GlitterShip

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!

Je me souviens

by Su J. Sokol

There are nine police cars. I count them again just to be sure and because counting usually calms me.

Arielle watches to see if I’m freaking out, asks if I want to leave. I tell her I’m OK but she's not reassured so I give her a sexy smile. If she would kiss me now, I’d have somewhere pleasant to channel my beating heart. She leans towards me and I see that she’s used her superpowers to read my mind again, but then another police car arrives, drawing her attention away.

Now ten police cars face two hundred and thirty-six demonstrators. We are peaceful, banging pots and chanting slogans. Our numbers include children, old people, commuters on bikes, dogs wearing red bandanas. A cop is speaking through a bullhorn but no one can hear him because of the clanging and chanting. Will they arrest us now? My heart beats like the wings of a falcon, trying to escape the prison of my chest.

Full transcript after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 23 for March 1, 2016. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

I'm extending the period for responses to the GlitterShip listener favorites poll until March 5th. You can find a link in the transcript for this episode at GlitterShip.com

GlitterShip Poll

Our story today is "Je me souviens" by Su J. Sokol.

Su is an activist, a cyclist, and a writer of interstitial fiction. A former legal services lawyer from New York City, Sokol immigrated to Montréal in 2004 where she works as a social rights advocate. Her short stories have been published in The Future Fire and Spark: A Creative Anthology. Her debut novel, Cycling to Asylum, was long-listed for the 2015 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. "Je me souviens" was first published in 2012 by the Future Fire and was recently republished in TFFX, the The Future Fire's tenth anniversary anthology.

Our guest reader today is Leigh Wallace.

Leigh is a Canadian writer, artist and public servant. You can find her latest story in Tesseracts 19: Superhero Universe and her art at leighfive.deviantart.com

I've also been asked for trigger warnings in the past. This story does contain references to police violence and anti-gay torture.

Je me souviens

by Su J. Sokol

There are nine police cars. I count them again just to be sure and because counting usually calms me.

Arielle watches to see if I’m freaking out, asks if I want to leave. I tell her I’m OK but she's not reassured so I give her a sexy smile. If she would kiss me now, I’d have somewhere pleasant to channel my beating heart. She leans towards me and I see that she’s used her superpowers to read my mind again, but then another police car arrives, drawing her attention away.

Now ten police cars face two hundred and thirty-six demonstrators. We are peaceful, banging pots and chanting slogans. Our numbers include children, old people, commuters on bikes, dogs wearing red bandanas. A cop is speaking through a bullhorn but no one can hear him because of the clanging and chanting. Will they arrest us now? My heart beats like the wings of a falcon, trying to escape the prison of my chest.

I tell myself that this is Québec. They will not put a black bag over my head. They will not throw me in the trunk of one of their cars. They will not burn me with cigarettes after beating me. No, this doesn’t happen here ... I am pretty sure. They have granted me permanent residence and have even hired me to teach their children math. So I will stay here and demonstrate for my students.

The police open the trunks of their vans. I’m concentrating on my breathing, on not blanking out, when a little ball of energy in a red cape flies into my legs.

“La policía, they are here to catch the bad guys, Papa?” he asks me, his speech the usual jumble of French, Spanish and English.

Before I can speak, Arielle answers. “No, mon petit chéri, this is not why they’re here today.” Her face is an eloquent mix of amusement and sadness.

“I will catch them, then! But first Papa must fly me home so I can eat my supper.”

“C’est correct? Can we go home now?” Arielle asks me.

I shrug, hiding my relief, and lift Raphaël high over my head. I run full out towards our home, fast enough so that his cape flies out behind him and fast enough that my own need to run is satisfied. Our four-year-old superhero has come to the rescue.

The next morning, despite a sleep fragmented by nightmares, I’m energized, thinking about being a part of something important again. This was not my first demonstration in my new home, but the first of this kind—spontaneous, focused, a little confrontational. And joyous. Even more so than the mass manifestation when our numbers first surpassed 250,000.

That day, I stood at the overpass by rue Berri, Raphaël on my shoulders, watching the street below swell with a current of demonstrators wide as the Rio Grande. I’m good at counting, my eyes instinctively grouping people into hundreds, thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands. Surely they must listen now, I thought. Surely they will see the beauty, the rightness of our cause!

Our euphoria was short-lived as we watched the news and listened to the lies about our goals, our numbers. Last night, with our pots, with our “casseroles”, we banged out our anger and turned it into music. I am proud, too, that les casseroles, “los caserolazos”, are borrowed from the political traditions of my own people.

Now, standing at the front of my high school math class, I feel strong, in control. Numbers—they do not lie to you; they do not let you down. I explain the first problem, my eyes scanning the classroom, counting students. Someone is missing. When I’m presenting the second problem, Xavier stumbles in, limping slightly and with his left eye blackened.

I don’t ask him for his late pass nor for his homework. I even let him read whatever it is he’s awkwardly hidden behind his math textbook. A large oval bruise on his upper arm is already aging, turning from black to green. As I answer a student’s question, my mind goes through a familiar set of choices:  the police, youth protection, the directrice of the school ... When the authorities were called in last time, it did not end well: denials and threats of legal action by his politically connected family, followed by unexplained absences.

I ask Xavier to remain after class is over. He approaches my desk, giving me a sullen look from under his long hair. There seems little point in asking him what happened, so instead, I ask him what he’s reading. He hesitates, then shrugs and places it in my hand.

“C’est une bande-dessinée. A ‘Comic book’ in English.”

“I am not anglophone,” I say.

“Yeah, but you’re not from here, are you?”

He says this like I might be from Mars or some other planet.

“Why do the people in the bande-dessinée have the heads of animals?” I ask. “Are they superheroes, these animal-headed people?”

“I’m not ten years old. I don’t believe in superheroes.”

“I would like to help you, Xavi.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help. And I can’t stay. There’s a student union meeting. To vote on the strike.”

Enthusiasm has replaced his precocious cynicism. But then I watch him limp away, a sense of helplessness making my own limbs feel heavy.

The end of the day finds me in the teachers’ lounge. Luc joins me, compositions from his students clutched in his big hands. I gaze up at my best friend and he quickly drops down beside me.

“Qu’est-ce que tu as?” he asks, reading me as always.

“Xavier came into class today all beaten up. I don’t know what I should do.”

“If you suspect something ...”

“It is beyond suspecting. I know what’s happening and it’s not just beatings.”

“Are you sure of this?” he asks.

I simply look at him. He knows about my past. Not just the torture but the rapes as well. Luc was able to get this information out of me even when the tribunal could not.

“Don’t worry, Gabriel, I have friends at youth protection. We’ll find a way to help him.”

I feel a little reassured. I move closer, so that I can lean against him. He lets me, even puts his arm around my shoulder. Some of the darkness leaks out of me.

If Arielle were here, she would be happy, seeing how I can still take comfort from other men. She was my lawyer at the refugee hearing and accepts me as I am. She tried to prepare me for their questions, but I failed her. On such and such a date, they asked me, had I been tortured for my political crimes or for the crime of being queer? It seemed important to be precise about this, but I was confused. Maybe I was tortured for the former and raped for the latter. The fear of disappointing the officials, of making them angry, made my words flee. Perhaps that’s why, in the middle of the hearing, I blanked out.

“I should go home,” I say to Luc. “To cook supper. Arielle is counting on me.”

“How is Arielle?”

“She is good. We had very hot sex last night. Do you want to hear about it?”

I feel happy thinking about this while leaning against Luc’s shoulder. It was when Arielle and I made love for the first time, on the floor of her office, that I realized she had superpowers. I hadn’t been sure before, even though she’d rescued me from the hearing. Arielle might even have won my case, but instead, she found a way to spare me the pain of testifying. She offered to marry me, explaining it in logical, lawyerly terms. She’d just gone through another in a series of unreliable roommates and untrustworthy boyfriends. She wanted someone who shared her political values to also share, on a longterm basis, the household expenses and cooking. And one other thing. She wanted a child.

Luc tells me maybe another time, after a few beers.

“Will we go somewhere that has ‘Maudite’ beer?” I ask him. “I like the picture on the label, of the flying canoe, la chasse galerie.”

“Speaking of which, I have that book for Raphaël. Of old Québecois tales, including a few chasse galerie stories.” He hands me a large volume, the edges soft with use.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, running my fingers along the expensive binding.

“My parents gave me this collection. Keep it as long as you need it.”

“Merci beaucoup mon cher ami,” I say, kissing him on both cheeks and then once on the lips for good measure. He accepts my shows of affection with his usual aplomb.

That night, I tell Raphaël my own version of a chasse galerie story.

“Once upon a time, men were chopping down trees deep in the winter forest. They were sad because they missed their children and partners.”

“Where were they, Papa?”

“In another forest ... planting trees to replace those that had been cut down. So one day, the men boarded a magic canoe to visit their loved ones.”

“Were they superheroes?”

“Claro que si. They could mix their powers together into one big superpower. That’s how they made the canoe fly. But there was a super villain too, and he ... he sprinkled forgetting dust into their eyes so that they could not remember who they were, and their canoe started falling down to the earth.”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“Flying Boy came to the rescue. He brought the boat down safely and used a magical washcloth to wipe the forgetting dust out of the men’s eyes.”

“Was Flying Boy wearing his red cape?”

“Yes. And now it’s time for superheroes to go to sleep.”

“Papa? Why did the super villain make the men forget things? Why is he bad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a bad thing happened to him, something he needed to forget. Good night Flying Boy.”

“Good night, Papa.”

I tuck him into bed, trying to ignore a growing darkness. I make myself think of the night Rapha was born. The moment I held him, I knew he’d been gifted with strong powers and that it was my job to protect him until he was old enough to use them safely. This responsibility is what has kept me from ending my own worthless life.

Arielle is watching the nightly update about the strike. There’s a late-breaking development about a student who’s in critical condition after a cop's plastic bullet struck her in the eye. I pull Arielle onto my lap and hide my face in her curls while counting to myself. Maybe Arielle will use her powers tonight to make me forget things that strike and burn and tear into tender flesh.

On Facebook, I learn that this week has been declared “une semaine de résistance” for secondary school students. Our school votes to go on strike, but staff must report to work as usual. I stay in the teachers’ lounge, not wanting to be alone, but I’m restless, so I go down the hall and stand at the entrance. At nine o’clock, the police arrive in full riot gear and declare the students’ picket illegal. They open their trunks and pull out shiny yellow vests and canisters of malevolent substances. I walk back into the teachers’ lounge. 

“We should be out there,” I say to the others.

A debate ensues but many teachers are missing, still in their classrooms.

“I’ll get them,” Luc volunteers. He turns to me. “Stay here until I get back.”

I wait for a while, then go to the front entrance again and see the beginnings of trouble between a group of students and the riot cops. Just then, Luc appears.

“Venez dehors! Nos étudiants se font embêter!” he shouts to the others.

I run outside and Luc catches up to me, his hand closing around my upper arm. I pull him with me as I throw myself between the students and the riot police. We’re shoved but keep to our feet and Luc is saying “Calmez-vous, calmez-vous,” making eye contact with each of the cops in front of us, patiently explaining that we are teachers, a French teacher and a Mathematics teacher, and that we must all remain calm to set a good example.

After a few tense moments, more teachers come outside. We join hands, forming a barrier between the students and the police. The students chant slogans like “Education is a right” and “À qui nos écoles? À nous nos écoles”. Luc pulls L’Étranger from his back pocket and begins reciting from it. I spot Xavier, a courageous smile on his face. By the end of the morning, almost all of my colleagues have joined us and the police have retreated to their cars. I grip Luc’s hand tighter and think about kissing every single teacher standing with us. With these heroes beside me, I feel invincible.

The next night I have a beer with Luc at a café on rue St. Denis. I finish five ‘Maudites’ and am feeling a nice buzz from that. I told Arielle I’d eat something with Luc. I can’t lie to her so I steal a handful of his fries. He offers me his burger but I shake my head, too keyed up to eat much.

“Shouldn’t we be going?” I ask. “The manif is scheduled to begin at 21 hours.”

“It’s not like the theatre, my friend. We don’t have to be there when the curtain rises. You sure this is alright with Arielle? There’s more risk being arrested at night.”

“I have promised to be careful.”

At Parc Émilie-Gamelin, I’m in my element. It’s hot for late September. A thick darkness envelops me. There’s an aura of unpredictability that I appreciate because deep down, I’m an optimist who believes that whatever happens next has got to be better than what we already have. My lips move to the chants. An anarchist marching band playing circus music draws me in deeper, to where the park is filled with magic.

Luc introduces me to people he knows. After a while, I wander off as he gets into conversation with one of his ex-girlfriends. There’s a group of men wearing dark clothing on the fringes of the manif. They’re rowdy and loud and exude a dangerous energy. I’m drawn to them. I also want to run from them. I find myself a couple of metres closer to the group, though I don’t remember deciding to approach them. In fact, I remember deciding the opposite. My feet are taking more steps in their direction and I can’t make myself stop. The men are carrying something in their hands. Their eyes flash yellow in the darkness. I’m terrified and mesmerized as I come closer still. One raises his arm with a look of gleeful malice. Someone grabs my shirt from behind.

“Câlisse de tabarnak,” Luc shouts. “Can’t I turn my back on you for a minute?” My collar is bunched up in his fist as he guides me, not gently, out of the park.

“Who are those guys?” I ask. “They looked like skinheads with hair.”

“Agents provocateurs or just assholes. What difference does it make? You know to stay away from them.”

“They have evil powers. I couldn’t pull away.”

“You’ve had too many beers. It’s time to go home.”

I leave with him, but I know I’ll be back. I’ve found another activity where it feels right that I’m still alive. I count through the list in my head: Taking care of Raphaël, teaching my students, making love, going to manifs. I’ll just have to be careful to avoid the super villains. If our collective actions succeed, it may even give me back some of the life force stolen from me when I was a teenager.

Arielle and I are watching the news. She’s become a news junkie in the same way that I’ve become a junkie for demonstrations.

“Our government makes me ashamed to be Québécoise,” Arielle says.

“The real Québec is in the streets, marching and chanting and demonstrating. Come out with me more. You would feel better,” I tell her.

She touches my cheek. “You reassuring me. It should be the other way around.”

Of course the police violence and new repressive laws frighten me. But conditions in Québec, politically and socially, are still better than in the country where I was born. It’s for this very reason that whenever things become worse here, I feel nauseous, like the world is spinning in the wrong direction.

“Let’s go together to the nude manif tomorrow. It will be fun. I can put fleur-de-lys pasties on your nipples.”

She smiles and I know I’ve convinced her.

The next day, Arielle calls me at school to say that they’re concerned about Raphaël at the garderie. He’s telling everyone that he’s a superhero and trying to fly off tables and playground equipment. They’ve asked for a meeting.

