February 22, 2016

PodCastle 404, ARTEMIS RISING: Territory

28 minutes

* Author : Jae Steinbacher

* Narrators : Kim Rogers and Maura McHugh

* Host : Amal El-Mohtar

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 404, ARTEMIS RISING: Territory is a PodCastle original.

disturbing imagery

Rated R

Welcome back to Artemis Rising!

Territory

by Jae Steinbacher

If we do the magic wrong, Lucy, we won’t know until our bodies fail and there’s nothing we can do to go back.

We lie down together in the grass, the damp blades tickling our legs below the hems of our pleated skirts, our hands clasped, and close our eyes, and let our hearts slow until they beat no more. The rain comes first, plastering your dark curls against your forehead, washing away the spell words inked on the palms of our hands. Our skin turns pale and cold, harder and yet more yielding. We stop smelling like ourselves, like cherry lipgloss and hard white soap and the heather crushed on the bottoms of our shoes. We smell like nothing for a time, and then like the bottom of the bins, like the dog on the side of the road, putrescine and cadaverine.

Where are you and I in those moments before the flawed magic works? Hovering somewhere, inside ourselves or above our bodies? Placidly dreaming, like we did so many times last summer as we listened to cassettes of The Clash and Eurythmics in the woods by your house? Or screaming silently, saying, “We didn’t know it would be like this when we gathered the raven’s feather and the fox’s clote. We were afraid to cut the words in our palms, didn’t know that pricking our fingers wasn’t enough blood to preserve our bodies.

“This is not what we wanted, not what we meant to do. Take us back to our letters and our mums and dads. Take us back, even if they beat us and tear us apart and send us away.

“Take us back, even though life will not cure us of this love for one another.”

But the flawed magic is working, and as the rain slows, the questing worms place their soft mouths against us. The beetles tick across our hands and legs, beneath our clothes. We feel little parts of ourselves lost in them, and remember the spell words we uttered.

You, fiach dubh, raven. Me, sionnach, fox. Because you dreamed of wings. Because I wanted to run.

And because we’ve done the magic wrong, but mostly right, by the time the raven comes to your corpse and the fox to mine, we have a couple hundred little consciousnesses each, in the beetles and the snails and flies, the little creatures of the forest. We know the taste of ourselves and each other, the shape of our insides and the many colors skin changes to. The sinking of the earth beneath us, the architecture of skin and sinew and bone. If we could ever come back to ourselves, we’d be horrified and fascinated. But as the small creatures all is order, impulse, survival. Nothing goes to waste.

The spell still calls a fox and a raven, as it was designed to. Your raven is male, a detail we did not consider, but does it matter anymore? He alights on the breast of your white shirt and tilts his fierce dark eye up at the curve of your chin, as if expecting you to wake and meet his stare. He hops to the collar of your shirt and finds the flesh there already started, dips his perfect long beak and takes of you.

As he feasts, you find yourself in the workings of him, one trespass for another. You stir in his hollow bones, twitch the long black primaries.

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