DP FICTION #102A: “On a Smoke-Blackened Wing” by Joanne Rixon

edited by Ziv Wities

WE

The airplane is gray and gleaming, rising off the ground into the fog of early morning like a magic trick, obscured and then revealed, impossible. The engines roar too loudly, like they will tear down the sky. They roar and roar, and then—

The transformation. The wind under the airplane’s wings buckles as the wings buckle, shake, separate into a beating of hundreds of wings. Out of the fog we come. This time, this first time, we are geese: black-brown wings and furious hearts. We fly awkwardly, at odds with the turbulence; we are newborn, but already the flock is forming as our instincts awaken in the air and we orient ourselves not against the ground or the stars but against each other.

***

Avie

I’ve always loved birds. When I was five I asked my dad for a bird feeder so I could see birds out my window when I was sitting at my desk doing remote school, but he just handed me his phone and said, “you know how to look up videos.” I do know, but bird videos aren’t as cool as having my very own bird friends that came up to my window to say hello. And anyway, I already had a tablet when I was five because kindergarten went on remote school after the wildfire that burned down the school building and made us have to drive in the middle of the night to my uncle’s house and sleep on his floor for two whole weeks, so I just used my tablet.

I asked a bunch of times for a bird feeder and my dad said, no, we didn’t have any place to put a bird feeder, and then even when we moved to the good wildfire refugee housing he still said no, the birds didn’t need me to rescue them from the wildfires. But then on my birthday when I turned seven my dad got me a present and it was a bird feeder! It’s a special kind with different colored windows just like our apartment building, so you can put different seeds in it so each bird can eat their favorite food. Blue jays eat peanuts! But other birds, like sparrows, only like small seeds, you can tell because their beaks are so tiny!

My birthday was two days ago and this morning I hung the feeder out on the branch of the magnolia tree with some wire, and my dad helped, and almost right away birds started coming! I saw a blue jay and some tiny ones with black on their heads and a bright yellow one that was a goldfinch! My birthday present from my aunt and uncle was an app for my tablet where I can take a picture of a bird and it tells me its name and all its facts like what color its eggs are. I think they talked to my dad so they knew I was going to have birds! This is definitely my best birthday ever.

***

WE

The next time, we are grackles. Bodies the size of a clenched fist, sleek slick ink-black feathers, pale eyes that gleam like pearls in midnight moonlight. We flock at first in the shape of the plane we used to be, remembering how it felt to be bolts and panels, wires and combustion. Each passenger, now winged, remains in our assigned seats for an instant before our bodies realize the seats, too, are black birds and we are all lifted on the currents of air that have been disturbed by our transformations.

We fly.

***

Avie

My bird app has lots of sections, like one section for different kinds of birds that perch on branches, and a section for owls and hawks, and a section for birds that live on the beach. There’s a lot that don’t live in California where I can ever see them. They live in places where I could never even go, like New York or the Amazon Rainforest or an island in the ocean.

The saddest birds are the ones with a little star beside the place they live in. The star means they used to live there but they don’t live there anymore because they’re completely dead. Maybe humans hunted them and ate them until they were all gone. Or maybe they got all burned up in a wildfire, like my mom in her car, or maybe they flew away to the moon!

That’s a joke, birds don’t live on the moon. I know that because I’m in second grade now and we saw a movie of astronauts and robots on the moon and other places like Mars where there aren’t any birds. During the movie I looked out my window and I saw a pretty bird I never saw before that was soft and gray and gold-pink. It was looking right at me! I tried telling it about the moon but it flew away.

***

WE

The drone that becomes a Mexican sheartail was manufactured in Mexico. The sheartail darts—we flex our wings, our speed like a flash of light off the water.

The American-made drone becomes a red-throated loon. Another becomes an ivory-billed woodpecker. We goshawk, we fish eagle. We pelican.

We shimmer and disperse, we coalesce. We are becoming powerful.

***

Avie

I can’t decide which kind of bird is my favorite. Hummingbirds are really, really pretty. I saw one this morning perching on the tip of the magnolia branch right beside my window! It was small and shiny just like I remember and it had a bright red patch on its throat and it looked right at me with one eye and then the other eye! I think hummingbirds are my favorite.

