costume of the place, gold braids and silver sharkskin suits.

She smiled smugly. “Subtle, no?”

Tericatus nodded, frowning.

“Come now,” she said. “Is it that hard to admit defeat?”

“Not so hard, my love,” he said. “But isn’t that Cathay?”

Dark felt another touch of unease. You never know what a Trickster Mage is getting you into. And there indeed stood Cathay at the front desk, speaking sweetly to someone, a bouquet of withered purple blossom in her hand, more of it in her hair, a smell like longing and regret and the endless sea.

Dark murmured, “She always loved those flowers and yet did not like contending with the Daughters.”

Tericatus said, “She had lovers here, I know that. No doubt she has five inheritances coming.”

Cathay turned and smiled at them. The Dark bowed slightly, and Tericatus inclined his head.

#

“But,” the Dark finally said into the silence as they walked away, headed by mutual accord to the bar closest to the noodle shop, “we can still argue over which of us exercises the second most subtle art.”

END

"The Subtler Art" was originally published in Blackguards: tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues edited by J.M. Martin in 2015.

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, leaving reviews on iTunes, or just telling a friend.

Thanks for listening, and we'll be back on February 13th with two original stories: "Curiosity Fruit Machine" by S. Qiouyi Lu and "The Slow Ones" by JY Yang.

[Music plays out]

The Subtler Art

by Cat Rambo

Anything can happen in Serendib, the city built of dimensions intersecting, and this is what happened there once.

The noodle shop that lies on the border between the neighborhood of Yddle, which is really a forest, houses strapped to the wide trunks, and Eclect, an industrial quarter, is claimed by both, with equally little reason.

The shop was its own Territory, with laws differing from either area, although the same can be said of many eating establishments in the City of a Thousand Parts. But the noodles were hand shaved, and the sauce was made of minced ginger and chopped green onions with a little soy sauce and a dash of enlightenment, and they were unequaled in Serendib.

Full transcript after the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 32 for January 24, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

For some GlitterShip news: coming on February 1st, we will be open to poetry submissions. For more information, check the submissions guidelines page on our website, GlitterShip.com. Also, starting with our Winter 2017 issue, GlitterShip also has seasonal issues available via our Patreon (patreon.com/keffy) or at glittership.com/buy, for those of you who would like to read the stories before anyone else.

Our story this week is "The Subtler Art" by Cat Rambo.

Cat's fiction has appeared on GlitterShip before. Episode 13 featured her story "Sugar" , way back in September 2015.

Cat lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. 2017 sees the publication of her second novel, Hearts of Tabat.

 For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and online classes, see http://www.kittywumpus.net

We also have a guest reader this week!

Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, among other places. Their debut short fiction collection Singing With All My Skin and Bone is available from Undertow Publications. They unfortunately live just outside Washington, DC, in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.

The Subtler Art

by Cat Rambo

Anything can happen in Serendib, the city built of dimensions intersecting, and this is what happened there once.

The noodle shop that lies on the border between the neighborhood of Yddle, which is really a forest, houses strapped to the wide trunks, and Eclect, an industrial quarter, is claimed by both, with equally little reason.

The shop was its own Territory, with laws differing from either area, although the same can be said of many eating establishments in the City of a Thousand Parts. But the noodles were hand shaved, and the sauce was made of minced ginger and chopped green onions with a little soy sauce and a dash of enlightenment, and they were unequaled in Serendi

Parts

by Paul Lorello

I honestly don't think anyone on Earth was ever happier than Jake was when Bobo Schmuley's index finger arrived by Special Courier on Tuesday. I was the one who got stuck signing for it and paying the non-breakability reward while Jake stood right there in the sub-cooler, jumping up and down and slapping at his sides.

I held the parcel out at him. He grabbed it hungrily and tore it open and he took out Bobo Schmuley's finger and held it up to the light and turned it around—this pallid, hairy thing, stubbier than I thought it would be. He smiled, and I'll confess now that it gave me a soft spot to see him made so happy by simple pleasures. He'd make up for it by the end of the week, but I did have that one soft spot at that moment.

Full transcript after the cut.

 ----more----

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 31 for January 11, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Before I get started, I'd like to let you know about a slight format change for GlitterShip. If you enjoy listening to GlitterShip via podcast or reading the fiction on our website as the stories are released, don't worry! That's not going to change. However, GlitterShip's stories will be released in 4 seasonal issues per year starting this month with Winter 2017. These issues will be available to purchase at the beginning of the season in EPUB, MOBI and PDF format and will include three months' worth of stories. If you like what we do here and would like to support GlitterShip, as well as get an electronic copy of the stories to keep, check out GlitterShip.com/buy.

Our story this week is a GlitterShip original: "Parts" by Paul Lorello.

Paul Lorello is a freelance writer from Ronkonkoma, New York. His fiction has appeared in Big Pulp's Kennedy Curse anthology, Black Chaos: Tales of the Zombie, Membrane, The Big Adios, Way Out West, and Pseudopod. In 2014, the Pseudopod podcast of Paul's story, "Growth Spurt", was chosen as the winner of the coveted Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction Short Story. Paul lives with three quadrupeds and one biped. He knows very little about everything.

Parts

by Paul Lorello

I honestly don't think anyone on Earth was ever happier than Jake was when Bobo Schmuley's index finger arrived by Special Courier on Tuesday. I was the one who got stuck signing for it and paying the non-breakability reward while Jake stood right there in the sub-cooler, jumping up and down and slapping at his sides.

I held the parcel out at him. He grabbed it hungrily and tore it open and he took out Bobo Schmuley's finger and held it up to the light and turned it around—this pallid, hairy thing, stubbier than I thought it would be. He smiled, and I'll confess now that it gave me a soft spot to see him made so happy by simple pleasures. He'd make up for it by the end of the week, but I did have that one soft spot at that moment.

Jake had about sixteen more bids on other parts of Bobo Schmuley. He feverishly browsed them, like watching all these little pots of water set to boil. I failed to mention that this was merely his latest acquisition. That more of Bobo Schmuley was gathered up in a stoneware bowl in Jake's room. They listed the items for auction piecemeal. Bit by bit, as it were. Whet the appetites of folks like Jake for as long as they possibly could, issuing little teasers on newstables and crawl signs, a scroll on the side of a community car—as if the community car industry hadn't already sold out—Bobo Schmuley's Uvula Coming Soon! Or something like that. The heads would turn and suddenly there would be this electric buzz in the air. And then would come sounds from the detractors, who blow these little horns that go skeeeeeet, as they shout their little slogans. I was always one with them in spirit, though I always knew enough to keep my gob stopped. Get a few detractors who'd been sniffing Sour Air and mix them up with these fervent Schmuley devotees and you've got yourself a riot, my friend. Add to that a heat index of 123 Fahrenheit and the thing becomes not so much a war as an unbearable nuisance, with a lot of screaming and fainting and throwing up and very little progress in terms of one side triumphing over the other.

I also didn't mention that this was about the time that I started conversing with Jake seriously on the subject. "This will be over sooner rather than later," I said. "Sooner or later," I said, "they'll run out of Bobo Schmuley. Then what will you do?"