“I can go, Arielle.”

“They’ve asked that I come, specifically.”

“That is sexism.”

“No, it’s more that...”

“What?”

“It’s because of what you told Raphaël, last time this happened. That he needed to wait until he was older to use his superpowers. And to only use them when they’re needed.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“No, not angry but ... We’ll talk more later. Are you still going to the manif?”

“Yes.”

“There’s usually less police violence at the nude ones. You’ll be careful?”

“Of course. I love you.”

Without Arielle and Raphaël, the apartment feels a little sinister. It’s better in Raphaël ’s room where I can sense him in his toys and artwork. I hold on to one of his superhero figures and draw strength from that. Next, I enter our bedroom. I wrap my arms around Arielle’s pillow and breathe in her familiar odour. Feeling stronger, I go to the shelf in the back of my closet and find the box that I haven’t opened since my uncle smuggled me out of my country. I take out the red cape, red feathered mask and calf-high red boots. The cape against my nose, I smell the streets of my childhood and adolescence.

My mother sewed this costume, but she did not bring me up to believe in superheroes. My parents were university professors. Both were politically active, proud of my work for the student newspaper and tolerant of my sexuality. Their openness and support encouraged me to finally tell what my uncle did to me.

No, my parents did not believe in superheroes. Nor did they believe in super villains. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. They never should have gone to the police. My uncle was too powerful. Their so-called car accident left me without protection, with thoughts of vengeance like cold ashes in my mouth.

I hold the costume in my hands, remembering when I wore it so proudly. It was after “los casserolazos”, after the occupation, and after the kiss-in, but the taste of my classmates’ lips was still fresh in my memory. The superhero demonstration was the last one before I was taken. Like me, only parts of the costume survived, but maybe some traces of the powers that were stolen from me remain in the material. I shove it into a bag and head for my bike.          

I’m marching down rue Ste-Catherine wearing my cape, my boots, my mask and nothing else. The breeze feels good on my bare skin. My boots protect my feet and my mask protects my identity. It’s almost like having the power of invisibility.

Everyone is friendly, many people talk to me. Some take my picture. I know I’m good looking but I take no pride in this. I did nothing to earn my looks, yet, it’s something I’ve had to pay for, repeatedly. “Excuse me,” I say to the person who’s chatting with me.“I have to stop here.” On the side street under a circus canopy stands a man wearing a red kerchief who has the dark eyes and quirked smile of my country of birth. He’s holding a six-inch tall toy polar bear banging a miniature pot with a tiny, perfectly formed wooden spoon. The bear is wearing the flag of Québec as a cape.

“How much, monsieur?” I ask.

“Just take it, hermano.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Yes. It is for your child. Take it.”

I hold the bear, sensing in its erect posture and soft gaze a power to protect. I look up to thank the man, wondering how he knows about Rapha, but he’s gone.

At home, I give Rapha his gift. I let him turn it on so that he can hear the pot banging, a sweet, high pitched clang clang ... clangclangclang. I tell him to keep it safe because of its magic, then kiss him goodnight.

That evening, on Facebook, I see the first photo of myself at the nude manif. In the next couple of days, more photos follow, including one where my back is to the camera as I look over my shoulder. I’m holding up the toy polar bear with its flag-of-Québec cape. My other fist is raised as well. This is the photo that goes viral.

Wednesday, I arrive at school early and, uncharacteristically, so does Luc. He comes into my classroom with a copy of a popular glossy magazine in his hand. He slaps it onto my desk.

“Please tell me this isn’t you.”

I look at the cover photo—a close-up shot of me at the manif, fist in air, my more private parts artfully photo-shopped. It’s difficult to answer him, the power of his verbal request at odds with the truth.

“He’s wearing a mask,” I finally answer. “You can’t tell, for sure, who he is.”

“Je n'en reviens pas. You can’t be that stupid.”

I hang my head thinking, ‘Yes I can.’ He hears my thoughts.

“Écoute, you’re going to be called into the directrice’s office this afternoon. Don’t say anything. Let me handle it. D’accord?”

At the meeting, Arielle is there too. They sit on either side of me, protecting me as they answer concerns about propriety, judgment, reputation, regulations. My head is pounding from the force of the words in the room. I try to count how many hours of sleep I’ve had this week. If I strung those hours together, would it be equivalent to one full night’s rest?

 In the end, I’m told that I’ve gotten off lightly. I get to keep my job, without even a warning in my record. But I cannot come to work for ten days. The first day is without pay and those following are sick days for me to rest and “find my equilibrium”. I am not to give interviews.

Still, the news is full of information about me—that I am a teacher with a four-year-old son, that I am a refugee which, strictly speaking, is not even true. But this is the excuse used for why my school is not identified, nor my name used. The real reason is that Arielle and Luc have created a shield of partial invisibility.

Nevertheless, there are photos of me—far away, obscured, fully clothed. And quotes in support of the movement and against police violence, not attributed directly to me but said to be “summaries of my position” as communicated to “friends”. I learn that the fact that this message comes from a teacher who is also a political refugee and father has earned me, and the movement, “a great deal of new popular support.” Arielle tells me that this has earned me a lot of enemies too—principally, the government and the police—and insists that I lay low for a while.

I try to do as Arielle says. For the first forty-eight hours, I actually do not leave my bed. Arielle suggests I start seeing my therapist more frequently. Luc comes by with offers of bike rides, soccer games, a film. The problem is that I am not teaching, not with my students. When Raphaël is at the garderie, I feel useless. Finally, I tell Arielle that I must go out.

The next day, I participate in three separate demonstrations and a teach-in. Afterwards, I go to a public assemblée générale. The meeting is held in Parc Lafontaine where, just metres from us, a woman in black fishnet tights and stilettos is being taught to wield a whip by a huge bald man in leather. Every few minutes, I’m distracted by the sound of the whip cracking accompanied by a sharp burning pain on my back, but when I look around the assembly, no one else seems bothered. It occurs to me that I may be the only one who can perceive these two super villains. I leave and, biking very fast, attend four different “casserolazos” before heading to the night manif. When I return home, Arielle asks me what I’ve been up to. I tell her everything, which of course I must do. She insists that we both stay home the next day.

It’s a good day. We make love, nap, drink red wine. I feed a little off her life force—I cannot help myself—but I don’t think it hurts her because she’s so strong. In the evening, I put Raphaël to bed while she listens to the news. She’s turned the volume low but I can tell there’s been a report of some super villainy. I know this by the staccato rhythm of the words, the erratic, fractured images. As I enter the living room, Arielle turns off the television. I walk towards it as though to a cooling corpse.

“What happened?”

She hesitates. “Some arrests, police violence. There were ... injuries.”

I know that I’m to blame. I either caused it or ... or maybe if I had been there, I could have lured the evil towards me.

“I’m going to the demonstration tomorrow,” I tell Arielle.

“Gabriel—” I cut her off, steel myself against her power.

“Please,” I say, putting my fingers on her lips. “Please,” I whisper again.

She sighs. “Then I’m going too.”

On the way to the demonstration the next morning, we drop Rapha off at his friend’s on avenue Mont Royal. He’s disappointed that he can’t come, but we tell him to watch for us, that the march will pass right by this street.

After last night’s events, the mood at the manif is somber. The numbers of police and the way they are armed seem more a provocation than a way of keeping the peace. Nevertheless, the demonstrators remain positive. I march between Arielle and Luc in a bubble of safety. Something in the mood still doesn’t feel right, though. I’m glad that Rapha is safe at his friend’s home.

It’s after crossing St. Laurent that I realize that super villains are threatening the demonstration. I can see them, just off to my right, but whenever I turn my head, they’re gone. Arielle asks me what’s wrong, so I mention my nervousness for the students. Luc thinks I mean our students and says that Xavier and other kids from our school might be marching with the youth contingent behind us. He offers to try to find them for me.

Now there is only Arielle beside me. This is the moment when I must leave. I kiss her hard on the lips and make a run for it. I find them easily, instinctively, the evil calling out to me. I can taste the violence in the air as it draws me closer. Suddenly, I see Xavier and my panic mounts.

Everything happens at once. An arm is raised. People are running. A canister bursts in the air. Riot police appear from nowhere, weapons already in hand. Arielle calls me from a distance, Luc’s head and shoulders appear above the crowd. The mass of humanity is rumbling and reforming. Xavier’s eyes meet my own.

“Run!” I yell to him and his friends, and they do.

The next instant, the first matraque cuts across my hip, taking my legs out from under me. My head hits the pavement. Everything goes dark. I remember.

We were all standing under the night sky, a mass of students dancing in our superhero costumes. The evening was hot and full of motion, my arms tight around the shoulders of my two best friends. We sang and danced while we waited for the government to finally see that we were their children and that the things we fought for were good and right.

I was almost too happy, too excited. Almost, I was a little bored. My two friends agreed to leave with me and we found our way to my old home. Someone had placed a new lock on the door I used to enter. I was seeking my parents’ ghosts, hoping they were watching over us, yet I did not heed this obvious warning from the dead. I smashed the window, my parents’ murder a shard in my heart.

We were inside, kissing. I went from one set of lips to the other, my hand under the girl’s superhero skirt, the other rubbing the boy through his superhero tights. It was all very innocent—cuddles and caresses, seeking warmth in the ruins of my childhood home. I thought about returning to the demonstration, guilty about convincing my friends to follow me to this dark and sad place. This was the power I had—to make people love me, to make them see my love for them, to make them follow me, heedlessly.

And still, It might have been alright, if I hadn’t taken off my costume.

My eyes snap open. The cop’s face is snarling above me. “It’s you, the magazine star. Let them take your picture now,” he says, punctuating his words with a blow across the chest. I taste blood in the back of my throat.

They arrived with their guns, pulling me from my friends. The beating began at once, the force of the blows seeming to flow from an exterior power. I fought back at first, scanning the street outside for help. When my uncle stepped forward from the darkness with a look of anticipation about to be satisfied, I stopped fighting.

“Run!” I yelled to my friends. And they did.

I don’t want to fight back this time. But my body doesn’t listen. It’s trying to stand. The next blow takes me and I’m down again, the pain exploding behind my eyes. I look up, hoping they’ll finish me off quickly. It’s then that I see Rapha leaning over his friend’s balcony, the little bear clanging away in alarm, my son’s mouth a big “O”.

Pain. The stench of death and decay. In the prison, my only comfort was that my friends were not also taken. I balanced this against my agony. Snatches of sleep are brief, dreams of warm lips and smooth limbs. I began to imagine that I could see my friends flying over the prison in their costumes, planning to save me. I waited for rescue as minutes/hours/days became lifetimes endured. My uncle always came after the pain, speaking to me of loyalty to government and family and God, his hands on my body, gentle as a poisonous eel. I could no longer hear my own cries, could no longer fight. They’d stolen my life force and I was fading. I finally realized that my friends’ superhero powers must have been stolen as well. That this is why they never came for me.

Raphaël has climbed over the balcony railing. With horror, I realize that he’s seen me. I sense Arielle’s presence coming nearer, Luc’s as well. My death is coming too, but not soon enough. I will still be alive to see my child jump from the balcony.

“Rapha!” I cry as he becomes airborne, his cape flying out behind him. The police baton is raised again. I close my eyes and wait for it.

I’m flying through the air, holding on to Raphaël. We’re moving very fast above the streets of Montréal. Am I dead yet? I don’t want Rapha to be in a place of the dead. “No,” I moan and realize that, after all these years, I can hear my cries of pain again.

“Shh,” a familiar voice says. “Ça va aller. I’ve got you.”

Luc’s face is above mine, his arms carrying me swiftly through the streets, the crowd opening before him. If I could, I’d ask him to care for Raphaël in my place. My hand rests against Luc’s chest, his shirt wet and sticky with my blood. I try to touch his lips with my fingers so he can read my mind, but my fingers reach only his chin, slipping  down again on its rough wetness. My hand drops to my own mouth. I taste salt, feel Luc’s chest heave with his sobs, with the strain of carrying me and running. I press my hand against his heart and he runs faster.

In the ambulance, Arielle holds my hand. Her voice cradles me. “Lâche pas, Gabriel. Lâche pas.” Hope hurts more than giving up, though, and I don’t think I can take any more pain. Then she puts my hand on her cheek and I feel her tears. I absorb the salt through the tips of my fingers and hold on a little longer.

Awareness slips in between longer periods of confusion. I see the friends from my student days beckoning me to dance with them. I see them pass the missing pieces of my costume to Arielle and Luc who hold fast with their powers of reason and strength, of goodness and loyalty. Above them all is my precious Rapha, flying and free. I remember now how he jumped from the balcony, landing squarely on the policeman’s back, how he passed his red felt square across the cop’s eyes, and how the man backed away from me in shock, as though only now seeing what he had done.

I wake and wake again. Luc or Arielle are always beside me holding tightly to my hand. When I ask for Rapha, I am told not to worry, that he's fine. I sleep and heal.

On a day when my head is clear, I open my eyes to Arielle sitting beside my hospital bed with Rapha on her lap. He clutches a newspaper, on the front page, a photo of his exploit, his red cape flying out behind him. The headlines reads:  Boy superhero leaps to the rescue. Negotiations resume, student leaders hopeful.

“What happened?” I ask.

“It’s a long story,” Arielle says. “What did you think you were doing?”

“My students were in danger. I saw Xavier, told him to run.”

“Well he ran and found Luc, which probably saved your life.”

“Papa,” Raphaël whispers. “Maman made me promise not to fly anymore until I am grown up. I said d’accord but only if you come back to life.”

“Well I have, so you must do as you have promised.”

“I also promised not to tell any more newspaper people about how I can fly. And about the magic forgetting dust.”

“Forgetting dust?” I ask.

“Yes. Like you told me. I used the red square to wipe it from the policeman’s eyes. And I said the magic words.”

“What words, Rapha?”

“Je me souviens.”

END

Dedicated to student and teacher superheroes everywhere.

"Je me souviens" was originally published in The Future Fire in 2012.

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 the IDES OF MARCH with "Lamia Victoriana" by Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Je me souviens

by Su J. Sokol

There are nine police cars. I count them again just to be sure and because counting usually calms me.

Arielle watches to see if I’m freaking out, asks if I want to leave. I tell her I’m OK but she's not reassured so I give her a sexy smile. If she would kiss me now, I’d have somewhere pleasant to channel my beating heart. She leans towards me and I see that she’s used her superpowers to read my mind again, but then another police car arrives, drawing her attention away.