My bird app says these kind of hummingbirds are star-birds: “Allen’s hummingbirds are extinct in the wild.” I’m getting really good at reading because my tablet came with an app that tells you what words mean and how to say them out loud. I wanted to ask my dad why my bird app says my hummingbirds are extinct, which means all completely dead, when there was one in the magnolia tree, but he had his work headphones on and his boss gets annoyed if he misses answering a customer. So I didn’t have anyone to ask. Maybe my tablet is wrong and the bird in the tree was a different kind of hummingbird. The picture I took was sort of blurry.

***

WE

For many days the planes and drones cower on the ground. We circle the globe on the high currents, gaining flock members in ones and twos, from wind-blown balloons and children’s toys. In our bones we remember the sky full of our wingbeats, our shadows darkening the ground like a storm system from mountain to mountain.

Nectar-eaters and animal-eaters dispute approaches—there we argue, here we converse, there we shriek. Our flock contains contradictions, but we parliament, and eventually we settle under the leaves and soften our voices. Soon, the airplanes take wing and we wait, using the night-hunters’ stillnesses, until the sky is filled with thousands of machines. Now we rise.

***

Avie

The funniest thing ever happened today! I was heating up my breakfast roll in the microwave and outside the window I saw so many birds and they were all walking on the ground. They were all sizes, with long ostrich legs and short duck legs and black and brown and orange and blue… some of them were big fat gray birds with funny faces. Those ones I didn’t even need my bird app to find their names because I already knew they were dodos!

I wanted to tell my dad that there were dodos in the courtyard, but he had his headphones on and was talking in his weird customer voice, so I just waved at his boss through the webcam and I went and got my tablet so I could look up the facts for the birds who were visiting me.

Some of them I couldn’t get good pictures of because there were so many of them. It was birds all over, on the steps up to the apartments across from us, and on top of Ms. Holloway’s car that she has a permit for because Nika uses a wheelchair, and a whole crowd on the grass in the middle and everywhere!

The ones whose names I could find were all star-birds. Every single one! Except they kept moving around a lot so maybe I missed a lot of them that weren’t. Most of them were in the section of the app on birds that can’t fly at all, which I didn’t know there were so many! And then my dad realized I was late for video school and he made me close my bird app and log on.

***

WE

Now we are many. Now we are no longer lonely. Do the ground-dwellers know what we are becoming? They send fighter jets after us that scream through the sky like they are about to die and are so, so frightened of the end of the world.

Instead of an end, we offer them a beginning. The jets become swans, and the pilots also become swans. The bullets from their powerful guns take flight and become cliff swallows and storm petrels and Carolina parakeets.

We whistle and screech and sing a laughing racket like every sound at once. We are all one flock, tumbling through the sky like nothing at all can hurt us.

***

Avie

In school the kids in my class were talking about how the airplanes disappeared and no one knows why or how or if they’ll ever come back. Austen was crying and Deshawn told her she wasn’t allowed to cry because it was his cousins who disappeared off a plane, not hers, and then T’resa said she thought it would be fun to be a bird, and then Austen screamed at her to shut up and that it wasn’t true that anyone turned into a bird because that was impossible. Then our teacher muted us all and said he was turning school off for the day.

My dad was still working and I’m not supposed to interrupt him even if I’m lonely because he has to work hard so some day we can move out of refugee housing and I can have a bedroom. I wanted to ask him whether people could turn into birds and it made me mad that I couldn’t! I know Austen was really mad about it and so was Deshawn even if he didn’t scream at anyone, and I didn’t say so because Austen was crying, but I’m like T’resa. Birds have more friends than just video school friends that get turned off when your teacher is mad that someone yelled! Birds have flocks which means they have friends all the time.

I went outside and waved to all the pretty birds perched on the roof of our apartment building—they had such pretty tails, like black and white arrows and swooping green ribbons. I’m sure they were star-birds, even if I didn’t know their names because I didn’t have my tablet with me. They didn’t wave back but they bobbed their heads and whistled hello, and that made me feel a little better.

I practiced jumping down the stairs for a little while, to see what might happen. I was going to try to climb up the railing and jump off there, to see if that would be high enough to turn into a bird, but Nika’s mom stuck her head out the window and said I couldn’t.

***

WE

By the time the ground-dwellers and their metals stop flying altogether we are hundreds of hundreds of millions. We are an ocean of wings beneath the bright sun. We encircle the world like the water-ocean and our wings outmatch the cold, wet waves.

With the sky closed to them, the ground-dwellers live slower. So many are angry about reaching the limits of their power, but each bullet they fire only increases our numbers.

Those who are not angry are quieter. Some of them come to us, and we beauty them, gently. We invite them to sing.

