GlitterShip

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

LEARNED PEOPLE is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL

Learned People

by Chelsea Eckert

She's on her bed, on her knees, leaning against the window so that her face is pressed against it. Her fingers are interlinked across her gut, and she's dead. Absolutely. Paleness clings to her like dust on a moth's wing.

For a while I lean against the wall. The paint is a lumpy, intestine pink, which is/was Tess's favorite color. Hard whimpers push their way out of me. I am, for a moment, blind and deaf. A wolf pup at the tit. When I feel more awake I push myself steady and climb onto the bed. Tess doesn't blink. Her eyes are on the sky. One lid twitches.

No, not dead.

Full transcript after the cut.

Our story this week is a GlitterShip original: "Learned People" by Chelsea Eckert.

Chelsea Eckert is currently attending UNC Greensboro for her MFA in creative writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared (or will appear) in over twenty-five venues. Stalk her like a hungry catamount at http://chelseaeckert.me.

Learned People

by Chelsea Eckert

She's on her bed, on her knees, leaning against the window so that her face is pressed against it. Her fingers are interlinked across her gut, and she's dead. Absolutely. Paleness clings to her like dust on a moth's wing.

For a while I lean against the wall. The paint is a lumpy, intestine pink, which is/was Tess's favorite color. Hard whimpers push their way out of me. I am, for a moment, blind and deaf. A wolf pup at the tit. When I feel more awake I push myself steady and climb onto the bed. Tess doesn't blink. Her eyes are on the sky. One lid twitches.

No, not dead.

I'm thinking: Has she eaten? When did I sell her the Drops? What day did she have one?

"Come on," I tell her. Panic twinkles under my lungs. "It's Eve. Wake up. It's time for—school. For pre-calc. Mr. Arvo. Mr. Arvo loves us. Loved."

I haven't been to Mr. Arvo's house, but he's likely in the same position as Tess. In the same stupor. Everyone at school, far as I know, dropped out a couple weeks after I started selling the CosmiDrops to them. Administrators, teachers, the kids. The kids first. I didn't really mourn anybody until more than just the bottom-feeding pipe-bomber types stopped attending.

"Tess," I whisper. A name is a kind of, you know, power. A Czech man, I read in Reader's Digest or somewhere, once brought his wife out of a five-year coma just by saying her name a hundred times every day. I try to do the same right now and I lose track somewhere in the forties. Wouldn't have mattered.

So I shake her. It's like throwing rocks into a pond. Stillness is the natural way of things. A body at rest, and such. But—maybe—

I press my face between her shoulder blades, gripping the sides of her arms. My dad Pe and myself—both of us to blame for this, squarely.

But—no. It's not our fault.

I kiss Tess on the back of the head. Her curls lay on my lips, and she smells, just oh-so, of her flavored cigars, her contraband. My mind spins, drifts. Becomes a wave, swarming. Yet it never really touches down on any shore, any subject, least of all fate.

People should have helped Pe and me.

Human beings can do that easy.

Hunger. Okay.

Real, multiple-day hunger, pick-at-the-dirty-plates hunger, because you can't afford the food—that was me and Pe, after my mother died. Not too many folks in America know any kind of shit about that, I don't think.

You ask: how do you suddenly go hungry, nice-family-nice-house?

Follow me here.

Your monthly rent for the two-bed-two-bath with the expansive yard might be $1500 a month, and your father, alone, only makes maybe $1700 a month from various patent royalties. And it goes to the rent and it goes to the water bill and it goes to keep up the appearance of comfort.

And you yourself can't find a job, especially because you can't drive, because you can't focus on the tests, because of those hot fists in your gut. And your father is afraid to drive you anywhere unnecessary because the car might get all fucked up, which you can't afford and—etcetera.

Your mother never had life insurance or any kind of contingency plan. No one did, no one does. Tragedy collapses on other folks.

So: your technically-unemployed-but-not-really super-inventive father gets to brainstorming. A million-dollar idea, he believes, lies deep within him and has since birth, like—eggs, inside infant ovaries.

At dawn and dusk me and Pe passed each other on the stairs and that was all. Fatigue really drilled into us, broke up our minds, so that little bits of ourselves floated around in our veins, our bodies, never really congealing. I usually walked to school, and tried to let myself go into the wind, but exhaustion, like muscles to bones, sticks.

Then one evening Pe called me up to the attic, which was his office-slash-lab-slash-mancave-slash-library. To put all the bumbling professor and/or frazzled inventor tropes to rest, maybe, my dad kept it sterile and dignified, dustless though expansive, his books arranged alphabetically by author-then-title, the caged mice and rats chattering along with something like peace, the miniature kitchen wiped down.

Pe turned to me with a tray of upturned lollipops in his hands. The pops looked like little bits of topaz, black and blue and silver, and at first I didn't grasp that they were really edible. They were, it seemed, spheres containing the universe and all its stars, gorgeous in their detailed smallness.

"They're called CosmiDrops," Pe said. He is, I think, a bit disarming, because you can't tell his seriousness from his cheeriness, his jokes from his demands.

"Okay."

"When they're ready—a week or two at most, Evie—you're going to go selling them door-to-door."

"I don't have to try them, do I?" I asked, because—something about their shape, their size, murdered my appetite. Couldn't tell you why at the time. I guess—you wouldn't eat a flower, would you? Out of a crack in the road? Even if you were starved—how brutal would that be? They were that nice, that frighteningly nice to look at. But I trusted Pe more than myself.

"No, Evie. You're just going to be the salesperson." Pe's eyes fluttered. "Remember when you got that one Girl Scout patch, for the cookies? Wonderful times. And wonderful you. You were born under winning stars and you have what your mother, God rest her soul, would have called 'a mouth full of coins. '"

I realized then I hadn't lately been thinking anything like, What would Mom do right about now? And definitely nothing like, What did she think before the semi hit her sedan? It was just me there, physical and on the earth, alone-but-never-lonely like a river good for fishing.

"You could peddle these to everyone," Pe continued. "Successfully. Twenty-five per tray." He leaned in and put a hand on my bicep. "But you are not, under any circumstances, to eat one. They are expensive to make."

When I pried a CosmiDrop out of the tray and held it up to the window, it shined silver pinpricks onto Pe's cheeks.

"Pe, no one's gonna buy these," I said. But he had already tucked his chin in, his eyes overcast with something lukewarm.

At Tess's house I spend three, four hours trying to get her to eat. In health class we'd watched a movie about child abuse for some godawful reason and I remember that, when little kids came in starved, hospitals would smear peanut butter in their mouths. They'd stop refusing food after that. So I do that for Tess—there's only Nutella and that seems like it would do just as well.

I hold the back of her head, prying her mouth open like I would for a petulant elderly cat. In goes the spoon. She gags. I pull it out, but a bit of the hazelnut stuff is on her tongue. It has to do for now.

Tess turns back to the window, her eyes beautifully wide. I don't know where the rest of the Thorsbys are, her parents and older brother. Maybe one was a Zero and got out of town. But then—I sold six boxes of CosmiDrops to them. Six. They wanted to help. So much. Still—if they had helped Pe and me the right way—

Not our fault. If we'd had help—

At the edge of Tess's bed I sit and eat the Nutella out of the jar for a while with all the weariness of a drunk.

"I'll figure this out for you," I say to Tess. The backs of my eyes hurt. "I'll figure it out for your fam, because they're good people. The five of us. We'll—I don't know."

Only after I head into the darkening street do I realize I left out my father.

Pe had mice up there in the attic. The ones with the little blood-colored eyes that are, like, two dollars each at the pet store. Test subjects. They died a few days after Pe revealed the Drops to me. I poked them in their enclosures one morning and they were as thin and light and yellow as old paper. They'd also made no waste at all, no shit, nothing. Not in a whole week.

"High fructose corn syrup," Pe said, "has that effect on small mammals, don't you worry, Evie. If they didn't die, I'd be concerned, ha ha."

Later, on the phone, Tess said: "It's happened. Your papa's gone bubbly. You should call somebody. I don't know who, but like—"

"I'm hungry," I said.

"Come over for dinner, honey. When was the last time you ate? Tell me." I heard the flick of a lighter at the other end. Tess always did this, lit up hidden in her garden shed among all those earth-smells and dead bulbs and rust, and she was, in my head, like a sole skyscraper peering over the thickest forest imaginable. Something natural and something not, fused together and shiny. She had—made sense, from the day I met her, knee-to-knee on the bleachers at a homecoming game.

"This morning? I had, uh. The saltines in the back in the cupboard. And then your burrito at school. I'll be okay—"

"We should adopt you."

"I know. But then we'd be sisters."

Ha ha ha. Laughter. Good times. Then I said, "Everything'll be okay when the welfare starts a-rolling in. When we get approved."

"If. You can't depend on that. Come over for dinner, now."

"When," I said.

After my mother died Tess kept saying to me shit like, "Pe should use his hands for more than picking his ass." She thought Pe was—eccentric. Like the dad from Beauty and the Beast or something. How could you even think that about a real human being? Then once or twice she threatened to call the cops on him and I pleaded with her, promised her a thousand things I don't even remember now.

But I guess my girl had her reasons.

Look. Before school even started, before the Drops, Tess came over one day. She made a big fuss over me as usual, made me eat all this chalky protein shit her brother gulped down for football like a horse at the trough. Then we went and lay on my bed for a while.

Twilight fell down in no time. I was in a sweaty haze—that sort-of foggy, oatmeal-thick place you get into when you're content. My head was tucked between Tess's shoulder blades, but all her belly muscles under my arms were tense.

"Hear that?" Tess asked.

I resurfaced from unconsciousness. Low vibrations seemed to be rocking the bed and the two of us and in fact the whole house. When I say low I mean super low; it tickled my insides and pricked my guts like the deepest bass drop possible. It was inside me, uncomfortably.

She got up and pulled me up, too. We both looked to the ceiling, which seemed to be the source of the vibration. Someplace upstairs.

Tess said, "Your pops is dicking around up there."

That wasn't fair. Half that shit you see on late-night television, advertised—half that shit is Pe. He just made some bad deals. Few to no royalties, which would have meant we had a lot more money forever. All lump sums, and I don't know where that bit went, but it wasn't with us, and it hadn't been with my mom either. Still: not his fault.

I wanted to go back to bed but Tess left the room and approached the attic stairs. By the time she got to the trapdoor the vibration had stopped. I yelled for Pe, and he yelled back that he was sorry for all the noise, and that he'd stopped now, for the night.

"I don't like this," Tess said, hands on her hips.

"What? What's there not to like?"

"You didn't hear it. The tone. When the house was shaking."

I rubbed my brow.

"The tone," Tess said, clutching my elbows, and I recoiled a bit. She was not a person who touched much except with total passion. "The tone, that's all I can think to describe—it's like an out-of-tune guitar, if the strings—were made of pipes. Thick lead pipes."

"A house shakes, it makes fucked up noises," I said, and wrapped my fingers in her curls. "Back to bed, okay?"

"Thick lead pipes like the kind they used in the Roman Empire," she replied. A long breath flapped out of her, and she laughed. Spell broken. "God, honey. Whatever your dad's doing, it's got me crazy. I need to light soon, I think."

She never did fall back asleep that evening, though.

Next morning before school I worked on the crossword in the paper. I couldn't really concentrate—hunger had neatly squatted in my stomach again. It was always a trespasser. But I liked to distract myself. I'd found a lot of ways to do it.

I said, "Four letters, starts with Q. 'Never winning.'"

Pe sat across from me with a glass of cloudy water, looking overall like an old war machine decommissioned. He'd always been boyishly scrawny—I got comments about it from enamored classmates—but now I saw his age, the way the grief had whittled him. He said, "Yesterday I tried to go to the food bank behind Saint Mary's, but—I couldn't, Evie. I couldn't."

"I know."

"They'll approve us for food stamps. I know. When they do we'll make a bunch of pizzas, how's that."

"Four letters, starts with—oh, quitters. Quit. Uh-huh," I said, scribbling it down. It was the first Tuesday of the month. Beef taco day at school. God. My mom used to say none of the meat they used was real, that it was all soy bits, the stuff not given to prison inmates; my friends, minus Tess, joked it was llama parts, bear parts, gator parts. Into the trash it would go, untouched. So much assumption in that motion. It felt evil.

"Did you put all the trays in the car?" Pe asked. When I nodded, he said, "Odd, that the Drops didn't attract you. But then, you didn't hear the People talking last night, either. Did Tess?"

"Did Tess what?"

"Hear them talking."

For a good forty-five seconds I tried to ken Pe's meaning. He said, "The Learned People. Did she hear them?"

"She heard—the rumbling, whatever it was. It sounded like pipes or something, she said. I don't know. I don't really remember, but she seemed all, like, concerned."

"You must be a Zero, then."

I laid the paper down flat, and I could feel my face wad up like tissue.

"No," Pe said, "no, not a zero, Tess, a Zero. You are not sensitive to the Learned People. They told me some humans aren't." Finally, Pe turned to me. Forty-two and already moon-eyed, water-eyed. "They'll like to meet you."

"Pe."

"I'm telling you this because I see no sense in lying to you, Evie. I never have and I never will."

By the time I got to pre-calc Pe and his words were dead lightbulbs at the back of my memory. I could barely recall the morning. I figured that was what growing up was like.

The CosmiDrops sold gorgeously. I laid a few on teachers and friends and people saw them and were drawn to them. Kind-of like how dachshunds, nose to the ground, circle a single spot to dig at. Our garage housed about a hundred packages—I got rid of all of them.

How I did this: I was fast and I worked all day, in school or out. Because—pity loosens wallets and pockets and checkbooks. I couldn't stand it. Couldn't. Made myself dead tired, just so I could go home and sleep away everyone's shit consciences. So that's how, though this town is, maybe, four thousand folks give or take, probably everyone got a Drop.

Far as I can see, not a single person resisted, except myself. If another Zero lived here—they probably went a-running a while ago.

I wouldn't have had to do this if people had just helped us the normal way.

Cars still zoom down the road in front of the Thorsbys' house. They're from surrounding towns. The noise of the engines crushes me every time—that suddenly expanding thunder, rising up, crushing the krrup of bird and the solemn rf rf rf of everyone's dogs locked up inside and dwindling. I don't try to flag anyone down for help. I close my eyes, instead. Start to walk. Try to find pain in my body. You can assign some meaning to hurt. But nothing's there.

Well: animals don't seem to like the Drops. There's a miracle.

I decide this is an apocalypse. I'm pretty sure it's just our town on its knees like the Lord Himself meant to saunter to earth at any given minute. But apocalypse, you see, means uncovering. And I don't think I knew much about myself or my dad until this started happening. We are practically naked now.

Blocks pass, dead. On the street behind Main, I see a little kid, maybe seven, on her knees outside of a ramshackle apartment complex, her gaze at the sky. She has the same sharp little eyes Tess does. Because it gets really cold at night now I pick her up. Grocery-bag-type dead weight. The door to the second apartment is unlocked and I slip her inside, but don't dawdle. An utterly sacrilegious smell clings to the complex and I realize it's slithering up from the whole town, has been for days now.

Then Main shifts by me, with its uncomfortably adorable Ma-and-Pa shops. I can't handle looking into the windows. Instead I put my hands in my pockets and continue on, head down like a bull or a goat, stubbornly, horns out.

The lights are on at my house, even in the attic. And I think: doesn't the electric company keep graphs or measures or something of all this? The water people? Hasn't anyone noticed our total ejection from society? It's been four days or so since—I mean, is it like in movies, where some fat man writes all the weird stats off as an error?