He ignored me the first few times I brought it up. Then it started getting to him. He'd rub at his little frozen blue nose and then the teeth and the fists would clench and the eyes would widen and he'd start to tremble all over. I have to admit I found it amusing. He knew it. It made him angrier.

But he kept on. I couldn't understand why. It's not like he'd ever have a complete Bobo Schmuley. No one would. There was only one, and they were going to run out of him soon. Sure, there were counterfeits out there, but they were easy to spot. Easy for Jake, that is, and anyone else who was serious about collecting.

Here's what happened. A day or so later, Jake came in and started rummaging through the kitchen chest freezer, torso deep.

"That's not sanitary," I called to him. He ignored me.

His legs flailed around, flopping sort of, like a fish or that Sloppy Epileptic toy that people were all up in a tizzy about a couple of years ago.

It's technic, stupid hectic,

Mucho apoplectic

Sloppy Epileptic!

Whooooooo?

Sloppy Epileptic!

Batteries not included.

So I got up. "You do realize you're making an unholy irritant of yourself." And that's when I saw he had a screwdriver in his hand and was chipping away at the rime on the inside of the chest. His mouth was open and his teeth were clenched and he was breathing in gusts and tears and there was spit flying onto the fishstick boxes.

"Fuck you, Miles," he said, chipping with his syllables. "Fucking. Unit. In the. Sub. Cooler is. Fucked. Fuck. Fuck you."

And it didn’t take a brain surgeon to understand, because he kept his parts in the sub-cooler and there was going to be Holy Hell on Earth if they spoiled. I looked through the sub-cooler window and saw a thin fog forming in splashes across it. The real problem was that we spent most of our daylight hours in the sub-cooler. To hell with his parts. To hell with Bobo Schmuley. Of course I didn't say this.

Jake stabbed a coil or something because all of a sudden the room was flooded with this hammy smell of leaking coolant gas.

"Now you done it! Now you went and messed up our cooler and messed up our whole apartment with that stink!"

He dropped the screwdriver into the chest and used both of his chunky hands to gather up the shards of ice he'd managed to free, cursing the whole way because the cold was stinging his fingers. He ran into the sub-cooler and I watched him through the window. He stood before the bowl, looking panicked. Then he dropped the ice pieces next to his bowl of parts and then took off his shirt, laid it next to the bowl, and carefully placed his collection of parts onto it. Then he gathered up the ice and dumped it hastily into the bowl and carefully lifted the shirt and put it on top of the ice. This endearing combination look of satisfaction and triumph and relief came over his face, and he wiped his hands on his pants, then looked around as if there was another shirt in there somewhere. Then he came out.

"That was absolutely poetic," I said.

He pointed at the room, his mouth a rictus. He looked through the window, I guess to make sure he was pointing in the right direction, then looked back at me. "The fucking unit."

"I know," I said. "And now take a whiff."

He did so. "What's that?"

"Coolant. And you're coming with me to go buy another chest. And you're gonna go halfsies on it."

"What about the sub-cooler?" he said, defeated.

"I might be able to fix it. But get your shoes on."

And so we went out to the community car stop and there was this argument in process. Two sourheads were screaming at a young woman with a daisy graft on her chin.

Daisychins were, in those days, by and large, crazy about parts, and this one probably made an excited comment about an upcoming release, incurring the wrath of the sourheads.

Jake took her side, and I had to take his. And now it was three against two. Two sourheads, that is, which is like arguing with four regular people, each of whom speak a different language.

They said that Bobo Schmuley probably wasn't a real guy anyway. And they said that Bobo Schmuley's best parts were all taken and all that was left were grubs and inferior arteries and so forth. And anyway, they said, get a life. And besides, they said, agents of the everclear are everywhere. Their go-to slogan.

I agreed with them silently.

One of the sourheads lunged forth to bite Jake's face. I swatted at him. Probably not the best idea, as now we'd drawn a crowd. And as luck would have it, a community car rolled by and scrolled another message about Coming soon! Bobo Schmuley's Liver! Bid or Be Smashed! And someone shouted that there was absolutely no way there was a liver up for grabs. Jake and the daisychin were red in the face. Redder, that is. We were all red in the face. And we were all sweating profusely out there. Community car stops have no coolers.

I put my hands on Jake's shoulders in an attempt to reel him in. His muscles were ropey and tense.

"Miles," he screamed at me. That's all he said. Then he turned to the sourheads. "Goddammit, go back to Wildwood!"

Wildwood was a low-income suburb in those days. The phrase "Go back to Wildwood" was a terrible insult back then.

There was this eerie, momentary calm, the kind that is usually needed once class warfare is invoked, so that everyone can consider where they stand.

The sourheads pulled out these homemade whizzers that sparked when they switched them on, and that spat sparks intermittently all over the place. And I said, "Now, hold it." And I put up a hand.

That's when someone blindsided one of the sourheads with a fist in the ear. I heard a whizzer amp up and the subsequent shaky squeal from its target. The car stop suddenly looked like it looks when a cyclone hits a grain silo. It looked exactly like that. I managed to pull Jake out of that mess.

We didn’t talk at all for the rest of our errand. We got the chest and scheduled a Special Courier delivery and went halfsies on the price. I had to spot Jake his half because he went and bought a new stoneware bowl for his parts. I should probably say here, though I probably don't need to, that I hated how Jake just threw the parts into a stoneware bowl without bothering to display them. What good is it if you don't display your collection to its best advantage? But that's the way it was with parts, I found out. Most people who collected them just threw them into a bowl.

I couldn't fix the element in the sub-cooler. Which meant that it would be a good week we'd have to spend in the heat. Jake was especially sheepish about it when he asked me if we could please keep his parts in the new chest freezer. I couldn't say no. The last thing I needed was to have him blowing hairs off my head about his parts going warm. For lack of a better thing to do, and a little out of curiosity, I went to help him transfer them from their little stoneware home in the ever-warming sub-cooler to the new freezer. Jake was ecstatic beyond measure to be doing this. He proudly exhibited his parts, holding them regally as he marched them from room to room. I thought they were rather pathetic, particularly for their unremarkability. Nowhere was there an ear or a tongue or a tooth. Nothing really any average person could name save for the sole finger, which was truly his most prized possession among a bleak and withered assortment of muscles, tendons, and odd, jigsaw cuts of membrane.

And here's what had happened. In the altercation at the comcar stop the day before, one of the sourheads had dropped an air cap. I saw it gleaming on the ground there like a little bullet and I snatched it up. I'd always wanted to try Sour Air, and anyway it was just one cap. And when we were done transferring the parts and Jake was brushing his hands together for a job well done, I went into my cube and got out the cap and huffed it. Good and deep.

Sour Air is elegantly poor, like cheap aftershave.

And when I came back into the room, I saw Jake standing there with the freezer open, smiling down on his parts like a proud papa.

"You're never going to have the whole person," I said. The Sour Air was making me itch all over on the inside. "And anyway you keep ruining our days with those things."

I was not at my most eloquent, but I honestly don't think anyone could be so in my situation.