Now ten police cars face two hundred and thirty-six demonstrators. We are peaceful, banging pots and chanting slogans. Our numbers include children, old people, commuters on bikes, dogs wearing red bandanas. A cop is speaking through a bullhorn but no one can hear him because of the clanging and chanting. Will they arrest us now? My heart beats like the wings of a falcon, trying to escape the prison of my chest.

Full transcript after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 23 for March 1, 2016. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

I'm extending the period for responses to the GlitterShip listener favorites poll until March 5th. You can find a link in the transcript for this episode at GlitterShip.com

GlitterShip Poll

Our story today is "Je me souviens" by Su J. Sokol.

Su is an activist, a cyclist, and a writer of interstitial fiction. A former legal services lawyer from New York City, Sokol immigrated to Montréal in 2004 where she works as a social rights advocate. Her short stories have been published in The Future Fire and Spark: A Creative Anthology. Her debut novel, Cycling to Asylum, was long-listed for the 2015 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. "Je me souviens" was first published in 2012 by the Future Fire and was recently republished in TFFX, the The Future Fire's tenth anniversary anthology.

Our guest reader today is Leigh Wallace.

Leigh is a Canadian writer, artist and public servant. You can find her

Into the Nth Dimension

by David D. Levine

The fence around Dr. Diabolus's lair is twenty feet tall, electrified and topped with razor wire.  I'd expected no less.  From one of the many pouches at my belt I pull a pair of acorns and toss them at the base of the fence. 

I exert my special power.  Each acorn immediately sprouts, roots digging through asphalt as the leafy stem reaches skyward.  Wood fibers KRACKLE as the stems extend, lengthen, thicken, green skin changing to grayish bark in a moment.  Leaves SSHHH into existence; branches reach out to the neighbor tree, twining themselves into rungs. 

Before the twin oaks have reached their full height I spring into action, clambering up the living ladder as it grows, creeping along a limb even as it extends over the razor wire.  It's a dramatic, foolhardy move, but I can't delay -- Sprout is in peril!  The branch sags under my weight, lowering me to within ten feet of the ground, and I leap down with practiced ease. 

Full transcript after the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 22 for February ... 20th, oops. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you!

Our story today is "Into the Nth Dimension" by David D. Levine, read by... David D. Levine.

David is the author of novel Arabella of Mars, which will be out from Tor Books in July 2016, and over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award in 2006, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.

Oh, just one more thing! While I was putting this episode together the SFWA Nebula award nominations came out, and David JUST, as in, literally minutes ago, received a Nebula nomination for his story "Damage," which was released on Tor.com. Congratulations!

GlitterShip would also like to congratulate some of the authors whose stories appeared in previous episodes: Ken Liu (Episode 15), was nominated for best Novel for his book "The Grace of Kings", Rose Lemberg (Episode 7) was nominated for her novelette "Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds", and Sarah Pinsker (Episode 2) was also nominated for a novelette, "Our Lady of the Open Road."

Ok. NOW you can listen to the story.

Into the Nth Dimension

by David D. Levine

The fence around Dr. Diabolus's lair is twenty feet tall, electrified and topped with razor wire.  I'd expected no less.  From one of the many pouches at my belt I pull a pair of acorns and toss them at the base of the fence. 

I exert my special power.  Each acorn immediately sprouts, roots digging through asphalt as the leafy stem reaches skyward.  Wood fibers KRACKLE as the stems extend, lengthen, thicken, green skin changing to grayish bark in a moment.  Leaves SSHHH into existence; branches reach out to the neighbor tree, twining themselves into rungs. 

Before the twin oaks have reached their full height I spring into action, clambering up the living ladder as it grows, creeping along a limb even as it extends over the razor wire.  It's a dramatic, foolhardy move, but I can't delay -- Sprout is in peril!  The branch sags under my weight, lowering me to within ten feet of the ground, and I leap down with practiced ease. 

Again I concentrate, and the two trees wither away behind me, a gnawed patch of asphalt and a few stray leaves the only sign they'd ever existed.  I feel their pain as they wilt and die, but I don't want my intrusion discovered sooner than necessary.  The loss of their green and growing lives is just the latest of the many sacrifices I've made.  I press onward.

Slippery elm makes short work of the side door lock; mushrooms blind security cameras and heat sensors.  These bright corridors, humming with electricity and weirder energies, are cold places of steel and concrete, offering me no plants or plant matter to leverage my powers.  I've faced worse.  I prowl quickly, silently, keeping my head down, all senses alert to any trace of the kidnapped Sprout.

Voices!  I duck into an alcove as two of Dr. Diabolus's goons round the corner.  As soon as they've passed I spring out behind them, tossing seeds at their feet.  Fast-twining English ivy ensnares one before he can cry out, but the other evades its tendrils.  "Phyto-Man!" he gasps.

POW! my fist responds.  He drops cold beside his still-struggling comrade, whose eyes glare with hatred above his smothered mouth.  I direct the ivy to bind the unconscious goon as well, so he'll raise no alarm when he awakes.

Even their underwear is synthetic fiber.  Dr. Diabolus is thorough, I'll grant him that.

Deeper and deeper into the cavernous lair I probe, keeping an eye on the pipes and conduits that line the ceiling, smaller leading to larger, following the branch to find the trunk.  I know Dr. Diabolus; wherever he's holding my sidekick it will be near his latest contrivance, and all his inventions require massive amounts of power. 

If only he'd gone solar instead of stealing plutonium, we might have been allies.

At last I come to a massive, vault-like door, all steel and chrome, set in a concrete wall into which many thick conduits vanish.  But nothing is more persistent than a plant.  I tuck dozens of tiny dandelion seeds into the crack between door and jamb.  Their indomitable roots reach deep, swelling and prying, until with a WHANGG of tearing metal the door bursts from its frame. 

With my own muscles I wrench the shattered door aside and burst into the chamber.  Dr. Diabolus turns to me, cape swirling.  "You disappoint me, Phyto-Man," he sneers, his artificial eye glowing red.  "I expected you here half an hour ago."

"Traffic was terrible," I quip.  The chamber is dominated by a complex machine, seething with arcane energies that make my head swim, but there's no sign of Sprout.  "What have you done with my sidekick, you fiend?"

"I sent him to... the Nth Dimension!"  He pulls a lever on the control panel before him.  A ten-foot iris of blue steel in the center of the machine SNICKs open, revealing...

Looking into the opening makes my eyes feel like they're being pulled out of my head.  It's as though all the colors of the palette have somehow been smeared together with... others... forming impossible combinations of hue and tone that swirl sickeningly.  But worse than that, the weird amalgam of color seems to bend... around a corner that isn't there.  It's painful to see, even harder to look away.

CHANGG!  Something hard and cold fastens onto my bicep, breaking the spell.  "What?" I cry.  Before I can move, a second steel claw CHANGGs onto my other arm.  CHANGG!  CHANGG!  CHANGG!  I'm caught like a fly, steel bracelets ringing my arms, legs, and neck.  Jointed metal arms haul me off the floor, suspend me in the air before the gloating Dr. Diabolus. 

"HAHAHAHAHA!" he laughs as I struggle in vain.  "You've foiled my plans for the last time, Phyto-Man!"

"If you've harmed Sprout--!" I growl through clenched teeth, straining against the imprisoning metal.

"My dear Phyto-Man, I must confess... I don't know!"  He works the controls and the arms propel me, none too gently, toward the yawning portal.  The uncanny colors swirl crazily, filling my vision, seeming to tug at every fiber of my being.  "But whatever has become of your Sprout, you will shortly be joining him there.  Bon voyage, Emerald Avenger!"

The arms thrust me forward.  With a SPRANK! the five claws open simultaneously, flinging me into the swirling abyss.

A hard, gritty surface presses against my side.  I'm cold, my head is spinning, and everything hurts.  There's a thin, rushing sound off in the distance.  Traffic?

I sit up and open my eyes.  And immediately I wish I hadn't.

There's nothing to see but a cracked and filthy concrete floor and my own hands, but they're all wrong... seriously wrong.  The floor curves away from me in every direction -- the same impossible curvature I'd seen in Dr. Diabolus's portal -- despite the fact that it looks and feels flat.  And the surface looks like... like concrete multiplied by itself.  Cracks are crackier.  Grit is grittier.  It's all realer than real; it pounds on my eyes as though I were staring into the sun, though there's barely any light.  And the color is not just gray, but a weird amalgam of thousands of different grays blended smoothly together.  A whole shining rainbow of grays.

My heart is pounding.   I've faced death many times, fought monsters, escaped from traps, but I've never experienced anything this disturbing.  Always before the threat came from outside, but now it's me -- my own perceptions -- that have changed.

My hands, too, are a disconcerting, amplified version of themselves.  I turn them before my eyes, and as they rotate I seem to see both sides at the same time as the front.  In color they are... kind of an ultra-pink, not the plain pink I've seen every day of my life but an eye-hurting blend of unnatural shades.  Pinks that don't exist, have never existed.  And as I look more closely I see disturbing swirls of texture in my skin, spiraling like microscopic galaxies, like nothing I've ever seen before.

I swallow and rip my attention away from my own fingers.  Have I been drugged?  I shake my head hard, but that just makes the headache and dizziness worse.  I pound my fists on the ground, but though I feel the impact and the pain there's no comforting THUD, just a muffled thump so faint and distant I might as well be imagining it. 

"Hello?" I call.  No, nothing wrong with my hearing; my voice bounces back to me from the darkness, echoing off the distant, unseen walls.

To my surprise there's an immediate reply.  "Michael?"  The voice is heartbreakingly familiar.  I feel a twinge of hope.

"Sprout?"  I peer into the darkness, hoping for a glimpse of green tights and pointed shoes.  It's a ridiculous outfit.  Why have we never changed it?

And why have I never wondered that before?

"It's me, Michael.  Richard."

A familiar figure appears in the dim distance, but with everything so strange here I can't afford to relax.  "Is this a secure area?  We should stick to code names..."

"No need.  There's no Sprout here, and no Phyto-Man either."

Worries spring up in my mind -- impostors, hypnosis, possession, brainwashing -- but I decide to bluff it out in case there are unseen observers.  "Well, I'm here now, Sprout." 

"This all seems very strange, I know, but don't worry.  Everything will be all right."

Despite his reassurances, there's a strangeness about Sprout as he approaches.  He's wearing street clothes, in colors and textures as hallucinogenic as everything else here, and his face combines familiarity with an alien super-reality exactly as my own hands do, but the really disturbing thing is the way he moves.  Each step flows into the next with a weird gliding motion that propels him forward seamlessly, without transitions.  It's like he's rolling toward me on a treadmill, constantly cresting a hill that isn't there.  I push down feelings of nausea and... and fear.  Never in all my adventures have I faced anything as disquieting as this place.  "Where am I?"

"Dr. Diabolus called it the Nth Dimension, but the people here just call it the world."  He's reached me now, and the mingled concern and relief in his face match the conflicting emotions in my own heart.  "I'm so glad you're finally here."

He bends down and helps me to my feet, a disturbing reversal, and I find that I move with the same unnatural glide that he does.  Even more disturbing, I find I'm naked.  "My costume!"  I cover myself with my hands as best I can, but the loss of my belt pouches, my carefully nurtured collection of seeds, leaves me feeling not just nude but defenseless.

I reach out with my powers.  Perhaps a seed from a discarded Fig Newton lies in a crack on the floor, a seed I can grow into leaves to cover my nakedness.  But there's nothing; my powers are dulled almost to nonexistence.  I can feel wood beams supporting the ceiling high above, but I can't warp them to my will. 

I'm helpless.  For the first time in... I can't remember when.

"Don't worry," Sprout says, "no one here wears costumes.  I brought you some clothes."  He turns, the motion revealing sides and back, width and depth and thickness, all at once.  I groan and nearly lose my balance.  "Oh!" he says.  "I'm sorry.  Try closing one eye.  It helps."

I do, and it does -- the colors are still wrong but the disorienting sense of everything being too far away and too close at the same time is greatly reduced.  Sprout -- Richard -- reaches into a rustling paper bag and hands me a folded bundle. 

Putting the clothes on is a challenge.  Each trouser leg recedes like a portal to another world; buttons and zippers feel much larger, more detailed than they should.  I close my eyes completely and let my instincts take over.  It makes a big difference.  How many times in my life have I dressed myself?  But this still feels like the first time.

I sit on the filthy floor to tie the unfamiliar shoes.  "That's better," I say.  "Now let's get to work."  Maybe action will still the trembling dread in my heart.  "There's no time to lose -- we need to get back to our own dimension and defeat Dr. Diabolus before it's too late!"

Richard smiles and shakes his head.  I'm starting to get used to the weird multi-dimensional effect.  "Don't worry, there's plenty of time."  He puts out a hand.  "Come on.  I'll explain over coffee."

Sprout's lack of concern raises anew the questions I'd had about drugs, hypnosis, imposters.  But, lost in a strange, incomprehensible world, I have no better alternative to offer.  I take his hand. 

His hand is warm and soft in mine.  When was the last time I'd grasped it without gloves, without haste, without danger all around? 

He leads me across the floor -- now that my eyes have adapted a bit to the darkness and strangeness I see that the space is a cavernous, disused warehouse -- to a corroded metal door.  It opens with a muted squeak of rusty hinges, not the SKREEK I would have expected, but once we pass through it to the street I'm assaulted by a cacophony of sounds, visions, and smells more intense than New Year's Eve in Metro City.  Cars in an astonishing variety of designs and colors careen by, with the same seamless motion as Sprout's walk but a hundred times faster.  Each one seems to zoom in from the horizon and vanish away to infinity all in a moment, but even as they speed by I can't help but notice their scratches and dents and chips in the paint and a hundred other details.  It's a dizzying kaleidoscope of color and detail.

"Whoa!" I cry out as Sprout hauls me back from the curb.

"Careful, big guy."  He pats my shoulder.  "You're not invulnerable here."

"Well, I've never been in Dynamic Man's league..."

"No, I mean you can really get hurt easily.  It doesn't take much, and it takes a long time to heal.  Look at this."  He pulls up his sleeve, revealing a hideous scab on his elbow.  "I scraped this on a brick wall when I first got here.  Just a little scrape, nothing I'd even have noticed if I were in a fist fight with the Demolisher, but it hurt like a son of a bitch --"

I've never heard such language.  "Sprout!"

"-- and a month later it's still not all the way better."

A month?  Immediately I'm on high alert again.  Has the imposter slipped up?  Sprout only disappeared the day before yesterday.

But he notices the change in my expression -- faces here seem more subtle, more expressive -- and puts up a hand.  "Sorry.  We're on a monthly schedule.  One or two of our days, more or less, is a month here.  I should have told you right away."  His eyes dip to the sidewalk.  "There's a lot I should have told you, before."

My suspicions are only slightly allayed, but I still have little alternative but to stick with this person, whether or not he's the Sprout I know.  Whoever he is, he just saved my life.