Well: I know who could answer that.

Upstairs I go. The house is quiet. I know Pe's still home because I can't imagine he'd scamper off like a dog from—this, whatever this is, the Drops situation. It passes through my mind that maybe he's some kind of serial killer, having faked his way through life in human costume. But—no, it's nothing that simple. Nothing that—cinematic.

As I get to the trapdoor the vibrations begin—the ones I felt when Tess was over. The ones that seemed to thrive inside me and multiply, like bugs, like—something nasty. I remember what Tess said: little poison pipes. The house is still silent, though, dead silent, and I rush up into the attic, through the door, calling for Pe.

An awful shadow subsumes me, made of—not darkness. Not the right word. Not even shadow really covers it. If a prism could show us a spectrum made of various kinds of nothing, shades invisible to the eyes of natural things—that. That's curled up in the attic. Nothing around me has form, not even Pe (whom I sensed was nearby, like you sense things with your neck-hair), not his desk, not his books.

Pinpricks of light trail along my fingertips, and against the void they're delicious, warm. Then I sense a sudden and loving heat against my belly and lungs, exactly where the vibrations lived just moments earlier, and I'm—not comforted, but—it all feels normal. As if this show of darkness was organic and natural, like the growth of corn in the fields or a dog running away to die.

It's alright, all of it, and so, good, in its own way. Everything going as planned, as it would, forever.

I can't see any faces. Just their consciousness, on my fingers—yes, I sense lives. Lives and a great collection of knowledge, truths, facts, uncovered bits of the universe, stretching on inside a well-kept castle of infinite capacity. The Learned People. Something is feminine about them, something like the presence of a mother, a wife, even.

Then—something—and the attic returns.

Pe sits on the floor near his desk, his knees curled under his chin like a kid who hates the world. He slips a Drop between his lips and breathes out. But I dive at him. He can't leave me here, no, wouldn't, couldn't, because we're human, we butt against nature, we're nobody's experiment, never, never. When I push on his cheeks the Drop pops onto the floor with a click.

"They were going to come for us," Pe says, and he's weeping. "Everyone's looking up and waiting for the ships, do you see, Evie? We'd have been like rockets escaping gravity."

I shake him, because that's what you do in the movies. Crying, crying—what do you do when your dad cries? I slap him. He meets my eyes with a betrayed look.

"I'm going to call the cops," I say. "It's over. This shit is over. Pe. Pe. Pe. Daddy. Dad."

"They can't do anything, Evie!"

"Daddy."

I lay my head in his lap. He lays his nose on my shoulder. And it may be inappropriate or whatever but that's what we do, sitting there. Two, three hours, maybe, ruined, the two of us. Then a great rumble storms through the street, the house, Pe and me, mingling with his sobs, and I know what has happened, I know it like I know that all things get older and waste away.

When it's dark I pull out my phone.

"If we'd taken the Drops," Pe moans. "We'd have. I. I. Evie. Evie."

Sirens. I come out with my hands up, because that seems like the right thing to do. Cars everywhere, noise. A few cops dart around. Securing the perimeter, I guess. Took long enough, didn't they? They don't even know why everyone's disappeared and I'm not going to tell them. They'll look in houses and find not a soul, except my father and me. A modern Roanoke. Or the last man on earth and his daughter of doubt and pettiness.

One of the burlier cops rolls up to me as an ambulance slides into the street.

"I'm hungry," I say.

"Jesus Christ. What's happened? No, actually, no—don't say anything—hey, Lieutenant—"

"Do you think the Learned People will be good to them?"

"Ma'am," says the cop. He makes a settle down gesture. Some time passes. I stand there. They pull my dad out of the house on a stretcher, and his body is slack.

A blanket falls on my shoulders. I am directed to a police car. More and more official types are showing up. Men in dark suits like I've never seen before. The word bioterrorism bounces through the air. So does the phrase bureaucratic mess and trauma.

The seat is very hard. The window goes up, trapping a hard smell inside the car. Someone's smoked in here, and the thought of it makes me cry. I decide that we're all fuck-ups and what mighty fuck-ups we are. In my head I make a list of people who won't be alright: myself, Pe, maybe the first few folks who ate the Drops. I decide that the rest of the town has been saved. I decide that Tess has been saved.

END

“Learned People” is copyright Chelsea Eckert, 2016.

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

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

Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back soon with a reprint of "City of Chimeras" by Richard Bowes.

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Sarah’s Child

Susan Jane Bigelow

Once, I dreamed that I had a son named Sheldon, and my grief tore a hole in the fabric of the world.

In my dream I walked through the halls of an elementary school, and I went into the office. Everything was gray and blocky, but somehow not oppressive. I was certain, then, that it was the elementary school in my old hometown, and that I was both myself and also not myself.

Full transcript after the cut

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 28 for May 24, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is "Sarah's Child" by Susan Jane Bigelow, read by Amanda Ching.

Susan Jane Bigelow is a fiction writer, political columnist, and librarian. She mainly writes science fiction and fantasy novels, most notably the Extrahuman Union series from Book Smugglers Publishing. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine’s “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” issue, and the Lamba Award-winning “The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard,” among others. She lives with her wife in northern Connecticut, and can be found at the bottom of a pile of cats.

Amanda Ching is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Storm Moon Press, Candlemark & Gleam's Alice: (re)Visions, and every bathroom stall on I-80 from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. She tweets @cerebralcutlass and blogs at http://amandaching.wordpress.com.

Sarah’s Child

Susan Jane Bigelow

Once, I dreamed that I had a son named Sheldon, and my grief tore a hole in the fabric of the world.

In my dream I walked through the halls of an elementary school, and I went into the office. Everything was gray and blocky, but somehow not oppressive. I was certain, then, that it was the elementary school in my old hometown, and that I was both myself and also not myself.

I asked for Sheldon.

“Ms. Harp is here,” someone said, and then there he was. He was blond, maybe five or six, with a round face like my sister’s. He smiled toothily up at me.

I took his hand. “Come on, honey,” I said. “Let’s go.”

And then I woke up. Janet snored softly next to me.

I touched the space on my body where my womb would have been, if I’d been born with one, and ached.

It was a mistake to tell Janet.

“So you had a dream,” she said, crunching her toast. She ate it plain, no butter. “So what?”

She was wearing that muscle shirt that made me melt, and her short hair was a mess from sleep. Janet was athletic, butch and pint-sized, and she wore her queerness like a pair of brass knuckles. I was lucky to have her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It just seemed so real.”

“I dreamed I was a hockey player,” Janet said, popping the last piece of toast into her mouth. “But I ain’t one.”

“I know.” I stabbed at my breakfast, not feeling all that hungry. “Never mind.”

She came over and kissed the top of my head. “Sorry, babe. I know it bugs you sometimes.” She put her dishes in the sink. “You aren’t gonna start asking about sperm donors or anything, right? Did you freeze yours?”

“No,” I said. “And no. I didn’t.” There’d really been no point. When I had my surgery I’d been in the middle of the divorce with Liz. Kids were out of the question.

“Cool. You gonna be okay?”

I nodded.

“All right. I gotta hit the shower. See you at the game tonight!” She headed off to the shower, humming happily to herself. She usually took half an hour in there, so I’d be long gone by the time she came out. I poked at my scrambled eggs again, then tossed them out.

I couldn’t shake the dream, though, so I went through my day in a fog. People at work asked me if I was all right, and I just shook my head mutely. Sure. Fine, just a little haunted.

I didn’t go directly home that night. Instead, I drove the half hour north to Elm Hill, and parked outside the elementary school. School was long over, though a few kids played on the ball fields and ran around the swings.

I shut the car off and got out. There was a hint of fall in the air, though the leaves hadn’t turned yet. I walked through the playground, passing by my own ghosts on the steps, by the wall, on the baseball field, and up to the fence. There was a little rock there, smaller than I remembered. I sat on it, and thought about Sheldon.

This was silly. It was just a dream. I’d had dreams about motherhood before. Pregnancy, babies, those dreams came with the hormones. Everybody had them, or said they did.

So why wouldn’t this one let me go?

I sighed. Somewhere across the playground, a father with two daughters was watching me. I waved at him, and he turned quickly around again. Dads don’t like me.

Impulsively, I rummaged in my purse and found the little reporter’s notebook I kept handy. I’m not a reporter, I work in layout and design for the magazine, but somewhere along the line I’d picked up a few of their habits.

I pulled a pen out of my purse and started to write.

Hi Sheldon

My hand shook. What was I doing? This was stupid. There was no Sheldon.

But my traitor hand kept writing.

I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you had a nice day. I used to play on this rock when I was little, like you. I hope you have a lot of friends, and that you’re happy.

Your friend,

Sarah

I couldn’t bring myself to sign it ‘Mom.’

My phone chimed, and I pulled it out. There were two texts there. One was from Janet, wondering where I was. Guilty—I’d forgotten her game—I texted her back that I’d be there in about half an hour.

The other was from a number I’d never seen before. It was a weird combination of letters and numbers, and there was no name.

From: AC67843V-D

Hey I can take Sheldon Friday txt me back –D

Angry, I texted back—

Not funny, Janet

—and put the phone away. I folded the paper up and thought about chucking it away. Then I folded it again and stuck it in a little crack in the rock.

Maybe somehow it would find its way to him, wherever he was, and he’d leave me alone.

Janet was a little peeved that I’d missed the start of the game. She took softball seriously, and the fall league was special in some way that I’d tried my best not to understand. But I got there in time for the fourth inning, which meant I got to see her steal third base, so it wasn’t a total loss.

“Where were you?” she asked as we were downing beer and pizza with the team after.

“Just got held up,” I said. “At work. You know how it is.”

“They exploit you,” she said, pointing at me with the business end of a slice of pizza. “You shouldn’t let them do that. It’s cause you’re trans—” I winced. Tell the whole pizza joint, why don’t you? “—that they think they can take advantage, cause you’re desperate for work. You shouldn’t take it.”

“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”

“Damn it, Sarah,” said Janet. “You gotta stick up for yourself! You never do. You just let Liz roll away with your house and car and money, and you let your boss get all kinds of unpaid labor out of you. You need to grow a spine.”

And I let you boss me around, too, I thought, eating a slice of pizza. So what?

“You didn’t have to send me that text,” I said.

“What, I just wanted to know where you were!” she said.

“No, the other one. The Sheldon one? That was mean.”

She blinked. “I never sent you anything about Sheldon. Who’s Sheldon?”

That night I dreamed about driving around the streets of my hometown. The town was different in that way familiar things change in dreams, but I still knew it was Elm Hill.

I took a turn and pulled into the parking lot of a condo complex. “Home, home,” sang a little voice in the seat next to me. I looked over and there was Sheldon, smiling up at me. I got out of the car and walked around to his side, my heels clicking on the pavement. I opened the door and helped him out.

I glanced in the window, and saw reflected back a face that was and wasn’t mine.

I woke up, the feel of Sheldon’s cold little hand in mine burned into my memory.

My mother was no help at all.

“Your sister’s pregnant,” she announced when I called her over lunch.

“Again?” I asked. Patty seemed to get pregnant with alarming regularity. This would be her fourth.

“So she says. I hope it’s a summer baby. They could name her June. Such a pretty name. I wanted to name you June, if you’d been a girl.”

I’m a girl now, I thought, but didn’t say. “The baby would be born earlier than that, right? It’s only September.”

“Well, you never know. And think what an interesting story that would be! ‘This is my daughter June, she was born in May!’ Wouldn’t that be an interesting story?”

“Sure. How’s Dad?” I asked, quickly changing the subject.

“Same as ever,” she grumped, launching into a long story about how he was out with his golf buddies all the time and never home. Not that she wanted him home, of course.

I almost told her about Sheldon. He was still haunting me. But what would I have said?

Instead, I listened as she told me about Dad, passed judgment on the sorry state of my career, and questioned whether Janet was right for me. I made the appropriate noises at the appropriate times, and excused myself to go back to work when the time came.

That evening I found myself pulled back to the parking lot of the elementary school in Elm Hill, looking out over the playground and thinking wistfully of what might have been. Maybe I should find a therapist, I thought. Maybe I should get help.

I got out of the car and strolled across the field, trying not to look guilty. I didn’t see the dad from yesterday. I sat myself back down on the rock, and sighed. The piece of paper was still wedged into that crack.

This is ridiculous, I thought. Why was I even here?

I was lucky. I knew I was. I had a home, a cute girlfriend, and a job. I didn’t get abuse on the streets. I wasn’t young anymore and I was never pretty, but so what?

So what.

Why did I want what I could never, ever have so badly?

Suddenly furious, I ripped the paper out of the wedge in the rock. I was about to tear it to shreds when I noticed that the paper was a soft blue color. My notebook only had white lined.

Curious, I opened it up. There, in a child’s blocky script, was written:

HELLO

I like beinG on the Rock. I make Believe its a SPACE SHIP.

My mommy is nice and a DIKe and is coming to pick me up soon. Do you like Dinosars?

SHELDON

My hands began to shake. This had to be some trick. I turned the paper over, looking for signs, but there was only the name of the paper company on the back. “Bloomfield Paper - Made in the R.N.E.” was stamped next to a little pine tree flag. There was no other mark, nothing to indicate where this had come from.

I got out my pen and paper again, and wrote another note.

Hi Sheldon

I like space ships, and I like dinosaurs. I’m very glad your mommy is nice. I hope you had a nice day today, too.

Sarah

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Before I lost my nerve I wedged the note back into the rock, and left quickly.

I went back to the rock the next day, and sure enough, there was another blue paper stuck in the crack. This time it was a crude picture of a dinosaur, signed by Sheldon.

For Sara, it read, spelling my name wrong.

I smiled, touched, and tried not to think about what a creep I was being to somebody’s poor kid. I tucked the drawing into my purse.

Just then my phone rang, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I checked my phone; it was that same combination of letters and numbers as the text from yesterday had been. AC67843V-D.

Hesitantly, I answered it.

“H...hello?”

“Hey, June,” a man’s bored-sounding voice said. “I can’t take Sheldon on Friday after all. Sorry.”

Sheldon.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying and failing to keep the quavering out of my voice. “I’m not June.”

“What?” The voice on the other end sounded very confused. “Oh. Huh. Wrong number, I guess. You sure you’re… you sound just like her. Weird.”

“I’m Sarah,” I said.

“And you’re on your own phone?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Well, if you see June tell her David can’t pick up Sheldon Friday.”

The line went dead, leaving me shivering in the bright sunny afternoon.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to Janet snore, turning it all over in my mind.

At last I got up and paced, restless and weary at the same time.

I fixed myself a cup of tea and sat in the living room, surrounded by books, stacks of DVDs, my old board games and framed prints of the brassy 40s pin-up girls Janet was obsessed with. The place felt like us, and calmed me down a little.

I took the picture and the note Sheldon had sent me out of my purse, unfolded them, and smoothed them out on the coffee table in front of me.

“Hey,” Janet said. I jumped, knocking my tea onto the floor.

“I’m sorry!” I said, leaping up.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, smiling sleepily. “I’ll get some paper towels.”

I sat back down, trembling. Janet returned and mopped up the tea on the floor. “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say.

“Eh, that floor’s tough. I’ve spilled way worse on it.” Janet sat next to me and noticed the drawing and the note. She picked them up and looked them over. “What’re these?”

“Nothing,” I said too quickly. “Just some old things I found.”

Janet looked like she wanted to say something, but swallowed it. “Come back to bed,” she said eventually, and padded off back toward the bedroom.

