* Author : Lina Rather

* Narrator : Setsu Uzume

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Behravesh

*

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Originally published in Shimmer Magazine in March 2017.

Rated R.

Extinctions

By Lina Rather

Your mother taught you three things, up in the great white wilderness, before she went and shot that man:

* How to kill an animal quickly and mercifully.

* How to kill the veiled things that prowl in the shadows at the edge of your vision. These are harder and faster beasts, but they all fall like deer in the end, and that’s the best advice your mother could have given you.

* How to sew and mend the veil of the world so the secret things cannot escape. Truthfully, this was your grandmother’s teaching, but your mother would have taken credit for the sun, had God not claimed it first.

After your mother went to prison, you stayed with your grandmother, and after she died in her sleep, you went to the city. Odd girls on their own in the city come to bad ends, but you come from a long line of people who made their livings fixing and killing, and that sort of work never goes out of style. These days you have work that suits you better, in a tattoo shop in the low-rent part of the city where you spend most of your days doing flash and sweethearts’ names.

Sometimes you take the kind of job your mother and grandmother did. You never wanted a legacy — the second sight, or the power in your blood — but they might as well go to good use, so long as you don’t make a habit of it. Your mother fought monsters under a hundred skies, and look where it got her. You’ve seen ghosts and you’ve seen demons, and you’ve killed a thousand monsters, but unlike your mother, you don’t make a life out of it, or so you tell yourself.

Hell, you’ve even got yourself a girlfriend these days who makes you dinner and tells you you’ve got pretty eyes, which is more than your bastard, runaway father ever gave your mother. You met her when you tattooed her from the cut of her pelvis to her collarbone, from scapula all the way around to breastbone. As it turns out, six 6-hour sessions is a lot of time to get to know each other. It’s your best work, and you say this because it’s true, not because it’s on your girlfriend. The tattoo covers up a mess of other work — another girl’s name (one you’ve never asked about); a vinyl record drawn by someone with a nervous tic; the band name of a no-hit wonder. She’s got your picture on her keychain, between a bottle opener and pepper spray.

Maybe you love her and maybe you don’t, but you think it doesn’t matter yet.

So when the red-haired woman comes, you’ve got something to lose. It isn’t like when you were alone and ready to tear open the throat of any monster that crossed your path. You got sick of sleeping on other people’s couches by twenty-two; now there’s a lease, and groceries. Monster hunting and exorcisms don’t pay the bills (and look at where that got your mother).

The red-haired woman is beautiful. You know the instant she comes through the door that she isn’t here for a tattoo or another set of earrings. She wears a petitioner’s grimace, determined and sick, and she knows which tattooist you are without having to ask.

“I’m here for help,” she says, and out of her breast pocket comes one of your mother’s cards. If she’s got one of those cards,