Jake bit his upper lip and breathed through his nose and then he turned his back to me. Then he shook a little and whipped around in a frenzy. "You prove to me they aren't him!"

I had said nothing about them not being Bobo Schmuley. And I told him so.

"Fuck you, Miles," he said, fully composed. "I always figured you for a detractor."

The drug was a wonderful thing, for it evened me out where I needed it. "Let's talk this over in the sub-cooler," I said calmly. "It's warming up, but it's a lot better than standing out here."

He was cowering beneath me.

I said, "Jake, it's a beautiful day outside."

He said something about me not knowing what I was talking about. I found I was okay with that.

"Jake, you are parts obsessed, and it has to stop."

I had blood on my hand. Under my nails.

And then what happened was I was waking up someplace else. I was in the sub-cooler, and it was dark, and I was lying down, and Jake was sitting next to me and cradling his wrist and weeping silently.

I won't go through the whole scenario, only that Jake told me through his tears that I'd been screaming nonsense when I grabbed his wrist and tore it open with my nails, and I said the most awful things to him and about his parts.

His sobs got heavier. "I... felt like... I was... dying... inside... when you... did... that..."

I sat up. My head screamed in pain and there was a dull buzzing or ringing inside there somewhere, fading as if attached to a dream. I caressed the back of his neck and he shriveled up and then let go all at once, sobbing miserably. I think I was crying too. I don't remember. It was a terrible day that ended in a terrible night.

I woke up the next morning and Jake was still asleep, curled up like a dog next to me. We were both drenched in sweat. The browser wall lit up with a silent message that said Jake had won another auction. A five-inch sliver of Bobo Schmuley's right shoulder blade would be arriving soon. I had a tough time deciding whether to wake him or let him sleep, trying to think which would be worse. I came to the conclusion that letting him sleep through it would be worse, but I didn't want to wake him. I didn't want to have to get excited about parts. I was through pretending.

The next day was when the bad stuff happened. Jake's new part arrived. The Special Courier was a snarling thing that stunk of Sour Air and chicken scat.

Special Couriers get bad press so often it's hard not to join in sometimes.

I gave the parcel to Jake. He kept his head down when he grabbed it from me, and he took it into his cube in the sub-cooler.

About an hour later he emerged with this dour look on his face. He pointed behind him. "Scapula," he said. Then he slunk back into his cube. A minute or two later, I heard him call.

"Come in here, Miles. It's highly probable that I don't know what I'm talking about."

Grudgingly I went, knowing full well it would come to no good end. Jake was holding up two identical pieces of bone.

"It can't be a dupe," he said.

"They're the same," I said. "A scapula is – what do you call it? What do you call something that's different when it's either left or right?"

He shifted his gaze from one part to the other.

"Well, that does it then," I said, and I left him there.

The heat was unbearable. The sub-cooler regulator part was due to arrive in six days. We bought a couple of ice dollies to sleep with. That helped a little.

Sometime the next afternoon, I realized Jake had not spoken to me for the past twelve hours. I guess you don't pay any attention to certain things you'd rather not admit to, or maybe there is a superstitious wrinkle in all of us that makes us afraid to notice something for fear that it may not actually be there. Whatever the case, I was grateful for Jake's silence. I could keep to myself and read, and sniff Sour Air – I neglected to mention that I ordered a case of caps the day after my first experience with the stuff. It came later on in the day. The package had been tampered with and the case was three caps short. It's no secret that Special Couriers palm a couple here, a couple there. I filed a euthanization request against the Special Courier that delivered the parcel. Back then, you still had to submit euthanization requests in person. I was lucky that I didn't have to wait long on line. I'd heard horror stories.

I should hear back in four weeks to schedule my secondary assessment exam. By then I probably won't be interested anymore.

I looked up and there was Jake holding a piece of ice to his lip, tears streaming down his doughboy face.

The air made me not care about Jake so much. It even gave me a strange confidence about the future—and I know why it is that sourheads are often regarded as psychics.

But then I saw him standing there with a bag of stuff

packed. And I looked and the new stoneware bowl was gone. I didn't want to look in the new freezer, but I did. He watched me look and he didn't say anything.

I brought him into the sub-cooler and told him to sit.     

"Jake, this is all about parts, isn't it? Parts caused all this. And now parts are gonna end it. I'll collect them with you, and we'll start new, OK? We'll make it like nothing ever happened, and your wrist and your lip'll get better and there'll be parts for everyone, right? Bobo Schmuley forever, and all that?"

He breathed through his nose. It looked as though acquiescence was trying to escape in a sneeze. "Mm-mm, no. No."

"Come on, Jake. Be a man."

"No. You don’t get it. Because underneath it all, you don't believe. And you hit me."

I went to take his head but he shrunk away. "I'm sorry I tore your wrist and hit you in the face, Jake."

He didn't respond to that, and it made me more ashamed to look at him. I was thinking maybe the air caps were a bad idea to begin with, as it amplified every emotion. So I decided never again with those blasted things.

"I'm moving out, Miles."

"Don't do that," I said, huffing another cap.

"No, I can't stay. You hate me enough to want to do some serious damage like this." Here he fingered the medi-skin patch on his wrist.

There was a buzz of hate and fear inside me. "Who's going to take care of you?"

"Don't worry about me," he said. "I won't be hurt anymore by you, and that's all that matters right now. All's I know is I can’t stay here." Here he started to cry. His chin was on his chest.

I told him the sub-cooler part was coming soon.

"You can abuse me all you want, but don't tell me my parts aren't from the real man."

I know I shook my head to this.

Jake rubbed his eyes with the collar of his dingey shirt. "I've been doing a lot of mulling over this the past twenty-four. Miles, if you're gonna get along in life, you have to understand something..." He took a couple of long, clear breaths with no sob-sucking in between. "You can't tell me, or anyone for that matter, that their parts don't belong to anyone. Because if there isn't a name attached, it's just parts. Y'understand? Without a name, we're all just parts. Do you understand?"

I needed some more air, and even while I squirmed, he even had the audacity to put his hand on my arm. "Do you understand, Miles?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Then I'll kill you," I said, "and sell your parts under the name Bobo Schmuley."

It was a terrible thing to say. I wish I hadn't said it.

Jake left. He hasn't been back.

I hadn't known he was capable of this.

I'm scared he's gonna be hurt out there. I'm afraid he'll get killed. And I'm afraid to find out if he does. And I don't ever want to hear about parts.

END

“Parts” is copyright Paul Lorello, 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 I’ll be back soon with a reprint of “The Subtler Art” by Cat Rambo.

[Music plays out]

Parts

by Paul Lorello

I honestly don't think anyone on Earth was ever happier than Jake was when Bobo Schmuley's index finger arrived by Special Courier on Tuesday. I was the one who got stuck signing for it and paying the non-breakability reward while Jake stood right there in the sub-cooler, jumping up and down and slapping at his sides.

I held the parcel out at him. He grabbed it hungrily and tore it open and he took out Bobo Schmuley's finger and held it up to the light and turned it around—this pallid, hairy thing, stubbier than I thought it would be. He smiled, and I'll confess now that it gave me a soft spot to see him made so happy by simple pleasures. He'd make up for it by the end of the week, but I did have that one soft spot at that moment.