I put the picture and the note away, and followed.

I finally fell asleep about 3 AM.

This time I dreamed I was at a café, talking with my mother. Except she wasn’t exactly my mother: she had longer, grayer hair, and was thinner and better dressed than my mother usually was.

“And I found it in his backpack,” I was saying, in a voice that wasn’t quite mine. “I thought he had a girlfriend or something. But doesn’t this look like an adult’s writing?”

She pushed a piece of paper across the table at my mother. I was somehow not surprised to see the note I’d written to Sheldon sitting there.

My mother picked it up and frowned that distinctive thoughtfully disapproving frown. “There’s no teacher there named Sarah?”

“None,” I confirmed. “He says he just finds it in the rock.”

“You should ask the principal to look into it,” my mother said. “Or tell your deadbeat ex. Wasn’t he supposed to take Sheldon today?”

“He was,” I sighed. “Then he backed out without telling me. He swears now that he did tell me, but I don’t know.”

“Does this have to do with that Janet woman?”

Janet?

“Ma, I told you, I don’t know any Janets.”

“She seemed awfully friendly. Little Xs and Os in her text.” My mother narrowed her eyes in that way she had when she knew something was up. “June, you’re hiding something. Is it true, what David said? That you’re a… you know?”

My mommy is nice and a DIKe, Sheldon had written. What had this David person been telling him?

I drummed my fingers on the counter, stalling, but just then Sheldon came back from wherever he’d been, and we talked about nothing else besides him until I woke up.

“Didn’t sleep at all?” said Janet, taking in my bleary expression that morning.  

“Some,” I said, cradling my cup of coffee with my trembling hands. Thank goodness it was Saturday. “I had more dreams.”

Janet sat, not looking at me. “Sarah? If you were in some kind of trouble, or if something was really wrong, you’d tell me, right?”

“I’m not in trouble,” I said quickly. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“But you can’t sleep,” she pressed, still not looking at me. “You’ve been home late. You had those notes from a kid last night. And… you look like you got hit by a truck this morning.” She visibly braced herself, then gave me one of her very serious looks. “What’s going on?”

I thought about coming up with some half-assed excuse. I thought about saying “nothing” again and pretending it was all fine. I thought about being reassuring and hiding my pain like I always did.

But I was so tired and heartsick that I told her everything.

When I was done, Janet just sat there for a few minutes. “Wow,” she said at last.

“I know.”

“What do you think this all means?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling utterly helpless.

“I’d say it’s just bad dreams, but, what? You think the drawing and the note mean it’s real somehow? Sarah…”

“I know, I know,” I said, miserable. I felt more exposed sitting there at the table than I ever did when I took off my clothes. “I’m sure there’s explanations. But the phone calls, the way June had my letters to Sheldon in my dream…”

“June?” Suddenly Janet was alert. “Who’s June?”

“Sheldon’s mother.” I shook my head, reaching for an explanation that made sense. “I… I think she’s me, or who I could have been. June is what my mother would have named me, if I’d been born a girl.”

Janet pulled out her phone and paged through it, brow creased.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to hold back the tears. “I know this is weird! I just want to have a quiet morning. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

She handed me the phone. “I sent you a text the other day,” she said. “I got this back.”

From: AC88534J-J

I’m not Sarah, who is this? My name is June.

I just stared at it for a moment, shocked. Then I pulled out my own phone and showed her the text from “D,” who I now suspected was David.

“I’ve never seen phone numbers like that,” said Janet. “But they’re similar to one another.”

I started piecing it together in my mind. “Where were you when you got that text, Janet?”

“A contract up in Elm Hill,” said Janet slowly. “Why?”

“That’s where I was when I got the text, and the call,” I said excitedly. “That’s where the school is!”

“But look, it gets even better,” said Janet, taking back the phone and poking the screen. “I got another one a few minutes later.”

From: AC88534J-J

Please don’t tell, but I think I’m gay. I have to tell someone.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“I thought it was someone pranking me at that point,” said Janet as I digested the text, agog. “Like Lisa. She does shit like this, and she knows how to do stuff with phones.” She tapped the phone thoughtfully. “But now… Jesus. Sarah, is this real?”

“It is,” I said firmly. “It has to be.”

“What’s going on?” Janet asked. “Why do you have such a connection with this Sheldon? I mean, he’s not your kid, right?”

“No, not exactly. But June… She’s got my mother, the name I would have had.”

“She’s you,” said Janet. “Or who you would have been, if…”

“Yeah. If.” I said, and an entire world was contained in that world.

“So what do we do about it?” Janet asked.

It was a good question. Our parallel lives were crashing together, I was driving myself nuts from lack of sleep, and all I wanted was everything she had.

This couldn’t go on.

“I want to try to talk to them,” I said.

I spent the whole weekend a wreck, trying not to think about the plan . I had more disjointed dreams about Sheldon and June, enough to know that June was talking with a therapist but couldn’t bring herself to say what she needed to say, and Sheldon was going through a serious dinosaur phase. I stayed far away from Elm Hill until Monday, though, when I drove up in the early morning to deliver a final note.

I got the answer Monday afternoon. They’d be there.

That night I dreamed about June, who was sitting up alone, looking at the notes I’d sent Sheldon, drinking.

Tuesday afternoon came at last. Janet drove us up to Elm Hill; we didn’t say anything the whole way. When we got to the school, I had to sit for long moment, just staring out at the playground.

A light rain had begun to fall, and there were no other children that day. Probably for the best.

At last I steeled myself and got out of the car.

“You’re sure they’ll show?” Janet asked dubiously.

I nodded, clutching Sheldon’s note in my pocket. He’d said they would come. I believed him.

“This is a bad idea,” said Janet, staring dubiously out at the damp playground. “You want to go home? We should go home. I can make dinner. You like my dinners.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I’m going. You can stay here if you want.”

Janet was speechless for a moment. I never stood up to her. But then she got out of the car. “Right behind you,” she said, giving me a little smile.

Together, we marched across the damp grass to the rock.

“So what happens now?” Janet said, crossing her arms and shifting from side to side.

I was about to answer that I didn’t know when sunlight streamed in from somewhere just to my left. I jumped back, and shielded my eyes.

The first form I saw was Sheldon’s. He stood there, holding his grandmother’s hand. She looked shocked as she saw us. She was so like my mother that the lack of recognition in her eyes was awful.

And there… holding Sheldon’s other hand. She was shorter than me by a good six inches, and she had the narrow shoulders and face of my sisters. But she looked a little like me, too. We had the same eyes, the same mouth, the same hair.

“June,” I whispered.

“Are you Sarah?” June said. I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“Sarah!” said Sheldon. He waved.

“Hi Sheldon,” I said, voice catching.

June hesitantly reached out a hand toward me, then drew it away again. “Are you… me?”

I nodded again.

“How? I don’t understand. You don’t look like me.”

“No. I was born a boy.”

“Oh?” Her eyes widened. “Oh!” Her eyes fell on Janet. “And you…?”

“Janet,” my girlfriend said. “Hey.”

“And you’re with… her?”

Janet took my hand. I squeezed it, grateful

“Awful,” said June’s mother.

“Hush,” said June shakily.

“Now what?” Janet asked softly.

“Now we resolve things,” I said firmly. I understood it now, the way that June looked at Janet. The text she’d sent: I have to tell someone. We both had something the other one wanted. June had Sheldon, and everything he represented.

And I… I had Janet.

I looked, really looked, at Sheldon, and I felt an ache so bad that I began to cry. Janet put an arm around me, and pulled me close.

I straightened. “June?”

June looked at me, fear plain on her face.

“She’ll be okay,” I said, nodding at her glowering mother. “You can tell her. I told her about me, a few years ago, and she wasn’t thrilled. But… we dealt with it and moved on. You have to, to be happy.”

June shook her head furiously. “You don’t understand.”

“I do,” I insisted, amazed at how calm I suddenly felt. “Better than anyone. You and me… everybody pushes us around. But we’re made of iron underneath. There’s a part of us that won’t bend.”

June looked at me and I saw how helpless she must have felt. I remembered feeling like that… just before I changed my life forever.

“I did it,” I said. Behind June and Sheldon was blue sky and bright sun. “You can, too.”

June turned to her mother. “I’m gay, Mom,” she said softly. “I am. I am.”

June’s mother huffed miserably. “I figured that out, genius. So what? See if I care. You’re still my daughter.”

Chills ran down my spine. So what? my mother had said, all those years ago. See if I care. You’re still my child.

June gave her mother a long, hard hug, then turned to me. She seemed to be standing straighter.

“Iron,” I said.

“Nice job,” said Janet, trying to be charitable.

June laughed. She had this perfect voice; she was so beautiful in all the ways I wasn’t. And she had Sheldon. My heart cracked a little more.

“I don’t suppose there’s one of you in my world?” she said to Janet.

“Can’t hurt to check around,” said Janet. She pulled me close, possessive. “But I’m taken.”

The sunlight began to dim, and June, Sheldon and June’s mother started fading.

“Sarah,” said June. She looked more ghostly now. “If you want a baby… have one.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t even know if that’s what I want.”

“It is,” said June, her voice the whisper of wind through the trees. “If you’re anything like me.”

And then they vanished completely, leaving us alone in the rain.

Janet rubbed my back as we drove home. “You okay?” she asked.

I nodded. “I think so.”

“Is it over?”

“Yes,” I said, and I was certain. “She got what she wanted.”

“You didn’t, though,” said Janet nervously.

“I… think I did, though,” I said. “Somewhere in there I stopped wanting to be her. She has Sheldon, she’s short and pretty, but she doesn’t have you. And I like having you.”

We drove on as the rain started coming down harder. I turned the wipers up to maximum.

“We can talk it over, if you want?” Janet said hesitantly. “The, uh, baby thing.”

I couldn’t say anything for a moment. “Really?”

“Really,” said Janet. “I mean, I don’t hate the idea. I just hated the idea of having to, you know? And being pregnant…” She made a face. “I guess I can do it.”

“You don’t have to,” I said quickly.

“Yeah, but we can’t exactly adopt,” she said. “We’re a weird couple on a number of fronts.”

“I know. But I’d rather have you than a baby.”

Janet laughed, eyes bright. “That kind of talk makes me wish you had banked sperm. I’d bear your children right now.”

“Maybe I can scrape out an old gym sock,” I said. She laughed again. I loved that sound. I loved how easy we were with one another.

Janet snuggled against my arm. I was shocked; she almost never did that, even when I wasn’t driving through a rainstorm.

“I’m glad you’re you, too, you know,” said Janet. “I didn’t like June. Too many lingering straight girl hang-ups, you know?”

“Thanks, I think,” I said.

“What I’m saying is… let’s just take it a little at a time. We’ve got time, right? We can have time.” She groaned in frustration. “I’m saying that wrong.”

I slipped an arm around her. “I know what you mean,” I said as we drove south through the rain and back to our lives. “I know just what you mean.”

One time I dreamed I had a son named Sheldon. I could never any sons of my own, or daughters. But I did have Janet, and better, I had myself. I wasn’t like June. I was like me.

It was enough, and then some.

END

"Sarah's Child" was originally published in Strange Horizons in May 2014 and was reprinted in Heiresses of Russ 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,  making a donation at paypal.me/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

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Support GlitterShip!

Sarah’s Child

Susan Jane Bigelow

Once, I dreamed that I had a son named Sheldon, and my grief tore a hole in the fabric of the world.

In my dream I walked through the halls of an elementary school, and I went into the office. Everything was gray and blocky, but somehow not oppressive. I was certain, then, that it was the elementary school in my old hometown, and that I was both myself and also not myself.

Full transcript after the cut

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 28 for May 24, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story this week is "Sarah's Child" by Susan Jane Bigelow, read by Amanda Ching.

Susan Jane Bigelow is a fiction writer, political columnist, and librarian. She mainly writes science fiction and fantasy novels, most notably the Extrahuman Union series from Book Smugglers Publishing. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine’s “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” issue, and the Lamba Award-winning “The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard,” among others. She lives with her wife in northern Connecticut, and can be found at the bottom of a pile of cats.

Amanda Ching is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Storm Moon Press, Candlemark & Gleam's Alice: (re)Visions, and every bathroom stall on I-80 from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. She tweets @cerebralcutlass and blogs at http://amandaching.wordpress.com.

Sarah’s Child

Susan Jane Bigelow

 Just a Little Spice Will Do

by Andrew Wilmot

When Alex arrived home Sunday night with an overflowing grocery bag tucked under each arm, she saw her girlfriend doubled over at the waist, retching violently into the kitchen sink.

“Lindy?” She dropped both bags and rushed over.Lindy gripped the edge of the counter and heaved again, spitting a viscous strand of amaranth red into the stainless steel sink; it came out of her in small globules strung together like Christmas lights. Alex put one hand on her back andthe other on her shoulder, but Lindy flinched, shuddering as if they were blocks of ice. It was then Alex noticed the rectangular Tupperware container on the countertop to Lindy’s right. Next to it, a thin sausage wedge of Alex’s heart beat gently on one of her mother’s China plates. She looked inside the plastic container and noticed a new gash in the organ, a little south of the left atrium.

Full transcript after the cut.

[Theme music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 27 for May 10th, 2016. The end of the semester hit a little harder than expected, so I ended up shifting the May episodes back a week.

For today, however, I have GlitterShip's second Original story, "Just A Little Spice Will Do" by Andrew Wilmot, with a return by guest reader S. Qiouyi Lu.

Listener warnings for relationship conflict, similarities to eating disorders, and loving cannibalism.

ANDREW WILMOT is a writer, editor, and artist living in Toronto, Ontario. He is a graduate of the SFU Master in Publishing program and spends his days writing as much as possible and painting stupidly large pieces. His fiction has been published by Found Press, Drive In Tales, The Singularity, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia, and the story “When I’m Old, When I’m Grey” was the winner of the 2015 Friends of Merril Short Fiction Competition. He works as a freelance reviewer, academic editor, and substantive editor. For more on his work and creative pursuits: http://andrewwilmot.ca/about/cv/

S. Qiouyi Lu 陸秋逸 is a writer, artist, narrator, and translator whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, inkscrawl, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone. In their spare time, they enjoy destroying speculative fiction as a dread member of the queer Asian SFFH illuminati. S. currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with a tiny black cat named Thin Mint. You can visit their site at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter as @sqiouyilu."

 Just a Little Spice Will Do

by Andrew Wilmot

When Alex arrived home Sunday night with an overflowing grocery bag tucked under each arm, she saw her girlfriend doubled over at the waist, retching violently into the kitchen sink.

“Lindy?” She dropped both bags and rushed over.Lindy gripped the edge of the counter and heaved again, spitting a viscous strand of amaranth red into the stainless steel sink; it came out of her in small globules strung together like Christmas lights. Alex put one hand on her back and the other on her shoulder, but Lindy flinched, shuddering as if they were blocks of ice. It was then Alex noticed the rectangular Tupperware container on the countertop to Lindy’s right. Next to it, a thin sausage wedge of Alex’s heart beat gently on one of her mother’s China plates. She looked inside the plastic container and noticed a new gash in the organ, a little south of the left atrium.

She frowned. “I told you I’d be right back with stuff for dinner.”

Lindy turned, glared at Alex. “Figures you wouldn’t want me to taste this!”

“Taste what? Lindy, love, I don’t understand.”

“It’s rotten!” She pointed accusatorily at Alex’s heart.

