PseudoPod

• Author : Michael Chant
• Narrator : Ben Phillips
• Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Alex Hofelich
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis

PseudoPod 062 Replay: Faith in Sips and Bites is a PseudoPod original.

We are digging a classic from the vault and reloading it into your queues anew. We hope that it makes you consider diving into our decade of back-catalog.

Michael Chant writes fiction, poetry, and reviews of books, music, and film. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Twilight Showcase, Quantum Muse, Electric Wine, The Chiaroscuro, Nocturnal Ooze, and GC Magazine.

Your narrator is the Lich King, Ben Phillips.

If you are reading this, we must’ve done it. I’m going to tell as much as I can. You newspaper people will have to clean up the spelling. Going to have your work cut out for you. Make it pretty for the front page. Crazy thinking something I write is going to be on the front page. That’s the Lord working in His mysterious ways again. Got to type it out. When I write it out longhand it looks like Chinese. Just have to hunt and peck as best I can. Can’t write no more. Hands shake too much. Nerve damage. All of us got it now.

In Kristi Demeester’s novel BENEATH we have a pastor struggling with a crisis of faith, and an investigative journalist endeavoring to subdue shadows of the past to shield from the greater darkness to come. We have an innocent touched by that darkness that wants to catalyze her to transform the world from that which we know to one of Stygian dreaming.

The cover art is phenomenal. Considering our troubled preacher, it evoked feelings like those from Night of the Hunter, particularly the impressive shot of the underwater grave. Does the stone keep her grounded and prevents her from floating away? Is the snake and her faith keeping her connected or tempting her elsewhere? Which is the shackle and which is salvation? Beautifully executed, and perfect for the conflict within.

More about the book at Word Horde.

 

 

The post PseudoPod 062 Replay: Faith in Sips and Bites appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Jason Fischer
• Narrator : Barry Haworth
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“The Dog Pit” first appeared in Cthulhu: Deep Down Under and is soon to be reprinted in the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2015.

“The Dog Pit came about as a story for the Australian-themed Cthulhu anthology Cthulhu: Deep Down Under, and was inspired by some history tours I took around Sydney. I’ve long had a fascination with colonial-era Australia, and the colourful old gangs of the Sydney Rocks area were just begging to be used in a horror setting. Sydney is an odd place, old in terms of European settlement, and incredibly ancient for the Indigenous peoples who lived in the region prior to first contact. The idea of these layers of humanity sitting above an eldritch horror seemed to gel, and of course we writers are lucky that a few Aussie Cthulhu mythos beasties can be used and reused. So enter the dingo creature Kurpangga, trapped beneath the earth for a million years…”

by Jason Fischer

 

The Dutchman finally found the boy out on the gold diggings.

Being close to seven feet tall and as broad as an axe-handle at the shoulders, Cornelius Tesselaar was an instant curiosity in that place of mud and slap-shacks. His frock-coat and good boots spoke of a man more used to cobbled streets than a fossicker’s warren. He wore a top-hat, the good silk kind, and peered around him through a pair of expensive bifocals that by themselves would earn him a knifing if he stayed too long.

A quiet word and a handful of coins led Cornelius to the nearest opium den. He swept open the hessian sack that served as a doorway, and stood blinking at the thick cloud of smoke that drifted out.

“Toby Jangles,” the Dutchman boomed, striding inside. A dozen faces stared blankly at the man, even as he stepped over their sprawled bodies. One or two furtive shapes slinked away from the doorway, creeping into the furthest shadows of the clapboard shack.

The post PseudoPod 540: The Dog Pit appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Richard Harland
• Narrator : Graeme Dunlop
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“The Fear” was first printed in Macabra: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears in 2010 and reprinted in the US in Year’s Best Horror 2010.

 

“Yes – imagine that film! Even though it may not end up the way you expect, visualize just how it might look and sound on the screen!”

The Fear by Richard Harland

 

“It’s impossible to explain without visuals. You’d have to see the movie to know why it was so frightening. Think yourself lucky you never will.”

The post PseudoPod 539: The Fear appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : John Purfield, Amelia Gorman, Benjamin Blattberg and A. W. Baader
• Narrators : Brian Lieberman, Laura Hobbs, John Chu and Christopher Reynaga
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 538: Flash On The Borderlands XXXVII: Higher Beings Command is a PseudoPod original.

“Higher Beings Command…Their Powers To The Ground….” Coil

“Behold, The Drowning” was first made available to the public via the “No Sleep” section of reddit.com.

“I would like the audience to consider, while listening to this story, the implications of sensory deprivation on fear. Loss of sight has been explored many times over; it is pivotal to our primordial fear of the dark. Loss of sound, however, receives far less attention and is, potentially, more horrifying for reasons stated by the story’s protagonist.”

“Bring The Moon To Me” was first printed in 2015 in the anthology SHE WALKS IN SHADOWS (later renamed “CTHULHU’S DAUGHTERS”), edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles

“The Hole At The Top of the World” is a PseudoPod Original.

“The story is about equal halves me imagining a character given his own space when, in many other stories, he’d be relegated to a minor role; and me thinking about depression.”

“This Creature, This Creature, This Wonderful Creature” first appeared in the short story collection SING ALONG WITH THE SAD SONG in 2016.

Behold, The Drowning by John Purfield

I once wished I could give both my eyes for a pair of ears that worked. My world is experienced through the narrow window of my vision. I hear no birds sing, nor waves crash on rocks. The intricacies of music are lost on me, but for the vibrations of a particularly obnoxious bass line. In the animal kingdom, there are many blind animals, but precious few deaf creatures. The deaf die fast and young, for hearing is the only sense that gives you full scope of your environment. You can hear a predator creep behind you, but you cannot see it unless it is in front of you.

Bring The Moon To Me by Amelia Gorman

They had names like Herringbone and Honeycomb, or Tyrolean Fern. My mother turned yarn into thick forests and spiraling galaxies with luscious titles. I watched her fingers busy themselves for hours to produce squares of cloth. Sometimes, her hands faded away and the string had a life of its own. Like a snake or an eel, it raised its head then dipped it back down. It looped around itself, only to slip away and tie up its own tail. Eventually, a familiar pattern emerged.

The Hole at the Top of the World By Benjamin Blattberg

Imagine a man on top of the world, with a sharp knife.

His name is Tenzin Tsheri and he hesitates before saving the world, again.

He has been here before: sitting on a comfortable rock on Ngadi Lonzo’s gray summit, waiting for the mountain climbers below to begin the final ascent. He has led them up the mountain, though it is late in the climbing season. (It is always late in the season when climbers come to summit Ngadi Lonzo. This late, there are few tourists climbing any of the Himalayas.) He looks at his knife, then at the men and women attached to his guide rope, like fuzzy ripe melons on a red nylon vine.

Tenzin chews a chocolate mint Clif protein bar and looks out into the future. On top of Ngadi Lonzo, he can see that future, a ghost of the present just visible under the bright crispness of what’s coming.

When the climbers are crossing the final ridge, he will cut the nylon rope that anchors them to this world. In one graceful movement, the climbers will slip down the mountain face, the jagged ice wall sandpapering them beyond recognition. Some will scream. An untied ice ax and a loose pair of goggles will pinwheel across the bright empty sky. That will be the climbers’ only trace or echo. Soon, Tenzin will throw even these remainders down into the crevasse after them.

That is how Tenzin will save the world.

Tenzin has done this before with other climbing groups. He feels no tremor of remorse over these impending deaths. (They have already died in the future that he sees.) His family has always kept Ngadi Lonzo’s secret from those who would wake up the void inside the mountain.

They are easy to recognize, these cultists who worship Khyah, the Empty Throne. (These climbers give the void a name, Khyah, and they think they understand it.) His father taught Tenzin to recognize them. Though, in their own way, these cultists are much like other mountain climbers, like those wealthy Americans Tenzin met that one summer when he helped his cousins lead tours up Everest.

That Everest summer, Tenzin noticed that all mountain climbers share a fierce joy in their eyes, a glimmer that persists beyond all exhaustion. But the cultists have a certain hollowness to their eyes, to their smiles, though Tenzin also knows it is a horror cliche to say so. (In the coldest winter months, Tenzin stays indoors and reads for days; Clive Barker is his favorite.) These days, Tenzin doesn’t even need to see their faces to identify Khyah cultists: they carry their bodies like cargo, like men and women in transit or already dead.

The climbers are on the final ridge now. From where he sits, Tenzin can see the last man in the line touch his free hand to the hidden sacrificial knife that he has carried all this way. It is hidden, but Tenzin knows it is there. He sees it now, in the future, in the man’s hand, in Tenzin’s own belly, his blood steaming and scentless in the thin mountain air like a cup of instant ramen without the flavor packet added.

Tenzin wants to laugh at the image or cry.

He touches his knife to the rope. Tenzin feels the vibrations of their hands through his knife. This is how he saves the world, as he has done before. A single long heartbeat later, his shadow on the summit moves to catch up. The shadow knife touches the shadow rope, vibrating with the hands of shadow people.

Now, he tells himself. Do it now.

In the future, they are already dead, tumbling into the crevasse, broken on the crevasse floor. Tenzin takes another bite of his protein bar. Or the same bite. He is never full anymore.

Tenzin considers the sudden shock of the fall’s end. Down there in the cold and quiet of the crevasse, the preserved bodies tell a sedimented history of climbers, from box cameras to reindeer boots to down jackets to clip-on stainless steel crampons. (Cultists change their appearance with the times. Or: no matter how much they want the world to end, they don’t want to be cold on the way there.)

In the dark and cold of the crevasse, things remain what they once were. Down there, old books with hideous designs wait to be gently thawed and read. Down in the ice, dead men’s dreams sleep as if in museum displays, untouched. Even the void slows and becomes a crystal you could hold in your hand, refracting broken light, bending it into the far corners of the world.

This is another future Tenzin can see now, and because he can see it now, he always could see it: in this future, he jumps into the crevasse, into the windless quiet, and the blue darkness swallows him in increments as he falls, a comet’s tail of snow trailing him down.

(None of us really know Tenzin, but many of us know that particular dream: to be swallowed into the earth, a hole opening just for me, just for you. The hole closes after us, erasing any trace of where we were, not even the hole of our absence. After us, the world goes on.

(That’s the difference between us and the cultists: When we disappear into the hole, we dream the world goes on. When you start wishing to take the world into the hole with you, then Khyah comes to you in your dreams. In your dreams, Khyah shows you the empty summit of Ngadi Lonzo. When you wake, you find a knife under your pillow. An old knife. Cold.

(Bring it to Ngadi Lonzo. And as you cross the final ridge, ask yourself the only question that matters anymore: will Tenzin cut the rope and send this knife down into the crevasse again or is this the day that he lets the future happen?)

Tenzin could jump into the crevasse, but he won’t because it takes too much feeling to jump, and Tenzin has a numbness spiked through him. He can’t remember the last time he really felt something.

In his pocket, Tenzin finds a Clif protein bar: chocolate mint, his favorite once. He checks his pocket for the wrapper of the bar he just finished, but can’t find it. Tenzin Tsheri feels himself settle back into the moment, like an icicle melting into a basin. He looks down at his climbers, pulling themselves along the rope, almost to the final ridge now. His knife settles on the rope, like the needle of a record player finding its groove after skipping.

A wave of deja vu shivers through Tenzin. He savors this one decisive moment, the density of his feelings bringing him back to it. Or perhaps it is all his years on Ngadi Lonzo, so close to Khyah, that makes him feel as if he’s lived this moment before. Or perhaps, most depressingly, this moment is like so many he’s lived before and will continue to live through: climbers, crevasse, climbers, crevasse.

Khyah is a god-thing of emptiness and, in a way, Tenzin is its high priest.

In one future, Tenzin lets the climbers wake Khyah and show the world the reality of that yawning blue emptiness.

In another, he cuts the rope and lets the world go on and keeps that emptiness inside him.

Tenzin sees both futures, considering them like paths across a sheet of ice. The high glare off that imagined ice sheet blinds him, turning the world into a great bright emptiness. From his seat on top of the world, Tenzin looks down and sees nothing below him. He hesitates with his knife on the rope.

(A long heartbeat later, his shadow moves, either following him or moving away.)

 

This Creature, This Creature, This Wonderful Creature by A. W. Baader

“It came first as a cloud, this creature, settling upon my mind: its happy moist softness seeping into the folds of soft pinkness; soft pinkness accepting it happily, joyously, greedily. It came as gentle Spring rain or the softest touch upon the tenderest of wounds, it came and I wept. Weeping elation flecked tears down scabrous smile cracked cheeks I allowed this creature (this creature, oh! this wonderful creature) to make home (a nest a burrow a home) deep inside my mind.”

The post PseudoPod 538: Flash On The Borderlands XXXVII: Higher Beings Command appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Brian Trent
• Narrator : Setsu Uzume
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 537: A World of Bones is a PseudoPod original.

A World of Bones By Brian Trent

She awoke in the blackness thinking she was still alive, fumbling for the lipstick she’d never found. Angela Chen jerked to her feet, confused at discovering herself in this place of shadows. She had been dreaming—if dreaming was the word now—of the wet corpses along Quinyun Road. Pawing at their pockets, feeling guilty as she did. Seeking only a little tube of lipstick on that rainy night as Shanghai fell.

And then the impact to the back of her head. The blood and teeth spilling in a syrupy glob from her mouth…

A hand touched her shoulder.

“Liusu?” Angela cried, spinning around to face the dark.

“No,” came the hushed reply.

“Shen,” she whimpered, recoiling. “How did you get in here? The others—”

“I go where I please. What are you doing in here?”

Angela’s confusion melted, replaced now by a dread she had come to know so well. “Sleeping,” she said. “Dreaming.”

His whispered laughter shivered like wind among the reeds; Angela realized that someday, she’d forget what voices had ever sounded like, since no one here—not her, not her friend Liusu, and not the lurking Shen—was capable of speaking above a whisper. Their voices had died with their bodies. They merely pushed air through dead throats now.

“We do not sleep, little sparrow,” Shen said, when he had recovered.

“They’re sleeping in the courtyard outside!” she insisted, pointing to the temple doorway.

Shen seized her arm and dragged her through the doorway to the balcony rails. The courtyard to Hudu Chongyuan Temple was a sprawling vista filled by smaller temple annexes. In life, these divine houses were visited by tourists; Angela herself had come here with her grandfather more than once, holding his leathery hand as they visited each annex. She had liked the annexes, liked the bronze statues within, the smell of burning joss paper, and the colorful tapestries.

“Look,” Shen snarled.

Angela stared into the courtyard. The ghosts were still there— orderly rows of kneeling, praying, naked bodies.

“Minister Fan told them to unload their sins before rebirth.” Shen chuckled. “No one wants to be first to finish!”