Full transcript after the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 31 for January 11, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Before I get started, I'd like to let you know about a slight format change for GlitterShip. If you enjoy listening to GlitterShip via podcast or reading the fiction on our website as the stories are released, don't worry! That's not going to change. However, GlitterShip's stories will be released in 4 seasonal issues per year starting this month with Winter 2017. These issues will be available to purchase at the beginning of the season in EPUB, MOBI and PDF format and will include three months' worth of stories. If you like what we do here and would like to support GlitterShip, as well as get an electronic copy of the stories to keep, check out GlitterShip.com/buy.

Our story this week is a GlitterShip original: "Parts" by Paul Lorello.

Paul Lorello is a freelance writer from Ronkonkoma, New York. His fiction has appeared in Big Pulp's Kennedy Curse anthology, Black Chaos: Tales of the Zombie, Membrane, The Big Adios, Way Out West, and Pseudopod. In 2014, the Pseudopod podcast of Paul's story, "Growth Spurt", was chosen as the winner of the coveted Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction Short Story. Paul lives with three quadrupeds and one biped. He knows very little about everything.

Parts

by Paul Lorello

I honestly don't think anyone on Earth was ever happier than Jake was when Bobo Schmuley's index finger arrived by Special Courier on Tuesday. I was the one who got stuck signing for it and paying the non-breakability reward while Jake stood right there in the sub-cooler, jumping up and down and slapping at his sides.

I held the parcel out at him. He grabbed it hungrily and tore it open and he took out Bobo Schmuley's finger and held it up to the light and turned it around—this pallid, hairy thing, stubbier than I thought it would be. He smiled, and I'll confess now that it gave me a soft spot to see him made so happy by simple pleasures. He'd make up for it by the end of the week, but I did have that one soft spot at that moment.

Jake had about sixteen more bids on other parts of Bobo Schmuley. He feverishly browsed them, like watching all these little pots of water set to boil. I failed to mention that this was merely his latest acquisition. That more of Bobo Schmuley was gathered up in a stoneware bowl in Jake's room. They listed the items for auction piecemeal. Bit by bit, as it were. Whet the appetites of folks like Jake for as long as they possibly could, issuing little teasers on newstables and crawl signs, a scroll on the side of a community car—as if the community car industry hadn't alr

City of Chimeras

by Richard Bowes

1.

Salome's hand is the hinge and John the Baptist's head is the hammer on the doorknocker at the Studio Caravaggio. I slam the brass head held by its brass hair on the door a few times before the spy slot on the iron door opens and closes.

To mortal eyes here in the Middle World even a half-breed Fey like me can appear a bit translucent with his hands and hair trailing away like phosphorous.  In my case most of that is the effect of Prince Calithurn's Glamour having rubbed off on me. But at this address I'm recognized and expected. Though since I've come on time, I am by local standards early to the point of madness.

Just then, I feel the probe of another mind. By instinct I block it.  The rivalries and feuds of the tall elves are twisted and beyond logic.  Recently certain ones have appeared in Gotham who can scan and probe as well as my lover Calithurn or any other Fey. And these newcomers mean us no good. This time however, it's Prince Cal himself and I let him into my mind.

"Enemies from this world and Faery are at my throat," he announces. "Though my father has abandoned me, his enemies have not. My cousins from the South and their friends from the West are closing in. I need you by my side, Jackie Boy."

Full transcript after the cut.

[Intro music plays]

Welcome to GlitterShip episode 30 for November 22, 2016. I am your host, Keffy, and I have a story to share with you today, but a message first.

We are two weeks into the longest nightmare many of us have ever faced, and a resurgence of horror for those of us who have been through the darkness before.

I have no gentle platitudes to offer today. I am sure that I am not alone in fluctuating between broken-hearted grief, staring terror and burning rage.

I tweeted most of this yesterday, but I feel that it bears repeating, and repeating, and repeating.

There are already people telling you the Right or Best or Most Effective way to resist fascism. Some of these Best ways are not accessible to everyone, for a number of reasons. Some have higher costs for some groups than they do for others.

There is no One Single Best Way to fight fascism. The Best Way is anything you can do. Maybe you can make unlimited phone calls. Maybe you can take to the street. Maybe you can't. Maybe you can do something else. Maybe you can survive.

What if the only thing you can do is remind your friends and the rest of us fighting that we are loved, and we need to drink some water? Do that. What if the only thing you can do is wake up and tell your friends that you are still here? THAT IS WORTH DOING.

There are people who say the best way is to wait. Or that unless you do X, your effort is worthless. Don't listen to them. It is true that some single actions will have more immediate effect than others. But, the answer is not "Do THIS THING or DON'T BOTHER."

The truth is that we need EVERYBODY to fight the rising tide of fascism at EVERY STEP using ANYTHING THEY CAN.

What are YOUR skills? What can YOU do? Do that. Keep doing it. In the darkest hours of humanity, we have still needed people to cook meals, to fold a blanket, to hand a cup of water, to give a hug, to babysit, to say "you are meaningful."

RESISTANCE IS NOT A SINGLE HERO. RESISTANCE IS MILLIONS OF ACTS BY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE MEAT GRINDER.

Many of the contributors, creators and listeners to GlitterShip are marginalized along one or many axes that make them feel threatened after this horrible expression of white supremacist power in the United States. We must all stand together to protect all of our people, all the way to the most vulnerable of us. If you are queer or trans, make sure that you are protecting those among us who are also people of color, or poor, or disabled. Those of us with more privilege to higher standards. Those of us who are white, who are not members of targetted faiths, we must be willing to stand between our friends and those who would destroy them.

It isn't easy. Oh, it isn't.

I admit that I spent some time wondering how I was going to make things happen, if GlitterShip is worth it, considering what we face. The first two years of episodes have been difficult, partly for personal reasons, and partly for the rising despair as all of this around us keeps slipping into horror.

But. GlitterShip remains. I am a queer, trans writer and editor. I am selecting stories that speak to me, many from among the voices of other queer and trans people, many of whom have very different backgrounds from myself. Authors of stories I have run are trans, non-binary, gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, immigrants, latinx, disabled, asian, and on and on.

There is a lot of work to be done, but GlitterShip will remain. We will continue to be a voice in the dark. We're still here.

Richard Bowes is an award winning author of science fiction and fantasy. His fiction has won two World Fantasy awards, a Lambda award, Million Writers, and International Horror Guild awards. He has published six novels, four short story collections and seventy-five stories. Many of his works are listed on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database if you would like to read more of his work.

City of Chimeras

by Richard Bowes

1.

Salome's hand is the hinge and John the Baptist's head is the hammer on the doorknocker at the Studio Caravaggio. I slam the brass head held by its brass hair on the door a few times before the spy slot on the iron door opens and closes.

To mortal eyes here in the Middle World even a half-breed Fey like me can appear a bit translucent with his hands and hair trailing away like phosphorous.  In my case most of that is the effect of Prince Calithurn's Glamour having rubbed off on me. But at this address I'm recognized and expected. Though since I've come on time, I am by local standards early to the point of madness.