We walk to a coffee shop.  Safe from the chaos of the street, I can begin to appreciate the wonder of this world -- the colors and textures, the tears in the vinyl seat's upholstery, the individual grains of spilled sugar on the laminate tabletop.  My spoon makes a tiny tink, tink noise as I stir my coffee.  The flavor is astonishing -- rich and sweet and dark.  "So you've been here a whole month?" 

He nods.  "I showed up in the same place you did.  It's the closest analog in this world to Dr. Diabolus's lair.  It took me quite a while to figure this place out, but I finally did."

"You always were the brains of this partnership."  Before Sprout, there had been no Phyto-Computer, no chemical lab, no advanced cross-breeding program in the Hidden Greenhouse.  I'd really been little more than a thug with a green thumb.

"This world... it's like a layer above our world.  Everything here is... bigger.  More complex.  More detailed.  Even the color spectrum... there's an infinity of different colors here, Michael."

I think back on the time I fell into the Hollow Earth, and how I had to help the downtrodden people there throw off the tyrannical overlord Karg before I could return to the surface.  "Then they must have even bigger problems than we do.  More villainous villains!  More despotic despots!  More disastrous natural disasters!"  I find myself grinning with anticipation.  "This could be our greatest adventure!"

"You might think so, but I haven't seen any sign of it.  There aren't any villains here."

"It's some kind of Utopia, then?"

"Not really."  His face squinches up the way it does when he's thinking hard.  "There are people who do bad things.  But every time someone does something that seems entirely villainous to me, a whole bunch of other people come along and say it was really the right thing to do.  I'm kind of confused, really."  He shakes his head.  "Even bank robbers have their defenders here.  And there are tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes, but they're... diffuse.  I mean, yeah, people get hurt, but you never see the President's daughter trapped under a collapsed building or someone racing to get the secret plans to the hidden base before the whole Eastern Seaboard becomes uninhabitable."

"Sounds... boring."

"Oh, it's not!"  His eyes brighten and he grabs my hands across the table.  "It's the most wonderful place, Michael.  There's art and culture and nature like nothing you've ever seen.  Not just stuffy charity balls where the only exciting thing is when The Rutabaga tries to steal the debutante's diamond necklace.  I can't wait to show you Turandot."

I pull my hands from his.  "Whoa, whoa, whoa, kiddo.  We're not here to be tourists.  We're here for a reason.  And once our job is done here, we'll go back where we came from.  That's the way the world works."

"Not this world.  In this world you can do whatever you want, make the best of what you've got, succeed or fail or just muddle along... you're not limited to playing the role you were born into, fighting the same villains and foiling the same plots over and over again.  Not like our world."  He reaches into his hoodie's front pocket, pulls out a slim colorful magazine.  "To the people here, we're fictional!"

The title of the magazine is The Amazing Phyto-Man, issue 157.  On the cover, a hulking over-muscled brute with a ridiculous green outfit and a caricature of my own face smacks a tentacled monstrosity in the beak.  The pages inside are divided into squares and rectangles, each bearing a picture and some text...

It shows the whole story of how I got here.  Over the fence, down the corridors, the confrontation with Dr. Diabolus, the metal arms flinging me into the portal.

I feel as though the world has been jerked out from under my feet.  "This is impossible.  Absurd.  Some kind of hoax."

"It's no hoax.  There were ten copies of this one on the rack I bought it from.  All our friends have their own publications too."  He taps the final panel, showing me screaming as I fall into the swirling colors... but the colors on the page are the flat, limited palette of the world I came from.  "This is how I knew you'd be arriving here."

I stare at the page.  It's wood pulp with vegetable inks.  My powers are weak here, almost nonexistent, but I can feel the minuscule thread of green life in it.  In some ways this stupid little magazine is the only thing in the whole chromium-and-vinyl coffee shop that's real. 

The only thing that's real...

I turn back a page.  It's one large panel, with Dr. Diabolus laughing "HAHAHAHAHA!" as I struggle in the grip of the metal arms.  I stare at his flat, cartoonish face.

I exert my power. 

It's not easy.  What I'm trying to do is unlike anything I've ever done before.  My teeth grind together; my pulse pounds in my temples. 

This is as hard and as strange as the very first time I ever made a seed sprout. 

It had been an apple seed, a discarded pip from my lunch, that happened to be lying on the floor the day that eerie green-glowing meteorite had crashed into the experimental greenhouse with its stocks of Growth Serum X.  That tiny seed, and the potential apple tree within, had been all that stood between me and certain death as the heavy beam had come crashing down toward me.  As though in a dream I'd sensed its potential, I'd reached out, I'd pulled harder than I'd ever pulled on anything before... and the tree burst into being, root and branch and leaf cushioning the beam's fall and saving my life.

That had been the first time I'd felt that green power flowing through me.  Now I feel it again, a thin green thread of life pulsing in the dead, flattened wood pulp before me.  But this time it's different somehow, pulling at me even as I pull at it.

Sweat stings my eyes and runs down my nose.  I keep straining...

And then Dr. Diabolus blinks. 

The caricature face turns fractionally toward me, its look of triumph beginning to change into one of astonishment...

It's more than I can sustain.  I collapse, my breath rushing out in a whoosh as I fall back into the padded seat.  The page before me reverts to its previous form, but I feel a sense of triumph. 

Sprout snatches the magazine away.  "What did you do?" 

"I used my powers.  I touched our world.  I made a change." 

"So what?"

"We can use this!"  I pound the table.  "I don't know how, but somehow we can use this magazine to get back to our own world!"

"Hush!" Sprout pats the air with his hands; I notice that the server and the other patrons are staring.  I sit down, noticing as I do that I'd surged to my feet.  "Michael... I don't want to go back to the world we came from."

"We have to!"

He looks at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable. 

And then he bolts from the table. 

I stare stupidly at the door as the little bell over it tinkles, then take off after him.

Sprout's fast, but ever since that day in the experimental greenhouse I've been stronger and tougher and faster than most people, and at least some of that seems to have come through the portal with me.  I manage to make it through the door before his heels vanish around the corner.

Running in this world is a kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic experience.  Walls seem to rush at me, a riot of color and texture; cars veer and swerve, horns blaring.  But I keep my eyes fixed on Sprout's blue hoodie as he dashes across streets, pushes through crowds of protesting civilians, runs down alleys. 

Block after block, I'm gaining.  Sprout was always the smart one in our partnership, but I'm the one who battled The Piledriver to a standstill.  Soon I'm only a few feet behind.

We're racing down an alley, dodging around dumpsters and piles of newspaper, when I get almost close enough to touch him.  He looks over his shoulder... and trips on a bundle of magazines.  He tumbles on the concrete with an "oomph" that sounds almost like something from our original world.

I catch up to him just as he's sitting up.  Bright red blood runs from his nose; there's a rusty smell.  "Guh?" he says.

I bend down, put an arm around his shoulder.  "Are you all right, old buddy?"

He stares into my eyes for a moment, blood painting his nose and mouth.

And then he kisses me.

I taste blood.  I feel his warm lips soft under mine. 

I kiss him back.

Then, horrified, I push him away.  "What are we doing, Sprout?"

"Kissing.  And you liked it as much as I did."  His bloody lips twist into an ironic smile.  "If you couldn't figure that much out, I guess I really am the brains of this partnership."

"But... but you're just a kid!"

He glares at me.  "I'm twenty-two, Michael."

Twenty-two?  It's strange to realize that he's right.  He was fifteen when I adopted him after Maniac killed his parents, but that was... seven years ago.  Where did the time go?  How had I failed to notice he'd grown into a lithe, attractive young man?  "Even so... it's... it's wrong."

"Maybe where we came from.  Not here."  He pulls a bandana from his pocket, wipes his mouth.  Blood still trickles from his nose but it's slowing.  "This world is better than ours, Michael.  It's complex and it's mundane and it's sometimes tedious, but it's not just the same round of villains and fights and secret identities over and over again.  It's... it's real, Michael.  And here I can be what I've always wanted to be, instead of just playing a role."  He holds out the bandana.  "And so can you."

Sprout keeps holding out the bandana. 

After a while I take it, and wipe my own mouth.

Then I stand up. 

"I'm a hero, Richard.  It may be a role, but it's the only role I know."

Sprout just looks at me.  The expression on his blood-spattered face is a sick compound of longing, sadness, disappointment.  Perhaps I'm learning how to understand what I see in this world.

I wonder what the expression on my own face tells him.

"Give me the magazine, Sprout.  We'll take it to the warehouse where we came in.  I figure that's the best place to try going back to our world."

"No."

Sprout lies at my feet, looking so small and weak, the front of his blue hoodie stained black with his blood.  I could take the magazine from him easily.  "I'll find another copy."

"You don't have any money to buy one."

"I'll steal it."

He gives a weak little laugh.  "Liar."

I have to smile myself.  "Okay, maybe not."  I sit back down.  "Come back with me, Sprout.  You know it's where we belong."

He sits up, leans against me.  His shoulder is warm, the only warm thing in this cold, garbage-strewn alley, and I let it rest on my chest.  "Give this world a chance, Michael.  You've only just arrived.  I've already found a job at a nursery.  You could work there too."  He looks up at me.  His nose has stopped bleeding.  "We could share the apartment."

I consider the idea.  I put my arm around my sidekick, lean back against the filthy brick wall, and think very hard about it.  This world is amazing, with its details and colors and motions and flavors.  And to share it with Sprout would be... something I hadn't even realized I desired. 

But in the end, it's duty that wins out.  "I'm sorry, Sprout.  Even if I wanted to -- and there's a part of me that does, believe me -- it's more than just you and me.  There are people depending on us back home.  If we don't go back there, who'll keep the Scimitar Sisters in check?"  I give him one last squeeze, disentangle myself, and stand up.  "Coming?"

"You're sure I can't change your mind?"

I'm so, so tempted.  "I'm sure."

"Then I'm coming too."  He stands, brushes himself off.  "I'd rather be a cartoon hero with you than alone here."

We walk hand-in-hand back to the warehouse.  As we pass the coffee shop, I pause.  Sprout looks up at me, expectant.  "I, uh... I still have some of my powers here."  I clear my throat.  "I wonder if there's.... if there's any way we can bring... some of this world, back to ours?"

"I don't think so."  He points to a small shield printed in the corner of the magazine's cover.  "There are rules against it."

Finally we find ourselves again in the dark, echoey space where we entered this world.  I think about how strange it looked to me when I first arrived, and I realize I've grown used to these new perceptions.  My old world will seem so flat and colorless by comparison. 

Sprout stands beside me as I spread the magazine out in a patch of sunlight.  There is no joy in me as I contemplate the garish images full of POW and KRUNCH, only a dull sense of obligation.  "It's not too late to change your mind," Sprout says.  "We can make a life together here."

"I'm sorry, Sprout.  Our world needs saving."  But even as I say it, I know I'm trying to convince myself as well as him.  I hold out my hand.

Without a word, he takes it.

I bend down and stare hard at the last page, showing my cartoon avatar falling into the vortex between worlds.  I exert my will, block out all other sensations, focus my powers on the ink-saturated wood pulp.  Somehow, I know, I can use this image of the portal to return myself and Sprout to the world where we were born.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done. 

I concentrate.  I work my power.  I push and pull and strain... this is as hard as the time I used pea vines to temporarily close up the Grand Canyon.  Harder.

I strain still more intensely.  The printed vortex begins to whirl...

I feel again, just as I did on that first day in the experimental greenhouse, the deep connection between my soul and the green life underlying the page...

I feel the warmth of Sprout's hand in mine...

And I realize that the connection runs both ways. 

With an unprecedented effort of will, I reverse my power. 

Where before the meteor's green energy had flowed into me at my moment of greatest need, now I send the energy flowing from myself into the printed page. 

I scream in pain as the power drains from me like my life's blood. 

The image before me springs to life.  Just as the metal claws release, the cartoon me on the page reaches down and tears open his belt.  Seeds of all descriptions pour out in their thousands, most falling into the vortex, but many others sprouting and twining and filling the portal with leaves and stems and branches.  I bounce off the web of vegetable matter, springing right back toward Dr. Diabolus.  WHAM!  My fist connects with the villain's chin.

Then all is blackness.

Later.  I open my eyes, and the first thing I see is Dr. Diabolus's lab.  Everything is flat, static, in eight garish colors.  But then I blink, and realize I've fallen face-first into the magazine spread on the floor before me.

I sit up.  I'm no longer looking at the last page of The Amazing Phyto-Man issue 157.  It's now the first page of issue 158, a single large panel.  In it Dr. Diabolus, threatened by an enormous Venus flytrap, cowers at the controls of his dimensional portal, through which a grinning Sprout steps to take the hand of Phyto-Man.  All's well in Metro City.

"Michael?"  Richard is just awakening beside me.  "Wha... what just happened?"

It takes me a long, reflective moment to find an answer to his question.  "I... I sent the power back where it came from, I think."  I look within myself.  It certainly isn't in there any more.  "It's with him now."  I tap the page. 

Richard's eyes dart from the page to my face.  "But that's you."

"Not any more.  I'm just Michael now."  I stroke the flat, cartoon version of myself with my fingertips.  "Phyto-Man is back where he belongs.  I don't know how much of me went with him, but I hope... I hope he enjoyed his day in this world.  Maybe he can use what I learned here to make Metro City a better place."

"But what about... us?  What happens next?"

I close the magazine.  "I don't know.  Isn't it amazing?"

END

“Into the Nth Dimension” was originally published in Human For A Day, edited by Jennifer Brozek and Martin H. Greenberg in 2011.

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 March 1st with “Je me souviens” by Su J. Sokol.

Into the Nth Dimension

by David D. Levine

The fence around Dr. Diabolus's lair is twenty feet tall, electrified and topped with razor wire.  I'd expected no less.  From one of the many pouches at my belt I pull a pair of acorns and toss them at the base of the fence. 

I exert my special power.  Each acorn immediately sprouts, roots digging through asphalt as the leafy stem reaches skyward.  Wood fibers KRACKLE as the stems extend, lengthen, thicken, green skin changing to grayish bark in a moment.  Leaves SSHHH into existence; branches reach out to the neighbor tree, twining themselves into rungs. 

Before the twin oaks have reached their full height I spring into action, clambering up the living ladder as it grows, creeping along a limb even as it extends over the razor wire.  It's a dramatic, foolhardy move, but I can't delay -- Sprout is in peril!  The branch sags under my weight, lowering me to within ten feet of the ground, and I leap down with practiced ease. 

Full transcript after the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 22 for February ... 20th, oops. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you!

Our story today is "Into the Nth Dimension" by David D. Levine, read by... David D. Levine.