“That’s not possible.” Alex surveyed her heart.Several small wedges had been cut away—battle scars pocking the bruise-coloured surface. The organ beat calmly, like clockwork, like there was absolutely nothing wrong. “Looks just fine to me.”

Lindy thrust a blood- and fatty tissue-coated fork at Alex. “Try it yourself. Go ahead, make a liar out of me.”

“Lindy —”

“Taste it! Then try and tell me everything’s fine.”

Alex relented, accepting the fork. She suspected her heart would taste a little off no matter what, in that way that anything chilled tasted at room temperature. She could feel Lindy staring at the back of her head, wearing her mother’s scowl—the same Alex had seen when, after six months together,they went on a week’s vacation to Johannesburg to meet her parents. Lindy’s mother had taken one look at the pale, freckled Irish girl with the decidedly un-Irish name and told her daughter that she would starve to death on someone with such a sour, unfeeling heart. Lindy was quick to protest, but her mother silenced her as if she were still in primary school. She sniffed the air between them, wafting in then imperceptible scent of their nascent vintage. “There’s poison in you,” she said, at last, to Alex. “You’ll ruin my good girl. You’ll be the death of her.”

Neither spoke afterwards of the incident. Indeed, Alex had very nearly forgotten about it, and likely would have were it not for Lindy standing behind her at that moment, waiting expectantly for her to sample her own disposition.

Alex carved a small triangle from the space above the left ventricle. She put it to her nose, sniffed. She heard Lindy tsk dismissively, as if Alex were admitting complicit behaviour in whatever it was she was being accused of. Not wanting to give her further ammunition, Alex forked the tiny fragment of muscle into her mouth and started to chew. It was tougher than she remembered—a little like biting into a half-inch slab of pickled ginger—but it tasted the same as it ever had, like unsalted ham with a slight metallic aroma.

“It tastes fine,” she said after swallowing. “Like normal.”

Lindyappeared wounded. “I never thought you’d do this to me. I didn’t think you could do this. To me.”

“Love, I don’t—”

“You’re lying!” Lindy shouted. “It tastes rotten, like, like bad eggs, or beef left on a sidewalk in the rain.”

“How would you know what either of those taste like?” Alex said jokingly.

“Don’t—” Lindy pointed to the heart again. “It’s gone bad. It isn’t . . .You’ve let someone else taste it, haven’t you?”

“What? No, of course not!”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I’m not!” They were interrupted just then by a sharp thumping against the wall—their neighbours to the west.Alex exhaled, lowered her voice. “I’m telling you the truth.”

Lindy looked away, wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “There’s still so much of it left. I don’t understand how.”

“It’s yours and yours alone. I swear it.”

Lindy shook her head. “I . . . I just don’t know if I . . .”

Alex took her hand. Lindy resisted at first, then let her squeeze, pull her closer. Alex stared at her lovingly. “Everything I am belongs to you.”

In the staff room the next morning, a half hour before the start of first period, Alex went up to Claire, said her hellos, and poured a mug of coffee. Claire was a mid-forty-ish two-time divorcee who taught sixth grade.She took one look at Alex’s heavy-lidded eyes and pulled her to the window for a sidebar.

“You look like shit,” she said once they were out of range of the other teachers.

“Hi, Claire, it is a lovely day, isn’t it?”

Claire scoffed. “Crumpet, don’t even. What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

Alex sighed. “It’s Lindy . . . and it’s me, and . . . I don’t know. Something’s not right between us.”

Claire smiled slyly, wiggled her fingers in a lewd gesture. Alex shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

“Out with it then,” said Claire. Sensing Alex’s reluctance, she added, “I’ve heard it all. There’s nothing you can say that’ll shock me.”

“It’s just . . . my heart. She said it tasted—”

“Bad?”

“Rotten. Like meat left under a radiator for a month.”

“How would she know—?”

“Right?” Alex shook her head. “Anyway, I tried a piece and I didn’t notice anything off about it.”

“Well of course you wouldn’t. You never mind the flavour of your own recipe, dear. Dennis, my first husband, he used to say that every time he passed wind—one man’s sulphur was another’s potpourri.”

Alex knitted her eyebrows together. “Seems a bit reductive.”

“But true nonetheless.”

“I suppose . . .” Alex sipped her coffee and thought back to the quite subtle aftertaste of her heart, like pocket change resting on the back of her tongue.

She remembered what it was like seeing Lindy’s heart for the first time. She presented it early on; it was only their fifth date. Alex recalled it perfectly, how Lindy had run excitedly into the kitchen after they made love for the first time and returned with a ceramic rim bowl hand-painted with concentric rings. She cradled it in both hands as if she feared it would slip from her grip at the slightest breath.

“I’ve not done this before,” Lindy said. “Ever, actually.” She climbed back into bed and raised the bowl between them. The organ smelled dense with images and sounds; a host of thoughts and memories trespassed in Alex’s mind, as if she were viewing a series of home movies from Lindy’s childhood. She shut her eyes and inhaled acutely, allowed the odour of Lindy’s heart to glide down her oesophagus with the ease of crema. She opened her eyes again and saw Lindy holding a knife and fork between her knuckles like a peace sign. Alex took the utensils and Lindy watched — nervously, excitedly —as she cut a small but perfect equilateral triangle from the very centre of the muscular organ. Lindy’s heart beat faster as Alex cut, as she pulled out the piece from the whole, as she placed it slithering, squirming on her tongue and started to chew.She felt her devotion grow with every bite, and when she swallowed, Lindy released a heavenly sigh;when she wiped clean her lips, returning to the moment, Alex saw something new and fearful in Lindy’s eyes: trust.

“You don’t have to give me yours right away,” Lindy was quick to say. “But I’m ready, whenever you are. It’s important you know—you can trust me.”

But Alex hadn’t waited long. It was only their next date when she told Lindy she had a surprise for her. She’d asked her to close her eyes and open her mouth. Lindy did so, stifling whatever anxious thoughts she felt as she waited with her mouth agape like a child at the dentist’s.

Earlier that day, Alex had gone to her parents’ home and taken her heart out of the chest freezer in the garage. It had been buried beneath containers of frozen leftovers; her father hadn’t bothered to clean out the freezer in years—that had been her mother’s job. About the only thing he touched out there were the boxed bottles of their vintage stacked one on top of another.

Alex was careful not to disturb him when retrieving her heart; since her mother’s death, her father drank another pint of their mixed A-O every night, becoming evermore intoxicated by their shared history. When Alex tried to encourage him to go out and meet someone new, he responded by drunkenly throwing a bottle of their third year’s marriage at her, painting the wall behind her with glass-flecked blood.

Back in her apartment, Alex set her heart on the counter to thaw and went to run errands. When she returned home that afternoon, the organ was valve-deep in a pool of watery blood that tasted as flavourless as a movie theatre soda. With only an hour before her date, she quickly carved out a small section of her heart, which she then proceeded to dry and cut into even smaller triangles, each identical to the last in shape and size. Then, upon tasting one of the small pieces and finding it lacking, she whipped up a quick balsamic and extra virgin olive oil glaze, threw the pieces into a salad bowl, and drizzled them lavishly.

That night she sat on the bed with her legs crossed facing Lindy, the lightly dressed pieces of heart marinating in the bowl between them. Lindy sniffed the air suspiciously, crinkled her nose at—Oh, shit, I used too much vinegar, Alex realized. She started to panic, the pieces of heart beginning to hop and bounce in the bowl. She took out a piece—one of the more abundantly coated triangles—and, before she could chicken out, tossed it into Lindy’s waiting mouth.Lindy clamped down to keep the piece of heart from leaping out of her mouth and onto the bedspread. Alex watched, a perfect mix of eagerness and terror, as Lindy chewed, slowly at first, then faster, nodding her head as she worked her way through the leathery, tougher than anticipated meat.

“I-is it all right?” Alex asked.

Lindy opened her eyes. At first Alex was unable to read her expression—she looked a little like an infant relieved to have finished their plate of Brussels sprouts. Then she smiled warmly and hugged Alex, careful not to tip over the bowl between them.

“It was more than all right,” she said at last, kissing the words into Alex’s ear.

“You know,” Claire said, “that bastard cheated on me with the neighbour’s wife no less than three times. Know how I could tell? Each time he tried to surprise me by beating me home from work and firing up the grill. Thought he could slather his leftover gristle in barbeque sauce and seasoning and it wouldn’t still taste like warmed over piss, but let me tell you, that kind of betrayal doesn’t go away, even if you dress it up all pretty. You put a suit and tie on a pig and he’s still going to taste like mud.”

Alex’s face slumped as if it were being pulled down at the seams. “That’s what Lindy thinks. That I’ve cheated on her.”

“Have you?”

“No!” Heads turned at the unexpected outburst. “No,” she repeated, softer. “Certainly not.”

“And you’re not, you know, having any other problems?”

Alex shrugged shyly. “I don’t really get along with her mother. I’ve tried, it’s just— I’m not what she envisioned, I guess.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure if that’s it.”

“Then maybe you just need to, I don’t know, zing things up a bit.”

“Zing?”

“Add a little pizazz to your life.”

“But then she’ll think I’m hiding something.”

“Which she already does . . .”

“But I’m not.”

“Then leave it be. Either she likes your white rice or she doesn’t.”

“But I don’t want her to—”

“For fuck’s sake, ’Lex, just do something.”

Alex thought for a moment. “I saw this delicious looking tamarind chutney the other day at Whole Foods. I bet she’d like that.”

Claire shook her head. “You fucking hipster.”

For two days Lindy ate only salads, occasional handfuls of mixed nuts. When Alex presented her with a small soup bowl filled with several pieces of her heart floating in a sunset curry, she took one sniff and recoiled.

“What’s this?”

“I . . . I made a curry. It’s got bamboo shoots and green and red peppers and—”

Lindy pushed the bowl away. “I’m not hungry.”

“Love, please, you have to eat.”

“It smells like, like fish left on the sidewalk in the middle of July.”

Alex took the bowl away, covered it in Saran Wrap and tucked it back inside the fridge right next to the remains of her heart, its missing pieces amounting to no more than 5 or 10 percent of the whole. Next to this, housed in an identical Tupperware container, the remains of Lindy’s heart beat agitatedly— the organ looked like a veined,palatinate chicken breast with its centre ice cream-scooped away. In the middle of the night, when Alex, feeling peckish, attempted to stick a fork in Lindy’s heart, it squirmed and flattened itself against the far end of the plastic as if prodded with a hot poker. She shut the refrigerator door.

They would both go hungry that night.

Alex woke the next morning to clanging glass and metal. She walked down the hall from their bedroom, stopping at the kitchen. The contents of their fridge and freezer, as well as most of their cupboards, had been emptied and piled indiscriminately into the middle of the tile floor. The cupboard beneath the kitchen sink had also been opened, but the lone bottle of their first year’s vintage—still fermenting, bottled only the previous month—remained untouched.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“That whore’s heart!”

“Love, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I—”

“Don’t you swear to me. I know it’s here somewhere. Have you canned it? Is it in a mason jar somewhere with your grandmother’s blueberry jam?”

“There’s no one else,” Alex said, feeling defeated. “No preserves. No frozen dinners. No one’s hearts but ours.”

“And who’d you give yours to?”

“What?”

Lindy held up the Tupperware container with Alex’s heart inside. To Alex it looked as it ever did. “I don’t understand,” she said, exasperated.

“It’s all there! Nothing’s missing—not even the sliver I tried to eat with apiece of toast for breakfast. This heart is whole. It isn’t yours—it can’t be. It . . . it’s a fake.”

As Lindy spoke, Alex noticed her lover’s svelte, partially digested heart leaping wildly, moving its container across the counter as if charged with an electrical current. The blood surrounding it was starting to boil, the stench of solder and copper filling the air.

Alex opened her mouth again to defend herself, but Lindy jumped up and stormed past her before anything could be said. She slammed the bathroom door and Alex heard the shower turn on. She stood there for several seconds staring at the sea of consumables at her feet before she got down to her hands and knees and started putting things back where they belonged.

Nearly finished, she glanced up at Lindy’s heart, which had calmed down considerably. A soft musk rose from it now like morning fog over a farmer’s field.

Quietly, Alex walked down the hall and pushed open the bathroom door. Through the thin, almost transparent shower curtain, Alex could see glimpses of Lindy’s sparkling, melted sugar skin — and her ribs, like long witch fingers travelling beneath her parchment paper flesh, jutted out from beneath her arm, more visible than she remembered them.

Lindy didn’t go to work the next day. When Alex got home,she was as she’d been that morning: prone on the couch as if stricken with a bout of stomach flu. Alex brought her several small samples of heart, each dressed differently than the last:coated with a white wine reduction; tossed with vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh basil plucked from their windowsill garden; placed delicately atop a saltine and sandwiched by a thick slice of aged white cheddar.To Lindy,each attempt was more repugnant than the last. She tried to push Alex away but could not muster the strength. The more she resisted, the harder Alex implored, until at last Lindy raised herself upright.

“Why aren’t you suffering?” she asked plainly.

“What do you mean?”

Lindy pointed to Alex’s full face, to her rounded shoulders and non-xylophoned chest. “This isn’t hard for you.”

“That’s . . . of course this is hard for me. It’s killing me to see you like this.” Lindy tried once more to push her away but Alex held her bone-thin arm in place. With her free hand she snatched a piece of heart drowning in a mixture of soy and wasabi from one of a dozen small dessert bowls littering the coffee table. She tried to force it past Lindy’s lips. Lindy kept her mouth shut and Alex smeared the salted piece of heart across her pale, flaked lips and chin until it fell to pieces between her fingers, nothing but a wounded streak of brownish blush across her lover’s face.

Lindy fought but could not break free from Alex’s healthy, nourished grip. Alex grabbed a second piece of heart and inserted it into a small space in Lindy’s mouth, inside her cheek, pressing it against her clenched teeth. Lindy spat it back out again, the slab of muscle slapping Alex in the eye. Lindy got up from the couch, stumbled weakly, and then hurried toward the bedroom. She slammed the door, locking Alex out.

Lindy exited the bedroom two hours later to find Alex sleeping in a ball on the sofa. She nudged her awake and sat down next to her. She apologized, said she needed some time to herself, that something wasn’t right and she had to figure out what.

“When I look at your heart,” she said,“when I remember our times together I think . . . there should not be so much of it left.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“And I know what I’ve tasted, Alex. Dear. Love. I know what you taste like. I think I’ve always known, on some level, but somehow now it’s stronger than it was before.”

“I know, I taste like warm sidewalk fish and dead babies and—”

“Lies, Alex. Like lies.”

“This is about your mother. She never liked me.”

“But I did, and that’s what matters.”

“. . . Did?”

Lindy looked away. “You haven’t eaten in just as long. You say you haven’t, anyway, but you’re still so strong.”

“I haven’t, Lindy—Silindile. I haven’t eaten anyone. I promise.”

Lindy stared into her eyes in a way she hadn’t before. Alex found herself wondering if she had noticed the off-colour essence of her heart from the earliest days of their relationship and had simply remained silent. She recalled how Lindy had appeared when first tasting Alex, nodding as if to convince herself this freckled Irish girl with the distinctly non-Irish name could be anything more than another late-night snack or an experimental fusion dish more interesting than it was good. She reached out and touched Alex’s forehead with her index finger.

“I need to be certain, if we’re going to move on. I’d like a taste, please . . . of your brain.”

Alex was taken aback. “My . . . you want what?”

“Your brain,” Lindy reiterated. “Just a slice, a bit off the prefrontal is all I need. I’ll know then, definitively.”