Angela spotted the minister himself making a slow pace of the courtyard. He was accompanied by his retinue of administrators, the spirits who held Hudu Chongyuan Temple. Fan walked, a brown, shapeless robe cladding his scarecrow frame, and seemed to be a general inspecting his troops. He rounded the praying crowd and suddenly the sky’s greenish light revealed his face in every hideous detail. Angela cried out, shrinking back into the temple and touching her own face.

“You are no prettier,” Shen reminded her.

Angela let her fingers crawl over her features. Minister Fan was a shambling nightmare. His face was withered, shriveled, worn like a mask whittled from driftwood. His hands were like chewed leather. When he walked he sounded like sandpaper rustling. He was a man, in as much as sloughed-off scales were still a snake; hollow, tattered, and discarded. His retinue was the same. Mummy people. Cracked faces, wrinkled lips, and throats like abandoned flutes that could no longer summon real music.

Angela continued probing her face. She felt no trace of wrinkles or withering, but that was small comfort. Her face felt soft and wet… as the skin of a rotting vegetable was soft and wet and slippery.

“I lied,” Shen teased, seeing her horror. “You are somewhat prettier, but one day you will age and wither, just like the good minister.”

“I will not be here forever!” she snapped. “You may be, you miserable haunt! But soon I am passing through the Gate and will be reborn with the others and—”

She had leaned against a black rafter beam which had fallen during the shelling of Shanghai. To her surprise, she passed through it and collapsed to the floor.

Shen laughed uproariously and slapped his thighs. “Oh! Little sparrow!”

“Stop calling me that!” Angela drew herself to her knees. She hated when people laughed at her.

Still, Angela pawed at the rafter beam. Her hand sailed through it; there was a sensation, not unpleasant, like touching a warm undercurrent running through an icy stream.

“It hasn’t been there long enough,” said Shen, still laughing.

Something Liusu had told her returned: Things from life sink through to this afterworld, like ink through cloth, the longer they stay put. That’s what gives it substance. Angela craned her neck to regard the temple’s shadow-nestled rafters. “This rafter came from up there,” she said, speaking more to herself than to her tormentor. “A bomb must have shaken it loose.”

Shen stopped laughing. “A bomb?”

“There is a war going on.”

“China is at war?” Shen sounded surprised, but it was difficult to tell when he was being genuine. “With who?”

Angela rose to her feet once more. “Japan,” she said, somewhat surprised by his query. But then, how would he receive news in the afterlife, except to talk to the newly arrived dead?

His expression of astonishment was hideous; it stretched across his wet, leaf-brown face, his dark eyes like a brace of wells. “No, I cannot believe it! That little island of monkeys?”

“They defeated Russia not long ago. They are on the ascendant.” She frowned. “When did you live?”

“I served Emperor Zhuanxu.”

She made a dismissive sound. “Do you ever tell the truth? Emperor Zhuanxu? Grandson of the Yellow Emperor at the dawn of time?”

“It was the Year of the Fire Horse,” he said simply.

“It is 1937, now.”

He made no reaction to this. He merely watched her, hands interlaced below his chin like a praying mantis.

“How do pass the centuries here, oh ancient?” she asked sarcastically.

“Time passes on its own.”

“And yet you are not a withered creature like our fair minister or the others who…” she broke off.

Poor Liusu, she thought, suddenly abashed. What sacrifice! To stay in this hellish limbo with the minister, aging and aging but never dying, all to prepare ghosts for the next life! Aging, withering, and forgetting life’s simple pleasures—the ability to sleep, the smell of pork sizzling in a skillet, the taste of noodles steaming on red plates…

“Never to sleep again,” Angela muttered. “Never to eat…”

Shen grinned suddenly in lechery. “In life I would have eaten you the right way. Like a hummingbird teasing a flower. We can have sex, you know. The sensation isn’t terrible.”

“Why do you stay here, Shen? So terrified of living again, is that it?”

Her tormentor’s smile faltered somewhat, but he said nothing.

Angela crept down the temple stairs, past the giant Buddha statue which in life was jade but here was a looming, dark thing like an idol carved from blackest ebony. A ghost was entering the lower temple just then, and Angela nearly wept in relief.

“Liusu!”

The woman smiled like a gash in sun-baked mud. She was tall and narrow, sunk in heavy rumpled robes. Her bare arms, and the small of her chest, were slashed by calligraphy.

“Hello!” Liusu whispered the words through her mummified lips. “I was seeking you!”

Angela felt her ghost-body twitching, as if remember old heartbeats. “Is it time, yet?”

“Soon.”

She tried not to stare at the woman’s scarring. Like cuts in brittle bamboo, old proverbs covered her spiritflesh. Crudely engraved, perhaps, done by pressing herself into a sharp edge that had bled over from the living world.

They walked together along the black corridor. Angela glanced back over her shoulder, afraid that Shen might be there, goblin-like, in the rafters, or running up madly behind them. But there was no sign of him.

“Did you manage to sleep?” Liusu asked.

“No.”

“Soon you will be reborn. As a baby, you will sleep a great deal!”

Angela nervously kneaded her hands. “I will miss you, Liusu.”

The woman made no expression for a while. They passed a corridor of latticed windows through which the green sky scintillated. At last, Liusu halted. “It would be good to have a new friend. We’ve been here… I’ve been here… a long time.”

“You said since 1720?”

The withered thing that had been a woman nodded solemnly. “We were Han Chinese, living under the Manchu. My husband was a low-level administrator in the Qing courts.”

“Where is your husband now?”

“He went on to be reborn.”

“And you did not?”

Liusu made no reaction. Angela found herself staring at the woman’s scarring. She imagined the woman disrobed, proverbs and engraved memories winding beneath her flaking breasts, belly, thighs, the parched length of her legs. She read the calligraphy along one of Liusu’s arms: Yi jin ye xing. “’Dressed in the finest brocades to parade in the dark of night.’”

Angela remembered one of her grandfather’s stories. When he was young, he lived in a small village on the outskirts of a bamboo forest. A panda lived there, too, but it was a mad thing, a demented monster. Grandfather described the panda sitting atop the mutilated corpse of its own kind, flesh hanging from its claws and snout. And when there was nothing else to kill, he said, the beast would harm itself, furiously rubbing against trees or stones until its black-and-white fur was clotted with gore and stringy bits of flesh. The panda was not a panda any longer. It was a monster. A monster in a world of bones.

Instinctively, Angela glanced over her shoulder for signs of Shen.

The woman tilted her head, like a doll hanging from a tether in a shop window. “Tell me another story about university, Angela!”

Minister Fan’s people liked to hear stories from the newly dead, Angela had noticed. The tall, self-mutilated ancients were like country relatives interested in tales of city life from their urban counterparts.

So she indulged her friend with tales of the Japanese invasion of China, and how Angela and her fellow students had barricaded themselves on the university campus.

“But you died outside the barricade,” Liusu said. “Why did you leave?”

“I wanted some lipstick.”

The woman chuckled. “He must be a handsome boy!”

Angela said nothing. There was no boy, she thought. After weeks of living in the overly familiar, cramped dormitory, showering in collected rain water, eating stale food from cupboards, she had looked at herself in the mirror and seen a monster. A pale, frightened, ugly thing. A splash of lipstick, she thought, would make her feel alive again.

Angela cursed the irony.

Liusu took her by the arm and pulled her outside into the courtyard. “When you are reborn, you will meet many handsome men again, and get all the lipstick you like!”

“Unless I am reborn as a man,” Angela joked.

Liusu stared blankly for a moment. “I suppose,” she said.

“Either way, will I remember nothing of this place?”

“Would you want to?”

“No,” Angela said at once, and then added, “Meaning no offense, Liusu.” Outside, the crowd was still kneeling, still praying. Angela’s eyes flicked to the sky, where the churning tempest rotated like a luminous maelstrom, clouds bubbling around a milky jade center.

“When will we go to the Gate? How soon until we are reborn?”

Liusu’s face settled into its default solemnity like an old theater mask. “Quite soon, Angela.”

Minister Fan formally ended the prayers with a wave of his brittle staff, and the crowd dissolved into small, roving bands wandering like water across the courtyard. Families, friends, coworkers found each other again. There were even Japanese souls here, their whispers a babble of flat, foreign syllables, but they remained strictly together, isolated, gaping at the terrible sky.

Angela spotted some faces she recognized. The henpecked grocer from Nanjing Road, his wife nowhere in sight. The train attendant with the gray hair, now a bald, flabby thing, wet as something freshly born, dark and glistening, wandering among the spectral populace as if lost without his train.

Her own family was inland in Nanking; Angela wondered if the Japanese had reached the capital city yet. If so, were other ministers there, to herd these ghosts towards local Gates? Did each city have these decrepit administrators?

Angela climbed a set of stairs and entered another temple annex. She went straight to the balcony and looked out onto the park and Changshu Road. Several buildings were missing their rooftops, sheared away by artillery, and the debris was starting to appear like hunched, misshapen borderstones on the road.

Deeper in the park, where the dark expanse sunk into roiling green mist, lay the Gate.

“Hello little sparrow. Miss me?”

“Leave me alone, Shen!”

“Never.”

She whirled to face him. “I will be leaving soon, and you cannot stop me! Stay among Minister Fan’s little community if you wish…”

“Community?” Shen sneered. He jabbed a finger towards the eddying crowd, in its own way mirroring the churning of the green sky. “I’ve seen great communities. I’ve seen the markets of Xianyang and the poets of the Hundred Schools…” He trailed off, solemn memories washing across his moist face. “This place is a refugee camp! A woven basket left in a river, and you, little fish, swim right in!”

“I thought I was your little sparrow,” she snapped. When he spoke for long periods of time she could hear his antiquated accent. “And how do you keep appearing and disappearing?”

“There are bodies nearby,” he said cryptically.

“Bodies?”

“I enter them.”

Angela stared at him. “We can… re-enter the world of life?” Was this another of his lies?

“Yes,” he said simply.

“Does Minister Fan know?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s young, and I am ancient, and I have had time to develop my senses here. I can smell the dead. I can locate their meat and slide into it.”

Angela mounted an acerbic retort to this. But a horrible memory was returning, and with it a dreadful realization hatching slowly, like something pushing from a cocoon in her mind…

“The men who killed me,” she muttered. “You ate them!” She let out a hissing sob like a teapot. “You ate them!”

She wondered if she would always feel the bullet striking the back of her head. The teeth in her mouth. The blood spilling hotly down the front of her blouse. Blood the very shade of lipstick she’d been seeking.

The corpses along Quinyun Road had been wet and ashen in the rain. One of them was a fat woman with black stringy hair, mouth open in a sneer of yellow, frightfully crooked teeth. A checkered rag, sodden and muddied, was fisted in one bloated hand.

Forgive my intrusions, Angela prayed as she patted their purses and pockets. Forgive my hands upon you…

Something like a hammer smacked into the back of her head. She was suddenly on her knees, thinking: I’ve been killed.

She heard footsteps splashing behind her. Someone kicked her and she fell. One gaunt man went straight past her to the corpses, a pistol still smoking in his hands. He searched the pockets of the dead.

Angela felt hands on her thighs, hiking up her skirt in the cold rain.

The gaunt man glanced to his partner. “You’ll fuck a corpse?” he asked in perfect Hong Kong dialect, and Angela realized these were local men, not invading soldiers.

“She’s still warm,” quipped the other, unseen behind her.

“Well hurry up!”

Angela blinked through blood and rain. The man gave quick staccato grunts behind her. Angela didn’t move. Her vision was graying out at the edges. Shrinking down like peering through the wrong end of a spyglass.

Her diminishing gaze fell upon the bloated dead woman and her awful teeth.

Then…

Then the dead woman winked at her.

Angela felt a gasp of surprise welling in her throat. The gaunt man with the pistol reached the bloated corpse. He dug into her pockets. A locket caught his attention, and he stooped to investigate it—

—and the dead woman seized his head between her bloated hands and brought his screaming face to her mouth.

“You ate them,” Angela repeated. “You possessed that woman’s corpse and… ate those men!”

“I did more than that, little sparrow.” Shen looked sidelong at her. “Is that pity I hear for your murderers?”

“There is no justification for cannibalism!” she insisted.

“It was not their flesh I was after. It was their souls.”

A memory clicked into place. When she had died, Shen was the first ghost she’d encountered. But the men who killed her, the ones who died beneath the gnawing mouth of that bloated ghoul… they had been nowhere in sight. She hadn’t thought of it until now. They had died, so they should have emerged into the afterlife with her.

That hadn’t happened.

Because Shen had eaten their souls.

“You’re a monster!”

Shen leaned forward.  “Those men were fucking your corpse.”

“And you, oh noble beast, killed them to avenge me?”

“I ate them,” he whispered, “Because that is how I retain myself. That is why I shall never decay.” He waved a hand towards Minister Fan. “Look at them! They are drying out. Someday, they will simply fall apart, and the next inhabitants of Hudu Chongyuan Temple will use their tattered spiritflesh.” He pointed to the brown, lumpish robes the Minister and his retinue wore.

Angela shook her head violently. “No! I don’t believe it!”

“Even in hell, survival is possible.”

“This is not hell,” she countered. “This place is merely a byproduct of the universe, and we humans are complex enough to be conscious of it. If tomatoes possessed intelligence, perhaps their discarded skin would retain some of it when tossed into the trash.” She studied her tormentor’s perplexed face. “Never had a tomato, did you? Too poor to afford them? Or… oh! Right! In the time of Emperor Zhuanxu, tomatoes had not reached China from the New World!”

Shen said nothing.

“They’re delicious,” Angela pressed. “Perhaps the next time you possess the dead, you could try finding one in the market…”

He exhaled sharply. “I am your only ally here, you little bitch.”

“Fish, sparrow, bitch? Nothing from the zodiac, Shen?” There was a sudden movement from the courtyard below. The crowd was surging into the park! It was time!

“They are leaving for the Gate!” she cried.

She turned from Shen, but he yanked her back, and his face stretched into a hideous deformation it never could have managed in life. Unconstrained by bones, it became long and lupine, with black slit-like eyes and an unhinging jaw.

“You will stay here with me!” he roared.

Angela’s wrist slipped through his grip and she ran from the balcony, ran for all she was worth down the stairs and into the shambling crowd.

“Liusu!” she cried, seeing her friend dwindle behind her. “Goodbye, my friend!”

Her friend stood beside Minister Fan. The minister stroked his chin as if remembering that a beard might have grown there in life.

The crowd shambled out from Hudu Chongyuan Temple, descending towards the Gate and the fog that gathered there.

Back at university, Angela had seen war refugees moving through the streets in a silent, dazed tide like sleepwalkers. This new immigration felt like that. The ghost crowd walked towards the thick, soupy fog in the park. The Gate rose out of it like a watchtower.