Just then, I feel the probe of another mind. By instinct I block it.  The rivalries and feuds of the tall elves are twisted and beyond logic.  Recently certain ones have appeared in Gotham who can scan and probe as well as my lover Calithurn or any other Fey. And these newcomers mean us no good. This time however, it's Prince Cal himself and I let him into my mind.

"Enemies from this world and Faery are at my throat," he announces. "Though my father has abandoned me, his enemies have not. My cousins from the South and their friends from the West are closing in. I need you by my side, Jackie Boy."

This is just my lord in full dramatic flight. A half-breed with half a talent, I can block probes but I have no ability to reply. In any case there's not much I've been able to say to him lately.  

And I still have time before I need to be back beside him. Part of my half Fey birthright is the gift of Foretelling. And even in the worst future I have seen, he won't leave the mortal earth until this afternoon.

 The studio door swings open. Power is out in the city and seen from here in the silver morning sunlight the interior of the studio looks like a dark cavern.

The gate keeper is a mortal, young naturally in this house, a girl I am certain. What I had thought last time was short, feathery gold hair I see now is short gold feathers that cover her head, legs and arms. A small russet robe is draped over the rest of her body.  

She steps aside saying, "He's still in bed," and indicates the way.

The skylights above are dirty; most of the tall windows are curtained.  In a jumble of costumes and props, I make out a green and silver farthingale and an amber and blue doublet and hose tossed over a pool table, a Wehrmacht helmet hung on the high back of a wooden throne.

A sudden shaft of sun points up a blue and white pattern of pagodas and willow trees on a stretch of tiled wall.  

As I approach the Japanese privacy screens at the far end of the studio, a spaniel with the eyes of a child barks and backs up. A naked boy with a V of reddish hair on his chest is flushed from behind the screens and scuttles out of my path, one hand half concealing his crotch, the other clutching a donut. Green eyes and white teeth flash in what might be a fox's smile or snarl. I think I can hear the click of his nails on the floor.

     Since I first saw him here, I have been curious about the fox boy. I calculate that by the reckoning of the middle earth, I'm in my early twenties and that he's a year or so younger. But time has already put a mark or two on him. As a half-Fey, I am untouched and forever young.

I part two screens and look inside. On his huge, disorderly bed half covered with a sheet lies a large man with a big belly, dark hair on his face and body, thin hair on his head. Scars new and old: the jagged ones on his left shoulder and chest are more recent rough repairs of knife or broken bottle wounds. Neat laser traces on the knee outside the sheet indicate sleek, old fashioned replacement surgery.

The artist who calls himself Caravaggio is half awake. "Jackie Boy all ephemeral and flickering," he says focusing his eyes on me. I don't much like that nickname and he knows it. In the land of the Fey, Jackie Boy is a way of indicating my half human status. In this place, the word boy refers not to age so much as lack of money and position.

"Getting awakened by an angel is not necessarily a good sign." He sits up with a groan with the sheet still around him. "Nope, still alive. Everything hurts."

"You said you had something to show me."

"Well to show you and your lord. I was hoping against hope that he would stop by," he says and stumbles out of bed with a rueful smile. Some passions aren't even forlorn wishes. And the one he has for Calithurn qualifies.

     The sheet falls away and the fox boy, now in the loose boxer shorts that are often all the clothing a street urchin wears, reappears from the dusk. He holds out a dark green hooded robe into which Caravaggio inserts his arms without looking. The fox and I may be about the same age but I am a young man with connections and a bit of money. I've started wearing silk drawers in the same style as his under my riding britches. But a boy like the fox probably owns not much more than the, knee-length shorts he has on.

The kitchen, I know, lies through a nearby door. From there comes the smell of coffee and toasting bread and the sound of an alto singing a chant. That singer is joined by a husky not quite human voice way off key. Laughter follows and silence.

Half walking, half stomping, flicking switches and cursing when they don't respond Caravaggio makes his way across the floor until we reach the screening area. There he touches a wall panel and a small generator hums up on the roof. The alto from the kitchen, with fur as black as a panther's, chants as he brings out large mugs of coffee.  

The artist hits a couple of buttons and on a screen before us is an old map of Gotham. The magic island between two rivers lies at the center with New Jersey and the outer boroughs around the edges. Then the map tears open and a winged horse with a rider in gold armor leaps through: Prince Calithurn.

No such event has actually taken place of course. My lord is not in the habit of intentionally performing circus stunts.

The screen fades to a tumbled down street where an impossibly tall man, semi-translucent, seems to disappear into the broad daylight only to flicker back into sight as he speaks to a crowd. "We will take what is best from here and what is best from the Kingdom Under The Hill. We will make of these a new realm on Earth…."

This actually did happen. It was during Cal and my first days here. That was when I first spotted Caravaggio and his camera. The crowd, when the camera pans it, is colorful; one or two sporting wings where there should be arms, a couple with faces that slip between human and animal. But everyone, human and chimera alike, are enraptured, a rabble willing to be roused.

Then on screen I see that the almost ephemeral Calithurn, without missing a beat, has his sword in his hand. The blade twirls in the air, cuts in two a man with a drawn pistol. This also happened but not on the same day, nor in the same place.

The artist says, "I need so little from you and your prince to tell my story. Just a few samples. Computers will do the rest."

     On the screen is a large room and the only light is coming through the windows, a place of dark split by areas of sunlight full of girls and boys with bare feet, knees and arms but who wear raffish feathered hats, elbow length gauntlets, belts with daggers. These are ruffians who watch, half mocking and half in awe as an angel in gold and jewels, brushed leather jacket and, polished knee boots, suede knickers and a flowing silk shirt, his hair a halo, his ringed fingers trailing away like phosphorus, stands before a tough man in a battered motorcycle jacket and says, "I summon you in the name of my Lord Calithurn."

The man is Caravaggio himself, sporting a beard that he doesn't have. The angel is me, standing where I never stood and saying what I have never said: all of this through the worldly magic of cameras and computers.

"This is the look I'm driving for, the film I'm striving to create," he says. "One where men at their worktables are summoned to greatness by angels while their pretty little friends look on amazed."

All of this startles me. The Foretelling is a skill of the Fey in which some of us have visions of our possible futures. This disheveled mortal seems to have magic at least as great.

He says, "I'd like to see you as one of the crowd at the table too when we have you here all bare and informal."

     He finds his joke amusing. I ignore him.

Suddenly the power comes back on in Gotham and all around us in the studio the mysterious shapes and muted colors are revealed to be broken furniture, piles of tattered costumes and random accumulations of junk.

My host turns and shouts, "Dowse them!" The black figure moves gracefully, humming, smiling, flicking switches until we are back in a circle of artificial light.

"Turn this way, you creature of another world," the artist says viewing me through a lens. "Yes, that expression is perfect for an angel. Polite impatience." 

To mortals here in their earth the Fey, even half-breeds, are creatures of wonder and, they hope, salvation. Caravaggio calls himself a director, an auteur. What he is, at least in part, is a scavenger of images. Scavenging is the local industry.