David is the author of novel Arabella of Mars, which will be out from Tor Books in July 2016, and over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award in 2006, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.

Oh, just one more thing! While I was putting this episode together the SFWA Nebula award nominations came out, and David JUST, as in, literally minutes ago, received a Nebula nomination for his story "Damage," which was released on Tor.com. Congratulations!

GlitterShip would also like to congratulate some of the authors whose stories appeared in previous episodes: Ken Liu (Episode 15), was nominated for best Novel for his book "The Grace of Kings", Rose Lemberg (

Her Last Breath Before Waking

She is a city haunted by a ghost.

When the architect dreams, her sinews are suspension bridges, her ribs vaulting arches, her bones steel I-beams, and her blood concrete. In her dreams, the city is pristine and perfect. She is perfect.

The architect has a lover who is afraid to sleep. At night, the lover lays her head against the architect’s chest. Instead of breath and pulse, she hears the rumble of high-speed trains.

Full transcript after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 21 for February 2, 2016. I am your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Today's story is "Her Last Breath Before Waking" by A.C. Wise.

Before I get to the story, I just wanted to mention that GlitterShip is currently eligible for the Best Fancast category of the Hugo Awards. I wasn't really sure if GlitterShip was a "fancast" or a "semiprozine" but I thought I should check just in case anyone asked me.

That said, if you like GlitterShip, the best thing you can do is tell your friends to start listening. If they're interested in LGBTQIA short fiction but are unable to access audio (or just don't like it!), they can read all of the GlitterShip stories on our website at glittership.com

A.C. Wise's short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Shimmer, and, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in October 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

Our guest reader this week is Amanda Fitzwater.

Amanda Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Lethe Press’ “Heiresses of Russ 2014”, “Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists”, and recently an essay in Twelfth Planet Press’ “Letters to Tiptree”. Look out for stories coming soon from Shimmer Magazine and The Future Fire. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater

Her Last Breath Before Waking

She is a city haunted by a ghost.

When the architect dreams, her sinews are suspension bridges, her ribs vaulting arches, her bones steel I-beams, and her blood concrete. In her dreams, the city is pristine and perfect. She is perfect.

The architect has a lover who is afraid to sleep. At night, the lover lays her head against the architect’s chest. Instead of breath and pulse, she hears the rumble of high-speed trains.

The architect stands on the balcony of her close apartment looking over the city-that-is and seeing the city-that-might-be. She smokes thin cigarettes and mentally replaces the burnt-out factory and its blind-eye smashed windows with a row of gleaming, silver towers. Once she builds them, her towers will scrape the stars.

“The city is rotten,” she says; she doesn’t turn around.

“I like the city,” says the architect’s lover, so softly she might not be heard. “It’s where we met.”

But the architect isn’t listening. Her hands sketch forms on the air, rewriting the view with shimmering art deco buildings, glistening fountains, and wide, chilly plazas.

The architect’s lover creeps outside to stand beside the architect. She hates visiting the architect here; it’s too high. The wind plucks at her. She doesn’t like seeing the city spread out this way, reduced to brick and wood, stone and smudges of light. Her own apartment is close to the ground, where she can step out the door and feel worn cobblestones beneath her feet.

Sometimes, even though she knows the architect would disapprove, the architect’s lover goes outside barefoot. She stands in her doorway and breathes in the stench of factories, blanketing the city in smoke. She breathes in the crackling, golden scent of fresh bread from the bakery on the corner. She breathes in the rotting geraniums in her neighbor’s window box. But most of all, she breathes in the stink of the river, because once upon a time it smelled like the promise of a new world.

On those days, the architect’s lover curls her toes around the worn-smooth cobbles and drinks in the life of all the people who came before her — every horse’s hoof, every shoeless urchin, every factory-man and whore, every rainfall wearing the cobbles as round as they are now. It makes the city feel alive. It comforts her.

More than once, she has tried to show the architect her city, the one she sees with her feet curled around the cobblestones, but the architect only frowns. The architect has plans. The architect’s lover would re-write the city with new-forged memories; the architect would re-write it with glass and chrome.

The architect slides her arm around her lover’s waist, drawing her closer to the view, but she’s still looking at the city.

“One day this will be beautiful,” the architect says.

The architect’s lover looks at the architect instead of the city — the plane of her cheekbones, the sweeping lines of her neck and throat, the dark spiral of her hair.

“It’s beautiful now,” she says.

In the morning, the architect’s lover finds plans scattered throughout the apartment. She lay beside the architect all night, listening to the high-speed rumble of dreams moving under the architect’s skin. The architect couldn’t have drawn the plans. She must have shed them from her body in her sleep like unwanted skin.

In two weeks, a tower rises where the architect’s hands traced the air, even though there have been no work crews, no scaffolds, no sound of hammers and nails. Like the plans, the architect must have dreamed it, brought it into being by force of will.

The architect’s lover cannot remember what stood there before the tower, if anything at all. This makes her weep, sitting alone in a café near the river, where the architect will not see. The architect’s lover wants to remember everything about the city, imprint it on her bones: here is where she held the architect’s hand, there is where they watched long barges pole down the canal. If she can keep the city from changing, maybe she can keep the architect from changing as well.

People pass the café where the architect’s lover sits, but no one seems to notice the tower. It has always been there. They take it for granted; this is the way the city is meant to be. When she tries to ask about it, people merely shrug. They walk faster; they look at the architect’s lover with strange, indulgent smiles. They shake their heads before going about their days.

The next time the architect’s lover visits, the architect calls her out onto the balcony. She points to the tower that has always been there.

“You see?” the architect says, indicating the top of the tower, a pyramid of glass all lit up with giant spotlights and faceted like a jewel. “One day I’ll buy you a diamond bigger and brighter than that one. I’ll string stars around your waist and wrap moonlight around your throat. I’ll drape you in fur and put pearls and feathers in your hair. You’ll never want for anything.”

The architect’s lover shudders; she imagines drowning under all that weight.

The architect’s lover still longs to become the architect’s wife some day, even though she fears she will die of neglect if she does, so long as she doesn’t die of a broken heart first. She has tried not to love the architect every way she knows how, but her heart keeps circling back to the day they met. It is a fixed point in time, and for the architect’s lover, it will never change.

They were both strangers in the city, recognizing in each other someone else who had not yet learned to call it home. They discovered it together, exploring every street, every alley, every rooftop and doorway. As they did, the architect’s lover wrote each location on her heart, remembering the way the architect looked when she touched that lintel, this railing. The architect’s lover never saw the city until she saw it through the architect’s eyes, and now they are inextricably intertwined. After so long adrift, these twin points, architect and city, anchored her. In the secret places inside her skin and her bones, her name for both architect and city is home.

What secret name the architect has for her, the architect’s lover does not know. This, she does know: The architect never learned to name the city home and she will rewrite all the places they’ve ever been together — the smoky café where they first met, drinking absinthe and watching bloated corpses float down the river; the crumbling bridge where they shared their first kiss, the architect tasting of heady wine and the architect’s lover tasting of nothing at all; the factory where they first fucked, the rough brick against the architect’s lover’s back, and broken glass crunching under their boots. Even the rotten pier where the boats that brought them both from different places long before they knew each other first landed.

Even so, the architect’s lover cannot fall out of love.

All the places she has written on her heart will vanish. Her heart will remain. But when those places are gone, who will they be — the architect and the architect’s lover? Who will they be, separate and together? With no history, what hope can there be for their future?

The architect’s lover is afraid the architect will rewrite her if she falls asleep. So she stays awake, eating cold, tart plums the color of new bruises. She smokes cigarettes she can’t stand the taste of, and drinks coffee so thick the spoon stands on its own when she forgets it halfway through stirring.

She does all these things and tries not to think of the architect’s hands on her body when they fuck, placing causeways in the curve of her hip, a spiral staircase winding around her spine, a domed cathedral to replace her skull.

She can’t tell the architect of her fear. She can’t tell her she’s afraid, or she’ll lose the architect even sooner. She is losing her. Has lost her. Will lose her again and again. She wants to lose her, and yet the architect’s lover is afraid of coming unmoored again, losing the only place she can call home.

So instead she tries to imagine making herself vast enough to hold a city entire, her arms long enough to encompass bridges and canals, wrapped so tight nothing will ever crumble. Even in her dreams, in the rare moments she lets herself sleep, she fails.

These are the architect’s dreams.

One: She replaces her bones with scaffolding. Her eyes become window glass, shattering sunlight. Her jaw sings a bridge’s span, made musical by the tramping of a thousand feet. All through her are tunnels, connecting everything. Her veins are marble. Her foundation stone. Her heart a cavernous station thundering with countless trains. She is vast and contains multitudes. And she is beautiful.

Two: She is very young and playing on the river bank with her brother and her cousin. It is summer and they are barefoot, squishing mud between their toes, feeling the wet, green life of fish and frogs and stilt-legged birds. They break off reeds from the shore and whip-thin branches from the overhanging trees, weaving them into impossible, organic structures. She is not the architect yet, in these dreams, but hers are always the strongest buildings. Her brother and cousin are too impatient, their fingers too quick. They splinter the reeds, snap the wood, and throw the wrecks into the sun-glinting water. They don’t want it badly enough. Her constructions can withstand anything, bound by her force of will.

Three: She is very old, but ageless. Her skin, stretched taut over bone-that-is-not-bone, is so thin the light shines through it. There is metal everywhere she can fit it. She has carved away as many pieces of herself as she can and still walk, still breathe. She has cut windows in her flesh, replaced skin with glass so the delicate structures within, the winding catwalks and promenades, are visible. She is light, so light, but she abhors the body that remains, holding her down.

At night, she calls her children to her. They come creeping from the shadows, their fingers bloody from tearing her city apart by day and building it anew as dusk falls. Metal spines protrude through their skin. Electricity sparks in their bones, makes their eyes glow. They never speak, but they crackle. She has given them whips to hold, downed power lines with frayed copper ends. At her bidding, they flay her, drawing blood from her remaining skin. She closes her eyes, cries ecstasy from a throat clogged with emotion. They are so perfect, her beautiful children, but it is never enough.

She is never enough.

Four: In her house near the river, she lies snugged tight between her brother and cousin, breathing in their dreams. Elsewhere in the house, her mother, father, and uncle snore. The door bursts open, shatters, raining splinters. Her family, all of them, is dragged from their beds, pushed barefoot into the snow.

She can see her breath as they are marched, all in a line, to the river and forced out onto the frozen surface. Under the snow, the ice is impossibly blue, and under the blue, the water is impossibly black. She is separated from everyone but her mother, who grips her hand so tight their bones grind together, and refuses to let go. There are other families, nearly the whole village, teeth chattering, shivering, confused. One man protests, and a soldier in his warm coat and fur hat breaks the man’s nose with the butt of his gun. The man makes a choking noise. He spits blood on the ice, and one yellow-white tooth. He doesn’t protest again.

One of the soldiers wears a star on his hat. He barks a command in a language she doesn’t understand, and two of his men go to either end of the shivering line. They walk slowly, with their guns drawn, and shoot every third person they come upon.

One, two, three. Crack. One, two, three. Crack. Her father, uncle, and cousin are sixth, eighteenth, and twenty-first in line. Her mother is thirtieth, and she is thirty-first.

Each bullet is the sound of the ice cracking, her heart breaking, the feel of her mother’s cold-chapped hand grinding against her bones then letting go as the force of gravity and the terrible color of blood upon the snow pull her down.

Her brother survives. She survives. The solider with the star on his hat lays a heavy hand on her shoulder. He leans forward and breathes in her face, against her ear. His breath, the only hot thing on the frozen lake, smells of sausage and cheap whiskey.

“Go,” he says. “Go, and take your brother with you. I want you to remember. I want you to carry this moment with you wherever you go.”

There are tears on her lashes, freezing in place. She will never let them fall. They are perfect, inverted globes, holding the last image of her family. If they fall, they will shatter, and her family will be lost forever.

This is what the architect dreams.

The city changes. Weak and rotten flesh is scraped away to reveal shining bone. Towers rise. Bridges cross and re-cross the city. A train thunders from uptown to midtown and beyond, rattling windows paned in sparkling glass.

The architect recruits an army of children, urchins with dirty fingers. The architect’s lover sees them in the shadows of old bridges, chipping away fragments of old stone. She sees them in the streets, hurling those chunks of stone through dirt-streaked windows, exploding brick dust from ancient buildings, hastening decay. She sees them digging between the cobbles, pulling them like teeth, prying between ancient boards until they snap. Their fingers are everywhere.

She listens to the architect’s plans. She listens to the trains run beneath the architect’s skin when she sleeps. The city will never be finished, never be done. By night the children will build it up, by day the children will pull it down, and put new, shining structures in its place when the moon rises again.

The city will never be complete. The architect will never be complete.

Although they have never spoken of it, the architect and the architect’s lover disagree.

To the architect’s lover, the river smells of promise, a particular promise that smells of her mother’s skin — fried onions, boiled cabbage, and harsh soap.

To the architect, the river is the smell of sickness. It is the feel of her brother’s fevered skin under the palm of her hand. The river is the color of his eyes, glazed, muddy silt from its bottom occluding his sight. It is the sound of him parting blood-cracked lips at the end, rattling out one last breath, and calling her by her mother’s name. It is the memory of him surviving the ice, and dying — as so many others did — on the refugee-choked boat carrying them to a new life, a new shore.

The architect is determined she will stitch the river closed. Her thread will be iron and steel, binding up the city’s wounds, sealing her brother’s ghost underneath its skin like a bruise, where it needs must fade.

Sometimes the architect likes to imagine she never touched down on the city’s shore. When her brother died, she climbed up on the rail of the boat, crowded with so many stinking refugees, and let herself fall into the churned, muddy water. She sank, rag doll arms and legs drifting loose around her, hair trailing like weeds. She breathed out and out, silver bubbles rising toward the surface, the only bright and beautiful thing in all the muck. She did not jump, but sometimes she wishes she did. Sometimes, even though she knows it is not true, she convinces herself she did jump. The river swallowed her whole. Some other girl, a drowned girl, a ghost, entered the city in her place.

At her core, who the architect truly is, is different. She is still under water, still exhaling, watching those bubbles rise. She is waiting. And one day soon, she will breathe in, light, perfect, and stripped clean. She will breathe in. And wake.

She tries to tell her lover these things, but she knows her lover doesn’t hear them. Somewhere, somehow, they lost their way. They met in one city, and somewhere along the way, they diverged. They look at the city now, and they see different things. The architect wonders if she can ever build a bridge strong enough to pull her lover across. And if she can’t, what will happen to them, then?

The architect’s lover takes to drinking. She drinks in cafes and bars along the ever-changing river, which she scarcely recognizes anymore.