Rebirth! Angela wondered what it would be like. Her spiritflesh would occupy a newborn body, Liusu had told her. Even as that new body grew and lived and experienced, Angela would still be inside. Angela Chen, born in the calendar year of 1919 and who died a college student…

The green sky churned. The crowd had crossed half the distance to the Gate, and the mist was a vaporous, thickening residue, like smoke curling up from freshly-burned joss paper. Ghosts at the head of the column had reached the Gate and had begun to pass beneath it, heading down to the lowest portion of the park, to the all-encompassing fog beyond.

My soul will slip inside a new body like a hand into an oven mitt and life will begin again, she thought. And I will remember nothing of this place except perhaps in haunted dreams.

A hand fell on her shoulder.

“You need to stop,” Shen insisted.

“Leave me be!” Angela cried. “I choose to be reborn!”

And then she was through! She passed beneath the Gate before Shen’s greedy hand could stop her, and abruptly she was in the deepest part of the park. The ghosts around her were like ships on a foggy sea, each going their own way.

What happens now? she wondered. Are we drawn up into the green maelstrom? Do we melt away and then emerge wet and wailing from a new womb…

The mist seemed to grow darker. Something was moving towards them, around them. A shape thundered past, half-glimpsed; Angela had the impression of a glistening, headless trunk moving on three massive legs.

Slowly at first, like the hiss of an approaching tide, the crowd began to scream.

A great claw reached down and scooped up a man in front of her. The ghost shrieked as it was carried into a gaping mouth, and then there was a sickening crunch as his soul collapsed like shells beneath a mallet. Angela whirled about to see another monster—freakishly huge with a mouth that could swallow a bus. Another claw swept over her head, scooped through the mist. Ghosts screamed and were crunched away into oblivion. Jaws slammed shut like thunderclaps.

Angela fell to her knees.

The crowd was hemmed in on all sides. Ghosts were snatched up two, three at a time. Brought hissing to dark mouths.

A blackness materialized beside her. It was Shen.

She grabbed his leg. “What’s happening? What are they?!”

“Other things that lived once, before men were ever conceived.”

The fog whipped in many directions. A woman ran past, followed by a monster in greedy pursuit. Angela could sense the excitement of the feeding. The fog was pungent with terror and hunger.

“Help me, Shen! Take me away from this!”

Shen seized her face. “Will you obey me for all time?” he demanded.

“Yes!” she cried. “I swear on my ancestors, I will be yours to command!”

He didn’t waste another moment. Shen dragged her, weaving among the chaos. A monster lumbered past, so close that Angela could see strange glyphs and patterns carved on its mighty flanks. Three ghosts raced behind it; the beast sensed their movement and spun around, hooked a dark claw sidelong and knocked them to the ground. Angela watched, numb with horror, as the monster bowed its head… to feast on them where they had fallen.

“There, there, little sparrow,” Shen whispered, clutching her to his chest. “Just close your eyes.”

“Shen! Please…”

And then the world of monsters and darkness and mist dissolved, and they were in a place of rain.

Stepping into the dead body was like entering a rancid, black cave slick with rot. It seemed to suck at her like mud at a boot.

Angela sat up stiffly, her limbs strangely leaden. She was wearing a male body clad in a brown uniform. The Imperial Japanese flag was sewn onto one arm. A leather belt at her waist held a knife and service pistol.

The park, green and wet and dark, lay all around her. The Gate towered overhead, only it was red and wooden here.

Shen had become a tanned, Japanese soldier. He sat up. His exposed jawbone displayed teeth like bullets in a cartridge.

“Those things…” she began. “Those monstrous ghosts…”

“They cannot reach us here,” he assured her.

Other soldiers lay dead around them. A scrawny dog, startled by their sudden movement, whined and scurried away.

“Then there is no rebirth,” Angela muttered. “Minister Fan was sending us off to be killed! Why?”

Shen took her by the hand and began to stroll along the park, a mockery of two lovers in the rain-dappled night. There were many bodies; the park had been the scene of a terrible battle.

In life and in death, Angela thought.

Something was squirming in her throat; she spat onto the grass.

Maggots. They struggled and squirmed among the blades. Angela felt more of them crawling in her throat, and she retched violently, the worms spilling out of her mouth.

“You see now why we cannot remain here,” Shen said absently, nodding his Japanese face. He was pulling items from his uniform and inspecting them, one-by-one. A photograph of a woman with two little boys. His combat knife. He was especially fascinated by the service pistol, and he openly marveled at its construction. “We will leave these bodies, but must get out of the park first. The monsters are still feeding all around us.”

“Why were we betrayed?”

“Fan and his circle keep to the temple. The monsters get a steady supply of souls.”

“He communicates with them?” Angela cried.

Shen aimed the pistol ahead of them. “There was a dog who used to terrorize me in life,” he said. “To save myself, I started bringing food with me to toss at it. That was our arrangement. It came up, snarling and barking, and I tossed it meat. We never spoke. But we had an understanding.” He squeezed the trigger, discharging a single shot into the night. “If I ever stopped feeding it, it would have killed me.” “But my friend Liusu…”

“She was not your friend.”

Angela sobbed; the sound was a male’s voice, resonating in her borrowed throat. They had reached the periphery of the park now, and she noticed living men huddled beneath a storefront canopy. The men were noticing them too.

But they don’t realize we’re dead, she thought. They don’t understand that nearby, on the other side of shadows, are monsters in a world of bones.

“I warned you, little sparrow. I told you not to trust any of them.”

She fell against his chest. Shen embraced her again, almost tenderly, and she could nearly believe that she was just a little girl again in her grandfather’s arms. That she might awaken from this nightmare.

But then Shen’s dead arms were pressing her tightly. She felt her borrowed body detach from her, and the rain fell away, and the shadow world engulfed them both once more.

Back to blackness and a green sky.

Angela stared into the rotating vortex, feeling her hope for a life reborn fizzle away like fat crackling in a skillet.

Then she noticed where she was standing.

“Shen!” she cried.

He clamped his hand over her mouth. “Do not speak,” he warned her.

The monsters lay all around them. But they appeared to be sleeping, sated now that the feeding was over. One lay sprawled amid the black ruins, its four arms dangling by its headless, trunk-like body. Angela gasped at its size and strangeness; a grotesquely engorged abomination, surrounded by tatters of spiritflesh that lay strewn around its obscene bulk like streamers after New Year’s Festival.

The creature didn’t move. Angela saw no eyes. What passed for its face was nothing more than a terrible mouth. Scrawls and shapes were engraved into its bulk, either some kind of patterning that the creature had sported in life, or alien language carved post-mortem into its bulk, to remind it of long-lost eons.

“It is digesting,” Shen whispered into her ear. “Come, we must work quickly!”

Before she could ask, the realization flooded her mind.

“This is why you needed me!” she cried.

“Hurry!”

The beast stirred sleepily. Shen strode anxiously towards the sprawled-out creature. His mouth opened… and kept opening, stretching into a terrible cavern.

He started at its clawed foot and slowly, inexorably, devoured up the leg. The creature seemed barely aware of it, sunk in a post-feeding stupor. But slowly it stirred. It lazily batted at him with one arm.

Shen clamped down on the leg, tore a chunk of the limb away, and glowered at Angela as he chewed. “You must help me! If the others awaken and see their brethren half-eaten, they’ll understand. I need your help!”

Angela stared blankly at him. She figured that she had reached the limits of horror, but this new task—this thing that Shen wanted—seemed to plunge her into new levels of fear that threatened to disentangle her mind.

“Help me!” Shen demanded. “Help me or I’ll eat off your own limbs and leave you here, crawling around like a limbless maggot, for ten thousand years, you little bitch!”

The monster batted at him again. Shen bit down on its belly and the creature began to shriek—a tea-pot whistle.

Sobbing, shaking uncontrollably, Angela settled down beside one leg.

Shen had become a deformed mass. He didn’t look human at all. His face was stretched out, his throat bulged around the alien joints and bulk. But even in this state, he glared at Angela. The monster knocked him aside and flopped over on its stomach, began to crawl.

He scampered after the creature and clamped his mouth down on its trunk. Angela watched from a distance. Watched as the creature’s attempts grew feeble, and it finally collapsed.

She watched Shen eat the creature until only a limbless, mewling thing was left.

She shivered. She wanted to cry. But all she could do was shiver and be afraid.

He didn’t look human afterwards.

The volume of spiritflesh within him had distended him into something like a hideous toad, but even as she watched, he was deflating back to normal dimensions. Slowly, inexorably digesting what he had eaten.

“You little bitch,” Shen whispered thickly. They had shambled away from the fog and into the remains of a building. “If it had gotten away…”

“It didn’t,” Angela said dully.

“You will help me next time, or I’ll make good on my promise.” He seemed to be perspiring, looking like a fat, wet thing. His jaw diminished like elastic to its former shape. “Now you know what your three choices are! Become chum for old monsters, live as a steadily-decaying scavenger… or help me eat those dangerous things.”

“Until you tire of me!”

He pointed a dripping hand. “At my feet. You are not my sparrow any longer. You wanted a zodiac designation, eh? Be my dog!”

She shrank beside his swollen legs.

“I have had other servants,” Shen whispered, voice slurring with post-feeding exhaustion. He placed his hands on his distended belly, and when he spoke it was in a slurring, drunken stupor. “You will last only as long as you obey me! Now swear your fealty!”

Angela looked up, broken.

“Swear it!”

She bent and kissed his feet. Her lips planted tiny, hesitant touches along his feet, working down to his toes.

Three choices? she wondered, some semblance of sanity returning to her from the abyss. Did he say I have three choices?

No. There is a fourth here.

She kissed him until he was sleeping. Then, Angela Chen stretched out her mouth and engulfed Shen’s foot. Her teeth clamped down on the ankle.

Eventually he noticed what she was doing.

It was far too late, by then.

It seemed that time passed slowly, but this was only an illusion. Whenever she visited the living world, she was shocked at how the years, centuries, millennia, and eons had flickered past. When she finally learned to sniff out dead bodies and enter them, the war between China and Japan was long over, and the streets were crowded with sleek, beetle-like automobiles, and storefronts were electric and neon lairs. She saw a newspaper, marveling when its dateline said the year was 1997. The next time she returned, there were no newspapers, only thrumming holograms at each streetlamp, and it was the year 2065.

Then there came a time when there were no newspapers, no holograms, and no more sleek cars.

The thing calling itself Angela moved about the underworld. She fed when she noticed her bulky spiritflesh growing stiff and dry. Sometimes, she fed when she was bored, or when she remembered old betrayals.

Hudu Chongyuan Temple was lost history, almost myth to her mind. Liusu had paid for her betrayal. Minister Fan had long ago gone shrieking into her Angela’s gullet. She had hunted the monsters of old, too, and the fog was her only friend now, along with the churning emerald sky, and the shadows, and her own thoughts. All else was food.

But lately, odd things were bleeding through to the underworld. The landscape had changed. Strange monuments and hillocks materialized. New ghosts, interrupting a terrible age of drought, were once again crossing over.

The thing calling itself Angela decided to visit, after so many years of disinterest.

It was raining when she returned for a peek into the living world. Rainwater spilled off strange rooftop gardens and into street gutters. Dead bodies filled the roadside in the shadow of ruined, pulverized buildings. The bodies—her own borrowed body—were not Chinese or Japanese or any breed of human at all. The living world belonged to something new now. All around her were hulking nautiloid things with five spongy appendages. Creatures, a new civilization perhaps, who had come to preside over the world.

Angela saw a troop of them, armed with hatchets, passing her by. Their bronze age, she thought in amusement. And like the bronze age of long-extinct humanity, these creatures were at war. She rose up from a heap of bodies. The Wheel of Life and Death, like a waterwheel, never stops turning.

The troop of hatchet-wielding, shelled abominations noticed her standing tall from the pile of dead. They emitted ear-piercing trills and scattered away, gibbering in a language she didn’t understand.

But she could guess.

They’re telling others about the monster, she thought. The monster in a world of bones.

The post PseudoPod 537: A World of Bones appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Sandra M. Odell
• Narrator : Linda Hamilton
• Host : A.C. Wise
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Ashley Mackenzie
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 536: ARTEMIS RISING 3: Meat is a PseudoPod original.

Meat by Sandra M. Odell

A poster on the far wall of the crowded cafeteria chamber shows an identical man and woman in coveralls and happy smiles with their hands on the woman’s pregnant belly.  The caption at the bottom reads: A REPRODUCTIVE WORKER IS A HAPPY WORKER.  MED CALL TO SCHEDULE YOUR NEXT SEXTIME TODAY.

Ollie puts her hands to her belly, her empty belly.  Three miscarriages in the last eleven cycles.  Only two more chances for a live baby before the overseers stuff her in a containment suit and ship her to processing half a kilometer below the meat farm.  No one comes back from processing.  “My baby won’t look like everybody else’s.  It’ll be different.  Better.  Everyone will know it’s my baby.”

Across the table, Charlie shrugs and keeps shoveling meat porridge into his mouth.  Like everyone else in the meat farm.

She looks around the cafeteria.  The same faces, the same voices.  Sluggo.  Mary.  Abner.  Patty.  Gwen pulling her hair out one strand at a time.  The woman who eats rats.  The bald boy who constantly bangs his head against the wall until he passes out.  All crazyheads.

Ollie picks at a few of the darker lumps in the center of her bowl, takes a bite, says to Charlie, “How many babies do you have now?  Five?  Six?”  When he doesn’t answer, she continues, “I went to the nursery before shift.  You have six crib babies and two in the walker room.  Do you ever go to the nursery?”

Charlie shakes his head and keeps eating.

Ollie pushes her bowl away.  “What’s your fertility rating?  Nine?  Nine-point-five?”

Charlie scrapes the last bits from the side of his bowl.  “Don’t care.”

Ollie stares at him.  “How can you not care?  I don’t have one baby and I care.”

Charlie taps the side of her bowl with his spoon.  “You gonna finish that?”

Sleep shift.

Ollie pulls a jagged piece of metal no longer than her thumb out of her personals box, then crawls to the metal mirror at the head of her bed.  She tilts her head up and down, left and right.  The bare bulb above her stretches putty shadows from her brow, her nose.  The same shadows, the same recycled meat air, the same cubby barely big enough for the bed.  The same reflection.

Charlie hasn’t noticed her sores even though she left them untreated so they’d stand out.  She needs something to attract his interest so he’ll want to sextime when her rating improves.  She presses the sharpened tip to the side of a scab above her left eye and cuts out a bloody crescent, digs deep to get the muscle underneath.  She swallows the screams and pain.  Continues to carve down to the pink-white bone, gouges a line to a second sore a finger’s width above her nose.  Blood streams down her face like a ripe vat of meat.