“Know what?”

“That you are who you say you are.”

Alex stood up, looked down at Lindy. “But that’s not . . . I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” Lindy’s hurt rebounded.

“What do you mean why not? Because then there won’t be anything left for me!”

“I can’t believe how selfish you’re being!” Lindy shouted as she too rose to her feet. “We’re talking about saving our relationship here.”

“No, you’re talking about saving our relationship. I’m talking about you taking what isn’t yours.”

“How could I ever have eaten someone so self-obsessed?” Lindy spat on the ground as if there were residue of Alex still on her tongue.

“I’ve already given you my heart—what more do you want?”

“I want the truth!”

Alex circled around Lindy and went into the kitchen. She retrieved a long butcher’s blade from the wooden block next to the stove and put it to her wrist. “You want more of me?” She raised the knife high and in one smooth, unhesitating motion, lumberjacked her hand off at the wrist. The appendage dead fished to the ground in a filmic spray of crimson. Alex’s face immediately paled as agony and sudden blood loss siphoned her adrenaline. The knife clattered to the ground and she picked up her dismembered hand, waving it in the air like a dead puppet. “How about a finger? I could chop them off one at a time, sauté them knuckle by knuckle like sausage links.”

Lindy scrunched her face, revoltedby the decidedly pedestrian offering. “You’ll give me what you give your friends when I deserve so much more?”

“You already have so much more.”

“But not the best of you.”

No further words were exchanged that night. Lindy took the severed hand and helped wash and bandage the wound.She placed the newly freed appendage in a separate round container and tossed it in the vegetable crisper. She then gave Alex a handful of brightly coloured pills from the bottles she kept behind the vanity mirror in the washroom. They went to bed without so much as a grunt of acknowledgement for all that had happened, backs turned, their hips and feet inches apart as if their bed had been slashed in two. The medicine quickly took effect; Alex’s eyes grew heavy, and soon she felt no pain.

She’d been unconscious for only an hour when she was awoken by a soft pain in her scalp—the sensation of one hair after another being pulled back as if someone had slapped a bandage over top her head and was removing it a millimetre at a time. The annoying tug soon became a fiery tear and Alex opened her eyes—immediately blinded by the blood that had snaked into her eyes from an incision at her hairline. She let out a high-pitched shriek and started furiously wiping away the blood with the palm of her hand. When she was finally able to see again she saw Lindy standing next to her side of the bed brandishing a paring knife in one hand and a small hammer and chisel in the other.

Alex could not find the words for the violation she felt in that moment. Lindy backed away from her, tightening her grip on the utensils in her hands. Forthwith her vacant stomach broke the silence cementing between them, presenting her case — her need — in a way no words ever could. She turned and ran from the bedroom. Alex again opened her mouth — to scream, to call out, to say something — but the pain from her multiple wounds was too much and she passed out.

The following morning, Alex knew immediately something was amiss. She rolled over in bed and saw an empty space beside her. Slowly the fog cleared and she remembered what had transpired. She gingerly touched her forehead; the tips of her fingers discovered small rivers of dried blood leading back to a very fine, one-inch horizontal slice above her left eye. When she looked to her pillow she saw a deep cardinal pond that dried the farther it extended over the surface of the once-white sheathe. An iron weight of panic formed in the pit of her stomach and she glanced out the open bedroom door to the paring knife, hammer, and chisel on the carpet halfway between the bedroom and kitchen.

“Lindy?”

No answer. Alex slowly, dizzily got out of bed. She felt her legs wobble as she entered the kitchen. A roll of gauze and a bottle of rubbing alcohol by the sink were the only indicators of her self-inflicted wound from the night before. Her stomach rumbled fiercely and she opened the fridge, stepping back in shock. Next to the container holding what was left of Lindy’s softly pumping heart, her own looked suddenly weathered and emaciated, like sheets of paper soaked in brine then left in the sun to curl and crack.

Her confusion was quickly usurped by the hunger devouring her insides. She retrieved a fork and knife from the cutlery drawer and, before it could scamper away, stabbed and shaved a thin slab from Lindy’s heart, dashed it with just a bit of salt and pepper before placing the wiggling, soft muscle on her tongue.

Except it wasn’t soft but suddenly hard, firm like the fat encircling a porterhouse.

Except it wasn’t wiggling but beating.

Faster.

Faster still.

Alex spit the piece of Lindy’s heart to the sink, watched as it bass drummed its way into the drain, leaving a thinning slug’s trail of blood as it climaxed, as it heaved, as it breathed a sigh of release.

And it tasted foul, like . . . like French toast made with sour milk and six-month-old eggs.

Or like lies.

Lindy arrived home an hour later. She looked fuller than she had in days, had a glow about her one could only describe as radiant. She put her jacket, which smelled sick with booze and sweat, on the kitchen counter and went into the living room. Alex was waiting for her on the couch. Right away Lindy looked to the bloodied stump where Alex’s right hand had been, and then to the still leaking cut on her forehead.

“It’s no better,” she said.

“No,” Alex agreed. “It’s not.”

Lindy’s chest swelled into a shield. “Well I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”

Alex was perplexed; she seemed to be almost gloating. “You could at least act upset. A little — a smidge, maybe.”

Lindy crossed her arms. “You look hungry.”

“You don’t.”

She looked away. “Look, what’s done is done. Now you know how it feels.”

“Yeah, I know how it feels.”

Lindy tightened her stance, pulling her insides into an hourglass. The longer she stared, Alex noticed, the greater her uncertainty scratched its presence onto her face.

Alex reached down, lifted the hand-painted ceramic bowl Lindy had presented to her one year earlier from the floor beneath the coffee table. In the bowl were two slices of heart: hers and Lindy’s. Unseasoned. Uncooked. Raw.

“Taste them—both of them,” Alex said.

“Why?”

“I want you to taste the difference.”

“The different between what?”

“Between you and me. I want you to know the difference between a lie and the truth.”Lindy sneered at the polemic. “So sure of yourself? Then do it. Taste them both and call me a cheat again.”

Lindy glanced away from the offering. Alex stood up, moved as she moved. She held onto the bowl, keeping it in front of Lindy no matter which way she turned. Lindy watched, though she did not want to, as the pieces of her heart beat faster and more frantically until finally she could not take it any longer and she slapped the bowl from Alex’s hand. It struck the wall and shattered,depositing both pieces of heart to the ground with little more than limp insinuation.

Lindy ran into the kitchen and grabbed her coat off the counter. Alex chased after her, but Lindy, as if trapped in a whirlwind, reached beneath the sink and retrieved the Bordeaux of their one year. She raised it in the air. Alex barely had time to duck as Lindy hurled the vintage above her head. It smashed against the drywall, showering Alex’s back and hair with the memories and claret they’d shared. Lindy had already exited the apartment by the time Alex was upright again.

Thirty minutes passed. Alex, accepting that Lindy was not coming back, moved beneath the archway connecting the living room and the kitchen.She stood between the gory Rorschach of their memories dripping from wall to floor and the flopping goldfish fragments of a future that might have been. Feelingincreasingly weak, shecrouched down and startedpicking up the pieces of broken ceramic. Then she noticed her heart, just a piece of the whole amidst the debris, and it seemed suddenly larger than what she’d prepared. Next to it, however, was an aged, calcified piece of something that at one time resembled a delicacy—an intimacy—and she wondered to herself just how wretched it must now taste.

END

"Just a Little Spice Will Do" is copyright Andrew Wilmot, 2016.

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

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

Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on May 24th with "Sarah's Child" by Susan Jane Bigelow.

[Music plays out]

 Just a Little Spice Will Do

by Andrew Wilmot

When Alex arrived home Sunday night with an overflowing grocery bag tucked under each arm, she saw her girlfriend doubled over at the waist, retching violently into the kitchen sink.

“Lindy?” She dropped both bags and rushed over.Lindy gripped the edge of the counter and heaved again, spitting a viscous strand of amaranth red into the stainless steel sink; it came out of her in small globules strung together like Christmas lights. Alex put one hand on her back andthe other on her shoulder, but Lindy flinched, shuddering as if they were blocks of ice. It was then Alex noticed the rectangular Tupperware container on the countertop to Lindy’s right. Next to it, a thin sausage wedge of Alex’s heart beat gently on one of her mother’s China plates. She looked inside the plastic container and noticed a new gash in the organ, a little south of the left atrium.

Full transcript after the cut.

[Theme music plays.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 27 for May 10th, 2016. The end of the semester hit a little harder than expected, so I ended up shifting the May episodes back a week.

For today, however, I have GlitterShip's second Original story, "Just A Little Spice Will Do" by Andrew Wilmot, with a return by guest reader S. Qiouyi Lu.

Listener warnings for relationship conflict, similarities to eating disorders, and loving cannibalism.

ANDREW WILMOT is a writer, editor, and artist living in Toronto, Ontario. He is a graduate of the SFU Master in Publishing program and spends his days writing as much as possible and painting stupidly large pieces. His fiction has been published by Found Press, Drive In Tales, The Singularity, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia, and the story “When I’m Old, When I’m Grey” was the winner of the 2015 Friends of Merril Short Fiction Competition. He works as a freelance reviewer, academic editor, and substantive editor. For more on his work and creative pursuits: http://andrewwilmot.ca/about/cv/

S. Qiouyi Lu 陸秋逸 is a writer, artist, narrator, and translator whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, inkscrawl, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone. In their spare time, they enjoy destroying speculative fiction as a dread member of the queer Asian SFFH illuminati. S. currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with a tiny black cat nam

The Face of Heaven So Fine

Kat Howard

There is an entire history in the stars. Light takes time to travel, to get from wherever the star is to wherever we can see it, here, on Earth. So when you think about it, when we see the stars, we are looking back in time. Everything those stars actually shone on has already happened. But just because a story already happened, that doesn’t mean it’s finished.

Full transcript after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 26 for April 19th, 2016. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing these stories with you.

It's been a while since GlitterShip last ran flash fiction, so I'm treating you to an episode with three flash stories in it. This episode also marks the return of Bogi Takács, whose fiction previously appeared in GlitterShip episode 3, "This Shall Serve As a Demarcation."

Our first story today is "The Face of Heaven So Fine" by Kat Howard

Kat Howard lives in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in year's best and best of collections, and performed on NPR. Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, will be out in May from Saga Press. You can find her on twitter at @KatWithSword.

The Face of Heaven So Fine

Kat Howard

There is an entire history in the stars. Light takes time to travel, to get from wherever the star is to wherever we can see it, here, on Earth. So when you think about it, when we see the stars, we are looking back in time. Everything those stars actually shone on has already happened. But just because a story already happened, that doesn’t mean it’s finished.

Juliet was the bleeding heart of a story, made flesh and made gorgeous. She was all eyeliner and fishnets, the kind of girl who looked like she’d carve designs on her own skin, not because she was trying to hurt herself, but just for the beauty of it, you know?

It wasn’t ever herself that Juliet cut, though. It was her lovers. All of them. That was the deal. A fuck, and then a perfect star, cut out of their skin.

The scars were like a badge of honor. Proof you’d been with her. People would ask her to put them some place visible, those little stars she cut out of people, but Juliet chose. Juliet always chose.

I fell in love with Juliet the first time I met her, which doesn’t make me any different from anyone else. I know that. That’s just how it was with Juliet. If you fell in love with her, it was an instant, headlong crash.

I don’t think she fell in love back. It didn’t matter. She was like a star – so bright that everything else seemed dim when she walked into the room. It was enough to be in her orbit.

I met her for the first time at a party. I knew who she was. Everyone knew who Juliet was. She was a love story with a knife, and a tattoo of an apothecary’s vial.

But when we met, I was dancing, and some guy bumped into me, and I tripped. When I put my hands out to catch myself, it was her shoulders that they landed on.

She leaned close, her lips almost brushing my ear, “You’re Rose, right?”

I nodded.

“Let’s dance.”

We did.

We danced until I could taste her sweat mixed with mine, until I wasn’t sure whether the ache in my thighs was from exhaustion or desire. We danced until I saw stars, her hand under my shirt, tracing a constellation on my skin.

Because of the distances between the stars and the Earth, some of the stars we see in the sky have already died, burnt themselves out. Some people think that’s sad, that we look up and see things that aren’t there anymore. I think it’s beautiful. It’s like, because we can still see them, in a way they’re still alive.

After, when her fingers were still inside me, her head resting on my chest, I asked: “What do you do with the stars?”

Juliet was silent long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said, “There was a boy, and I loved him. It was the kind of love people write poetry and songs about.

“He burned brighter than the stars, and then he died. And I didn’t. I thought I would, but I didn’t.”

She climbed from the bed, and looked out the window. “I promised I would cut him out, and hang him in the heavens. That way, everyone can see him, and when they do, they’ll know he was worth everything.”

Juliet cut the star from the skin on my chest, right over my heart. She used a dagger. “It was his,” she said when I asked.

It hurt. Of course it hurt. The star of skin was the least of what she was cutting out of me.

I had never wondered before how it was that people fell out of love with Juliet.

The scar healed cleanly. Not just cleanly, but perfectly, a star shining on my skin.

I look for him in the sky. That boy that Juliet loved so much that she would change the face of heaven for him. I don’t know how long it takes the light from those stars, the ones that she hangs, to reach us here, but I know that it will.

I wonder if light reaches back in time, too. Maybe it’s impossible, but a lot of things are, and they happen anyway. I see the stars, and I wonder if that boy ever looked up at the sky and knew how much Juliet loved him. The kind of love people write songs and poetry about. The kind of love that is written in the stars.

END

Our next story is "A Thing with Teeth" by Nino Cipri

Nino Cipri is a queer and genderqueer writer living in Chicago. Their writing has been published in Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Podcastle , Daily Science Fiction, and other fine publications. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, essays, and radio features, and has performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer. They currently work as a bicycle mechanic, freelance writer, and occasional rabblerouser.

A Thing with Teeth

by Nino Cipri

She started with Elena’s books. Sylvia tore out the blank back pages first, then the title pages, the dedications. Finally, the words themselves, the brittle pages of the story. She tore them into strips, sucked on them until they were soft, chewed them into balls and swallowed them.

Sylvia thought she could detect hidden tastes on the pages. The worn copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon that Elena had kept since childhood was faintly sweet, like store-bought bread. The sex guide tasted coppery, and Elena’s journals had a hint of fake cherry, like cough drops. The books of poetry were minty, but with a bitter aftertaste.

Elena’s letters were next. Torn into pieces, swallowed, hidden in the cavern below her throat. Sylvia could taste the dust on them, the fine desert sand that Elena said got into everything. She could taste gun oil, the military-issue soap, the hand-lotion that Sylvia had mailed across continents and oceans. She'd imagined Elena running into her dry, chapped knuckles when she'd packed it up.

This stuff is worth its weight in gold around here, Elena had written. You’re a goddess.

I miss you.

I miss you.

I miss you.

The words echoed in the empty part of Sylvia’s chest. Her stomach felt like an empty house, filled with dust and ghosts.

She swallowed the death notification from the Army, and then the letter from Elena’s commanding officer. It included all the details that the official notification had left out, typed out in unadorned English: the ambush, the ground-to-air missiles, the crash, the fire.

We couldn’t recover her remains from the wreck, he wrote. I’m sorry. It’s likely that she died from her wounds, and not the fire. She probably went quick.

Sylvia thought again of Elena’s hands. Had she worn that lotion that day? Had she smelled its perfume before she died?

Sylvia tore the letter into strips and let it dissolve on her tongue.

If hope was a thing with feathers, what was grief?