***

Avie

This morning the pretty gray and gold-pink birds outside my window didn’t fly away even when I put my hand on the glass. I like them. They’re nice.

I told my dad I was going outside to play and he said I could go by myself if I promised to stay in the courtyard because he was busy working and Nika and her mom were outside. Even though Nika’s a lot older than me she still plays with me sometimes, but her mom said not today because they were going to the doctor to check on Nika’s lungs, which got smoke inhalation during the fire that got their house.

Even though I promised my dad I would stay in the courtyard, I went around the corner and down the street and up the hill and climbed up the big rock at the top of the hill where I like to sit sometimes because you can see the tops of the roofs of the buildings where all us wildfire refugees live. I thought about practicing jumping off the rock, but I didn’t.

I felt kind of sad and mad and it was cloudy like a sore throat. Like there was a wildfire burning far away but still close enough to smell the ash from all the dead trees and dead squirrels and dead deer and dead moms that got all burned up in their cars. But then I heard birds singing, the soft sound of the gray-gold-pink birds my app says are passenger pigeons even though that’s impossible because they’re extinct. I looked around and saw birds landing in the bushes, in the trees all around me, in the grass. A pigeon landed on the rock beside my foot and cocked her head at me. Her eyes were black with a pink ring on the edges like she’d been crying, and it made me feel better to know someone else felt the way I do.

There were other kinds of birds in the flock, some small brown seagulls and herons with long legs like the chopsticks in takeout teriyaki, and robins and blue jays and orioles, who aren’t star-birds, and a whole cluster of bright beautiful extinct hummingbirds that swooped and darted and then hovered all in the air above me.

At a signal I couldn’t hear, the flock launched themselves back into the sky. Their wings blew the hair back from my face and I knew they wanted me to fly up into the sky with them. I couldn’t hear the signal to go, but in a way, I could hear it. I could feel it in my body lifting me up. But I didn’t know how to do it.

The pigeon and the hummingbirds were still there and they looked at me and I looked at them and then down at my hands and my arms which were turning iridescent green-black like a hummingbird and then I thought, maybe my mom could be like a star-bird, like a hummingbird, completely dead but then not dead at all, and when I jumped off the rock I spread my wings.


© 2023 by Joanne Rixon

2548 words

Joanne Rixon lives in the shadow of an active volcano with a rescue chihuahua named after a dinosaur. They are a member of STEW and the Dreamcrashers, and are an organizer with the North Seattle Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup. Their poetry has appeared in GlitterShip, their book reviews in the Seattle Times and the Cascadia Subduction Zone Literary Quarterly, and their short speculative fiction in venues including TerraformFireside, and Lady’s Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.


Joanne Rixon’s fiction has previous appeared in Diabolical Plots, with “The Cliff of Hands”. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #101B: “The Dryad and the Carpenter” by Samara Auman

edited by David Steffen

Mortals slice us dryads open to count the layers of our lives; it is easier than listening to our stories. They slide their fingers over our rings, thinking that our texture, our shifts in coloration would bring them understanding of their own lives. In their minds, we exist to bring poetry to their sighs and serve as metaphors for longevity.

I ignored that wisdom, that tingling fear in my roots, for the first six years that the carpenter and his family lived beneath my boughs. I watched as his daughter sprouted into childhood. I celebrated when his wife was pregnant once again. They spent their days tasting the honeyed air from beneath my gray canopy and sighing their contentment. Through all these years, I whispered my stories to them and believed they loved me.

Even though I told them my tales, they apparently heard nothing but nature’s silence. How do I know? Four seasons ago as I was luxuriating in the mingling pollens of the spring, he built his workshop.

***

Though my roots have sunk into this shallow soil, I stretch back centuries. I once lived, gray-green and shining, beneath a Mediterranean sun. Athena brushed her love onto me, fingertips to my cheek. Her gray gaze met mine—her lips met mine. I wept to be so anointed. She left, of course; leave she must, and my love was bounded and strengthened by that “must.” I, merely somewhat immortal, did what I must and became something other for her sake. My olive once-skin pressed upon olive bark, and together the tree-and-me became merely me.

I rose with the years. I gifted mortals my seeds, my art. They pressed the olives that I bore and wore the oils as a badge of honor. But, for all the olives that they took, many more spread beneath me and bore me wild-running-growing children. Hardy and burled and lovely-to-me, they raced along the wilderness like the wine-god’s lovers.

Though mortals used my flesh, my fruit, the experiences stored within me, I was beloved. Veneration fed me. My gifts were truly gifts—given graciously and not stolen.