Ollie mops at the blood with a dirty sex wipe.  An electric burn stick to cauterize the edges, and it’s done.  A fertile Ollie smiles at her from the mirror.  The reflection licks the blood from its fingers.

Zonker rolls off of her and against the wall.  His gooey sperm thing twitches, a drop of milky white oozing from the tip.  He reaches towards her forehead.  “What happened to your face?”

Ollie jerks her head back.  That’s not for him.  “Nothing.”

“It looks – ”

“Zip up.  I gotta plug my vag.”

Zonker likes to talk after sextime, but Ollie isn’t interested.  She’s done her job, now he needs to get out so she can clean up and pump hormones.  Processing.  Ollie shudders, drops the vag plug between her legs.

Zonker hands it to her.  “Here.”

She takes the plug, rolls away.

Plug and pump.  Plug and pump.  Think pregnant thoughts.  Think Charlie thoughts.

Workers hump and haul in the vat room.  Yellow steam hangs thick and fatty in the air, slicking down hair, seeping into coveralls, filling every thought, every breath, with meat.  It curdles the overhead lights and stings the eyes.

Charlie works head man at the big vat, slicing off thick, ripe slabs of meat with the saw, hauling them out of the vat with hooks for the crews to cart away.  Other crews work the smaller vats, while fixits rebuild and scour the older vats in back.

Ollie strides over to the big vat.  “I have this,” she tells Dick.

The small man stares at her forehead a moment, shrugs, and walks away.  Ollie slides into the routine, loading slabs until the bell sounds and the next shift takes over.

She falls into step beside Charlie on the way to the shower room.  “Good shift, huh?”

Charlie grunts.  He wipes his hands through his hair, smearing it with red.

In the shower room, white steam mingles with yellow and swirls around sallow bodies like a bruise.  Everyone talks the same words under the water: “Good shift, huh?” “Loaded fifteen carts.” “We hear anything from processing yet?” “Not yet.” “What’s your rating?” “They got another dead baby.” “Who’s your next sextime?”

Charlie takes a place at the end of the far wash wall and begins to scrub himself with a wire brush.  Pink tinged foam runs down the sores on his back and legs to the sludge swirling around the center drain.  Snoopy moves one shower closer, sidles over with a shy smile.  Ollie pushes her out of the way and steps under the spray.  Snoopy pushes back.  Ollie pushes harder, bares her teeth, balls her fists.  Snoopy moves off to find another shower.

Ollie puts her face under the water.  Thousands of tiny needles drive themselves under the new scabs on her forehead.  She turns her back to the spray, tipping her head enough that she wets her hair and not her face.  Better.  She foams up her own brush.  “Hey, Charlie?”

He grunts and thrusts his brush under the foam dispenser.  He does not open his eyes.

“Charlie?”

He turns, squints at her, spits out a stream of water.  “What?”

Ollie gives him her best profile, scabs and all.  “Notice anything different?”

Charlie stares at her.  “About what?”

Ollie tips her head to the side.  “About me.”

“. . .No.”

She faces him directly.  “Nothing?  About my face, maybe?”

Charlie frowns and continues to wash his sperm thing.  “You got your hair chopped?”

“No!  About my face.”  He has to see.  She jabs a finger at her forehead.  “Something.  Different.  About.  My.  Face?”

Charlie shakes his head.  “No.”

Ollie throws her scrub brush at him.  “Are you blind?  The sore right there?  It’s bigger, not like the others.  It looks different, don’t you think?  I look different.  No one else has a sore like this.”

Voices around them grow quiet.  Water snickers behind her back.

“I said it looks different!”

Charlie shrugs and began to rinse.

Ollie stalks towards the dry room.  Behind her, Snoopy says, “Charlie? I saw you have an open sextime, and. . .”

A smiling naked woman holds a stimulator pack to the underside of the testes of a giant, erect sperm thing.  REMEMBER TO KEEP HIM STIMULATED.  Men hold up cellophane pill packs.  VITAMINS FOR HEALTHY SPERMING.

The air in med call is muggy and heavy with meat.  Ollie leans forward to get a better look at the report screen on the rickety metal desk.  “You sure?”

Linus nods and taps the single word in red at the bottom of the report:  NEGATIVE.

“No pregnancy this time,” he says, turning the screen back to face him.  “Maybe you didn’t stimulate him enough.”

“I did everything right.”

Linus chews on his mustache, the right side a mat of brown and gray whiskers, the left a stubble of gnawed ends and tiny pimples.  “This says not, so. . .”

Ollie puts her hands to her empty belly.  She’d felt the baby move, had even chosen a name from the registry.  Popeye.    “Is it already in my record?”

Linus nods.  “Went automatically.”

Ollie picks at her forehead.  She’d been so sure.

“ – hormones for next time,” Linus is saying.

She pulls herself back to the conversation.  “What about next time?”

“Your sextime next month,” he says, and taps the screen.  “I’ll get you a new kit with the increased levels.  That should do it.”

Ollie’s attention wanders as she counts.  Cracks in the wallpaper in front of her – 24.  Spots of rust on the stirrups at the end of the exam bed – 7.  Number of drawers in the supply cabinet – 14.  Drawers that didn’t close properly – 5.  Pick.  Pick.  Pick.  She flicks away a bit of scab.  “Can I schedule my next sextime with Charlie from E Sector?”

Linus squints at the screen, taps it again.  “He’s scheduled for Hazel from J Sector the same three days as your cycle.  You’re partnered with Bozo, C Sector.”

Ollie hates Bozo, his fumbling hands, the way his breath whistles through his collapsed nose when he sperms.  She drums her heels against the chair legs.  “Bozo has trouble with his sperm thing.”

Linus shrugs.  “He has a four rating, and is the only clean genetic match in your category.”

“I’ve sextimed Bozo three times already and no baby.  Let me try Charlie, Linus.”

The medic shakes his head.  “I can’t.  I don’t know what women see in him, anyway.  He really has a sub IQ.”

“Because he has the best rating.”  She leans forward, needs him to understand.  “Please.  Charlie’s a better match than Bozo.”

Linus chews on his mustache until Ollie is ready to scream.

“Lots of women want Charlie sextime,” he says finally.

Desperation claws at her throat.  “I’m not lots of women, I’m me, and I need a baby.”

Processing, processing, processing, processing.  The word twists around her head, a spring wound too tight.  Ollie begins to rock back and forth.

Linus looks at her sidelong.  “All that attention on him doesn’t leave many sextime chances for the rest of us.”

Ollie wipes at a trickle of blood running into her eyebrow.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The medic fiddles with something under the desk.   “I may be able to change his schedule.”  Points to her forehead.  “And I can get you an ointment for that when we’re done.  It looks infected.”

Ollie stops rocking.  Cold rot fills her belly.  “When we’re done?”

Another shrug.  Linus watches her with pale, hungry eyes.

Ollie feels a containment suit breather mask against her cheeks.  She closes her eyes, hears the medic come around the desk.

Ollie grabs the piece of metal from the personals box and positions herself in front of her mirror.  She presses her body to the cubby wall, Linus still sticky in her unplugged vag.  Her hands shake.  She can’t stop crying.  Why can’t she stop crying?  “He sextimed me, Charlie, but it doesn’t matter.  He can’t give me a baby, only you can do that.”

Hot breath blurs the lines of her mirror self.  “I’m not other women.  I’ll be different for you, and we can sextime a baby, Charlie.”

Charlie still thinks she’s like everyone else in the meat farm, but she’s not.  He’ll see.  She grabs her left upper eyelid, pulls it taut, and slices through it top to bottom in one clean stroke.  Ollie laughs at the searing, red pain.  The right eyelid, same cut.  She gags, howls, pukes with laughter.

It takes three attempts with the burn stick to cauterize each eyelid, and Ollie laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

“All right, now open your eyes.”

Charlie does.  “Why are we at the nursery?”

Ollie bares her teeth in a smile.  Her eyelids are lined with gristle and grit.  It took two soak pads to remove the caked blood and loosen the cut edges from one another.  Every blink makes her roar with silent laughter.  “I thought you might want to visit.”

Behind the nursery glass, orderlies tend to six listless babies with pinched faces beneath harsh, yellow lights.  Dark-skinned or light, you could slice the face off of one baby and put it on another and they would all look the same.  At the back of the room, an accusation of eleven empty basinets are lined up beneath a poster of a pregnant woman giving the thumbs up sign.  IMPROVE MORALE.  WE’RE COUNTING ON YOU.

The orderlies do not smile.

Charlie looks at the swaddled figures on the other side of the glass.  “They’re babies.”

Ollie nods.  “They’re your babies.”

He scrunches up his face.  “So?”

“You should be proud of your babies.”  Ollie taps the glass.  “That one there, the one with the dark hair, that’s Olga.  She was born five days ago.  The one beside her is Mortimer.  I think he got that weird lip from his mother.”

Charlie watches as an orderly attaches a line from the baby’s feeding tube to the nutrient pump at the head of the bassinet.  His brows draw down as if trying to corner a memory or a stray thought.  “His mother?”  He shakes his head and stuffs his hands in his coverall pockets.  “We’ll be late for shift.”

Ollie stares in wonder at the tiny fingers and toes, the round bellies and wrinkled ears.  She presses her left hand to the glass, blocking out one of the babies to make room make room for hers to come.  “When we have a baby, we can visit it every day.  Won’t that be nice?”

But Charlie is no longer there; he’s headed down the tunnel to the elevator.  Ollie hurries after him.  “Wouldn’t you like that?”

He doesn’t stop walking.  “Like what?”

Ollie gets in front of him and walks backwards until she bumps against the elevator door.  “We could visit our baby together.  Would you like that?”

Any minute now he’ll notice her eyes, how she’s not like the others.

Charlie grunts and reaches around her to push the call button.

Any minute now.  Her smile is brittle with laughter.  “When we have a baby, I mean.”

“We’ve never sextimed.”

They’re going to send you to processing.  That’s what he really says.  Ollie is sure of it.  “Yes, but, but we will.”

Charlie shrugs, gaze wandering to the flashing blue floor indicator above her head.

She licks her lips.  “Do you like my eyes?”

He doesn’t look at her.  “Mmmm.”

The elevator door opens, but she doesn’t move, can’t move.  Any.  Minute.  Now.  “I made them just for you.”

Charlie steps forward then back, frowns.  “Move.”

Ollie grabs either side of the door so he can’t get around her.  “Do you like them?”

“We’re going to be late.”

“I don’t care.  I don’t care!”  Laughter claws its way up her throat, leaks out the corners of her eyes in salt and blood.  Ollie trembles with laughter.  “You’re like the rest of them.”

The doors jerk back and forth against her hands.  The elevator buzzes with a reminder to step away.

Again Charlie tries to step around her.  “C’mon, move.”

Something cracks deep inside her belly.  “You really are too stupid to care about anyone but yourself, aren’t you?”

Charlie sighs in exasperation.  “What are you talking about?”

The crack widens, hot and jagged.  “My eyes!  That’s what I’m talking about!  My eyes!”

Charlie throws up his hands.  “So what?  You have eyes!”

Processing.  Processing.  Processing. Processing.  “I’m not like everyone else!  I’m different!”

She’s screaming so loud an orderly steps out of the nursery to see what’s going on.

Charlie pushes her into the elevator and steps in after her.  “Different.  Crazyhead.  Fine.”

The laughter balls Ollie’s hand into a fist and punches Charlie in the face.  Blood spurts out his nose and he falls back into the tunnel on ass and elbows.

The orderly hurries towards them.  “What’s going on?”

“I’m different!” Ollie screams at him.

The doors close on the jagged edges of Ollie’s world.

She lays on the exam table.  Linus climbs on top of her, says, Call me Charlie.  Say it for me.

Ollie rolls her forehead across the cool metal mirror.

Linus says, It may take more than one try to fix his schedule.  I’m sure it will.

His hands are clumsy between her legs.

She is alone in her cubby save for the memories.  She pulls back and her reflection considers her from beneath a thin layer of grease and blood.  Ollie wipes at it with the cuff of her coveralls, smearing the image.  She curses, uses the other cuff.  No good.  Red streaks slice her face into slabs of meat ready for the carts, her eyes thick black clots.

Charlie and the orderly will report her; they have to.  The overseers will send her to processing along with the crazyheads, but she’s not crazy.  She just wants a baby.  Needs a baby.  A low moan uncurls between her lips, caresses her ears with razors.

Charlie walks up behind her, eyes bright and attentive.  She whirls around.  No one is there.  She turns back and Charlie stands behind her reflection.  He smiles at her through the streaks of red.  Look at me, only at me, he says, and Ollie can do nothing else.  I see you.  I know you.  Look at me.

Charlie wraps his arms around her reflection.  Ollie wraps her arms around herself in sympathy.  The moan becomes a whimper, the whimper a sigh.

He holds up her piece of metal, shiny and sharp.  Ollie’s reflection smiles at her from the circle of his arms.  She rests her head on his shoulder and turns her face toward his sunken chest.  Charlie bring the piece of metal up and strokes Ollie’s reflection from the corner of her eye to the corner of her mouth, again from her nostril to her ear.  Ollie’s reflection shudders and presents her other cheek with a smile.  One tender cut at a time, he peels away the lie of skin to reveal the exquisite truth of her face, the ring of muscles around her eyes and mouth, the tiny pads of fat that are her cheeks.  Her meat, her fertile, rich meat, all that she is and ever will be.  Irresistible.

Ollie reaches out to the mirror; the glass flows up and around her hand to her wrist.  She curls her fingers in the red ribbons spilling down her reflection’s neck, feels the exquisite warmth of their laughter.

I see you, I know you, Charlie’s reflection says.

Ollie’s reflection, beautiful and red, fingers laced over her swelling belly, smiles at Ollie.

Ollie pulls her hand out of the mirror and licks the laughter from her fingers.

The cubby door slides open and Charlie stands there in his undershirt, rubbing his eyes.  His nose is a swollen black lump of meat in the middle of his face, a white steri-strip across the bridge.  “What?”

Ollie smiles.  “Hello, Charlie.  Can I come in?”

She slaps him in the face with a stun module and he falls back onto his crumpled bed, muscles fighting one another to move.  Ollie steps into the cubby, closes and locks the door behind her.  She had sextimed Linus to get at the stun module, completely worth the hassle of stuffing his body in the supply cabinet.

She felt lightheaded earlier, but now her mind is clear, her vision pure.  She is the breath of every shift and sector, the blood in their veins, the perfection of the meat beneath their identical skins.  The fans roar her name, scream devotion from the belly of beasts below.  The air is sweet.