Is that the place where she met the architect? Or was it over there? What of the factory, the stone bridge? What of the taste of the architect’s skin, smoky with the factory’s ghosts, sweat-slick beneath her lover’s lips? What of absinthe cradled on the architect’s tongue, and their hands held palm to palm — so tight — bone to bone? So tight they will never let go. Where are the echoes of their heels cracking in rhythm, one, two, three, as they run from one place to the next, running wild into the future?

The architect’s lover doesn’t recognize herself anymore. She doesn’t know where she fits — not on the streets, where cobbles no longer rise to meet the arches of her feet; not against the architect, where sharp juts of bone meet her fingers in place of the soft hollow of a throat, the gentle curve of a hip, or the warm swell of a breast.

She drinks and she smokes until her memories blur, until their edges round and grow soft like the scarcely-remembered thousand-year cobble stones. The architect’s lover shouts at strangers, her words slurring as she tells them of factories and piers and bridges that never existed.

She tells them of home.

When she slips up and says she is the architecture’s lover, not the architect’s, no one corrects her.

She is a ghost, in love with a city.

And in time, because she is afraid and she doesn’t know how to fall out of love, the architect’s lover takes home a beautiful boy whose name she can’t be bothered to remember. She fucks him precisely because it means nothing. Smoking still more cigarettes, eating chilled and bruised plums, watching him sleep, she is terribly afraid she’ll marry him one day. Still never knowing his name, the architecture’s lover will use up her body bearing the beautiful boy’s children. Children who will become the monsters of the architecture’s dream.

The architect, the architecture, is all angles and planes now, the glint of steel, concrete skin. The architecture’s lover doesn’t recognize anything anymore. She is a stranger in a city she once loved, a city that held so much promise. A city she called home.

The architect’s lover remembers her mother putting her on a boat. There were so many boats in those days, all leaving from different places, but all traveling to the city — a place of promise, a place of dreams. She remembers clinging to her mother’s skirt, sobbing and not wanting to let go as her mother’s hands — red and blistered from washing — urged her up the wooden gangway.

“It’s a better life,” her mother told her. “You’ll have opportunities I never had, things I can’t give you. You’ll be happy there, in time. Promise me you’ll try.”

She remembers gripping the ship’s rail so hard her knuckles turned white, leaning out over the churning water, waving and straining her eyes until her mother was only a vanished speck on the horizon. Landing on the city’s shore didn’t take the pain away, but stepping from the boat’s swaying deck onto firm land once more, the architect’s lover straightened her spine, keeping her promise to try. Determined to make her mother proud.

This is not the city she once called home.

This city is hostile. It is like the place she came from, on a boat, so long ago, a place that pushed her out, not wanting her anymore. It does not love her. It barely knows she’s alive.

And yet, still, she cannot fall out of love.

The architecture’s lover looks at the beautiful boy whose name she doesn’t know, and tries to love him. Silent tears run down her cheeks; she doesn’t remember why.

The architect stands on her balcony high above the shining city. Her city. Towers stab defiant at the sky, bridges stitch old wounds closed, trains hum deep underground, and the winking glass that is everywhere catches the sun. Strong and true, it will never crack, never break, never crumble.

Her skin is planed clean, scraped thin. Still, it is too heavy for her bones. But there is time, she knows. This is only the beginning.

The architect shades her eyes, and looks toward what was once the river. People stride along what are no longer banks, small as ants from up here. They are laughing, smiling. Women, sleek in cool silk the color of her towers. Men, in crisp suits the color of ice cream that will never melt. Their teeth are impossible in the sun. They don’t remember a life other than this one. She has made it so.

Everyone should have the luxury of forgetting the times when they weren’t as happy as they must be now.

Still, something tugs at the edges of the architect’s mind. There is a ghost in the city. The shadow of towers, spewing smoke, and the memory of a kiss, and salt-tasting skin against her lips haunt her mind. Before her marble skin, before the columns of her spine, the tension bridge of her jaw, before the diamond pane windows of her eyes, wasn’t she someone else? Wasn’t there someone who knew her as she was, and loved her just the same?

There, amid the ant-bustle on the once-shores, is a lone girl. Her feet are bare and spattered with mud. She is looking straight at the architect, across all the distance, and the people part around her like water breaking around a stone. Like she isn’t there.

The architect wonders: Is that her? Or someone she used to know?

Even though she can’t see them from her balcony, the architect knows: The girl’s eyes are the color of stirred silt, and blue ice. There are weeds in her hair. She raises her hand — a drowned girl, waiting to breathe, waiting to rise from the river and come ashore — and waves to the architect, but she does not smile.

The architect’s lover leaves the café. She is utterly lost. She recognizes nothing here.

She goes toward the water, some vague memory pulling her. But the map written on her skin is muddled. The streets, everything she thinks she knows, has been re-written.

The architect’s lover is looking for someone, but she doesn’t know who. No one looks familiar here. Except…

Except there is a girl, standing and looking across the water. It is a girl the architecture’s lover almost knows. The girl has eyes like silt and ice. They remind the architect’s lover of home.

The architecture’s lover raises her hand, catching the girl’s attention. The girl looks at her, and the architect’s lover falls to her knees. A name catches in her throat and stalls. She can’t remember. She weeps, and doesn’t know why. In her mind, there is one word, echoing persistently and meaning nothing: Home.

The architect stands on her balcony, and looks at the girl and the water. For a moment, the architect thinks there is something she has forgotten. Then she puts the thought from her mind.

Soon the city will be perfect. She will tear it down and rebuild it until it is so.

The architect turns. She does not raise her hand to the girl on the shore. Or the weeping woman on her knees by the girl’s side.

The architect goes inside. And she does not say goodbye.

END

"Her Last Breath Before Waking" was originally published in 3-Lobed Burning Eye in December 2013.

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

Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on February 16th with "Into the Nth Dimension" by David D. Levine.

Her Last Breath Before Waking
by A.C. Wise

She is a city haunted by a ghost.

When the architect dreams, her sinews are suspension bridges, her ribs vaulting arches, her bones steel I-beams, and her blood concrete. In her dreams, the city is pristine and perfect. She is perfect.

The architect has a lover who is afraid to sleep. At night, the lover lays her head against the architect’s chest. Instead of breath and pulse, she hears the rumble of high-speed trains.

Full transcript after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 21 for February 2, 2016. I am your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Today's story is "Her Last Breath Before Waking" by A.C. Wise.

Before I get to the story, I just wanted to mention that GlitterShip is currently eligible for the Best Fancast category of the Hugo Awards. I wasn't really sure if GlitterShip was a "fancast" or a "semiprozine" but I thought I should check just in case anyone asked me.

That said, if you like GlitterShip, the best thing you can do is tell your friends to start listening. If they're interested in LGBTQIA short fiction but are unable to access audio (or just don't like it!), they can read all of the GlitterShip stories on our website at glittership.com

A.C. Wise's short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Shimmer, and, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in October 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

Our guest reader this week is Amanda Fitzwater.

Amanda Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Lethe Press’ “Heiresses of Russ 2014”, “Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists”, and recently an essay in Twelfth Planet Press’ “Letters to Tiptree”. Look out for stories coming soon from Shimmer Magazine and The Future Fire. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater
 
 

Skeletons

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

   “Who’s gonna watch the skeletons?” I ask.

            We’re about to go camping. Cathryn’s undressing before the closet in her garage apartment. I’m trying not to watch, though she wants me to. Instead I peer into her glass terrarium where the skeletons live, three of them: a dwarf T-Rex and two dwarf stegosauruses. The T-Rex stands atop a lonely pile of rocks.

            “I was going to leave them extra food. You think that’s okay?” Cathryn rummages through the clothes pile on the floor, such beautiful chaos. I stare at her reflection in the glass. Her bra, lacey and black, makes me want to glimpse what’s underneath, even though I have before, five times.

Full transcript appears after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 20 for January 19, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Before we get started with this episode today, I've put together a small Listener's Poll for the first nine months of GlitterShip, covering the stories that we put out in 2015. This is intended to be a low-stress, just-because-I'm-curious poll. I will have the link up in the transcript on glittership.com, and you can also find it at: goo.gl/forms/sp9XsEJANj The poll will stay open through February 29, and I'll announce the results in one of the March episodes.

Our story this week is "Skeletons" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, read by guest reader Ranylt Richildis

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats–Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in over 40 magazines and anthologies such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Goblin Fruit. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or at her website bonniejostufflebeam.com. She is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary Agency.

Ranylt Richildis is a writer and editor based in Ottawa. Her short story, “Charlemagne and Florent,” was selected for Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ranylt is the founding editor of the Aurora-nominated Lackington’s Magazine, an online SFF quarterly devoted to stories told in unusual or poetic language.

Skeletons

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

“Who’s gonna watch the skeletons?” I ask.

We’re about to go camping. Cathryn’s undressing before the closet in her garage apartment. I’m trying not to watch, though she wants me to. Instead I peer into her glass terrarium where the skeletons live, three of them: a dwarf T-Rex and two dwarf stegosauruses. The T-Rex stands atop a lonely pile of rocks.

“I was going to leave them extra food. You think that’s okay?” Cathryn rummages through the clothes pile on the floor, such beautiful chaos. I stare at her reflection in the glass. Her bra, lacey and black, makes me want to glimpse what’s underneath, even though I have before, five times.

“I guess so,” I say. I look back at the T-Rex. His name, Cathryn tells me, is Ronald. The steggos are called Thelma and Louise; she thinks she’s being ironic. The T-Rex’s bones are so small I'm sure that if I picked him up I would break him. His eyes are tiny as sequins and suspended in empty sockets. He wails like a cat in heat. “I think something’s wrong,” I say.

“He’s just hungry, Emma. Feed him. Food’s next to the cage.”

I open the yellow bottle of skeleton food; the musty smell makes me cough. The bottle is full of squiggling little worms. I pour some into the terrarium. Ronald clambers down the rocks. He dips his jaw into the worm pile and scoops them into his mouth, swallows. I can see them travel down his throat and into his empty bone stomach where they wriggle inside him.

Cathryn clears her throat. She stands before me with her hands on her hips, wearing tight blue jeans and a bumblebee-striped halter top. She’s dressed for clubbing, not camping, and I realize that the kind of camping we’ll be doing won’t require the hiking shoes or the toilet paper I brought. I tell her she looks great. She does. I look back at the tank. The T-Rex peers up at me.

“Let me free,” he whispers. His voice is like an echo. I can’t. We’re going camping.

In the shallow forest we set up our tent. The land has been cleared for people like us, who want to be in nature but not too far in. Our tent is a miniature house. The box says it will fit twenty people, but we’ve only got five. It has French doors that fold down and collapsible walls to give everyone a sense of privacy, but through the first night I hear Cathryn and Anne, the girlfriend she brought along, their heavy breath and little moans. They make the whole tent sweat.

The site is close to the river, but not too close. At night we cannot hear the current. The bathroom is just around the corner, and there’s a leaky water faucet next to where we parked the car, ten feet from the tent. Our friend Wendi brought a portable mini fridge and a fan; they run on batteries, but the fridge eats two an hour so we have to run to the store once a day and buy at least twelve packages of four. We make a game of it. In some ways the drive is the best part of the trip, mostly because Cathryn is the one with the car, and she’s asked me to go with her each time. We roll the windows down. She talks about the new girl, Anne, how they’ve just met but already spend nearly every night together. Every word she says feels like a secret between us. I don’t want to hear about Anne, but I don’t not want to hear about her either, because I want to know if she’s better than me. I want to know when we’ll share a bed again. I try to deduce the information from the cutesy story of how they met at the campus coffee shop, but I can’t, because Cathryn has always been unpredictable, mysterious. With her unflinching face she reveals nothing. Every time she asks me to get in the car with her, I do.

The nearest trash can is two whole miles from our site, so we’re forced to rough it in that regard at least, dumping our food scraps into a plastic bag. Most of what we brought is food. Peanut butter, bread, baked beans in a can and hot dogs with mustard, two bottles of cheap red wine and a plastic handle of rum. Our broke friend Mike does the cooking. It’s his way of paying us back. He also does the majority of the drinking. He’s brought his set of oils, and his paint-stained hands dye whatever he touches. Each hot dog bun has a blue handprint, and by the time dinner’s finished the rum bottle is covered in fingerprints.

The second night Wendi builds a fire and we sit around the flames. The smoke follows Cathryn. No matter where she sits, the wind moves in her direction. Finally she settles in one spot, lights a cigarette, and lets the smoke clog her eyes. We play a drinking game, Never Have I Ever.

“Never have I ever been to Disneyworld,” I say. Cathryn and Wendi put down a finger; they went there once together.

“Never have I ever done acid,” Wendi says. The rest of us admit defeat.

“Never have I ever been in love,” Cathryn says. No one puts down a finger; no one is sure enough to commit to that. We all four of us look at Cathryn through the smoke. Her hair is up, the skin of her neck glistening with sweat. That we all want her is common knowledge; we can’t help ourselves. This is what holds our friendships together, the flame to which we are helpless as moths.

That night, as we sleep, trees rustle, and the fallen branches on the ground crack like knuckles. When I leave the tent early in the morning to walk to the restroom, I find the contents of our trash bag scattered, the bottom ripped. By the river I spot a leopard, its white fur stretched so tight the bones poke through. In the disappearing moonlight I nearly see the heart pumping in its chest. It’s looking right at me, and I stand and stare until the sun creeps up and the leopard, its fur no longer see-through, bounds into the brush.

Back at the campsite a crowd is gathered around the dying embers of last night’s fire. A dodo skeleton hops around the fire pit. One of the bones from its foot is missing. Without the feathers it looks just like any other bird. We only know it’s a dodo from its fat chest, its dodo beak. Plus it tells us what it is when we ask it.

Cathryn shoos the bird. “Go, fly away.”

“Dodos don’t fly,” it says, lifting a bone wing. The invisible joints crack. “I’m stuck.”

It hangs around until we change into our swimsuits and leave for the swimming hole. It’s only a couple of miles away, so we walk. Cathryn and Anne hold hands. The rest of us walk behind them. We talk about the dodo. Mike had never seen one. “I’m going to paint it,” he says.

Wendi huffs. “I was gonna paint it.”

“In my painting, he’ll be wearing a tie and drinking a martini.” Mike laughs, and Cathryn turns around and gives him an eye. She knows that laugh. Since high school she’s known it.

“How much have you had?” she says. “I swear to god, Mike, if that handle is gone.”

“Excuse me,” he says. “Excuse me if I like to have a little fun.”

Once Cathryn turns back around, Wendi reaches into the pocket of her swimming trunks and pulls out her flask. She and Mike take turns.

“In my painting, he’ll be flying,” I say.