"What you saw is what I finished yesterday," Caravaggio says. "I'm going to play it by ear and eye. Since I don't know what Calithurn and you have planned.

"Please tell him," he says, "That I'll go wherever he wishes for as much or as little a time as he has to spare me. I'll immortalize him. People will flock to him. He will be a hero, a mayor, a President, a king."

He pauses. "You're impressed by my impudence."

I'd come here this morning to see if what he had done was good enough for him to be entrusted with showing Lord Calithurn to the mortal world. "I'm impressed," I tell him.  "I want you with me and with Calithurn today. If you agree we'll go to him right now."

He jumps up immediately. "I can have my rig packed and ready in a few minutes. Bring my crew…"

 "No. This could be dangerous and it will be hard. Just you and that camera you had that first day. Get ready!"

He gives me an angry look but selects a camera, goes through the contents of a canvas bag, grabs items and stuffs them in. Then he  pulls on pants, steps into sandals, flips the hood on his robe over his head and shambles towards the door.

In the land of the Fey, fairy/mortal mongrels like me live in the Maxee, the demimonde that has grown up around the Kingdom Beneath the Hill. We never grow old but are never admitted to the true Elvin lands.

Cross-breed here has another meaning. The sly faced boy who has just made Caravaggio's bed and now sits on it cross-legged, smiling at me as I depart, the black-as-night alto, the feathered girl who opens the door to let us out, are by-blows of the chimera craze that possessed this city in the years before the bombs and earthquake. Genetic manipulation was illegal and thus enticing.

     The day is growing warm. On the street, small bare children play in the water spraying from a busted fire hydrant.  For a moment I am caught, reminded of doing that back in the Maxee.

     Suddenly a bicyclist, a youth whose red skin blends with his entire wardrobe of scarlet silk drawers and the red bandana on his head, rides through the spray, sending shrieking children and drops of water in all directions. His lizard eyes flicker my way.

     Longingly I watch him speed down the broken street. The Maxee too had wild boys of a sort but I was the child of a Fey and so was kept a bit apart. I thought about them and envied them their lack of status when I was a child.

     Caravaggio looks at the bicyclist and at me and seems amused. I think this whole city is a hunting ground for him. I picture Caravaggio when the want assails him, going out and snagging a partridge girl or cat boy and carrying them indoors to dress a set, to warm a bed.

Heads turn as we hurry along the buckled sidewalks of this devastated but vital place. I hear someone murmur, "The devil steps out with an angel." And I see us reflected in a broken pane of glass: him stomping along like he has hoofed feet and me glowing like a minor sun.

     My companion calls out, "Morning, Al. Morning Flo," to the couple opening the soup kitchen on the corner. Under his breath he identifies them to me, "Albert Schweitzer and Florence Nightingale."

It still amazes and amuses me, all these mortals with immortal names. Jimi Hendrix, one eyed and white haired, plays guitar and sings old songs on the street. Calamity Jane collects scrap metal in a big truck that's mostly scrap metal itself. John Henry rides shotgun for her.

Then I hear rolling thunder from further uptown and realize I've allowed myself to be distracted by this city

Suddenly I am probed by a stranger. I block and get probed again. They’re trying to see what I see, to find out where I am. Immediately after that, I receive a command from Calithurn. "Jack, get back here, now!"

At that same moment there is a yellow flash and Lionel Standler appears at the wheel of his cab. With a dead cigar stub in his mouth and a cap pulled down over his eyes, Lionel too has taken a name from the legendary past: the original was an actor who played cab drivers in old movies.

He has become chauffeur for the House of Calithurn. I'd told him to stay out of sight after he'd driven me down here this morning. I help Caravaggio haul himself into the back seat and jump in beside him as the cab takes off.

Deftly swerving around pits in the street, jumping only once onto the sidewalk to avoid a fresh rubble heap on Eighth Avenue; Lionel rolls towards the park and the Palace Calithurn.

The city, Gotham, is a hodgepodge of trash built on the ruins of wonders. Wherever two streets cross at least one of the four buildings on the corners will have been reduced to a pile of rubble years ago and left that way. The lights go off at odd hours of the day and night.

Old men with lined faces and beards will point up to where silver spires once pierced the sky. Women can be gotten to talk of the wonderland of stores that existed here in their youth. They sit on broken benches in a park where an arch has collapsed and a gibbet stands ready and waiting. They say that at night music could once be heard from the open doors of a thousand clubs and blasting out of car radios and that musicians played on subway platforms under the streets.

The life I lived in the Maxee was not so far removed from the ones I see around me. My mother came from Gotham decades ago in human terms; years as the Fey reckon it, when it was a powerful and prosperous city.

In Elfland she met and lost my father, a Fey who rose to high rank and abandoned us. She owned The Careless Rapture, a café in the Maxee district and left it to me when she died.

It was there that Calithurn found me when he was having trouble with his father, Clathurin, the King Beneath the Hill. He hid out in my bedroom upstairs from the café when the King's officers were looking for him.

And I was the only one he took with him when he fled from that place of well ordered magic and quiet oppression to the gut-wrenching stench and glimpses of grandeur, the chaos and chimeras of the mortal world and the city of Gotham.

It has never happened before but I've had two separate Foretellings of Calithurn and my future. Both are vivid but both can not be true. In one we ride through the city on winged horses to the cheers of the crowds. In the other we stand on a hill in the wind and rain surrounded by our enemies with no hope of escape. Lately, the second has seemed the most likely.

 Cal has told me many times that we will not go back; surrender does not enter into it. We will face death right here, the two of us. I no longer think he really believes this.

                     2.

From a few blocks away, I can see the Palace Calithurn bathed in Glamour and the noonday sun. Flecks of light, like bits of diamonds, shine in the black stone surface. The flags of the prince, a silver unicorn leaping over a blue globe with the inscription in Elvish, I Invite Your Envy, fly in a constant magic breeze above the turrets.

Lionel stops when I tell him to. "There may be trouble. Keep out of sight," I say, "Be ready to take Caravaggio back to his studio."

What magic I have is passive. Prepared for troubles today, I wear my favorite Fey clothing and my most precious ornaments and jewelry. I have a wallet with sixty thousand dollars in local currency in the pouch pocket of my riding britches. In my jacket pocket is a rap gun that can knock down ten men at fifty paces. In my right boot is a jump knife that will come to my hand from three feet away. 

When the earth moved and the city fell, some parts that were built on solid rock or saved through fate stood while all else went down.  The big old buildings that remain on the west side of the overgrown park are like armed forts, like compounds, where the magnates of the city live. 

It was through Calithurn's cleverness or the kind of instinct for ruling that he'd inherited from his father that he had ensorcelled this palace among the castles of the wealthy and powerful. Almost as soon as we arrived, he took a devastated building, not much more than a pile of rubble and through magic and enchantment raised this breath-taking, infuriating place.

It lies so close to the headquarters of the Bank of Shanghai which owns the city's future and to the home of Santee, the boss who makes and unmakes mayors, that no one dares to assault it or bomb it from the air. A tank lying smashed in the street is testimony to mortal frailty and the eternal vigilance of Lord Calithurn.