Ollie slides onto the bed beside Charlie, excitement rumbling in her belly.  She strokes Charlie’s face; dried blood from her palm flakes off in the stubble of his cheeks.  “Do you like my face?  I did it for you.  I am made new, a fresh vat.  I am the Lady of Meat.”

Charlie cannot look away, transfixed by her beauty.  Ollie takes his palsied hand, presses it to the slick curve of her cheek, laughs.  This moment, this perfect moment.  She rises up on her knees and slides the blood-stiffened coveralls to her hips, revealing the red traceries across her breasts and stomach, a map to her puckered, hairless mound.

Charlie gurgles.

“You like it?  I knew you would.  I’m not like the others.  I’m different.”

She catches a drop of blood oozing from her left nipple and paints his mouth.  “I see you.  I.  See.  You.”

Ollie pulls an aid kit, a stimulator, and a scalpel from her coveralls, more gifts from Linus.  Off comes Charlie’s trunks; she places the stimulator below Charlie’s scrotum.  A flick of her finger, the light flashes blue, and Charlie gurgles again.  His sperm thing twitches, then begins to swell.

She draws a red line down her tongue with the scalpel to anoint the blade, then touches the tip to the corner of Charlie’s left eye.  “We’ll make beautiful babies, Charlie, so many babies, and they’ll be different just like us.  You’ll see.”

The Lady of Meat pushes the tip of the scalpel into Charlie’s meat; blood wells up in celebration.

 

 

PseudoPod wants to draw your attention to an anthology that dovetails nicely with Artemis Rising.

Sycorax’s Daughters, is a new volume of dark fiction and poetry and it is our understanding that this is the first horror anthology written entirely by Black women. It explores the intimate details of cultural nuance, race, and gender. Sycorax’s Daughters mission is to work “as a visionary space where Black women explore horror on their own terms.”

Those familiar with William Shakespeare’s The Tempest may remember Sycorax. She is an African sorceress operating as “the absent presence” throughout the play. While never on the stage, she is influential. She haunts the white male characters. She refuses to be excluded from the story.

 

While we’re talking about anthologies, let’s mention For Mortal Things Unsung.

If you liked “Standard Procedure” by Dagny Paul at the beginning of this month or “The Lady with the Light” by Mel Kassel, you should go pre-order our anthology. Both of those stories were originally published in our 10th anniversary anthology. If you backed our kickstarter, your copy showed up in February. If you missed out, it will be available for purchase at the end of March for your reading pleasure.

The post PseudoPod 536: ARTEMIS RISING 3: Meat appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Mel Kassel
• Narrator : Jon Padgett
• Host : Setsu Uzume
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Ashley Mackenzie
• Discuss on Forums

“The Lady with the Light” was published originally in For Mortal Things Unsung in February 2017.

PseudoPod wants to draw your attention to an anthology that dovetails nicely with Artemis Rising.

Sycorax’s Daughters, is a new volume of dark fiction and poetry and it is our understanding that this is the first horror anthology written entirely by Black women. It explores the intimate details of cultural nuance, race, and gender. Sycorax’s Daughters mission is to work “as a visionary space where Black women explore horror on their own terms.”

Those familiar with William Shakespeare’s The Tempest may remember Sycorax. She is an African sorceress operating as “the absent presence” throughout the play. While never on the stage, she is influential. She haunts the white male characters. She refuses to be excluded from the story.

 

While we’re talking about anthologies, let’s mention For Mortal Things Unsung.

If you liked “Standard Procedure” by Dagny Paul at the beginning of this month or “The Lady with the Light” by Mel Kassel, you should go pre-order our anthology. Both of those stories were originally published in our 10th anniversary anthology. If you backed our kickstarter, your copy showed up in February. If you missed out, it will be available for purchase at the end of March for your reading pleasure.

 

 

 

 

I’m enthralled when I arrive at the house in Hawaii. I see so many things that my mother would call “wonders”: sea turtles heaving themselves up from the surf, leaving clumsy sand–angels; jellyfish dying slowly in the sun; seaweed pods that burp out air, the breaths that they held for years.  

Not everything is a wonder, of course. There are fish bones and dollops of seagull shit and women with floppy hats who coo over shells. But the ocean still surprises me. It coughs up newness now and again for me to discover, usually in the morning, when I leave the cat chewing on his food and walk down to the shore.

I establish a routine to keep myself from seeking out other tourists: wake up, walk along the beach, write for a few hours, eat lunch, watch a movie, go to The Log for dinner and exactly two beers. The people at The Log encourage me to bring in fresh pages for them to read aloud. To them, writing is a grand gesture, the mark of a man who can assemble his thoughts in a secret language. I tell them that the book is bad, and they don’t care. 

The book is bad. It’s worming itself out of me like a mucus. Better to spit it than swallow, but when I look at it, I’m disgusted. The main character is a detective. I’ve never met a detective, but I’m pretending to be Reggie Barns, a person who holds a pistol without wondering what to do with his thumb.

The post PseudoPod 535: ARTEMIS RISING 3: The Lady with the Light appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Christi Nogle
• Narrator : Dagny Paul
• Hosts : Andrea Subissati and Alex West
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Ashley Mackenzie
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 534: ARTEMIS RISING 3: In The Country is a PseudoPod original.

In the Country By Christi Nogle

At sunset everything is pink and blue-violet. The mother, Myrna, stands out on the balcony surveying the hills and follows the diagonal lines of them in zigzag down and past the tree line to the scene on the lawn. The little boy and little girl’s nightdresses glow pink in the sunset, succulents at their feet all spiral-shaped, soft and pebbly, the harder white of lilies behind them and the red-green foliage of the roses behind them. Their hair, which always shimmers in the light—his yellow-gold and hers deep reddish brown—is darkened now and so their skin glows healthier rose against it. There are no shadows on their faces. The pebbles between the flower beds are flat rose-gold. The paper lanterns the children hold are brighter rose-gold.

The little boy moves like a little girl, carefully, cringing back from others’ movements and from sharp or hard surfaces. His blonde curls will be cut off soon now. His plain nightdress is already wrong. The girl’s lace-trimmed nightdress cuts tight under the arms, and the sleeves are too short. She twirls with the lantern after her father lights it, then climbs the little ladder to hang it on a stake. Her legs are slim and darker rose.

The light falls further. The sky is a warm blue with cooler blue clouds. The blue flowers glow now, and all the whites look hard. The nightdresses appear white for a second, then grey-blue. The father joins the mother up on the balcony, holds her hand and leans into her. The little boy moves like a drowsy ghost in the yard, not chasing fireflies but shrugging when they do not come to him. He shrugs back at the parents in a flirtatious way, puts his jar on the ground.

Myrna thinks there is something a little less than ideal about the boy having been born second. There should be a little sister, later, so that the order no longer matters.

The girl is now pinching a rosebud off the bush, digging her fingernails into it, scattering damp half-formed petals over her head. She likes to pry the fetal plants from from their seeds, likes to pick weeds in the heat of day. She likes to pick apart insects of all kinds but especially the fireflies. She will peel the glowing part off to wear on her finger—look, a ring!

Myrna takes a good look at her the next day while they pick weeds. She is growing too long. The legs are too long, the calves and thighs of the same diameter, like poles, and in the filthy terry shorts, the butt is too round, the back too swayed. The face is indistinct: narrow nose, small eyes behind thick glasses, small mouth with small teeth that do not show when she speaks. Only the hair is perfect, mahogany red in the sun, glowing like Myrna’s own.

While they pick, the boy sits quietly in the shade on a blanket. If a bug crawls across his blanket, he will not molest it in any way. He will watch it with benign interest until it is gone and then will look forward at nothing. Soon the father comes to lie beside him. Soon they are both curled together like sleeping puppies.

In late summer, they sit on the front porch, the most wretched place to sit. The boards are bleached silver and full of splinters, their rails strung with wilted morning glories and the opportunistic Virginia creeper, which is deep green when the other plants start to fail.

The girl works on some packet of extra special summer homework, reciting her vocabulary words in a tone Myrna does not like, over and over: kaleidoscope, iridescent, phosphorescent, on and on.

“What weird words,” Myrna says finally.

“This lesson is on op-tics, the girl says. Do you know what pareidolia means?”

“I do not.”

“It means that we see . . . patterns in chaos. You see faces in the wood of the porch floor.”

“I don’t see faces anywhere,” she says, feeling oddly defensive.

“Sure, there is a face. You see something that looks like a nose, and so your mind works hard to find something you can use for eyes above the nose. It’s natural.”

“ ‘Patterns in chaos.’ That would come from Miss Griggs.”

“It does.”

“I see faces,” Boyd says. They don’t hear.

“It’s nice you’re learning so much, Cassie.” Myrna stirs the ice in the bottom of her glass and steps down off the porch, having spotted a weed.

“It’s nice you’re learning so much,” Cassie says.

“I saw a face in a towel in the bathroom,” Boyd says. “It scared me, that time.”

“It’s nice you’re learning so much, Cassie,” Cassie says.

“It’s nice you’re learning so much, Cassie”

“It’s nice you’re learning so much, Cassie”

“It’s nice you’re learning so much, Cassie”

Boyd starts to cry, all at once. He is sitting there, then he pumps his arms in the air a couple of times, then his face is wet and he is hyperventilating.

“Thanks again, Cassie.” Myrna picks up Boyd and takes him in the house.

Cassie leans down from the lowest porch step and draws the face/vase illusion from the teacher’s handout in the dirt with a stick and it is so beautifully drawn, she thinks, that she needs to make it more permanent. She places dead green beetles where the eyes of the faces would be. She gathers pebbles and uses them to outline the silhouettes of the faces. She places the best of the struggling morning glory vines at the top of the vase, trailing down.

“The reason that you’re able to find things when you go hunting for them is sort of the same reason you see faces everywhere. It’s like if you’re hunting for daisies, and you know what a daisy looks like, you have that picture in front of your eyes, and when there is a daisy there to fit into the picture, you will see it,” Cassie says just as they enter the woods.

“Then I have a picture of a mushroom, and one of a pretty forest flower—not of a daisy—and one of a turtleshell, all at the same time” Myrna says, “since those are what I want to find.”

“You can’t. It doesn’t work that way”

“It does. I can. I am a very able person,” Myrna says, adjusting her gait to miss a slimy patch of wet moss.

Myrna feels good, set for a long walk. She ponders as they walk down the slope and deeper into woods: If Cassie had not known these new vocabulary words, she might have never known the concepts, or maybe she would have gone around saying “that thing, where you see things in other things” instead of pareidolia or “that thing where you see rainbows in the oil” instead of iridescence, sounding like an idiot or crazy person until she learned to stop saying anything about these things—and stop knowing them—just as Myrna had learned to shut up with her own stupid thoughts at a much earlier age than this. These boys just past the woods, devoted to farming and to church, don’t have any mind for such a term.  Myrna herself, to tell the truth, has no mind for it even though she once went to college and was forced to try to think that way, but she likes to think she would like to leave such options open to Cassie.

She wonders if Miss Griggs started something that would have started anyway, sooner or later. It’s good, it’s fine, but Cassie will go into a different class next year and will not have another teacher like her here, ever. Cassie must go to some sort of a better school. How? Where? Or maybe “must” is too strong. She can go or not go and it will all be fine either way.

Myrna is skipping now from rock to rock, getting into a trotting rhythm as they descend. Boyd is happily skipping beside her but slips on a mossy rock, falls on his nose. A few drops of blood balance on the broccoli-textured moss, then flatten, staining the inside grey. Boyd is back to howling, holding his mother tight again. Misery is your element, she thinks, then hollers “Cassie, Cassie! Let’s go.” An echo comes back weak.

She walks forward a few more steps to see Cassie in a sunny patch far below, bounding from rock to rock as though weightless. She thinks very deliberately; if this is all you get Cassie, enjoy it. It is wonderful. You feel so strong. You have nothing but healthy memories. You are not troubled, Cassie. She likes to think positive things about Cassie when she can, and the positive thoughts make up a sweet story she tells to herself about herself, so they make her feel good.

 

Myrna tries again to go exploring. This time she leaves Cassie sleeping and fashions a sling to hold Boyd on her back. He is much too old to be carried about like this, and the father would probably not like it, but the father is off on a job and what are you going to do? “It’s a secret,” she tells Boyd. They walk without incident past the point they had been at the last time, twice as far, three times as far, and then they see it. Or Myrna sees it. With Boyd, who knows what he is seeing or not seeing?

It is a house facing them as they approach, an absurdly large one in the middle of the woods. There appears to be no road to it, or even a trail. The clearing is barely larger than the house itself, tall bare timber obscuring her view of much of its face though they are only a hundred feet away. She wants to say it is called a saltbox but is not sure that is right. It’s been so many years since she thought about things like that. In any case, it is very tall, with three windows above and two below, with the door between them. There is a door in the doorframe but no glass in any of the windows. All of the siding and thick trim pieces are weathered wood, as weathered as the dead wood littering the ground, looking never painted and left out here to rot for what? Fifty years, more?

Myrna unties Boyd from her back to set him on his feet.

She feels elation, a “wow” feeling through her whole body. “What a find, buddy,” she says. “We couldn’t have done better than this.”

Boyd yawns, looks hopeful. “What did we find?”

“Stay here,” she says, and approaches the house alone thinking that such houses have hazards, though what they are without any glass around she does not know. She walks around to the back, three windows above, three below. There is a lot of leaf mold and twigs and whatnot drifted up the sides, small beetles circling up out of it. No windows on either of the sides, no second door. She comes around the front to try the door. There is no knob or any mechanism for one inside the doorknob hole. She pushes and feels that the door must be nailed shut from inside. She turns to approach the window (thinking to look in, climb in?) and feels adrenaline hit her system in what feels like a second or more before she hears the shriek from Boyd.

Then there is the panicked run up the slope with Boyd in her arms, blood pumping out of a gash in his hand, such a long run that her lungs can barely keep up. There is the search for the keys in the mess of the kitchen, the drive to the little town hospital for stitches, the notice while waiting that it’s noon now and they should get something on the drive home. There is the drive home with fragrant fries and messy ice cream cones and Boyd asleep with his head in her lap, bandage and fingers and face all sticky with ice cream and staining her jeans with his drool. Fine salt and grease give a pleasant texture to the steering wheel. This is not the first time he has been rushed to an emergency room and will probably not be the last, but would that every time turned out so sweetly.

Through all of this, she is feeling a muted version of the normal emotions, panic and then concern, relief at the hospital and then the warm flood of good will toward herself and Boyd on the drive home. She feels good, just a little sore in the shins. The pain in the backs and fronts of her thighs will start tomorrow, she knows. God, she has not run like that in years. But right now, she feels good.