***

But in this life, I was forced to reckon with tools: his axe, his chainsaw, and the whine of the sander. In the tang of sawdust, I tasted many powdered lives.

The carpenter clipped my limbs yearly. He carved away my wildness. My olives no longer ripened for me but for him. They burst achingly upon his tongue instead of sinking gracefully to the earth where they could grow.

Nonetheless, I watched wistfully as his daughter ran shrieking across the lawn, tossing her sandals in the air. I felt the warmth of his wife’s hand as she placed it against me, bracing herself as her daughter sowed childhood’s chaos in her garden. But their love did not sear, gasp, or command like Athena’s anointment. With Athena’s love (brief, beautiful), I was. With theirs, I was not. I was only an object at the border of their lives.

To them, the crows and sparrows among my limbs meant nothing. The winds that played among my branches? Nothing. The sun motes pressing like gentle lips against my leafy face? Nothing.

***

In the workshop, the plates, platters, and cutting boards caught the dead reflection of sunlight in their polished wood as they sat in its windows. The shavings of sandpaper against grain blew everywhere—the fragrance of life sloughed off.

I watched what he did with his host of iron tools.

By day he carted our carcasses in his coughing truck. He’d pile us, lay us out to dry. He stole our bones to create skeletons for his beds and tables.

At night, he was more intimate. He spent the purpled light of his dusks stroking grains, twisting wood in the waning light, looking for a gleam of beauty that he could capture and remake as his own.

***

I feared that I would end my life as a bowl.

The carpenter spun a tale for his wife, his voice as soft as moonlight on my boughs. In his story, the beautiful old olive tree, foreign to this soil but so entrenched in their lives, would one day be cut down, severed. He would shape it into mementos for their children so that they’d remember the amber-hued afternoons and the taste of honeyed spring.

She protested. Softly. His voice a counterpoint, their conversation now in well-worn harmony. He told her that he knew my fading silver presaged my falling.

One hand on the roundness of her stomach and one hand in his, she acquiesced, and I whimpered.

***

Though dryads can’t sleep, I dreamt nonetheless. Even Athena’s kisses couldn’t shield me. In this dream, the chainsaw started. The buzz. Its engine screamed—and then choked on the gutter-stutter of its mechanical song. I stopped. Shards of me lay around my stump. His chainsaw shredded me into dust. I felt myself in every puff of it. I became powder.

Clenched in the claws of nightmare, I feared that my only chance at life (pale and echoless) would be in being made paper. I knew how humans kept their stories. They masticated our lives in their machine-jaws. All my days collecting sunbeams, exploring the miraculous depths beneath the tips of my roots—

All would be pulp.

My best hope would be to be mashed into paper for someone else’s story.

What agony can surpass the need to scream, only to find your teeth and tongue clattering out another’s words?

***

But dreams are merely dreams. Though snakes burrowed beneath my roots, I was not some python-wearing prophetess. My dreams did not bind me.

One afternoon as the daughter climbed my branches, I pushed against the strength of my trunk, attempting escape. As a young dryad, I would slip from trunk to trunk, taking on the flexibility of the willow or the melancholy of the laurel as it suited me. I would slip from me to different me, delighted at how my soul could remain even as my shape altered.

But then love set its boundaries; I shifted no more and settled into one me. No more lithe play.

Now I hoped that I could exist outside these old boundaries, this aging love. Even if it meant leaving these roots, these gray leaves behind.

I pushed hard. The resistance was as certain as Athena’s lips sealing me into this wood. The insistence of the daughter’s scrambling feet against my bark was nothing compared to that resistance. I couldn’t separate myself from this tree—for it was me.

***

The crickets sang their sad-songs and the frogs bellowed out their summer poems. The carpenter worried as his wife’s pregnancy continued toward its joyful fruition. I knew that I had time before his thoughts turned to preserving memories; he was still creating them.

But, bound as I was, I couldn’t act. I couldn’t craft wooden horses to storm his home (crafting wooden creatures seemed a bit counterproductive, I must admit). I couldn’t reach out a hand to feed Cerberus his favorite cakes to coax him into devouring the carpenter. Without a mortal body, what action could I take?

Perhaps none.

But. Even though the humans would not hear me, I could still communicate. I dove deep into the thrumming of life around me. I listened and planned, awash in its murmurs.

***

“Daddy, look!”

Out of the house the daughter ran, finger trembling with excitement as she pointed at his workshop.