“You don’t paint,” everyone says at once, except Anne, of course, who doesn’t know the first thing about me. Anne’s ass hangs out of her suit, and her walk is too sure, like she thinks she has this down, this Cathryn thing, like she’s permanent here, the most recent fixture. Wendi and Mike and I gulp and giggle.

“Two more weeks, tops,” Mike whispers. His guesses are usually the most accurate. He’s known her the longest. My skin tingles all of a sudden, part rum, part the image that flashes in my memory; her clothes a pile on the floor, the scratch of Ronald’s gimpy paws on the glass, the stale smoke smell, and the feel of that skin, soft in my palm. Two weeks.

At the swimming hole we rush the water. It laps our thighs as we sink our way in, getting used to the shock of cool. Submerging my whole body, I forget to hold my breath and rise up coughing. Mike grabs my legs, and I go down again. I open my eyes under the water. Bones litter the lake floor under our feet, many of them ground to form a second layer of sand. We walk all along them without noticing. I let the water carry my legs instead. I swim. When I come up for breath I’m at the far bank, where Wendi sits atop a rock with her feet skimming the water surface. Her face is red and wet, though her hair is dry.

“You okay?” I ask. A brittle fishbone snaps under my weight.

“I’m okay,” she says, shaking her head. “I think I’m in love with her.”

Yeah, well, I want to say but don’t. I feign surprise. “You’re straight, though, right?”

Wendi shrugs. “Does it matter? I hate seeing her like this.”

“Happy?” Me too. “Well, if you really loved her, you’d want her happy.”

I remember the first time I knew Cathryn wanted it. Wendi, Mike, and me in the car, driving down streets with no names for no reason. Cigarette ash blowing back in through the windows and staining our clothes with the stench. “You’re on her list.” Mike grinned. “She told me so.” Then it was a party at my place and we snuck into my bedroom and stuffed a chair under the doorknob. The curtains were attached by flimsy little clips and had fallen down, so we put them back up but you could still see through little holes where the fabric was worn, and we did it, aware and uncaring, while partygoer’s faces appeared and disappeared like apparitions at each hole in the window, trying to see in.

“You’re right,” Wendi says, wetting a toe. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

A school of skeleton fish passes over my feet. Their bone-hard bodies make my hair stand on end. When I stick my head under the water and my eyes adjust, they are already far away, but bringing up their rear is a phantom shiner with the last vestige of its transparent orange scales intact.

“Huh,” I say when I bring my head again above water. “I thought those had fully skeletoned a while ago.”

“This water freaks me out.” Wendi stands and turns, and we both see the leopard this time, its body stretched across a rock in the sun, its rib bones now visible. Wendi’s closer to it than me, and I wish we could trade places as she steps toward it until she is so close she can touch it if she wants. She reaches her hand out. She pulls it back. She helps me out of the water. Together we run back to camp.

When the gang returns from the swimming hole, Mike has a saber-tooth skeleton at his side, around its neck a collar he has made from the drawstring of his swimming trunks, which now hang below his navel. To keep them on he walks bow-legged, and once he arrives at the fire he hands Wendi the end of the string and disappears into the tent to change.

Wendi and I have been silent, passing a notebook of portable haikus back and forth, each of us writing one page. It’s a game we all used to play. The haikus are nonsensical, the language of ridiculousness. When Mike comes back out we put the notebook away.

“This is Tegan,” he says. “I’m gonna take her home with me.”

“Another pet?” Wendi asks. A whole wall of Mike’s room is covered in aquariums already. “Dude, you can’t breathe in your room as is.”

“I hate that name,” the saber says. “Give me another one.”

“Okay, your name is Nimrod.”

“Another one.”

“Tilly?” Mike says.

The saber shrugs.

“Tigger?”

The saber snaps Mike’s hand. Its teeth draw blood. He slaps its head. The bones rattle. He marches to a tree and ties the saber up, then wraps a dishcloth around his hand. As we eat peanut butter sandwiches and take shots of wine, the saber shouts insults. “Morons,” it says, “you don’t know shit about life. You think you know everything, but you’re fucking clueless.”

Mike hits it over the head with an unburnt log. No one screams; it happens too fast. The saber’s body falls. Mike unties it and carries it to the river. I follow him, try to tell him to stop, but my voice catches. He tosses the bones in the river and wipes the dirt from his jeans; on top of the dried paint, the stain looks like a skewed portrait, blue eyes and lips and all the rest dirt.

After walking back in silence, we find Cathryn holding the lucky girl, visibly shaken.

“Fucking thing was reminding me of my parents,” Mike says.

Cathryn doesn’t even bother to shoot Mike the eye. She takes Anne by the hand and leads her to the tent, and when we hear the click of the lock on the tent doors, Mike grabs hold of the wine, opens his throat, and guzzles. I sit beside Wendi and the fire and we don’t say a word. The bottle empty, Mike drops into the dirt and rolls back and forth, moving his arms in angel shapes. “I’m sorry,” he says again and again. Wendi and I don’t comfort him. The firewood crumbles like the bones and we just look on. I’m used to looking and not touching, staying out of the way until it’s my turn. I know that Anne won’t want us after this, won’t want to be a part of this, and somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. Two weeks tops, Mike said. He was wrong. It’ll go back to normal before that. We’ll forget it ever happened, starting tomorrow when we’re back in the concrete world.

We sleep the way we are.

On the way out the next morning we drive across the bridge over the river. In the backseat I stare out the window, and from the water's edge the leopard stares at me. As it pads to shore I notice its legs, all skeleton now. I imagine its claws, invisible but deadly.

The whole ride no one says a word.

When Cathryn and I get back to her place, the skeletons are still in the tank. The T-Rex claws at the glass. His bones creak. “Let me free,” he says. I knock on the glass, and Thelma and Louise scurry to the back. Ronald doesn’t move, static in his pleading.

Cathryn disappears into the bathroom. I look around her room, at the mess she’s left of clothes scattered over the ground. It’s hard to see the floor. I groan as I tiptoe over the piles. I reach my hand into the tank and pick the skeleton up by his shoulders. He falls apart in my hands. I carry his bones outside and look across her big backyard, which we only enter to smoke brief cigarettes at night when we need the air. In the back of the yard is an abandoned raised bed, one we all built together when we had nothing but time on our hands then forgot about, and I lay him down amongst the dead tomato plants, their thin spines snapped so that they seem to bow as we approach. His bones scatter in the dirt. I shake a plant. Its brittle leaves fall from the branches and bury him.

END

"Skeletons" was originally published in the Geek Girls issue of Room, 37.3 in Fall 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.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on February 2nd with "Her Last Breath Before Waking" by A. C. Wise.

Skeletons

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

   “Who’s gonna watch the skeletons?” I ask.

            We’re about to go camping. Cathryn’s undressing before the closet in her garage apartment. I’m trying not to watch, though she wants me to. Instead I peer into her glass terrarium where the skeletons live, three of them: a dwarf T-Rex and two dwarf stegosauruses. The T-Rex stands atop a lonely pile of rocks.

            “I was going to leave them extra food. You think that’s okay?” Cathryn rummages through the clothes pile on the floor, such beautiful chaos. I stare at her reflection in the glass. Her bra, lacey and black, makes me want to glimpse what’s underneath, even though I have before, five times.

Full transcript appears after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 20 for January 19, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Before we get started with this episode today, I've put together a small Listener's Poll for the first nine months of GlitterShip, covering the stories that we put out in 2015. This is intended to be a low-stress, just-because-I'm-curious poll. I will have the link up in the transcript on glittership.com, and you can also find it at: goo.gl/forms/sp9XsEJANj The poll will stay open through February 29, and I'll announce the results in one of the March episodes.

Our story this week is "Skeletons" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, read by guest reader Ranylt Richildis

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats–Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in over 40 magazines and anthologies such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Goblin Fruit. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or at her website bonniejostufflebeam.com. She is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary Agency.

Ranylt Richildis is a writer and editor based in Ottawa. Her short story, “Charlemagne and Florent,” was selected for Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ranylt is the founding edito

And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score

By Gary Kloster

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

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

"I'm busy, Huck.  Back off."

Full transcript appears after the cut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score

By Gary Kloster

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

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

"I'm busy, Huck.  Back off."

"Busy?"  Huck pursed his lips, made a show of studying the stencil I'd taped across the customer's shoulder blades.  "Gettin you some ink, boy?  A tribal?  Something all spiky and black and awesome to show off to the bitches back home?"

Huck's deep voice slowly penetrated my customer's drunken meditations, and his blood shot eyes rolled to blink back my ex-partner's regard.  "Who the hell…"  The young man's voice trailed off, the twitchy edge of drunken belligerence fading as he caught sight of Huck's face.

Huck smiled, and his smile stretched the pink rift of scar tissue that ran up from the corner of his jaw, across the twisted pit of his ruined right eye and onto his broad forehead.  Before Nikolai's betrayal, Huck's face had been sternly handsome and the blood tatted into his dark skin had shone like lightning.  That tat's magic had made him beautiful and terrifying, like a storm rolling, and with a look he could make all the world his bitch.  Now, left with just the scar and the spark of rage that still burned in the depths of his remaining eye, he had to be content with just scaring people shitless.

"Tribals are crap, redneck poser ink.  Do yourself a favor and piss off."

Two minutes after Huck banged in and my only customer that whole damn day was sulking out, a black dot of ink no bigger than a pimple hidden beneath his shirt.  "Follow him out, Huck," I said as the door rattled shut and I trashed the ink that I'd laid out for the job.  "We're done, remember?"

"Woody."  He picked up my sample book, stared at my name splashed across its front in bright red graffiti style.  "Dumb ass name.  Nikolai helped you pick that, didn't he?  Did that cocksucker give you a wooden pecker to go with it?"

My teeth clenched, locked back the curse I wanted to hurl at him.  It'd always been so easy for him to control me, to drop a few words and make me flare up in rage.  Or desire.  But those days were gone.  We were different people now.  "Just go.  Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it."

"You don't want to hear it?  Don't even want to hear it?"  Huck's big hands flipped restlessly through the pages of my sample book, but his eye was roaming the cheap sample-art posters tacked to the lumpy plaster of the walls.  "You rent yourself some space in a crappy little parlor on Hollywood so you could draw ugly tats with plain ink onto tourists, and so you don't need to hear me out?  You sure you can afford to say that?"

Threat growled like distant thunder through his smooth voice, but I wasn't going to let him shake me that way either.  "I can afford to stay out of jail."

"Jail."  The scar shifted around his smile.  "What was that to you?  Four years learning to ink and picking out girlfriends.  Jail must have been nothing for you.  Tough guy."

Four years being the freak in a cage.  That wasn't nothing, no, not at all.  I rubbed a hand over the rough bristles on my chin, shook my head, so sick of Huck and all those memories that rode his wake.  "They weren't my type."

Huck's hands snapped my book shut, dropped it to my desk where it teetered and fell to the floor in a glossy heap.  He pushed himself up straight to tower over me, the bright spot of spite in his eye burning down at me.  "Yeah, and you ain't my type anymore either, are you?"  In his face, I could read the disgust, the anger he still had at me for what I'd done, for the truth I'd carved into my flesh.  Flesh he once thought he had claim to.  "So stop trying to play the big boy.  There's new blood in town, big god's blood, and I mean to have it.  So that means I need me a bloodhound.  I need you."

"I ain't your dog, Huck."

His hands were on me, yanking me into him, and suddenly all I could see was his bright, furious eye and its ruined twin.  "You are my dog, Woody.  You're my bitch.  Always."  He shoved me away and I hit the table behind me, stumbled and landed on my ass.

From the floor I stared up at him, body shaking, anger and fear rattling through me.  We'd been lovers for years before it all burned down, before Nikolai destroyed us.  Years good, bad and chaotic, especially at the end when I had told him what I really was, told him that his pretty girl never believed she was a girl at all.  And that I wanted to change.  Through all of that, in all the twisted grotesquerie of what we had called our love, he had never touched me in anger, never dared name and claim me like that.  "Get out."

"No."  He stared down at me, hands twitching, his ill-leashed fury hungry for release, but as I pushed my back slowly to the wall he reined it.  "No.  This isn't just some score.  It's the score, the one that wraps this business up for all of us, you, me and Nikolai.  This pays it all."

Nikolai.  I close my eyes and let my head rock back to thump my crew-cut into the wall.  Of course it was Nikolai. Of course he'd come back to LA, blood in his hands and a smile on his lips.  "Oh gods, Huck, just give it up.  He hurt me too, hurt me bad.  Four years of my life are gone because of him.  But I can't steal those years back, and you can't hurt him enough to bring back your tat. Cut your damn losses and move on.  Going after Nikolai, getting back in the trade, it's just a slow bullet through your brain."

"You think I can let this go?"  His finger traced over the ruin of his face.  "He burned me.  He set me up and burned me, burned the blood of Zeus right out of my face.  I'm never going to let that go.  My balls won't let me.  How about yours?"

A cheap shot and I gathered up my book and stood while I let the pain of its bite fade.  "No Huck.  No.  I don't want your revenge, and I don't want your money.  Find yourself some other dog.  I'm done with the blood trade."

"I wasn't offering money."

The softness of his voice made me look at him, but he was staring away from me now, through the neon and out at the tourists passing in the garish unnight.  "What?"

"He has Ungud."

"Fuck!"  The book hit the wall, pages flying, the bright wings of butterflies torn away by a storm.  The trap had shut, and I never even saw it coming.  "Fuck me," I whispered, and damn he was smiling at me, sympathy and satisfaction.

"Not anymore, baby-girl.  Not anymore."

I watched them kill a god, once.  My mother took me.

She made me wear a dress, and I hated that.  I hated the crowd, the heat and perfume stink of the people around me as everyone pressed close to glass so thickly etched with wards that the altar below seemed to float in a fog of incantation.  I hated it all, but she made me watch.  Mom thought they were saving the world, culling the idols of the infidels.  Even then, I wondered if they were just making a profit.

The god looked like a dirty old woman, senile and sick.  It felt obscene, watching the priests stagger to the altar under the weight of their icons of protection, dragging her with them.  While they made their prayers, she drooled and muttered.  I watched, and couldn't believe it would happen.  Couldn't believe that anything so sad, so contemptible, could be a god.  Couldn't believe they were going to kill that wasted old crone.  Then they bent back her head and cut her throat.

One quick flash of a knife, and the blood came.  The black blood boiled out of her, writhed and splashed like a thousand snakes and the priests caught as much as they could.  Caught it to seal up in sacred vessels and sell for the glory of their particular truth.  That black essence of belief, sold by the ounce.