The normal emotions and the normal concerns proceed in the order they should, but there is something else too that she would not be able to define if asked and that she is barely aware of. It is the heavy, inchoate static of dread. It has been building for some time and will announce itself as she lifts Boyd, sleeping, from the truck. It will build to a higher pitch the instant she is aware of it, and in the minute it takes to approach the door it will rise higher and higher until she wants to drop him and hold her ears instead, though of course the sound is from the inside and not the outside.

The father is home, squatting and leaning forward, hands on her knees as she sits back in an easy chair. He is talking and then screaming. She can hear it all to a point but not clearly. It is likely that he is speaking a language she does not know because she can hear him, sure, but she cannot understand.

There are people in the fields, people starting into the forest, not a lot of people. She watches from the balcony and begins to count them but then grows too tired. They have vests that glow. Their dogs are having a good time.

A man is getting a glass of water in the kitchen when she goes down there. She smiles and asks if she can make him a cup of coffee. He looks puzzled, thanks her but no. She is about to leave and then comes to the fridge, takes off the class photo.

“If you look at this before you go hunting, it will make it easier. This thing is, if you see the thing in your mind, you will have like a map of it in your mind, and then when you go hunting for it, you will know it when you see it. Cassie—actually—it was Cassie who told me that.”

The man looks long at the picture, then hands it back.

“No, you take it,” Myrna says. “You can study it before you go back out.”

Myrna is feeling better now. She is worried, sure, but there are so many hands at work that there is nothing she needs to do, for once. She holds Boyd in her lap all day, stroking his bandage on the outside, careful not to touch the palm. She answers their questions politely when they come in.

The father comes in and takes Boyd from her to, sets him on his feet. He takes her hand and leads her out to the front porch. Here are two lines like rivers made of little pebbles. He wants to know what this is. “A map?” she guesses. If it is a map, of what? A map maybe to where the girl has gone? She doesn’t think so. She doesn’t know.

He leads her again—by the wrist, not the hand—to the shed. There is a little craft project going on the bench, with the ice cube trays set out to hold the little items. In one there are sequins, pins, and beads. In the other, parts of insects and flowers, seeds and pebbles. He takes a translucent turtleshell smaller than a silver dollar and looks at it there in his hand. He picks out a locust husk.

“What were these for?” he asks.

“It’s probably summer homework. She had so much of that.”

Miss Griggs was questioned, intensely they said. There was nothing to suggest involvement, but she had taken such a heightened interest in the girl that the father was sure there must be something. There was nothing more to the story than a spark between an overeager young teacher from the city and a smart little girl, they told the parents. They did not tell the parents that they’d asked many people about the mother, too. There was nothing more to the story than that she was a little prim, maybe a little more focused on the boy than the girl, but that was natural with him being so young and so adorable and the girl being a little “on the spectrum” or whatever.

They found a few more lines crafted in pebbles out around the property, and a few arrangements that the girl must have made but of which they could make no sense. One, a mouse with legs of other mice sewn on, was turned in to the police but never mentioned to the parents. There was debate about whether it was an inexpert piece of taxidermy or some kind of charm. A block of weathered wood with twelve rectangles scratched into it, six on two of its sides, was not thought to be related to the girl at all and was tossed into the brush by one of the searchers.

Then there was nothing to do but focus on Boyd. He needed to be watched in case there was an outsider involved. There was talk about moving, but that would be too much trouble even if it were not exactly wrong to do. And the community had been so supportive, how could they think of going away?

 

“They searched the house thoroughly, I guess,” she says some time later. She is twenty weeks into a pregnancy that is making her feel less sad about the past. She thinks the baby will be a little girl, the kind of little sister she has always hoped would bring out the best in Boyd. He will love her and will focus on her. She will be dirty blonde like Boyd and his father.

“You were here,” the father says, “but you don’t remember. They searched the crawlspace. They practically took apart the shed.”

“Oh yes,” Myrna says. She wants to say no, the other house, the house out in the woods. She wonders what they did with it when they found it. They knocked it down, she hopes. It was a hazard though solid enough and with absolutely no glass.

At night, she becomes agitated. She resents the thought that keeps occurring: the house. I never actually opened my mouth and mentioned the house, did I? In all of that time when I was dreaming about it every night and seeing her there, fallen from the second story or hiding crouched in the corner, I never actually opened my mouth. I was dreaming of her haunting it after that. I was dreaming she had tiled every floor with mosaics of pebbles and papered the walls in leaves and the wings of insects. At first I think I thought I had already said it because I was so confused, and then when I realized I had not said it, I thought they must have found it anyway. They were so thorough. They had dogs.

“I love her already. It hurts,” Boyd says one day when they are sitting up in bed with a picture book. He looks so much older in his plaid pajamas. His eyes are wet and he pulls toward Myrna, but he’s not pulling in on himself the way he once would have. He embraces the belly instead. It is so big now that the navel has popped up, and he touches it with the tip of his finger. “We have to wait until she comes before we go,” he says.

“What?” Myrna says, feeling repelled by him, which she does not expect. What she feels is a brief flash of loyalty to Cassie. What do you know about her? she wants to say. They have not talked about it, he and Myrna, though the father must have done some of that. It is the kind of thing that he would think to do.

“I mean the baby,” he says. “We don’t want the baby to fall.”

She sees, then, what he means. “Yes, we have to wait.”

“And while we wait, we don’t have to think nothing,” he says.

“Anything,” she says.

“Anything at all.” He smiles and turns back to the book, and they go on reading.

The baby is so strong, they can’t believe her, and ravenous. The best baby in the whole world, everyone agrees. Boyd is a little man now. He helps with everything. He is so gentle. The family couldn’t have done any better.

In midsummer they sit on chairs on the porch with the baby between them. She is quiet and good even in the heat, and they protect her from the sun with a pink umbrella that makes everything under it glow pink. Boyd has never seen so much pink in his life, and he tells Myrna it makes him feel safe just to see all of the pink things and the pretty clothes and stuffed animals that fill up the house now.

Dandelions grow up between the succulents now. Thistles grow up through the rosebushes, and the Virginia creeper smothers any other vine that might have once competed.

Boyd tells Myrna about what kindergarten is going to be like. There will be a teacher, and a teacher is like a mother but not as nice and not as pretty. The teacher teaches and you learn, but you play too. You play and play until you are so tired that you take a nap, and after the nap there is orange drink in a carton, chocolate milk, or white milk. There are cookies that the moms bring in, kept in a closet in the back, and the teacher picks two students each time to go and get them after nap. And you will have a best friend named Kiera Jean Jack.

“There is a green drink sometimes,” Myrna says. He has generalized all the things she told him about her kindergarten. It’s sweet to hear him talk so long at a stretch.

“Only sometimes,” Boyd says, “and when there is I will not drink it.”

“And you’ll learn to read,” she says.

“Maybe,” he says.

She dries her hands on her apron after breakfast dishes, and Boyd takes them in his. The father took him into town last month for a real haircut. His hair looks darker and is already growing tendrils at the edges. He holds her hands and says he wants to go for a walk.

The baby in a sling on the front of her, Myrna picks her way carefully down the slope, so alert to every sensation. The forest is loud with the creek sounds and insects and birds and thick with the wet and earthy smells. The lurid green of the ferns stands against a chaotic background of old leaf litter, rocks and moss. The shafts of sun come in through small gaps in the cover, lighting up the tiny insects that move like schools of fish. She keeps her feet from stamping down on the dead wood, the moss, the occasional dark salamander moving away from her. The strong horizontals of the trunks have a louver effect, letting her see a part and then another part of the background as she passes, but not all at once. She is feeling good, feeling vigilant but not frightened.

Boyd walks ahead but not too far. He’s being careful where to step. The walk is long. She stops for a time to pee and then to nurse the baby. She takes her shoes off, rubs her feet.

She and Boyd do not talk, but they glance at each other from time to time. This is a hunt and, if what they want is not in front, it may be to the side or even back a ways. Their paths become confused. The baby is awake again and fussing softly.

“Maybe we should go back,” Myrna says. The diaper is alright now, but she didn’t bring a second change.

“Maybe,” Boyd says, but he keeps moving forward. He stops, holds his head as though he has a crushing headache, or is he covering his ears?

When he turns back around he is crying. His face is red. “No,” he says. “I see something right over there.”

He turns back away from Myrna and pushes forward, faster now. The woods are so thick here that they can’t move straight for more than a few feet. He couldn’t have seen it; there’s nothing visible ahead, even now, and now they are a hundred yards further than when he said it.

Then she sees it through trees, at first nothing more than a hint of vertical line through the louvers of the trunks, gray behind gray. She sees the vertical line of rooftop begin to form and then as she begins descending, the darker shapes of windows.

Boyd is far ahead now, stopped and facing the lower left window. The dread doesn’t come as she thought it would. She coos to the baby, makes her way down to Boyd calm and slow.

When she has reached him and looks at him from the side, he looks so drained that she thinks he will collapse, but he stands still. She pulls the baby to the side so that she can be close enough to peer in the window. She looks in at exactly what she expected to see, darkness and then far back in the static, a patch of rosy color and a dim glint of hair. The light barely reaches. Boyd is not tall enough to see inside. He turns away, strokes the scar on his hand.

How did you know? she thinks. I dreamed it like this, but I didn’t know. They turn from the window and walk forward a few steps.

He is crying hard but does not reach for her. “I saw a face. It was hurt.”

She was in here hurt but still alive, but you didn’t want me to know, she thinks. So you cut yourself to pull me away from her. Or, you knew something was going to happen, so you took us away before it did. In either case the same, you wanted to let it happen.

“But there was nothing you could do,” she says. It may as well be true.

“May-be,” he hitches. He is starting to hyperventilate, but he sits and breathes deeply, hugs his arms around himself, calms down. His face when he looks up is serious but not upset.

“Is there something there behind you?” he says. He is squinting, tilting his head.

Myrna thinks of what it might be behind her. The house, no house but Cassie in a pile of leaves, or nothing, more trees.

“Did we find something or not?” He asks. “I can’t remember. I thought we were hunting for something.”

“Did we find something?” She says. “No, we didn’t.” She does not look back but takes his hand and starts back up toward home.

The post PseudoPod 534: ARTEMIS RISING 3: In The Country appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Wendy N. Wagner
• Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
• Host : M.K. Hobson 
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Ashley Mackenzie
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 533: ARTEMIS RISING 3: Drift Right is a PseudoPod original.

This piece was inspired by a trip to the Columbia River Maritime Museum and the Bumblebee Cannery Museum, both of Astoria, Oregon. Astoria has a long history of fishing and many of its original settlers were Finnish. It was also a hotbed of unionizing activity during the first few decades of the 20th century.

Drift Right By Wendy N. Wagner

The tide was in, and the butter and brine smell of the sea covered the stink of the river. The Kultaseni nosed against the current, keeping to the edge of the shipping channel. Ben kept a tight hold of the tiller and found himself forgetting to blink as he peered ahead into the darkness. Clouds like wool felting wrapped up the sky, and the air was thick with unshed rain.

He risked a quick glance at the man standing in the stern. Arlo Koski’s bigness defined him, set him apart from the other men in Astoria. At the Suomi Ladies Auxiliary annual tug of war, Koski was always called to be team captain. At union meetings, even the Seattle organizers shut up for him to talk. Ben could remember sitting at the back of the Suomi Brotherhood Hall with his brother Joe, listening to Koski and wishing he could be something, anything like the man.

Now his boss stood motionless, just a darker silhouette against the vaguer darkness of the night, watching for snags and boat traffic—the  last the most important since they were out here with no running lights. On a normal night, they might see three dozen boats on the water, but half of Astoria was down at the hall talking strikes. Ben wondered if he could still convince Koski this was a bad idea.

He cleared his throat. “Alice May’s going to be wondering where the hell I am. She’s handing out leaflets at the rally.”

“Those bastards are out here somewhere, stealing our catch,” Koski whispered. “We got to put a stop to it.” He shot a neat arc of spit over the side of the boat.

“Koski—”

The man tossed a flask back at him. “Have a drink and stop worrying.”

“I don’t drink,” Ben reminded him, but Koski waved a hand to shush him.

“You hear that?” He turned so he faced the Washington side of the river.

Ben listened a minute, trying to place the sound. Koski didn’t like it, that was sure. “What is it? Dog fights in one of the logging camps?”

The hoarse barking didn’t sound right for a dog. It echoed weirdly off the silent humps of the hills, the sound hollow and lonely as it bounced back and forth across the river dividing Oregon from Washington.

“Sea lions. Ain’t seen one on the river since I was a kid. We finish this up, we’ll go shoot a few. Teach them to stay away from our fish.”

Koski kept a rifle in the cupboard built into the seat at the tiller. Ben could almost feel it under his ass, a promise of hot metal and trouble. Not for the first time he wished he had stayed at home tonight, begged off sick, or taken up some small task at the rally. If he were passing out leaflets with Alice May, he wouldn’t be here in the dark looking for the men who’d been poaching their fish. Men who might very well have their own rifles tucked away in their boat.

“You’ve got to protect what’s yours,” Koski mused. “Your woman, your boat, your drift right—nobody ought to mess with them things. That’s a man’s life right there. It don’t matter if you’re talking about a man or a sea lion, you don’t let them take your life from you.”

“My pop’s got a sea lion hide for a rug,” Ben said, wondering as the words came out of his mouth—he had forgotten about the golden pelt tucked up under the edge of his father’s bed. He and Joe would lay on it when Pop was out fishing and tell each other stories of what they’d do when they got old enough to get away from the old bastard. “That’s the only one I’ve ever seen up close.”

The sea lions’ voices echoed again, a volley of barking cut short by a gurgling growl. He couldn’t tell if they came from behind them or up ahead, not the way the sounds bounced off the rocks and the water. They couldn’t be too close, he guessed—or maybe hoped. Sea lions looked awkward on the land, but their teeth were big as a bear’s, and he knew plenty of older fishermen who’d run afoul of the creatures. They’d fight you for your catch if they were hungry enough.

“There’s our marker.” Koski’s voice cut through the barking and Ben’s thoughts. “Give me the rifle.”

They’d come to the edge of their drift right. Every Sunday they went out here to drag the bottom of the river so their nets wouldn’t foul in the shit that lost its way on its journey to the sea: snags from flooded creeks and mis-tended log booms, oil barrels and empty beer kegs, dead bucks with scanty racks and fish-nibbled eyes. The things that sank to the bottom of the Columbia had been useful or beautiful once, but their time beneath the water turned them ugly.

Ben hated those hours dragging the river. They were nothing like the ones spent casting their nets or reeling in those silver salmon. He and Koski never talked much those times, but they didn’t need to. They put out their net and they let the current take them toward the mouth of the river, toward the sea, the birds and the weather calling to them like they were some kind of friends, and the soft curves of the hills casting smiles on the open stretches of the water. Ben had been a fisherman for four years, and he liked the work. He liked the muscles it put in his arms, big ones like Koski’s. He liked the man he was on the river.