Caravaggio pauses for a moment pointing his camera up. "Chutzpa," he mutters, "Hubris. Balls beyond those of mortal men."

As we approach the front gates, the building shimmers for a moment. Only I notice that the Fey Glamour has faltered.

The guards who keep back the constant throngs of favor seekers and gawkers call themselves Fess Parker and John Wayne. Parker is a tall thin man in buckskin and a raccoon cap, one blue eye squinting against the sun, the other wide and clear. He cradles an AK47. The other man is husky, hands like hammers, guns strapped on both hips. His eyes are hidden in the shadow of his Stetson brim. But Wayne telegraphs in his blunt, artless way that he's staring at your every move.

They nod, almost bow, to me and wave along my companion who pauses to film them. We pass through the gates into the courtyard where the magic horses, Bellephron and Callistro, snort and flap their wings.

Not two months ago, Cal and I rode these chimeras out of Elfland and into this city. I argued back then that we should let them go home and make ourselves inconspicuous, live among the people and get some sense of this place. Cal would have none of this. He is a prince. So we lived in this palace he wrought and we made ourselves known and envied.

After that first assault failed, the magnates of the city didn't dare attack us. But there were ones in Elfland, enemies of his father, who were happy to find the prince alone except for his half-breed boyfriend. At first Calithurn slapped them away. Now they have returned in numbers.

Inside, on the main stairs, Selesta sweeps past us, her small ears drawn back, and hisses her defiance. An actress, a singer, Calithurn's newest mistress, she still thinks that I'm jealous when all I am is disappointed. About his favorites of the moment, Cal told me, "Mortal toys, Jack, nothing more."

Whereas I, only part mortal, would count as only partly a toy.

I hear what sounds like distant thunder. The palace gives a small lurch and I see us again, Calithurn and myself, just the two of us standing with our horses on a hill with wind and rain and our enemies all round us.

We find Cal in the roof garden sprawled on the longest couch in all of Gotham. He stands and embraces me and for a moment with his golden hair and dark eyes he is the lover I first knew, the one who could suddenly appear swinging in my bedroom window and who, when he departed, would stride across the dawn sky waving farewell.

We came to middle earth, to this city, to form an alliance with the wronged and desperate mortals. With them, we said, we would return to the land of the Fey and break the hold of Clathurin, the King Beneath the Hill, and the father of Cal. Our idea was naïve and thus dangerous.

Where all was sunshine a few minutes before, clouds have rolled in. I find myself deflecting a mental probe from not that far away, and then deflecting another. These aren't attempts to communicate. The Fey who have reached out are trying to smash their way into my consciousness.

Calithurn's eyes flicker and I know he's feeling the same thing. Then he closes his eyes and with arms outstretched, turns 360 degrees. Briefly the probes cease, the sky lightens.

 I'd forgotten about Caravaggio. But he's still present, still filming. I turn to introduce him.

And I see in the man's eyes his desire for Calithurn. It's plain that my lord has conquered this mortal artist, this pot bellied man whose scars are the most interesting thing about his body.

My Calithurn's lip curls. He shows the two of us a house in a neighborhood of similar houses, a fat, fairly happy looking little boy on a tricycle, an ordinary couple smiling at what is obviously their child.

As we see the images we are told: Louis Falco, born in Bethpage fifty years ago, child of a civil servant and a dentist. They never understood why you took the name Caravaggio. You blight this world. Turn that camera off or you and it will be a puddle on the floor."

I catch the anger in Caravaggio's eyes, the contempt in Calithurn's glance and step between them. With my lord in such a mood, expressing his rage would be fatal for the mortal.

At that moment, the attack begins again. Thunder rolls and lightning splits the sky. One probe after another hits us. This distracts Calithurn enough that his Glamour, the magic that holds the palace together, flickers. I hear the building groan.

"We need to get everybody out before people are hurt," I say. "We're drawing fire and putting them in danger."

Calithurn shrugs, "It is time we set out on our travels," he says and sounds almost bored.

I yell for the palace to be evacuated and we head for the stairs. The building shakes as we descend. In the courtyard Bellephron and Callistro stamp and unfurl their wings. Servants stream past. Chunks of stone fall around us. Selesta is there with a suitcase full of what she considers to be valuables. Calithurn mounts Bellephron and lifts her up without ceremony. I'm on Callistro when the gates open and we canter out into the street.

"Get the people away from this place," I hear myself shouting. Fess Parker and John Wayne and the other guards force the crowds back. The horses spread their wings and glide across the street and into the park.

I hear a roar and a collective gasp and look back. My lord has abandoned his toy. Without his attention, the Palace is gone, disappeared in a cloud of dust. The rubble we first found is all that remains. I spot Caravaggio filming it all.

                        3.

     Entering the park, I know that Calithurn is going back to Elfland and that his time in Gotham has been a kind of royal tantrum, his talk of helping the mortals was idle chatter. Cal has been my lover and is my lord. I will be loyal to him and true while he is here. But as I've fallen out of love with him, I've fallen in love with this city.

We pause on a grassy rise and it's somewhat like what the Foretelling showed me. But that was a wilderness and a blasted heath and this is an overgrown park with buildings or the ruins of buildings visible through the trees, with Selesta whimpering and the remains of squatters' camps underfoot.

It's dark, though, with the wind blowing rain as I'd foreseen and I can see figures, some mounted on winged steeds, in the trees before us. This is the beginning of the road to Elfland and we are not going to get through it without a fight. Cal looks around and it occurs to me that he has run out of ideas and is waiting to be rescued.

Then I'm hit by mental probes, one after another. I've never been punched repeatedly in the face but that's what I think of when I can't block all of them and some get through. I feel bits of memory, my mother's tired smile, my father's constant surprise at his half mortal son, the streets of the Maxee where I grew up, being yanked out of my skull.   

Someone catches images from my Foretelling, sees as I saw the pair of us surrounded in the wind and rain. Someone else finds the fear I feel as this happens and twists it. Poor Callistro, whom I'd been trying to protect, gets spooked and rises up in terror, bucks and throws me.

Then I'm on the ground fallen on my right shoulder. There is shooting pain, my limbs are jerking and my head is banging up and down. There's blood in my throat, my left eye is clouded and my shoulder feels like it's broken.

Cal is standing over me broadcasting, "Off of him you cowards! Who will fight me? Let each of you sons of bitches challenge me one at a time!" And I know this is the end of us and want to be on my feet beside him.

Then all at once with nothing first, there is a huge bang and bright light. The rain is gone and a great voice bellows, 'WHO DARES DO THIS TO MY SON?"

Cal is silent, staring and I manage to half rise and look where he does. King Clathurin and all his power are here, thousands of Fey with their armor glittering. Clathurin is a big man but at this moment, he is gigantic.

"STAND FORTH AND FACE ME," he commands and waves his scepter wand. When I look over to the trees, there are bodies strewn about on the grass and none of them are moving.

 King Clathurin looks around for a moment then he turns and comes to Prince Calithurn who steps forward. They embrace and Clathurin's host raises their weapons in salute.