When the books and letters were gone, she ate their photos, the black-and-white strips from photo booths, the matte prints from their civil union, the out-of-focus pictures from their honeymoon in Puerto Rico. Still hungry, she started on Elena’s clothes next, the T-shirts with the ironic slogans, the cotton briefs, the lacy bras she rarely wore. Sylvia ate the sheets off their bed, both their bathrobes, a washcloth, a slipper. She ate Elena’s pocketbook. It took her four days and a heavy kitchen knife to finish off a pair of old hiking boots, chewing and chewing and chewing.

All that and she still felt hollow, carved open like a canyon.

Sylvia stood at the mirror with her aching jaw held open, peering into the inside of her own mouth. She half-expected to see words imprinted on the red skin of her throat, black letters crawling towards the tip of her tongue. Her breath fogged the mirror.

When Sylvia spat, there were threads of blood in the saliva, mixed with something darker. Ink, maybe.

Sylvia walked out of her house in her pajamas, into the cold, damp air. She ran her fingers over the bark of the oak tree that dominated the backyard, then knelt down on the grass and stared up at the sky through the branches, at the chalky moon, the glassy stars.

She stared at her hands, the bitten nails and torn cuticles, knuckles dry and chapped. She pressed her fingertips to the cool, damp ground at the foot of the oak tree. It parted easily, and she came up with two small handfuls of dirt. Hesitantly, she put one in her mouth, pouring it past her lips. She worked it around her tongue, and then swallowed it.

Sylvia worked quickly after that, digging her fingers into the damp sod. She clawed up chunks of the ground, shoving handful after handful into her mouth. By dawn, she’d swallowed enough dirt to fill a grave. She lay back, her hands caked with soil to her elbow, belly distended, lips and chin black with soil.

Finally, she thought. I’m full.

END

Bogi Takács is an agender Hungarian Jewish author currently living in the US. E writes both speculative fiction and poetry, and eir works have been published in a variety of venues like Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Capricious and Nature Futures, among others.

E has an upcoming novelette in GigaNotoSaurus and a story in Defying Doomsday, an anthology of apocalypse-survival fiction with a focus on disabled characters, edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench.

E also recently guest-edited an issue of inkscrawl, the magazine for minimalist speculative poetry.

You can find Bogi on the web at http://www.prezzey.net and on twitter as @bogiperson.

Increasing Police Visibility

by Bogi Takács

Manned detector gates will be installed at border crossings, including Ferihegy Airport, and at major pedestrian thoroughfares in Budapest. No illegally present extraterrestrial will evade detection, government spokesperson Júlia Berenyi claimed at today's press conference...

Kari scribbles wildly in a pocket notebook. How to explain? It's impossible to explain anything to government bureaucrats, let alone science.

Kari writes:

To describe a measurement—

Sensitivity: True positives / Positives = True positives / (True positives + False negatives)

Specificity: True negatives / Negatives = True negatives / (False positives + True negatives)

Kari decides even this is too complicated, tears out the page, starts over.

To describe a measurement—

Janó grits his teeth, fingers the pistol in its holster. The man in front of him is on the verge of tears, but who knows when suffering will turn into assault, without another outlet.

“I have to charge you with the use of forged documents,” Janó says.

“How many times do I have to say? I'm – not – an – alien,” the man yells and raises his hands, more in desperation than in preparation to attack.

“Assault on police officers in the line of duty carries an additional penalty,” Janó says.

The man breaks down crying.

Kari paces the small office, practices the presentation. They will not understand because they don't want to understand, e thinks. Out loud, e says:

“To describe any kind of measurement, statisticians have devised two metrics we're going to use. Sensitivity shows us how good the measurement is at finding true positives. In this situation, a person identified as an ET who is genuinely an ET.”

The term ET still makes em think of the Spielberg movie from eir childhood. E sighs and goes on. “Whereas specificity shows us how good the measurement is at finding true negatives.” How much repetition is too much? “Here, a person identified as an Earth human who's really an Earth human.”

The whole thing is just about keeping the police busy and visible. Elections are coming next year, Kari thinks. Right-wing voters eat up this authoritarian nonsense.

“So if we know the values of sensitivity and specificity, and know how frequent are ETs in our population, we can calculate a lot. We can determine how likely it is for a person who was detected at a gate to be a real extraterrestrial.”

Alien is a slur, e reminds emself.

Eir officemate comes in, banging the door open. He glances at eir slide and yells. “Are they still nagging you with that alien crap?”

The young, curly-haired woman is wearing an ankle-length skirt and glaring down at Janó — she must be at least twenty centimeters taller than him, he estimates. She is the seventh person that day who objects to a full-body scan.

“This goes against my religious observance,” she says, nodding and grimacing. “I request a pat-down by a female officer.” She sounds practiced at this.

Janó sighs. “A pat-down cannot detect whether you are truly an extraterrestrial.”

“I will sue you!”

“Sue the state, you're welcome,” he groans and pushes her through, disgusted with himself all the while.

Kari is giving the presentation to a roomful of government bureaucrats. E's trying to put on a magician's airs. Pull the rabbit out of the hat with a flourish.

“So let's see! No measurement is perfect. How good do you think your gates are at detecting ETs? Ninety percent? Ninety-five percent? You know what, let's make it ninety-nine percent just for the sake of our argument.” They would probably be happy with eighty, e thinks.

E scribbles on the whiteboard – they couldn't get the office smartboard working, nor the projector. Eir marker squeaks.

SENSITIVITY = 99%

SPECIFICITY = 99%

“And now, how many people are actually ETs in disguise? Let's say half percent.” That's probably a huge overestimate still, e thinks.

“So for a person who tests as an ET, the probability that they truly are an ET can be calculated with Bayes' theorem...” E fills the whiteboard with eir energetic scrawl.

E pauses once finished. The calculations are relatively easy to follow, but e hopes even those who did not pay attention can interpret the result.

Someone in the back hisses, bites back a curse. Some people whisper.

“Yes, it's around 33 percent,” Kari says. “In this scenario, two thirds of people who test as ETs will be Earth humans. And this gets even worse the rarer the ETs are.” And the worse your sensitivity and specificity, e thinks but doesn't add. E isn't here to slam the detection gate technology. “This, by the way, is why general-population terrorist screenings after 9/11 were such abysmal failures.” Americans are a safe target here; the current crop of apparatchiks is pro-Russian.

This is math. There is nothing to argue with here. Some of the men still try.

Kari spends over an hour on discussion, eir perkiness already worn off by the half-hour mark.

“We can't just stop the program,” a middle-aged man finally says. “It increases police visibility in the community.”

Kari wishes e could just walk out on them, but what would that accomplish?

“I had a horrible day,” Kari/Janó say simultaneously, staring at each other: their rumpled, red-eyed, rattled selves.

“I hate myself,” Janó says.

“I'm useless,” Kari says.

Then they hug. Then they kiss.

Below their second-story window, on Klauzál Square, an extraterrestrial materializes out of thin air, dodging the gates. 

_____________

Endnotes:

For those interested in the actual calculations, the Bayes' Theorem page on Wikipedia demonstrates them with the numbers used in the story, in the context of drug testing.

I first heard the terrorism comparison from Prof. Floyd Webster Rudmin at the University of Tromsø, Norway.

END

"A Thing with Teeth" was originally published in Eunoia Review in 2013.

"Increasing Police Visibility" was originally published in the June 2015 issue of Lightspeed: Queers Destroy Science Fiction.

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

[Music Plays Out]

Straw and Gold

By Kate O’Connor

Orin did not know the feel of gold. There was none to be found in his father’s mill. There were coins of tangy, sharp copper and rough iron fittings on the door, slick steel for the horses’ tack and clattering tin plates for the table. His sister had a silver ring that had belonged to their mother. It was smooth and cool as a night breeze on Jessa’s delicate finger when she held his hand, warm against his skin where it now sat. But none of those things were gold.

The padded stool underneath him was by far the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever sat upon. The king was a clever man. Fear and wealth could drive a person to incredible feats. He clearly thought to give a bit of both to the woman who might live up to her father’s boasting, even if he thought her father a liar. Magic was rare – and it meant power. Orin tugged at the veil that covered his short hair then ran his fingertips over the wood of the spinning wheel. The finely-sanded surface was slick with polish.

Full transcipt after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 25 for April 5, 2016. This is your host Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you!

Today is a big day for two reasons! First, it's the first episode of our second year! Happy first birthday to GlitterShip! Also, our story today is GlitterShip's first original short story. "Straw and Gold" by Kate O'Connor has never been published anywhere else in either print or audio. Going forward, GlitterShip will bring you one original and one reprint episode per month!

Also, if you are planning to attend Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin, May 27th to May 30th this year, there will be a live GlitterShip reading featuring a few of the authors who have previously appeared on this show. More information will be in listed on the convention schedule when we get nearer to the event.

On a serious note: if you live in the United States, you have probably seen the large number of bigoted, anti-trans bills being proposed in state legislatures. Although I don't want to spend too much time talking politics on this podcast, I do want to urge any American listeners to take a look at their local politics. If your state house is trying to pass laws that legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people, or criminalize trans people just for existing, please contact your representatives to speak out against bigotry. For those of you who have done so already, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

And now, on to what you're here for!

After graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Kate O'Connor took up writing science fiction and fantasy. Her short fiction has most recently appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show, StarShipSofa, and Escape Pod. In between telling stories, she flies airplanes, digs up artifacts, and manages a dog kennel.

Straw and Gold

By Kate O’Connor

Orin did not know the feel of gold. There was none to be found in his father’s mill. There were coins of tangy, sharp copper and rough iron fittings on the door, slick steel for the horses’ tack and clattering tin plates for the table. His sister had a silver ring that had belonged to their mother. It was smooth and cool as a night breeze on Jessa’s delicate finger when she held his hand, warm against his skin where it now sat. But none of those things were gold.

The padded stool underneath him was by far the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever sat upon. The king was a clever man. Fear and wealth could drive a person to incredible feats. He clearly thought to give a bit of both to the woman who might live up to her father’s boasting, even if he thought her father a liar. Magic was rare – and it meant power. Orin tugged at the veil that covered his short hair then ran his fingertips over the wood of the spinning wheel. The finely-sanded surface was slick with polish.

The dusty, dry smell of clean straw filled the air to bursting. Even his father’s barn wasn’t as fragrant. He reached down, feeling around him until his hand encountered the nearest pile. He plucked out a few pieces and rolled them between thumb and forefinger. The harsh stalks rustled and poked.

For a moment, Orin hated his father. It was bad enough that he had gone begging to the king, but even worse that he had told lies when a courtier had mocked him for his poverty. That kind of pride was a luxury their small family had no room to claim. But what was done was done.

The king’s men came while Orin sat carding wool, banging on the door with metal-clad fists and demanding the girl who spun straw into gold.

Orin felt Jessa trembling beside him as their father explained what he had done. Father’s voice had been quiet and desperate. He hadn’t expected the king to call him out on his lie. He had just wanted to be heard without scorn.

“I don’t know how.” Jessa’s voice, more familiar to Orin than his own, was a whisper. Even if the king had only wanted plain yarn, she couldn’t have given it to him. Spinning was Orin’s job. Blind as he was, he couldn’t work the mill, but he spun the smoothest, finest thread in the village. It was all in the touch and the way whatever material he spun came together. No matter how poor the quality, he could make the fibers turn right under his hands.

“We don’t have magic. No one does.” Anger flickered in Jessa’s voice, driven by her fear. “It’s treason to lie to the king.” Orin felt her shivers as if they were his own. The punishments for treason were harsh and they had never so much as met anyone who could do magic.

Orin took his twin’s hand in his. “I’ll go.” He was the one they could spare. Jessa helped their father with the mill. She was part of the little world that was their village. Orin was nothing -- a damaged, near-silent young man who was little help to anyone. Maybe if he explained, the king would forgive them. It would be a disgrace if the task couldn’t be done, but it meant nothing in the greater scheme of things if Orin was shamed.

He could feel their attention on him. “Give me a dress and put a veil over my hair.” Orin spoke with far more calm than he felt. The people who came to the house always remarked that the twins could pass for one another but for their sex. Jessa was strong and her shoulders broader than Orin’s from her work in the mill. Life indoors had left his skin smoother than that of the village children.

“You can’t do this.” Jessa’s braid brushed his arm as she shook her head. “The king will be angry with you.” She sounded angry and commanding, like she did when someone spoke ill of him or their father.

He smiled, reaching out until he found her face. He patted her cheek gently. She had always been his defender. “My turn, Jess. Get your church clothes. You’ll have to help me dress.” This time, he would protect her.

Orin wished he had thought to ask for water to soften the straw. It was a silly desire. Even with the proper tools and enough time to work the straw into spinnable fibers, it would still just be straw, and, come morning, he would be dead. The king had been quite clear, his voice viper soft as he breathed the words in Orin’s ear like a lover. If the task could not be completed, the miller’s daughter would die.

Orin turned Jessa’s ring on his finger. He was grateful for its presence, even though it most likely meant she wouldn’t get it back after. The ring was a little piece of her -- and of their mother. It hadn’t crossed his mind until the king had spoken that death would be his punishment. Banishment, servitude, imprisonment, those had all seemed possible, but not death.

He twisted the straw into a bundle. His hands were shaking again. He didn’t want to die. He had wasted who-knew how long trailing his fingers along the walls of the room when he had first been locked in. The walls were solid stone under his desperate hands. There were no windows to move the stagnant air, no doors but the one they had escorted him through and shut behind him, no other way out that he could think to search for.

Orin tried to imagine what gold would feel like. Warmer than the silver ring, he thought, softer than iron, smoother than tin. His fingers moved over the bundle, twisting and pulling. What was it about gold that made people want it so? It must be more than cold metal.

Jessa said it was the color of sunlight and corn. He imagined the warmth of the sun on his face, the heat of the earth after a long summer day, the dusty-sweet scent of the mill. For a moment, the memories were so strong he could feel them. The straw pulled together, fibers working free and warming under his hand.

Out of habit, he spun them onto the wheel, hands following motions made familiar as breathing by practice and loneliness. The thread felt strange and stiff. His fingers tingled. Startled, he stopped, shaking his head to clear it. He felt the thread where it wound around the bobbin. It didn’t feel like straw, but it wasn’t metal either. Heart in his throat, he gathered up more straw. He started to spin again, trying to imitate exactly what he had done before. The straw fell to bits. He kept at it, over and over until he was exhausted and shivering in the chill damp of the cell.

He couldn’t make it happen again. Orin let his head fall forward into his hands, tears wetting his cheeks. For a foolish moment, he had let himself believe it was possible, that he had found the magic that would save his life.

“Well now. This is interesting.” A warm, musical voice filled the room.

“Who’s there?” Orin’s head jerked up, cocking to one side as he listened intently for the location of his unexpected visitor. He wondered if he had dozed off. He hadn’t heard the door open.

“Why are you crying, miller’s son?” The voice came from the far side of the room, light and easy as a summer breeze.

“The king will kill me if I don’t spin this straw into gold.” It sounded so stupid when he said it aloud. How could anyone be expected to do such a thing? How could his father have imagined the king would believe such a blatant lie?

The man laughed. It was the laugh that told Orin his visitor wasn’t human. It was wild and unrestrained, almost painful to hear. He shrunk away from the creature, wrapping his arms tightly around himself. “And how did he come to believe a boy like you could do that?”

“My father told him my sister could.” The words felt like they were being pulled out of him. He didn’t usually talk easily, let alone to strangers.