“What you waiting for?”

“I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

“That why I do the thinking around here. Now hurry up.”

Ben stood and lifted the bench seat. His fingers found the cold muzzle of the rifle. God, this was a bad idea.

“Just going to scare them,” he reminded Koski. A part of him felt like a kid again, bringing his dad another bottle of beer even though he knew the drunker the old man got, the more likely he was to hit Ben or his brother. The rifle felt wicked in his hands, just like those bottles had felt.

Koski gave an indecipherable grunt and took the rifle. He jammed a fresh plug of chew into the pocket of his cheek. “See anything yet?”

Ben couldn’t see shit out here, but he made a show of looking around in the thick dark of the river’s night.

Then the tiny white flare of a struck match appeared, moving slowly toward them like a falling star traveling at river speed. “Shit.”

Koski crouched down in the bow. “Get us closer.” The light glowed bright for another second, then dwindled down to the red star at the end of a cigarette.

Ben’s heart jumped in his chest, but he kept his hand on the tiller. He trusted Koski. The big Fin had given him a job when no other fisherman would even let him help mend their nets. Koski had found Ben a place to live after he cleaned out of his pop’s place, and he never asked, not even once, for anything in return. Hell, last month Koski had even straight up given Ben enough money to buy a ring for Alice May. Nobody had ever taken more care of Ben Pouttu, especially not his pop, who right now was probably blacked out under the pool table at The Shark Tank.

Koski adjusted the sail a bit and they slowed even more, just moving enough to keep the current from pulling them downstream. The soft hiss of drizzle on the water started, and up ahead someone cussed softly.

The rain brought the dark down tightly around them. Ben’s tongue felt too big for his mouth and dry as fresh sawdust.

The gillnetter’s bow thumped something hollow. A man hollered and Ben jumped to his feet, not sure what to do next, but Koski was already moving, his massive silhouette the only shape Ben could be sure of.

Should he follow? Should he grab his gaff hook? He tried to find the quiet space in his mind he usually felt on the water, but his mind just spun.

The boat rocked and he realized Koski had jumped onto the next boat. No time to be scared. With that rifle in Koski’s hand and him wound so tight, Ben couldn’t let him out of his sight.

Ben grabbed the mooring line and leaped after his boss. Someone uncovered the lantern in the bottom of other boat and the soft glow stung his eyes. Ben stumbled and caught himself just as a fist glanced off the side of his head.

The night fisherman grunted as Ben dug his elbow into the man’s gut. He threw his arms around his attacker, pinning the man’s arms to his sides.

Someone bellowed, and from the rear of the craft, a sickening crunch sounded.

Koski stood panting. The gold light lit his face wrong, put too much in shadows. He wiped something slick off his face with the back of his hand. “Got him,” he said. He shook out his wrist. “Hell of a hit.”

“What did you do?” Ben’s prisoner whispered in heavily accented English. he twisted out of Ben’s grasp. “Ivan? Ivan!” He lurched toward Koski and the crumpled figure in the stern.

Koski shoved him. “I know you.” He gave him another shove, and the man tripped over a glass float and toppled backward again. “Goddamn crote. Should have known it’d be trash like you stealing our fish.”

Koski dropped onto his knees so he could straddle the Croatian’s skinny frame. Ben sat the lantern upright, needing to see, not wanting to see. He knew the man, of course. Town wasn’t so big he hadn’t seen the Novac boys down at the cannery or The Shark Tank. The boys kept to their little band of Croatians and Bulgarians, the two of them new enough to Oregon they still stank of sauerkraut and cherry brandy.

In the stern, Ivan lay with his head cocked up on the gunwale, black trickling all down his temple. The rifle lay beside him, the stock smeared with blood. The Croatian didn’t move.

“Did you bust his head in?” Ben whispered. “Sweet Jesus, we were just going to scare them!”

“Shut up,” Koski whispered. Luka Novac made a little whimper. Koski outweighed him by nearly a hundred pounds, and all of it fish-hauling muscle. The wind and cold had toughened even his skin, every exposed inch of it red and leathery and freckled. In the yellow light, he looked like the devil himself.

Ben took a step closer to Koski. “He looks pretty scared, Arlo.” The moist molasses fume of Koski’s breath settled over the three of them, a tobacco fog. The rain sifted down Ben’s collar in a steady, miserable dampness.

“Should have been scared before he started poaching our fish.”

“We didn’t mean nothing,” Luka blurted. “We were just doing what we had to!”

Koski slapped him hard enough to spin Novac’s face into the net underneath him. The crotes hadn’t had a chance to play out their whole net, and now the tail of it ran out the stern of the boat, tying the craft to the weight they’d dropped someplace upstream. The night had gone silent around them save for the soft movement of the water against shore and craft. Somewhere in the darkness, a fish jumped.

“He’s real scared.” Ben put his hand on Koski’s shoulder. He hadn’t heard that placating tone in his own voice since before his brother had run out in the night. Memory settled onto him so that he could almost smell the stale pipe smoke and sour beer stink coming off Pop’s clothes. Pop never beat Ben like he beat Joe, and Ben never knew why. Was it this voice? This soft, desperate voice that gave away just how weak and soft he really was?

Koski swiped Ben’s hand off his shoulder. “You scared, crote? You real scared?” He drove his fist into the smaller man’s belly. Not too hard, just like he was testing the man.

Novac twisted and bucked, but Koski had him pinned good, his knees pressing down Novac’s hands so he couldn’t fight back. Novac stopped moving. His eyes traveled past Ben and all the way back to his brother’s broken shape. “Please stop,” he whispered.

“You telling us what to do?” Koski punched him again, harder this time, and the air went out of Novac with a whoosh.

In the stern, Ivan still lay motionless and soundless. Ben shifted on his feet, but he couldn’t bring himself to walk the ten feet to the man’s side to see if he still breathed. If he didn’t know the man was dead, he couldn’t get in trouble for it, could he? He’d seen a man hanged just last summer for killing a man. It was an argument, just the kind of stupid shit two old buddies shot back and forth when they were out on a boat. Then the one had picked up a gaff hook and that’s all there was. He’d cried like a baby girl when they brought him to the gallows.

Ben spun around. “Jesus, Koski, we got to get out of here. If somebody catches us, it won’t matter if these crows were stealing from us. They’ll just put us in jail for killing Ivan.”

Koski let out a huff of breath, but he didn’t move.

“Damn it. How am I supposed to marry Alice May if I’m in jail?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Novac said. “Think about your friend here.”

It was the wrong thing to say and Ben knew it, but he moved too slow to stop Koski from grabbing Novac by the throat.

“You don’t know a thing about him,” Koski growled. He shifted his weight and came up slow, hoisting Novac till the little man’s feet dangled above the bottom of the boat. His legs swung across the lantern’s beam of light, casting darkness across the boat, then light, then dark again.

“You goddamn crow. The two of us out here six days a week fishing, our one free day scraping the bottom of the river to keep our drift right. Then you come along and take what’s ours. Rather have seen a chink out here than a goddamn crow.”

He shook the Croatian with every few words. Ben could hear the bones in Novac’s throat creaking and his limbs flopped weakly. His face looked dark.

The sea lions began to bark again, this time so close Ben felt the sound vibrating inside his body. He shook Koski’s arm. “Please,” he begged. Everything felt wrong: the sea lions, the shadows sweeping back and forth across the boat, the rustle of the nets as Novac’s toes stirred them ineffectually.

Koski dropped Novac. “Where the hell are they?”

“They sound right next to us,” Ben said. The sea lions’ cries echoed off the hills and pounded in his skull. His chest ached with the power of the sound.

Novac’s barking cough was nearly as loud as the sea lions. He pulled himself onto the heap of nets, clasping his throat and gasping.

“I can’t see anything,” Ben said.

Koski reached for the lantern and played the light over the water off the port side. No rocks, no logs, no sea lions. The animals’ calls echoed all around them, a stranger and crueler version of the sounds coming out of Novac’s throat.

“I see something,” Koski said. It wasn’t his voice at all, but some tiny, gutted version of it. Ben had seen Koski face down a black bear and a hurricane without losing his calm. Unflappable, ready for anything, tough. Up until tonight, Koski was everything Ben ever wanted to be in this world.

“What do you see?” Ben wiped his palm on his pants and switched the hand holding the lantern. He suddenly wanted nothing as much as a glass of whiskey.

Koski stayed silent. In the stern, Ivan Novac made the tiniest of moans.

“What do you see?” Ben repeated.

Koski raised his arm and pointed. The roaring and barking grew louder, came from all around them, no place and every place all at the same time. There must have been dozens of sea lions, maybe a hundred sea lions, their voices hollow and mean.

“Ivan?” Novac whispered, his voice filled with gravel. He crawled forward a few feet. “Are you okay?”

“Let’s just get out of here,” Ben said, but Koski stayed frozen, staring into the darkness where there was nothing to see. Ben pulled on Koski’s waist and the big man stumbled backward a few feet. “Come on,” Ben said. “Come on.”

He got Koski back into their own boat and then went back for the rifle, which still lay, blood-streaked and sticky, in the stern of the Croatian’s boat. Luka held his brother in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said. Luka did not look up at him. In the light of the failing lantern, Ben could see the bruises on Luka’s face and throat, ugly, vicious things.

Ben picked up the rifle, its iron cold as the river itself. Ivan’s blood had clotted on the stock and the black goo reminded Ben of the blood that had seeped out of his brother’s nose the night Pop had broken it. He had no idea how he was going to clean all that dark and nasty off Koski’s rifle. The sounds of the sea lions grew louder.

“Look,” Luka croaked. He pointed off the side of the boat, toward Washington, where the darkness seemed deeper and vaster.

Ben peered out there. Besides the sea lions, nothing moved or sounded. Fish did not jump. Ben could hear his own heart in his ears, pounding hard, as if it could free itself from his chest and swim away to the sea.

Then he saw it: a face rising from the water. The great dark eyes gleamed back at him, catching all the light of that one little lantern and reflecting it back at Ben. What did those eyes see in him? What had they seen before? He felt the soft weakness that had followed him his whole life and knew there was no place clean or pure, not in all this world, because underneath the violence and the whiskey and the petty arguments, there was only this, this seeing and being seen, this one pair of burning eyes in a face he could never, would never describe. The barking rose around him, louder and louder as the beasts closed in.

“It’s a sea lion,” Novac said.

The sounds began to fade as the pod passed them by.

“Just a sea lion,” Ben echoed. He shook his head and blinked, but the afterimage of those two eyes burned on in the backs of his eyes.

In the darkness, something splashed. He threw the rifle after it and then got back into the Kultaseni. He needed a drink.

The post PseudoPod 533: ARTEMIS RISING 3: Drift Right appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Dagny Paul, Victoria Winnick, Rachael K. Jones and Karen Bovenmyer
• Narrators : Tatiana Grey, Laurice White, Jen Roper and Jen R. Albert
• Host : Dani Daly
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Ashley Mackenzie
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 532: Flash On The Borderlands XXXVI: Artemis Rising Showcase is a PseudoPod original.

“When First He Laid Eyes” first appeared in Fireside, February 2016. Sometimes what is scariest in the world is what we normalize. This story is for the women who have lived this reality.

“Eyes That See Everything” is a Pseudopod original.

“Standard Procedure” first appeared in the anthology For Mortal Things Unsung.

“Us, Here” is a PseudoPod original. “A while ago I ran a roleplaying event, tabletop style, that explored a character’s dysphoria and body-anxiety through this kind of “meatscape” environment, basically exaggerating and inflating all of the points of greatest unease, making the internal external. I’d been thinking of incorporating that idea into a more discrete story for a while, and this seemed like a great time to do that”.

“Nothin’ ever seems to turn out right/I don’t wanna grow up” Tom Waits

When First He Laid Eyes by Rachael K. Jones

A girl’s first stalker is always a cause for celebration. She will phone her mother with the big news and spill the story in a tangle of words, voice raw with emotion.

Her mother’s heart will swell at her daughter’s achievement. Every mother hopes for this day. A stalker means beauty. A stalker means desire. It is always a compliment for a girl to become a man’s intended. Her mother will fuss over the details: How did they meet? What was he like? When will they see each other again?

These are hard questions for a girl. If her stalker is a proper stalker, if he observes his social graces, his intended cannot pinpoint the enchanted instant when he first chose her, the moment their lives entangled. She thinks it might have been on a dark thirty run at Cape Canaveral, when the humid Southern air pressed hot and moist around her like a stranger’s breath. She remembers red Mars, hazy through the Spanish moss on the oaks. She fancied she could run there if she continued down the trail through the park, past the beach, and on into the Everglades, into an alien world. Her stalker must have spotted her on that route as he walked home from the bar that sold half-price beer to men in uniform. She probably waved to him, because a girl is friendly to everyone. A girl always smiles. A girl ignores the dread in her stomach when a man’s gaze impales her like a needle rammed through a butterfly’s thorax.

Dread is traditional, of course. It is only natural that a girl should feel nervous about her first stalker’s intentions, just as it is traditional for him to weave secret plans for their future together. Whether he intends a courtly affair which worships at a distance, or if he intends to close in on her gradually like a satellite on a collapsing orbit, or whisk her away in his car, or bring their relationship to its final consummation on the cold asphalt of an alley–well, whatever he intends, it would be gauche to spoil the surprise, which he has worked so hard to prepare. His intended should never know precisely what he intends.

A girl’s friends will celebrate with her when they hear the news. Some have had their first stalkers already. They will reminisce about their first time, how they met, what he planned, how it ended. The other girls, the stalkerless ones, will listen carefully to the wisdom of their peers, hoping to glean useful tips for attracting their own admirers. A girl will have to describe her outfit over and over. They want to know everything: the fabric, the cut, her accessories, her makeup. Everyone knows that stalkers prefer a certain look. They almost disbelieve her when she describes camouflage-print sweats, the ones that were supposed to melt her into the trees. A girl is lucky to have done so little and yet attracted him anyway.

No one compares to a girl’s first stalker. No one holds quite the same place in her heart. Others may address her as “Ma’am” or “Ms. Martinez”, “sister” or “Anya” or “Darling”. People call a girl a lot of things, but no one else would dare call her “girl”. That right is reserved for her stalker.