Truth wins, chaos dies.  My mother pointed to the sacred circle carved into the altar, stained black.  The old beliefs were all going away, and the world would be pure.  I listened, silent and horrified at the thought.  A world where everything fit, just so.  Where no one could be out of place.  She pulled me away, content in her sanctimony, but I looked back and watched the priests trying to gather every last dark drop.  And I saw them fail.

It escaped them, slipped past them, ran away.  Some portion of that tainted tincture of everything that the dead god's worshippers had once invested in her ran back into the world.  Escaped, to pool in graveyard shadows and on the wings of crows, in bottles of dark beer and in the eyes of sick children.  No one could contain the blood.  That was a truth I could believe in.

So the blood of the dead gods gathered in the dark spaces, the secret places, and of course there were those stupid enough, crazy enough, to seek it out.  We found the dreams of a million souls gathered in the curdled essence of a deity and packaged it into little glass spheres, convenient for sale.  Of course the dealers were all fucked up.  And I had fallen in love with two of them, and my hands had been soaked in the blood of the divine.  It didn't matter that I was a blood hound, one of those dubiously gifted few who could sniff out the blood where it hid, who could resist somewhat the madness it cast in its raw form.  It still tainted my life.  Trying to turn my back on it had been a stupid dream.

Stretched out in my narrow bed, I stared at the peeling walls of my tiny apartment, tacked over with diagrams, photos, maps of the hills above LA.  Five years of impotent rage hadn't done much for Huck's temper, but it had honed his cunning, and now my room was a shrine to his dream of revenge.  For the past two weeks he had been force-feeding me every detail of Nikolai's return.  Dead gods knew where he'd gotten it all, or how he'd paid for it.  But now it was my job to know it.  Just like the old days.

The good, crazy days.  When Huck planned the scores and I pulled them off, riding his smarts through the job until I hit the point where the information broke down and I would just have to gut it through.  Then Nikolai would line up the buyers and bring in the cash.  That was when we were one tight little family, completely screwed up and seething but together, functioning somehow.  Until it had all blown apart.

I had tried to pretend I could turn my back on Huck and Nikolai and everything we had done to each other. Tried to pretend that we were over and done.  A stupid mistake.  We would never be over as long as all three of us still breathed.  Huck was too furious, Nikolai too careful, and me… They both knew me too well to let me go.  They knew exactly how to pull me back in.  Ungud.  The aboriginal god of snakes and rainbows and desire, a god who could be male or female, depending on its want.  Who was what it was, what it wanted to be.  A god whose blood could make me exactly what I was.

Three days, and maybe this would really would be over, like Huck said, solved under a sky painted red and black by his rage.  Three days, and maybe I or Nikolai or Huck might finally get what we wanted.  Or maybe again all our dreams would just spill out and be lost to violence, like the blood of that dead god.

A helicopter thundered overhead, hauling water east to the fire lines and that finally shut Huck up.

"I know," I said, before he could start up again when the noise faded.  "I know, and if I don't know it's too damn late to worry about it.  You've done your job, now let me do mine."  I watched his hands tighten on the steering wheel of his Tahoe, remembered how mad this made him.  A control freak, placing his carefully crafted creation into the hands of an improviser.  Five years of obsession hadn't changed that.

"The fire is rolling in faster than I wanted it too.  They might be thinking of moving."

"Yeah, maybe.  So what?  I'll deal with it."  My hands were slapping a quick beat over my body, checking pockets to make sure every piece of equipment was where I wanted it.  "You wanted me, you got me, now let me go.  I've got work to do."

"A real tough guy now, ain't you?"

"Always was."

His eye looked me over, and I could imagine him trying to picture me the way I was when we met, to see again the person I'd been when he'd wanted me.  It made me itch, uncomfortable.  "Were you really?"

"Yeah.  Why do you think you loved me, instead of all the other women you'd screwed?"  And then I was out of the car, slamming shut the door and leaving him with that.  As good a last line as I was going to get, if this all went to hell and I never saw him again.  I started down the street, heading for the bike paths that would take me to the house hidden high in these dry hills where Nikolai and the blood were waiting.  As I walked, I wrapped a black bandana across my face to block out the smell of burning.  And wondered if things had already gone to hell a long time ago.

The wards were easy, always were.  My nature makes me slippery, hard to fix with magic.  And I had them marked on a map.  The alarms were harder, but Huck knew my weaknesses and had drilled me on how to handle the ones that were still operating, the ones that hadn't fallen when the fire took out the power and the data lines.  The fire or some hired hand of Huck's, using the fire for cover.  Even the cell nets were almost useless, jammed with the panicked calls of property owners.

I pulled myself up onto the bumpy tile roof of the house, giving thanks as I did to the testosterone injections that built the muscle that made it easy.  It was a big place, some old money mansion built out in the wilderness before Santa Clarita had blown up in the valley below.  It must have cost Nikolai a bundle to rent, and I was betting he wasn't going to be getting his deposit back.  If he really had the blood of ten dead gods down there, it didn't matter how hard they warded the spheres that encased it.  Power would bleed out, and the shadows of this house would crawl with nightmares for years.

That, though, was the least of my ex-partner's problems.  I found the skylight I wanted and peered down into a room, empty and lit only with the ruddy glow of the approaching fire.  An empty room, except for the brass bound box that gleamed below me.  I frowned down at it.  Clear the ward on this skylight, slip down and gather up the loot, then away.  Just like Huck had planned.

My fingers danced around the skylight's edge, pasting in place the twists of iron and hair, spit and paper.  Charms to break the ward without letting it know it's been broken.  Then I worked loose the alarm wire, slipped open the lock and tied off my rope.  All in the plan.  I swung myself in, quiet as a cat, and slid down.  Adrenalin danced in my veins, waiting for the moment the plan went to hell.

I could smell the blood, even before I cracked the case.  I'd never been very gifted at sniffing the stuff out, had never been a good tracker.  My bloodhound abilities lay more in my gift at resisting its gnawing effect on my sanity.  But the scent was so strong here I could taste it, and I knew that there must be more blood in the case than I had ever seen before.  With care, I lifted away the soft packing meant to prevent the psychic hell storm that would burst forth if one or more of the globes inside broke.  And that was when the plan burned.

Eleven spheres nestled carefully in velvet.  Big crystal globes, and in the heart of each black liquid rolled and stirred, moving in tides that were steered more by my heartbeat than the moon.  Eleven.  Huck had said ten.  Behind me, the door swung open and my job really began.

"Woody."

"Nikolai."  Five years had barely changed him, but he was vain.  Exercise to keep the belly away, dyes to tint the grey that was creeping in, injections and charms to smooth the nascent wrinkles.  Still, he looked good.  He stepped into the room alone, shut the door behind him.  Didn't matter.  The guards would be on the periphery, waiting.

"I like what you've done with yourself."  His grey eyes roamed me, flicked across my short hair and goatee, the muscles I'd added, lingered on the bulge in the black fatigues I wore.  "You're packing now."

"In more ways than one," I said.  But I kept my hands still, didn't try to pull on him.  Nikolai wanted to talk, and I was fine with that.

"You like the merchandise?"

"It's interesting."

"It's expensive."  Nikolai walked a little closer, stopped.  With the box open, I knew he had to be feeling it, the buzzing edge of distortion that gave normal people the fits and left bloodhounds like me mostly alone.  An advantage, since it kept him back from me.  A little one.

"South American, mostly.  Huitzilopochtli.  Weet-seal-oh-POACHED-lee  They mix a tiny drop of that with meth and slam it.  Guys do that and they can dodge bullets.  For a little while.  Tezcatlipoca. Tez catly pouka Put a trace of it in the ink of a jaguar tattoo, and no one will ever lie to you again.  And nine more.  The trade's been good to me, lately."

"I see."  Good.  Eleven full globes, each the size of a damn softball, each one a pure god, each of them worth a fortune.  We'd risked our lives for a globe of mixed blood a tenth the size of these in the old days.  That case cradled more money and power than I'd ever seen in the trade.  Power enough that I could feel it gnawing at my inborn protections.

"I'm glad Huck persuaded you to come.  I've been wanting to see you.  I owe you an apology."

"You don't owe me anything."  Friends, lovers, family, they hurt each other and had to apologize.  Nikolai had been all of those to me, once, but he wasn't anymore.  Burning out Huck's tat had been a too clever attempt at assassination, and if I hadn't gotten spooked and ditched the blood I was carrying down a storm sewer, I wouldn't have been doing four years for breaking and entering.  Transporting even that little bit of unsanctioned blood would have kept me in a cage for life.  Nikolai had tried to take both our lives when he decided to stop freelancing and left us to join the east coast family that was muscling in on the LA blood trade. When he betrayed us, he stopped being anything but an enemy.  And enemies, they never need to apologize.

Nikolai read the thread of my thought in my body's tension.  He nodded, and I knew he never expected any other answer.  "I always thought I was the clever one.  But you both were smarter than I thought.  But this isn't really smart at all."  He waved a hand at the spheres.  "Who do you think fed Huck all the info that led you here?  Who do you think his informants were really working for?  And why do you think I made sure that he knew that I had Ungud?  I wanted you to come, Woody.  So I brought you a gift."

The spheres gleamed, shining soft in the red fire light.  I reached down, slow, and plucked up the odd one out.  In its depths, the black blood moved and flashed, brightened.  There were colors there, every color, vibrant as a rainbow, and they twisted together into the form of a serpent, into a woman, into a man.  Ungud.  "A gift.  Or a payment?"

"What is he to you, Woody?  What did he do when you told him what you really were?  When you told him that his girlfriend wasn't really a girl at all?  He would have driven you out, thrown you away.  I was the one who understood, who let you be what you are.  Who loved you as you really are.  Who let you stay.  That was me."  He looked at me, blue eyes so sincere, and my hand gripped the sphere so tightly I wondered if it might crack.  "Take my gift.  Then lead me to him."

"So you can finally finish with him?"  And here it was again, the real sick heart of our little family.  It had always been about the struggle between these two, to find out who was really in charge, who was really the alpha dog.  And I had always been a marker, part of the score.  That's why he hadn't just let me take the stuff and followed me back to his ex-partner.  He had to know that I was betraying Huck.  That he had won, finally.  "Fuck you."

"What other choice do you think you have?" Nikolai always sounded so sad when he had you right where he wanted you.  When he thought you were his bitch.

"What choice?  Did I ever have a real choice, pinned between you two?"  I looked out the broad windows at the distant hills, at the bright flames that stretched up into the darkness.  Ungud's sphere was tight in my hand.  "Here's my choice.  Everything breaks, and everybody dies."

Nikolai was smart, but slow, too damn slow.  He didn't even have time to wipe that sad, smug look from his face before my hand was wrapping around the velvet, yanking it free from the box.  In the air the dead god's blood shone in their clear cages, beautiful.  Then they slammed into the floor and shattered.  I only heard the start of Nikolai's screaming as the air broke around us, filled with ten thousand dreams of gods, dead and howling.  In my head, I denied them, walled them out and fumbled through their passions for the rope that hung beside me.  It was in my hand, the black nylon harsh against my skin, when they broke through and the whole world began to burn.

Around me, the ash fell like snow.  Smoke rose, black columns that made the sun a sick pale circle rising slowly in the east.  Closing my eyes blotted out that grey light, but the visions that had been burned into the darkness behind my eyelids gave me no comfort.  I opened them again and watched the fires crawl across the distant hills until Huck came for me.

"Woody."  He swung himself out of his truck, hand hidden beneath his suit jacket, waiting for an ambush.  "What happened?"

"What do you think?"  I wiped my bandana across my face, tried to blink away the smoke and visions.  In the ruins of his face, colors ran and danced like a broken rainbow, making my eyes burn.  "It was a setup.  It all went to hell."

"You didn't get the blood?"

I opened my hand, let the wan sun shine on the glass orb it still held.  "Ungud.  Only Ungud.  I dumped the rest."

He grunted.  "You dumped them?"

"I broke them all.  Broke them and crawled out through the chaos.  It was the only way to get past the guards.  And Nikolai."  I watched him twitch when I spoke the name.  "I smashed them at his feet."

Huck stared at me, his one eye red and burning.  "Then you did good."

I'd spilt out hell in that house and run away, and the screams of Nikolai and his men had echoed behind me until the fire finally swept over them.  I'd bought a new life and Huck's vengeance with the blood of dead gods and the screams of damned men.  My dreams were going to be tainted with both, forever.

"Good.  Yeah."  In the globe, the blood trembled, stirred by the tremor in my hand.  "I always do my best when your plans fail, and when chaos rules."    Holding the glass sphere tight, I made myself go on.  "Huck, I need something."

"I thought we were done.  I thought that was what you wanted.  You did your job, and your payment's in your hand."

"Huck, I don't want your money.  I want your help.  We used to do that, sometimes, remember?  Just help each other?  When you still loved me?"

He looked away, stared out at smoke and ruins, a big man with a rumpled suit and a scar.  "What?"

"I need a tat.  With this blood."

"So you can finally become a real boy?"

I ignored the stupid, useless bitterness in his voice.  He could never believe that this had nothing to do with him. "So I can be what I am."

"A man," he said.  "That much blood, you could be more than that."

I turned the sphere and watched the colors shine in the dark blood.  So much power, so much potential.  "Yes.  I can be every man.  Young and old, big and small.  All different, and all the same."

"A shapeshifter.  A changeling."

The idea pleased me, so much possibility after a lifetime of being trapped.  "I like change."

Huck's eye came back to me, and the corner of his mouth moved, almost made a smile.  "No lie there, baby-girl."  The words made me twitch, his name for me when we had been lovers, what he called me when we were tangled together.  "You could even be a woman.  Again."

I looked up and met his eye, and for first time ever he looked away.  "It's not for you, Huck.  I'm not going to be your girl again.  Ever."

"No.  I guess not."  He pushed himself up straight, walked around the truck and stopped by the door.  "This smoke is killing my eye.  Let's get out of here."

I stood, but didn't step forward.  "The blood?"

Huck frowned at me, his scar darkening.  Then he shrugged.  "I know a guy.  But he'll want to get paid."

My turn to shrug, and I did it while walking toward the car.  "Shouldn't be a problem, for us."  His eye narrowed, and I smiled.  "We just agreed not to screw each other anymore.  Best basis for a partnership we ever had."

"Shit."  He shook his head, but then slid into the truck, popping the door for me.  "Spilling that blood's made you crazy."

"No.  It made me sane."  In my hand, I clutched the blood tight, and in my head I held just as tight to the image of a serpent spiraling across my skin in every color of the rainbow.  A serpent that could weave my flesh into a thousand shapes that made a greater truth.  I would bear the blood of a dead god, and become what I'd always wanted to be.  Myself.

END

"And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score” was originally published in Fantasy Magazine in August 2010 and reprinted in Podcastle later that year.

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

Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on January 19 with "Skeletons" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.