Orin heard the man moving, striding through whispering piles of straw. He flinched away. “I’m not going to hurt you.” The other sounded annoyed, but Orin believed him. There was something solid about his voice, as though lying was beneath him.

Orin felt the heat of him as he knelt beside the wheel. Like sunlight. The wheel creaked as the creature spun it. There was an intake of breath that sounded almost surprised.

“It’s not gold.” The voice had shifted, amusement draining into intense interest. “No. Not gold at all. But something.”

“What do you mean?” Orin’s voice cracked, the fear twisting his stomach, reaching up into his throat.

“It doesn’t matter.” A rush of air as the man stood. “I can help you with your impossible task, if you want. For a price.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“I just told you I can spin straw into gold. Do you really think I need money, boy?”

Orin felt like his cheeks were on fire. He dropped his head again. “What, then?” he whispered.

“Something important. Something worth your life.”

Orin thought frantically. He had nothing, was nothing. His fingers twined nervously together in his lap, encountering a slim band of metal. He stopped and sat up straight again. Slowly, he pulled the little silver ring off of his finger. “Here. What about this?” It would hurt to lose it, hurt worse when he had to explain to Jessa that it was gone. It was all they had of their mother.

“Yes.” The stranger breathed, coming close. “That and the thread you spun earlier will do nicely.” The fingers that took the ring from Orin’s hand were deft and gentle. “Do we have a deal?”

“We do.” Orin nodded, heart racing.

“Close your eyes.”

Orin let out a derisive chuckle.

“Yes, yes. I know. Do it anyway.” The man walked around behind him, sounding exasperated. “You don’t sleep with your eyes open, do you?”

Orin shut his blind eyes, a faint smile tugging at his lips. His visitor seemed far more approachable when he was exasperated. He jumped when the man’s hands settled over his. They were calloused and well-formed. Not a farmer’s hands, nor a miller’s, but not soft like a child’s either.

“Here.” He turned Orin’s left hand over, setting something cool and hard on his palm.

“What is it?” Orin turned it over in his hand. It felt like a coin, smooth and simple.

“Gold.”

“But…” Orin traced the small object over and over, trying to sort out what made it so valuable. “It just feels like any metal. A little softer than silver, but just as cold.”

“Exactly.” There was a smile in the man’s voice now. He took the coin and handed Orin a bundle of straw. His hands guided Orin’s to the spinning wheel. His chest was warm and solid against Orin’s back, driving the chill of the room away. “Let me show you the trick of it.”

“How did you do it?” Jessa sounded wary. Orin didn’t blame her. Magic had no place in their lives. She sat on the bed next to him. The foot of distance between them felt like the moment before a missed step sent him tumbling. Their father hadn’t said a word to him since the king’s men had escorted him back home, treating him with care and awed respect.

“There was a man. He helped me.” Orin was half convinced it had been a dream. But a dream didn’t explain what had happened. The king had come with the dawn, a single guard with him. Orin had heard him through the door, his voice tired and resigned as he told the guard the woman would most likely need to be taken to the executioner. Then door had opened and all talk had ceased. King and guard both had barely breathed as they circled the room.

“What man?”

“I didn’t ask his name.” Orin shrugged. “I don’t think he was human.” He knew the man hadn’t been.

“You made a deal with a fairy?” Jessa’s voice was shocked. It went against every story they had been told growing up. A fairy’s bargain was a double-edged sword.

“Just for the ring.” He didn’t tell her about the strange thread he had woven before the fairy had arrived. It was too odd and she was already treating him like he’d done something frightening. “I’m sorry, Jess. I didn’t know what else to do.”

The bed shifted and she hugged him tightly. “I’m just glad you’re home.” Her voice was muffled and thick with tears. He was surprised. Jessa never cried. “Be careful.” She said, holding him so tightly it hurt. “Be really, really careful. They can be monsters.”

“I will be.” Orin promised. He doubted he would ever see the man again anyway. The thought hurt more than he cared to admit. “Besides, there are good fairies as well as bad. I would have died if he hadn’t interfered.”

A week later, the king’s men came again.

 “You won’t trick me twice.” The king said, though there was a question in his voice. “And if you prove incapable of repeating your accomplishment, the punishment will be the same.”

Frightened, Orin felt out every corner of the room he had been locked in. It was easily twice the size of the first and piled high with straw. Even if it had been filled with nothing more than wool, his fingers would have bled before it was all spun. He sank onto the stool, shocked into numbness. It wasn’t fair. He pulled up handfuls of straw and gathered them together. He would have to do his best and hope it was enough.

The night passed too quickly. It had taken him a good hour to remember the trick of it, but the thread had finally shifted and come together. As he had predicted, his fingers split and bled. The thread turned slick and slipped off of the wheel more often than not.

The first frustrated tears had long since dried on Orin’s cheeks. He slipped from despair to frantic hope and back again. His hands ached terribly as he spun. He didn’t know how much longer he had, but he knew it wasn’t long enough. He had managed less than a third of the work. He was so tired.

 “This won’t do.” Anger rumbled in the fairy’s voice.

Orin jumped, dropping the blood-covered thread. He reached for it, finding it again and setting it back to the wheel. He couldn’t afford to lose any time.

“I’m sorry.” Orin whispered. Was the man mad at him for spinning gold without his permission? They hadn’t talked about that. Orin had assumed the lesson was his to use.

“Hush.” Gentle hands took his, pulling them away from the spinning wheel. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

Orin sat still as his hands were turned over and examined. The small kindness nearly brought him to tears again.

“All of this in one night.” It didn’t seem like a question, so Orin stayed quiet. “And you barely more than a child.”

“I’m not a child.” Even to himself Orin sounded defeated. Had he had his sight, he would probably be considering a house and family of his own by now. He would never be a man like the king, proud and strong and whole, but he had done his best to protect his family and help where he could. He wouldn’t take the blame for a task that was beyond anyone.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” The fairy laid a hand on Orin’s head, brushing his hair back out of his face. “You are a treasure and they treat you cruelly. It makes me angry.”

“A blind man is valuable to no-one.” The bitterness that always lingered under the surface crept out. He had been a burden his whole life. Jessa was kind about it. Father mostly ignored him. But it was a hard, cold fact that their lives were harder because they had to care for him.

“Eyesight has nothing to do with it.” The man’s voice was sharp. “You have a mind for magic. It’s rare enough among my kind. Even more so with yours. Such a gift should be protected and cherished. But enough of this. You need help.”

“What do you want this time?” Orin had nothing left. Kind words or no, he didn’t think the fairy would work for free.

“Ten drops of blood.” There was amusement in his voice. “One from each of your fingertips, so I will know next time you land yourself in such trouble.”

Mutely, Orin held out his hands. It was a small thing, really, and it warmed him that the fairy cared to know how he was fairing.

Orin was not surprised when the king’s men returned a third time, though he hadn’t expected the king himself to come with them.

“Once more.” The king said, kissing the back of Jessa’s hand. “Do this for me one more time and I will marry you.”

Orin was glad he had been inside when the royal procession arrived. His hands were heavily bandaged. The sight of him would lead to too many questions. Jessa was good at playing blind. She had watched him their whole lives. She knew what to do, but if the king saw them together, it would be very clear that something was amiss. He was not a stupid man.

Jessa joined him a moment later, catching him by the elbow and leading him back to her room. He followed without a word.

“You’re not going this time.” Her voice was firm. “You couldn’t spin if you wanted to. I’m going to have to go and hope your friend shows up.”

“I can’t promise that he will.” Orin’s jaw clenched tight. He was helpless again. The king had already seen Jessa uninjured and strong. And she was right about his hands.

“I know.” She sighed. “Just once more and then we’re out of this for good. And everything else besides. I’ll find something to trade him. We’ll be safe and fed and comfortable for the rest of our lives.”

Orin hadn’t known she wanted to be queen. He wouldn’t have thought an offer like that would appeal to her, but he could hear the excitement in her voice. He supposed he understood. Hadn’t he already seen how power could change one’s life?

Orin didn’t sleep that night. He waited in his chair by the hearth until morning, wishing as hard as he knew how that the fairy would help his twin. At long last, the door opened and his sister was home.

“Your fairy did it. All of it. He said I could learn to do it myself if he had a week to teach me and I stopped talking at him.” Jessa was tired, but triumphant. “It’s done.”

Orin closed his eyes, relief making him weak. “What did you give him?”

“Nothing I’ll have to worry about any time soon.” She squeezed his shoulder fondly. “Now hush. I have to pack. We’re moving to the castle.”

“I can’t. The king will know.”

“I told him my blindness was cured when he kissed me.” Jessa laughed. “At this point, I think he’ll believe anything I tell him. He has a ballroom full of gold as proof.”

“I’m staying here.” He would get lost in the palace. “Don’t worry, Jess. Once my hands are better, I’ll spin for my supper. I’ll be happier here. Take Father. I’ve had enough of the palace to last me a lifetime.” He was ready to have his own life, to prove he could take care of himself without burdening them.

If he could learn to spin straw into gold, there was no telling what else he might be able to do given enough time to experiment. He could find his fairy again and maybe this time they would have the chance to talk. There was so much Orin hadn’t thought to ask while the man was saving his life.

Jessa hadn’t been home once in the year since she had wed the king. She sent her people to buy the thread he spun and made sure he was supplied with wool from the castle flocks. He was fast gaining a reputation for spinning the finest thread in the kingdom.

The late-night knock on the door was furtive and unusual. People visited him to buy and trade, nothing else. Orin got to his feet slowly. It was easier to make his way through the house now that he was the only one in it. Everything stayed where he left it.

“Orin. It’s Jessa. Let me in.”

As though he would have forgotten her voice. She was the king’s wife, but she was still his sister. He opened the door.

She threw herself into his arms, burying her face in his neck. He stumbled under the unexpected weight. She sobbed until he thought she would break.

“What’s wrong?” He asked once she had calmed a little. The shoulder of his tunic was damp. “Is it the baby?” Jessa’s son would be two months old. Orin had yet to meet him. The king didn’t approve of his wife wandering about the countryside to visit old friends. Orin didn’t think Jessa had told her husband she even had a brother.

“Yes. No. Sort of.” She paused, and took a shaking breath. “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I don’t know what to do. I have three days. Just three days before he comes back.”

“Before who comes back? You’re not making much sense.”

“Your fairy.” Her voice was angry now and she pushed away from him. “He wants my son. And because I was an ignorant, grasping little girl, he has the right.”

“You promised him your child.” Orin couldn’t quite believe it. How could she have offered something like that? Her own flesh and blood.

“Don’t say it. I know.” For a moment, she sounded like a queen, imperious and cold. “I begged him. I offered him anything, anything but my son.”

“There’s nothing I can do. I haven’t seen him since that night.” And Orin had missed the man, strong hands, wild voice, short temper and all. Though he had searched in his own way, asking anyone who came for thread and wool, no amount of wishing had brought the fairy back to him when Orin didn’t actually need his help.

“He said if I learned his name he would release me from our bargain. Do you know it?”

Orin shook his head. “I never asked.” The fairy had done so much for him and he hadn’t thought to ask so much as his name.     The chair creaked as Jessa sank into it. “I have people out looking. They followed him as far as the forest. Beyond that, who knows?” She was silent for a long time. Orin stood beside her, the distance between them palpable. “I can’t lose my baby.” She whispered.

“I’ll go.” Just like the first time, the words slipped out before he knew what he was going to say. For this, the fairy would find him. He had come every time Orin had needed him.

Jessa hugged him, the space between them evaporating like it had never been there. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” He would have to go into the forest alone. There was no point in hoping the fairy would come if he brought a guide.

Jessa’s men dropped him off at the edge of the forest. He followed the cart track a long way into its rustling, whispering depths, shuffling along slowly. He rubbed his fingertips, hoping that he was right and ten drops of blood taken more than a year ago would be enough to get him out of the mess he was walking deeper into.

After a while, Orin lost track of the path. He was hopelessly turned around. He pushed on, not sure if he should call out or be silent. He opted for silence. The fairy had always found him well enough before without him yelling.

He stumbled and fell over a tree root. Something smooth and cool brushed against his arm, coiling and alive. He jerked back, desperately hoping the creature wasn’t poisonous.

“You do get yourself into the most interesting sorts of trouble.” The familiar laughing voice came from the trees above him. “Stay still. I’ll send the snake away.”

Orin shivered. In no time, the fairy was beside him, helping him to his feet and brushing the crinkling leaves off of his clothing.

The tight knot in Orin’s stomach loosened. He had found him. Whatever else happened, he wouldn’t be left wandering the woods until he starved or ran afoul of something less pleasant.

“Let me look at you.” He was turned gently from side to side. “Hmm. Yes. You’re here about your sister’s child, no doubt.”

“It seems like we have been friends long enough that I might know your name.” Orin smiled. A year was a long time to think. He thought he knew the game his fairy played.

The man laughed long and loud. “Friends, is it?”

“You want rare treasures. Things that matter to people but get overlooked and forgotten. Am I right?” As before, Orin felt the fairy’s interest sharpen. “You don’t really want the baby.”

“You and your sister have proven most interesting folk. Why wouldn’t I want a part of that for myself?” His tone was light and casual.

“You’re lonely.” It surprised Orin. He would have thought there would be others like the fairy to keep him company. The silence was so complete that Orin wondered if he should have kept his mouth shut. The last thing he wanted was to make the fairy angry. What was it that he had said before? Magic was rare.

Orin reached for him, fumbling around the unfamiliar clearing until his hands found leather and cloth. He gripped the man’s strong arm in apology. “I have a better bargain to make with you.” He spoke softly.

“I’m listening.” The cool edge to the voice let Orin know that he had indeed set off the fairy’s temper.

“You will let my sister learn your name in time to keep her baby. In exchange, I’ll stay with you.”

“You would sacrifice yourself for her again?” The tone was mocking.

For a brief moment, Orin wondered if he should agree. Then he smiled. “It’s a bargain, not a sacrifice. That means I’m getting something out of the deal too.” His fairy wasn’t the only one who was lonely. Spinning in an empty house wasn’t much of a life. And he would get a chance to ask his questions. Not just the man’s name, but who he was and why he tried so hard to cover over his kindness with bargains and anger. “I keep you company, my sister pays with something she values, but doesn’t recognize, and you teach me a little magic here and there to pass the time.”

“All right, you ridiculous man.” The fairy was laughing again, all traces of his temper vanishing. “You win. Your sister can have my name. Though I think I am getting the better end of this.”

“No.” Orin grinned. “I am.”

END

“Straw and Gold” is copyright Kate O'Connor, 2016.

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

Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on April 19th with a selection of flash fiction reprints!

Straw and Gold

By Kate O’Connor

Orin did not know the feel of gold. There was none to be found in his father’s mill. There were coins of tangy, sharp copper and rough iron fittings on the door, slick steel for the horses’ tack and clattering tin plates for the table. His sister had a silver ring that had belonged to their mother. It was smooth and cool as a night breeze on Jessa’s delicate finger when she held his hand, warm against his skin where it now sat. But none of those things were gold.

The padded stool underneath him was by far the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever sat upon. The king was a clever man. Fear and wealth could drive a person to incredible feats. He clearly thought to give a bit of both to the woman who might live up to her father’s boasting, even if he thought her father a liar. Magic was rare – and it meant power. Orin tugged at the veil that covered his short hair then ran his fingertips over the wood of the spinning wheel. The finely-sanded surface was slick with polish.

Full transcipt after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 25 for April 5, 2016. This is your host Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you!