A stalker has the right because no one else is so dependable. Not her boyfriend, whose pride that his girl is intended sours to jealousy over the nonstop attentions. Not her friends, who will not forgive her sudden reticence, her avoidance of public spaces. Not her subordinates, who resent her for her tardiness when she takes labyrinthine routes to work. Not her mother, who calls her flighty when in rapid succession she takes up Portuguese, then astronomy, then sailing, then self-defense. Her stalker is always there for her. In the morning, she watches for him in all the usual haunts on her running route. He will appear, steady as the sun. In the evening, she spots his Ford Escort three cars back on the drive home. At the grocery store, she senses him staring through the gaps between tomato cans. He will watch while pretending not to, and she will do the same. They have come to rely upon each other, call and answer, strophe and antistrophe.

And if distance comes between them, what then? If one morning she fails to appear on the trail for their usual tryst? If he spots a stranger parking her car at an office that is not hers? If the curtains change color in her kitchen window, and a “For Rent” sign appears? If he finds her bedroom strewn with star charts and sea maps, and a suitcase missing? If, from their beach, he watches a sailboat launch into an ocean stained battle-red in the sunset, all his secret intentions swept away in a roar of breakers, a diminishing trail of broken surf?

The truth is this: a woman will attempt an escape. She will throw her weight against the ropes to turn the sails. She will lift the sextant and sight Mars ascendant in Libra, and correct her course against the tyrannical stars. She will watch the continent recede at the aft, while a shore approaches, remote but clear, on the fore.

Only when she has landed will she think of her stalker, when at the dock the locals greet her in a foreign tongue and she finds herself watching for him among their faces, throat tight, heart a-thumping. That is when she will realize that a stalker’s gaze is no needle. It is a hook, and his hand patient, and his line is long, and just when a girl forgets him, he will tug, and she will feel the keen red star pull on her like a baleful eye that will not blink, and remember that she is intended, and what he intends for her is fear.

A girl never forgets her first stalker. This, too, is traditional.

Eyes that See Everything By Karen Bovenmyer

“Back off, retard.” Jeanne and Stacey block the hallway to the bathroom, arms outstretched, hands knotted together so they make a human chain. “This toilet’s for normal kids.”

Max is angry. I feel him heavy in my pocket, but I don’t want to get in a fight and pee my pants, so I pick Luke instead. I pull him out and his feet get caught so I have to untangle him while they taunt me.

I hold him up so they can hear him. “Excuse me,” he says, in his most even voice, “I need to use the bathroom.” Luke is the most level-headed—thick chestnut hair, denim jeans—non-threatening, like somebody’s brother on TV.

“Get. Lost. New. Kid.” Jeanne nods her blonde head, as if dotting the period after each word. Her movements jerk Stacey forward, who laughs, blue eyes narrow and mean, dark curls bouncing.

Oi! She is vicious, no? ‘Ette talks in the way dolls talk only to me. Her father is in love with another woman. Next week he goes, she will feel so badly, yes. I don’t want to feel sorry for Stacey. My dad works too much, but he is going to be a good dad until he has a heart attack thirty years from now. ‘Ette told me so. I worry about it sometimes, but thirty years is a long time. ‘Ette says I’ll be grown up and out of prison five years and able to take care of myself by then.

“Excuse me,” Luke tries again. “Class starts soon. We will all be late.”

“Not gonna happen.” Jeanne walks forward. I grip Max—his breathless mumbles haven’t stopped—push her down and stomp on her face but you’ll need to elbow the other one show them right for being bitches do it now while they are close and surprised and they won’t be able to stop you before they are both bleeding—

Do not listen, ‘Ette says. What trouble he is, non? Be nice, remember Jeanne’s time is close to gone. ‘Ette knows three years from now Jeanne will die in a car crash.

“What is wrong with you?” Jeanne’s face is so close I can see the broccoli stuck in her pointless braces. She shoves me hard. A little pee comes out. She grabs for Luke and I try to yank him back, but she twists my wrist until I let go.

Don’t worry. We will be all right. Luke’s voice is distant and afraid. I lift both fists, Max in one, ‘Ette in the other. Everything about Max is hard and stark—pale skin, black hair, shiny shoes. He has thick eyebrows and a deep frown. ‘Ette’s layered skirts float around her like a tissue ghost, her long white hair in fluffy waves. Her features are too large for her face—huge eyes that see everything under a high forehead.

“Oh!” Stacey’s breath comes out in a gasp. ‘Ette is that beautiful.

“There is no need for this, mon ami,” ‘Ette says. “Life is too short.”

Jeanne turns Luke upside down and laughs. “Is that supposed to be an accent? God! You are such a weirdo.” She thrusts Luke in my face, bobbing him up and down. “I’m a super freak baby who plays with dolls.”

Stay calm. There is panic in Luke’s voice. Not Max.

—hit her in the soft place in her belly and then push her and take the pencil out of your pocket and ram it through her eye—

“Non, non. Put ‘im down gently, s’il vous plaît?” ‘Ette is upset too—more French creeps in. If ‘Ette loses it, we will only have Max, and that will not end well. Max can change even ‘Ette’s futures.

Jeanne grabs Luke’s head and twists. He screams, but only I can hear it.

“I want this one,” Stacey says and she lunges forward, her fingertips tangling in ‘Ette’s hair. I hold on to her, but Stacey kicks me hard in the stomach, pushing me back, pulling ‘Ette from my grasp. Sharp pain, and a hot flood of pee rushes down my legs.

“She wet herself!” Jeanne laughs, then pulls Luke’s head so viciously it tears from his body. His scream stops suddenly.

Non! ‘Ette’s voice is tight with pain. She dangles from Stacey’s fingers as the other girl looks from her friend to me, her mouth open. I will never forget her expression.

Max’s voice continues to howl in my head—the pencil right now while she is laughing—and Luke is silent and ‘Ette is crying and I have an empty hand now so I pull the pencil out of my back pocket and jump on Jeanne, hitting her in the mouth with Max. The pencil comes up, then down at her face.

There’s a soft pop and the yellow spike of wood is sticking out from her eye as she screams and drops Luke’s body. Stacey drops ‘Ette and runs away down the hall, yelling, yelling.

I pick up Luke and ‘Ette and step over Jeanne, who is rolling on the floor, clutching her face, and lean against the wall, sliding down until I’m sitting in my own puddle. Very bad, my little cabbage. ‘Ette says. Now we will go to another school. We are running out of schools.  I hold Luke’s parts and watch Jeanne. But you have saved her, oui. ‘Ette tells me that the boy who was going to ask Jeanne out, the boy whose car she died in, is creeped out by her staring glass eye and never asks her out, so she gets to live, and her braces aren’t so pointless after all. ‘Ette’s whispering voice tells me that Stacey’s father decides not to leave his wife and child just then, after such a trauma, and the other woman gets angry and leaves him instead, so he stays with Stacey’s mom. But I’m barely listening. Luke is broken, and I am broken, and like Jeanne’s eye, I will never, never be normal.

“Bon rien,” I whisper over Jeanne’s crying. It’s nothing.

Standard Procedure by Dagny Paul

When you turn twelve, they take out your teeth. Before that they’re bendy and kind of see-through and can’t do much damage, but after they get hard and brittle. And sharp.

Today is my twelfth birthday.

Mama helps me get ready, using the special soap the doctor gave us. She says that it’s important, that it’s an exciting time in my life because it means I’ll be a woman now, but she doesn’t look at me. She smiles at the floor instead and says that she’s proud of me and that daddy is proud of me, too.

In the last year, I’ve touched my teeth a few times, even though they say you’re not supposed to. They say we shouldn’t play with them because they could hurt us, but they also say we shouldn’t because girls shouldn’t be touching themselves there. I’m not sure which one is right.

My teeth are thin and smooth and getting sharper. I don’t tell anyone, but they feel warm and tingly when I let them open up, yawning, and rub the undersides with my fingers. It reminds me of the way a kitten I once had would open and stretch his claws when I touched the little jellybean pads of his paws.

I like to sit in the bathroom with the door locked, when everything in the house is quiet, and practice retracting them and pushing them back out. When I pull them all the way in, they feel like hard little nubs under my skin. It’s nice to have something I can control, that makes my blood race through my body in happy waves.

I can’t tell Mama because she’s still looking at the floor and smiling at the carpet. I wonder if she wanted to keep her teeth, too.

She pulls a cotton dress over my head. It slips over me easily because I don’t have breasts yet, but Mama says that they’re coming soon, and even if they don’t, getting rid of the teeth is the most important thing. Men will marry a woman without breasts, she says. They will not marry a woman who still has teeth.

I’m not wearing underwear and it feels weird, but Mama runs her hand through my hair and whispers to the floor not to worry, it will be all right.

Daddy doesn’t come, because Mama says he is busy, so she drives me to the doctor. On the way, I practice retracting my teeth and pushing them back out without using my hands. It feels good.

The receptionist tells us to wait in the straight-backed chairs across from her desk. She doesn’t look at me, either. Mama reads a magazine and I look around. There are no windows, but there are posters of smiling girls in bright colors.

I pull my teeth in. I push them out. It’s nice.

The doctor opens the office door and calls us back. He is old and wrinkly and white-haired, and he is the first person to look at me all day. He smiles. I try to smile back.

We walk down the hall to a little room with a table with stirrups at the bottom, and the doctor tells me to lie down on it. Mama has her hand on my shoulder, and it’s shaking a little, but she gives me a push and I climb on the table.

The stirrups have socks that hide the metal underneath. The socks have little happy faces on them, yellow circles with black dots for eyes, a curved black line for a mouth. The doctor tells me to take my shoes off, and when I ask him about the socks he gives me that awful smile again and tells me it’s so my tootsies don’t get cold.

I can hear Mama breathing. She is sitting in a corner on a small, straight chair, and she isn’t looking at the floor anymore. She’s looking at the silver tray of instruments next to the doctor’s stool.

He sits and rolls toward me and tells me to pull my dress up to my waist and put my feet on the smiley-face socks and scoot my butt to the edge of the table. “Scoot, scoot, scoot,” he chants. I do.

He takes a tool from the tray and puts it between my legs. I feel a shock of cold and my teeth come out without me wanting them to. It doesn’t feel good, the way it does when I do it myself, and I am scared.

Mama’s breath whistles through her nostrils.

The doctor doesn’t notice, or maybe he pretends not to. He pokes at my teeth, making little humming noises, and then his head pops up from between my knees and he smiles at me again. He’s still trying to look friendly.

I am cold. My flesh is covered in goosebumps and I want off this table. My teeth feel as angry and naked and exposed as the rest of me.

The doctor turns to his instruments and picks up what looks like a pair of tweezers, long and clean and sharp. Mama says she has to go to the bathroom, and she bumps her shoulder hard on the door on her way out.

The doctor puts his gloved hand between my legs again. I can tell he’s being careful, and his smile falters. His lip curls a little, the way Mama’s did when she found a dead mouse on the doorstep and had to use a plastic bag to pick it up.

He raises the tweezers. “Are you ready?” he asks.

I’m not. I nod.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” he says, and his smile is back, Santa Claus and favorite grandfather. He looks at me for a long time. He wants me to believe him.

I want to believe him, too. But I don’t.

Us, Here by Victoria Winnick

We are crawling. The space around us is tight and hot, and beads of muggy condensation run down our face– positive feedback ramping up the heat and the wet until the difference between breath and sweat is lost. Finally we’re out, gulping air and lying sweatslick on flesh that heaves beneath us, skin sticking on skin and apart as we breathe, and the ground breathes beneath us.

There’s a pillar in the distance. Thick, veined, prominent; never straight, never upright. It sags against the horizon, its bulk imposing even through the blood haze and the forest of curling spires that look like smoke, or a tangle of wire, or the nest of a bird that built only with ash. Our eyes drift to the shivering mass of it before our mind can process, and the meat below swells under our body, umbrage and shame and revulsion driving it up and around and over, trying to swat us away, a deep and ancient reflex. We sprawl, buffetted, not injured but not unhurt, and try to give the imposing, wilting tower the blessing of our ignorance.

It’s always the same dream.

We close our eyes and we turn, facing the opposite direction, willing the spire out of our minds, but it’s there again on the horizon. Smooth flesh beneath our feet grows rough with tiny pinprick spires beginning to rise here, too. They grow and climb, and perhaps in time there will be another forest of ash on our horizon. Spires climb from flesh in whatever places it remains unpierced, remains unburned, and they will always. We try to run. Eyes pressed shut and meat heaving apart from meat, we tilt to run, heedless, but the first step finds void, and our stomach thuds against our throat as we feel the beginning of the fall.

My leg jerks, and I spasm awake. I feel my hand slip out from underneath the skin at the small of Sam’s back, the junction in my palm snapping loose and severing my connection to her dream. I can’t see it anymore — the fleshscape of her dream, her meat draped in sinew and quivering, the spires, and the ever-present tower above it all. There’s a thick and heavy darkness in our room, but I can feel her shaking, inches away, as the dream begins to overtake her. I’ll never know how she managed to hold on before we found a way to share the strain of it.

I squirm forward and wrap my left arm around her shoulders, pressing her back against my chest. She almost elbows me when she feels my touch. If she were awake, we’d do our ritual exchange of apology and assurance-that-apology-is-unnecessary. And it is, truly. I know just how much it means that Sam lets me this close in the first place. I’d have to be a stone-cold bitch to hold a reflex against her.

I wriggle in close, my lips brushing the nape of her neck, and whisper; “Hold on, baby. I’m coming back.” Reaching down with my free hand, I feel for the part in her skin at the small of her back. It’s raised a little from the flesh beneath, like the hem of a shirt. I curl my fingers around it and lift, hearing the soft, wet sounds of flesh spreading apart from itself, and I slip my hand inside and press down. In my palm I can feel the crests of her spine pressing back against me, and… there. There, between bones, the little metal contacts, mated to the ones in my palm, clicking together with magnets like an expensive laptop and its power cord. It’s not even a second before her body begins to still, her breathing begins to slow, and I am we and we are…

In the dream.

The tower has risen, sturdy for the briefest of moments. This time, instead of trying to look away, we look up. The part of we that is still I whispers, “Look up!” and we agree. Above is other flesh. Not our flesh — flesh that is smooth and uncomplicated, distant as if seen through frosted glass, forming the sky of the world we live in every night. It is flesh that has come to us from places other than our body. Flesh that lives in our mind, set there by light and sound and thought.

We feel a yearning, we fight the yearning, for the impossible flesh that makes us love and hate our own. Our gaze falls back to the meat around us, the meat that is ours, the meat that aches and bleeds and shrivels.  All that we can do is try to live here. Here, where the spires grow up and pierce our feet. Here, where the tower menaces with its shrieking need to be ignored. Here, where disgust will vomit us and doubt will squeeze us and desire will bleed us and we will know every grisly inch. Here, because this is our flesh, and it is the only dream we’ll ever have.

“You are wearing a text. The lines

Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need

Any other literature than this poetry of mud

And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily”

Crazy Weather, John Ashbery

 

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