I struggle to my feet when I see the king walking away with his arm around his son. And I understand that Calithurn's expedition to Gotham was just a way of getting the attention of The King under the Hill.

 The presence of so much Glamour makes my eye clear, stops the bleeding in my mouth and the pain in my shoulder.

Cal hasn't even looked back. I'm having trouble thinking. But I understand that if I did return, he and I will not be together. I will live again in the Maxee, the great demimonde, like my mother and all the other past and present lovers of the Fey. I will become one of the local legends. "That half breed was the lover of Calithurn. Long ago, they went off to mortal lands together."

Selesta trails after Lord Calithurn not understanding that she's already forgotten just as I am. I wonder if my old coffee house the Careless Rapture is still there and if they will think to give it to her. 

Would I have gone back with them if Clathurin had taken me in his arms as he did his son? Probably. But that wasn't going to happen. I am a half-breed who has become inconvenient.

Will I follow Cal if he turns and gestures for me? No. I am going to remain here with the other chimera.

Then, as suddenly as he appeared, King Clathurin is gone, along with Calithurn and the rest, gone with not a trace of their Glamour left behind.

     And I'm alone in this strange land, feeling like the insides have been knocked out of me. The Fey do not laugh and do not cry and I inherited that from my father. I did not cry at my mother's death and I do not cry at this.

It strikes me that the futures I foresaw for Cal and myself may just have been scenes from movies that hadn't yet been made. At that moment, the Foretelling takes me again.

I see myself in high summer with the fox boy and some of the others from the studio. We are on a sidewalk walking down to the river. I am dark-tanned, not ephemeral in the least, dressed like the other street kids in nothing but my baggy shorts and with my hair tied up under a blue head bandana. It would seem to be late summer, four or five months from this moment. And I'm too dizzy and confused to know what to make of it.

"Jackie, you look like you're lost," I hear Caravaggio say. He's right beside me but sounds like he's far off and under water. "You took quite a fall there."

He turns me around and I see the yellow cab up on the grass. Lionel helps me into the back seat. Caravaggio gets in on the other side and we make a U turn.

     "It doesn't seem like he can take care of himself," Lionel says "His boyfriend's got enemies that would love to pick him clean. No doubt off him."             

None of this feels like it has anything to do with me. We drive out of the park. A mob of scavengers is crawling over the rubble of the Palace Calithurn, a couple of them spot the cab, one or two have guns. But Lionel is too fast for them and speeds away.

     "I can hide Jackie among the crew at the studio," Caravaggio says. "But we need to make him less noticeable."

     "Here's a place." The cab swerves and suddenly it's twilight in an alleyway between two buildings. I notice that Caravaggio has attached a small camera to the cab ceiling. Lionel opens my door of the cab. "OK Jackie," he says, "Hand over the clothes and valuables."

     "Why?" I try to go for the rap pistol.

     Caravaggio says, "Because there are two men and a boy in this cab," and pins me. Lionel pulls my ibex leather jacket and silk shirt off over my head. There's a burst of pain in my shoulder and I cry out. 

     "Look at those bruises!" Lionel says.

     "Nothing broken anymore or he'd be screaming. He heals fast is my guess. That black eye is fading already. I think maybe there's a slight concussion," says Caravaggio.

     As they talk they're working on me. My head spins, pain shoots through my shoulder and I can't stop them. In moments the rings on my fingers, the one my mother gave me, the one that my father owned, are drawn off my hands. My watch and bracelets and earrings and the gold collar around my neck, love gifts of Calithurn get taken.

     "Make a move for that jump knife Jackie and I'll break your other arm!" Lionel says. My boots of Elvin leather, the hose woven in Moir, the belt with the heavy silver buckle, are stripped off me.

     I hold onto the waist of my riding britches and beg to keep them. Even these knee pants would be a small sign of status and there's the wallet and money in the side pouch. It's just about all I have left.

     "I looked forward to doing this," Caravaggio says and yanks them off me. "And this," he adds riffling through my wallet and papers. Lionel pulls down my under shorts to make sure I haven't got anything else to steal but lets me keep those.

     "A young man of affairs wearing a small fortune on his back one minute," says Lionel, gathering everything up, "A boy with nothing in the world but his silk drawers the next."

     It's a warm day but I understand what's been done to me and feel like I've been run through with an icicle. Even if I could find the way, I can't go back to Elfland like this and I have no one here to turn to.

     Caravaggio pulls my hair into a tight knot in back, ties a bandanna on my head. He pops open a palm sized screen and shows me the picture the camera is capturing. I'm amazed to see myself as I appeared in the Foretelling.

     Caravaggio, murmurs, "You think only Fey can read minds, Jackie Boy? I've seen how you looked at my crew, at the boys on the street. You were curious but disdainful. Now you're going to find out about that life first hand."

     Driving downtown, Caravaggio, speaks softly. "If we hadn't gotten you out of the park, you'd be dead by now. We could have left you in that alleyway and you'd be dead by midnight. You're still alive and I'm going to keep you that way. You're going to learn how to survive in this world." 

     He has his arm around me and massages my neck like I'm a nervous show animal, and says, "With what I shot today and my half of the take from what you had on you, I'm going to make the greatest film to come out of this city in a decade."

     I want to ask him why I've been robbed and humiliated and what is going to become of me. Then we arrive outside the studio and Lionel opens the cab door. I realize that in the course of an afternoon I've lost everything and now am nobody. And anyone who sees me from now on will know that. I flinch away and want to hide.

     But Caravaggio forces me out onto the sidewalk saying, "Get used to it Jackie. The first time you ever ordered me around, which was the first time we met, I told Lionel I'd lead you into my studio dressed just as you are right now."

     "And I thought you were crazy," Lionel laughs.  Before he leaves, he says, "Go easy on him Caravaggio; he always tried to do right by me and the others."

     Caravaggio has hold of my good arm or I'd try somehow to cover myself. I did not cry for my mother or for Lord Calithurn and I do not cry at this. Though if I was mortal, I think I would.

     This world has traps a Fey could never imagine. This morning I strode down this street and heads turned. Now the pavement is rough on my bare feet and I need to watch out for broken glass. In the Foretelling I walk on it easily.

     Ordinary passersby pay almost no attention to one like me.  But when the feathered girl opens the door I see in her eyes awe that her boss has magic that can turn an arrogant Fey into this cringing street urchin.

     The rest of the chimeras, more than I ever guessed were there, gather as I'm led by the hand through the studio. Some are astounded; some are highly amused that the well-heeled visitor of the morning has returned to the zoo, stripped and bruised, as the newest addition to the menagerie. I hear giggles and whispers as I'm shown to Caravaggio's bed.

     In the Foretelling these are my friends and I can look people in the eye. But that's a future possibility. There's more wonder and terror in any square foot of Gotham than in all of Elfland.

      Exhaustion is about to take me when I hear Caravaggio say, "His name is Jackie Boy and he's come from a long way off to find his true home among us."  Then he tells the story of how I lost everything I thought I had.

END

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 I'll be back in early December with a GlitterShip original!

[Music plays out]