Today is a big day for two reasons! First, it's the first episode of our second year! Happy first birthday to GlitterShip! Also, our story today is GlitterShip's first original short story. "Straw and Gold" by Kate O'Connor has never been published anywhere else in either print or audio. Going forward, GlitterShip will bring you one original and one reprint episode per month!

Also, if you are planning to attend Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin, May 27th to May 30th this year, there will be a live GlitterShip reading featuring a few of the authors who have previously appeared on this show. More information will be in listed on the convention schedule when we get nearer to the event.

On a serious note: if you live in the United States, you have probably seen the large number of bigoted, anti-trans bills being proposed in state legislatures. Although I don't want to spend too much time talking politics on this podcast, I do want to urge any American listeners to take a look at their local politics. If your state house is trying to pass laws that legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people, or criminalize trans people just for existing, please contact your representatives to speak out against bigotry. For those of you who have done so already, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Lamia Victoriana

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

The poet’s sister has teeth as white as new lace. When she speaks, which is rarely, I feel a shiver down my skin.

I am not here for this. I am here to persuade my own sister, Mary, that she has made a terrible mistake, that eloping as she has with this poet who cannot marry her, will not only be her own ruin, but that of our family.

My tongue stumbles on the words, and every indignant speech I practiced on my way here has melted to nothing. The poet looks at me with his calm, beautiful eyes, and Mary sits scandalously close to him, determined to continue in her path of debauchery and wickedness. I cannot take my eyes from the poet’s sister.

Full transcript after the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 24 for March 15, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

This is the last story for the first year of GlitterShip! We launched last April, and although our episodes have not been quite as regular as originally planned, we've managed to settle into a 2-per-month schedule.

Coming up on April 5th, we will have our FIRST GlitterShip original story, and will continue with one original and one reprint every month.

GlitterShip is currently funded through the end of year 2 (through the end of March 2017) but will be looking for funds to continue the show for a third year -- and hopefully more!

If you like what we do here, please consider adding a dollar or two per month via our Patreon page, at http://www.patreon.com/keffy. You can also donate directly via Paypal at https://www.paypal.me/keffy or the Donate button at glittership.com/donate

I'm working hard to catch up on the first year's Kickstarter rewards, including the Year 1 anthology. There will be an update for Kickstarter backers by the end of the month.

I also ran a listener poll for the stories that were podcast during 2015!

The winners were:

1st Place: "Sooner than Gold" by Cory Skerry (Episode 9)

Thank you to everyone who voted!

Our story today is "Lamia Victoriana" by Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Tansy is a Tasmanian author of science fiction and fantasy. She is a co-host on two podcasts: Verity! and Galactic Suburbia. "Lamia Victoriana" was published as part of Tansy's short story suite Love and Romanpunk, and was previously reprinted in the Mammoth Book of Gaslight Romance.

Lamia Victoriana

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

The poet’s sister has teeth as white as new lace. When she speaks, which is rarely, I feel a shiver down my skin.

I am not here for this. I am here to persuade my own sister, Mary, that she has made a terrible mistake, that eloping as she has with this poet who cannot marry her, will not only be her own ruin, but that of our family.

My tongue stumbles on the words, and every indignant speech I practiced on my way here has melted to nothing. The poet looks at me with his calm, beautiful eyes, and Mary sits scandalously close to him, determined to continue in her path of debauchery and wickedness. I cannot take my eyes from the poet’s sister.

She is pale all over, silver like moonlight. The pale twigged lawn of her day dress makes her skin milky and soft. I have never seen such a creature as her.

‘If you are so worried about my reputation, Fanny, then come with us,’ urges Mary. ‘Be my companion. I know you have always longed to see the continent. We are to Paris, and later, Florence.’ Her deflowering has rendered her more confident than I have ever seen her. She glows with happiness and self-satisfaction.

 ‘You may have relinquished society’s good opinion, but I cannot countenance such a thought,’ I say.

But the poet’s sister arches her neck and says, ‘Come,’ and I am lost.

Within a week, it becomes obvious that they are not human. The poet and his sister enter rooms so silently it is as if their footsteps are swallowed by the very air. When we leave hotels, one of them speaks softly to the owner, and we leave without money or promissory notes changing hands.

Language is their coin, and they buy every trinket with a pearl from their tongues. I wonder, is someone somewhere keeping track of the cost of this life of ours?

Mary is immersed in her poet. At meal-times, she gazes fiercely at his hands, as if the way that his fingers toy with the silverware or hold a wine glass are in themselves a great work of art. She sighs about hunger or thirst, but does little to assuage such desires.

I eat, but the food tastes like ashes, such is my fear. I should not have followed my sister. Her fate should not be my own. I tell myself I chose this path because of my terror of what Father would do to me if I returned without Mary, but the truth is, I came with them because the poet’s sister asked me to.

On the ninth day, she kisses me.

I am distracted by my latest letter from home. The paper is clutched tight in my fist and my first concern is passing by the poet’s sister in the passageway without our skirts getting tangled together or my hip pressing unduly against hers. Unexpectedly, she turns to me so that our bodies are aligned in that narrow space and gasps her mouth against my own.

I drink her in, for a moment of perfumed air and warmth, and then she is gone, her laughter spilling against the walls as she moves, so fast, so fast.

Gone.

Mary cups her hands over the slight swell of her belly, admiring her new curves in the mirror. “I am greater than I was, Fanny,” she tells me. “The world is greater than it was.”

“You are foolish in love,” I tell her, snipping off the end of my embroidery thread. Love. Is that the fluttering feeling in my bones when the poet’s sister looks at me? Am I a greater fool than my sister?

“Admit it,” says Mary, tugging the silk of her dress out so that she can imagine how she will look when she is more months round. “Paris is beautiful.”

Paris. Paris is chocolate and pastries that we do not drink or eat, though it sits prettily before us at meal-times, in perfect china vessels. Paris is expensive frocks that my sister and her poet cannot afford, persuaded from fancy shops with quiet, forceful words.

Mary buys me a travelling dress, of sturdy linen and wool, with a jaunty hat. The colours are violet and black, as is proper for a widow rather than an unmarried chaperone. I wonder whom it is that I am supposed to be mourning, but I rather like the way that I look in the costume.

On the train to Florence, I stand at the window, gazing at the winding ribbon of Italian countryside. This, this is the world. I am free of the dust and the smallness of Father’s house and our street in London. I feel as if I could fly.

The poet’s sister brushes against me in the narrow cabin, and then again, so that I can tell it was not done by accident. Her fingertips linger on my waist as she steadies herself against the bunk. “Shall we join Mary and my brother in the dining carriage?” she asks.

I shake my head, not willing to say aloud that I cannot bear another meal of artifice and elegance at which nothing is eaten. They all enjoy the ritual, but it only serves to remind me of what we have lost, and what we have left behind. It unsettles me that such a vital human need has been lost to us.

Hungry. I am so very hungry, and yet I cannot swallow even a crumb.

“Well then,” she says, and tugs down the stiff blind that shuts out the light. “We are alone.”

The travelling dress comes apart so easily, as if it were designed for this. A button, a lace, and I am unpeeled. Her hands are cold against the heat of my skin, and her mouth fits against my neck perfectly.

My mind is overwhelmed with her fingers, her palms, the soft mound beneath her thumb, and the whisper of my chemise as it gives way to her. I do not notice the bite until she is so deep inside me that there is no return, no escape, just heat and taste and the rocking pulse of the train through every inch of my skin.

For the first time in days, in weeks, I am sated. Finally, I understand what I was hungering for.

To be food.

Later, much later, there is a whistle. The train has stopped. I am lying dizzy in the lower bunk, my body wrapped in the languid arms of the poet’s sister.

“We’re here,” she says, and slides over my inert body to dress herself. I watch as her white skin disappears into layers of fabric, of stockings and stays and damask. When she is her outer self again, she turns her attentions to me, drawing me to my feet and dressing me as if I am a doll. She even combs my hair, playing the lady’s maid.

When I speak, it is only to say, “So quiet.” Where is the bustle of the other passengers, the calls and urgent conversations, the mutterings as they embark or depart?

“All the time in the world,” she says softly, and powders my face.

Every apartment on the train is empty as we pass. But no, not empty. If I look too closely, I can see a hand here, a foot there, a fallen lock of hair.

She catches me looking. “My brother was hungry,” is her only explanation.

We meet Mary and the poet on the platform. They are bright with colour, delighted with themselves. Several porters come forth to carry our trunks, but they all have a dazed look about their eyes that proves the poet has already paid them with his dulcet words.

“I know we shall love it, here in Florence,” says Mary.

“It is a most accommodating city,” agrees the poet, with a satisfied smile.

We have been in Florence only three days when someone tries to kill us. He is a most unassuming looking gentleman. The poet’s sister and I are wandering the city markets, choosing furnishings and flowers that will look splendid in the new house that her brother is buying for us. He spends his days going from place to place, searching for the perfect villa, while Mary plans the garden where her children will play.

The assassin lunges out of the shadows, a rope knotted in his hands, and wraps it around my lover’s throat. She is caught unawares, but he does not expect me to savage him with the fine brass door-knocker I had been admiring on a nearby stall.

Blood pours from the wound on his head as I hurl the knotted rope away, cooing over the ugly bruises on her throat.

“Do not concern yourself, Fanny,” she says in a beautiful rasp. “No one shall destroy us.”

“You are not one of them,” the man gasps, holding his sleeve to the wound. “Do not let the lamia take your will and your life from you, Frances Wolstonecraft.”

I shiver that he knows my name. Or perhaps it is that other word — lamia. I do not know what it means.

“Come near us again,” said the poet’s sister. “And my brother will kill you.” She takes my hand, and we run away together, through the market.

“Who is that man?” I ask at the supper table that night. The poet, his sister and Mary all look at each other as if I have said something unpleasant, a truth not to be named aloud. “Why does he hate us?” I persist. Am I the only one not to know the secrets of this new family we have formed? I am not a child!

“He is an old enemy of my kind,” the poet says finally, shifting his wine glass one precise inch to the left, so that the candlelight makes a prettier pattern of ruby shapes on the tablecloth. “He hates us for being. That is all. His name is Julius. He is not important.”

“He was so strong.” I can still remember that look in his eyes, as if my lady were some kind of monster.

“We are stronger,” says the poet’s sister, and squeezes my fingers with her own.

From Florence, we travel to Switzerland, determined that our plan to live together in all happiness and beauty shall not be spoiled by the horrid man, Julius.

I wonder sometimes if he was sent by our father, if the poet only wished to spare Mary and I from that awful truth, that our own family would rather see us dead than happy.

We have our house of dreams, finally, in the midst of such green splendour, and a good distance outside the town where prying eyes might seek to spoil our circle. The poet and Mary visit the town often, to buy pretty trinkets, and to slake their thirst. When they are gone, it is as if the house is ours, only ours, and the poet’s sister and I can finally love each other as we long to.

She needs no drink but what she takes from me, in sweet drugging kisses that make me feel alive.

Mary’s child is born; a perfect silver nub of a creature with bright eyes. She is hungry, so very hungry, and nuzzles her constantly, sucking, biting, clawing at her for food. She hires a nursemaid from the town, and then another, but the babe’s thirst is too great, and for a while it is as if we are constantly digging graves for the scraps left behind.

Left unsaid is our belief she will not survive.

We will have to move again, and soon, but we have been so happy here. It pains us to speak of leaving the garden, the egg-shell drawing room, the balcony that looks out over the valley.

We stay too long.

I am awoken from a deep befogged sleep against the body of my beloved when I hear a scream in the night. The baby makes so much noise that I am content at first to ignore the interruption, but then there is another, and the shattering of glass.

The poet’s sister sits up in bed, shining and glorious in her white nightgown. “Him,” is all she says, and then she is up on her feet, hair streaming behind her, teeth gleaming in the darkness.

He has come for us.

The downstairs parlour is alight as we come down the stairs: flames crackle up the curtains and blacken the wooden walls. My beloved gasps as she finds the body of her brother in a pool of silver blood, his body pierced through the heart and his head lying some distance from his neck.

“Fanny!” Mary screams, and bursts through the flaming doorway like an angel, bearing her child wrapped in a sage-green blanket trimmed with ivory lace. “Take her,” she begs, placing the wailing bundle in my arms.

I stand there, immobile as Mary and my beloved turn back to the smoke and the flames, ready to avenge the death of the poet.

He — Julius, slayer of lamia — walks through the wall of flames with his sword held high.

It is a short sword, and bronzed rather than steel. How odd, the things you notice at such moments.

My sister bares her teeth, as sharp as those of my beloved, and they swarm him. I do not want to watch. I flee, through the kitchen, where I grab the only weapon I can find, a kitchen knife, and spare cloths for the baby. Then I run out of the house, my niece crying in my arms, down the hill, away from the beautiful house.

I feel it minutes later, the death of my beloved. It is a blossoming pain in my chest, as if someone has carved out my heart. I do not feel Mary die; we have no such connection. But my tears fall for them both.

I run and hide, but the baby is hungry and she will not stop crying. Finally I press her mouth again my upper arm and she suckles deeply, her own teeth finding the vein and drinking in great gulping swallows. I shall have to wind her afterwards, and the thought is almost enough to make me burst with laughter.

Too late. I should have silenced her minutes ago. He is upon us. I hear him treading the crisp grass nearby, and the rasp of his smoke-filled lungs. “Frances,” he says, as if he still thinks he has an ally in me. “Give me the child.”

The baby’s feed is not as delicious as that of my beloved. It hurts, though there is still a satisfaction in it, in knowing that I am food, that I am needed. Little Mary. Mine now. “No,” I say, quite calmly, though he is standing not far from me, and he has a sword. I do not think he will hurt me. For some reason, he does not believe I am one of the monsters. I keep the knife hidden in my skirts, so that he shall not see that I am able to defend myself.

“Listen to me, Frances. I have tracked these creatures for years. They were the last, the three up there in the house.”

My family. Tears rush anew down my cheeks, and I cannot wipe them away without disturbing the babe.

“There is only that one,” he continues. “When it is gone, the world will be safe. One less monster to ravage families, to destroy the lives of innocents such as yourself. Lamia who are born rather than made are the most powerful, the most dangerous. I have worked for centuries to weaken these creatures, and if this one lives to make more of its kind, it may be centuries more before they are wiped from the face of the earth.”

The baby releases me with a gasp and leans against my breast, breathing deeply. She is asleep. My niece, the perfect silver child. My daughter, now. He cannot even acknowledge that she is a ‘she’.

“No,” I say again.

“You can go home, Frances,” he says, in a soothing voice. “Home to your father, to your old life…”

The thought of it makes me shudder. “No!” I scream, and run at him with the knife.

He does not expect it, even now. He thinks I am food, a docile milk cow, with no reason to defy him now that my lover and sister are dead. I catch him in the neck, and he twists badly, falling down the hillside onto his sword.

I do not think he survived. How could he, a blow like that? After months of standing asid, as my sister and the poet killed for food, I have become a murderer myself.

Perhaps the murderer of thousands, by keeping my little Mary alive. The blood of my body will not sustain her forever. But I have learned that the lamia power of persuasive words is mine to share, if I hold the baby close to my skin, and that has been enough to get us from train to train, from country to country.

We will travel as far as we can, to a land so distant that another Julius can never find us. She will grow, my darling daughter, and she will feed. Some day, perhaps, she shall make me another lover to replace what I lost. We shall be a family, all together.

She shall live, my little Mary, long after I have gone, and live, and live.

I am not sorry for it.

END