Steaming mugs in hand, both the carpenter and his wife stepped off their porch. The daughter ran to them, laughing, buoyant.

The workshop was bound, completely encased in spiders’ webs. My friends had woven it into obsolescence.

Everything from the roof to the foundation was covered. Even the windows were obscured. The flat light of the late summer’s morning scattered against it. No mere silver glinting of a spider’s web here. There were blues, oceans and midnight reflections. Greens, the screams of peacocks and chlorophyll spilling light and life. Reds, carnelian flame, and autumn’s leaf. A beautiful cacophony.

Arachne always had a talent for colors. Mortals remember too well the lesson of her pride and read her only as a warning, but in so doing they render her flat. I had seen her so once, hating her for her treatment of Athena, but exiles in a new land can’t hold onto old grudges. Her daughters and I had to dig our roots into this soil together lest we erode alone.

“Daddy, your room is a fairy house!” the daughter said, tugging at his sleeve.

“Maybe so, kiddo.”

“I’m gunna look, okay?”

“Okay, but don’t touch it!”

And off she ran.

I watched as she dashed toward the workshop, investigating every nuance of the web. I had expected more fear and less wonder.

“What do you suppose did this? This is too big a job for any spider,” the wife said.

“Well, I don’t know what else it could be. There must be spiders nesting in some tree. A whole crop of ‘em,” he said, after sipping his coffee.

“Well, it’s certainly pretty. I’ve never seen spider webs with colors like that,” she said. ”Maybe it is a fairy house.” She smiled.

“We can leave it for today. But I’m calling the exterminator tomorrow.”

The webs wrapped around my branches trembled as the spiders fled. I, too, contracted and bent inwards, retreating from their conversation. Fear. Beauty. The brazen metaphor that cocooned his workshop. None of these worked.

I retreated into silence again.

***

I enjoyed waxing philosophical, burrowing my way into numinous contradictions. But this paradox, to act without moving, confounded me.

I employed all my tricks. I shifted my roots, sending the snakes (green, brown, yellow) gamboling through the yard. Giggles from the daughter, consternation from the carpenter. I sang my troubles to the trees nearby, and together we blanketed the workshop, his truck, and his screaming saw with our sap. Mild irritation and turpentine put an end to that rebellion.

I wondered. What if I broke loose one of my limbs? What if I sent it through his workshop? His bedroom? Could I still be me if I saved myself through violence?

In the beginning, I hoped to convince him that the life-bearing sap that runs through me pulses like his blood does through him. But he was no Socrates. There was neither wit nor questioning—only relentless motion forward. The only dialogue possible was between me and his tools. I feared that I would soon have more in common with Diogenes and his barrel.

***

I tasted the coming of autumn; the fragrance of death-and-life-commingling, the fruition of ending, fell upon me like the morning dew. I imagined I could taste my own death, and that death tasted largely the same as it ever did.

But there was hope and life, too. Someday soon the carpenter’s wife would be whisked off to the hospital, sure to return a mother of two. The carpenter couldn’t wreak vengeance on me for my rebellions with a new child in the house.

And the daughter was here.

She played among my roots, creating entire mythologies using my discarded twigs and autumn-spent leaves. As quickly as she created them, she destroyed them, in an explosion of creative energy that fed the next story.

She played among the cedar chips that the carpenter shoveled along my base. These cedar chips clogged my phloem and xylem with other memories, crowding me with experiences that were not of myself. I struggled to remember who and where and when I was.

But she incorporated them into one story, creating something larger than me. I was not that brave.

***

The carpenter became restless. His hands, never idle, grew increasingly frenetic as he scraped the paint loose from old furniture. One day, he turned his eyes to me. He paused as he measured my width and the angles at which my branches tend to fall.

The nightmares increased. They clung more soddenly to me, slowing my sap within my trunk. Only one thought brought me comfort.

My lady Athena.

In my desperation, I called out to her. Though she left me on the hillside thousands of years ago, I hoped that she had reserved some of her power to preserve me. She had left me little sign of affection over the years; never once had an owl perched upon my limbs. No aegis sheltered me. But I knew! I knew how she punished mortals who deigned to harm something she held dear.

My limbs shivered in the moonlight, waiting for the darkness to break.

***

They awakened to the dawn and warm-burred trills. Owls perched on the roof of the home. On the lamp posts. On the trees and the swing sets and the fence posts. Hundreds of them. The variety stupefied: owls meant to screech. To burrow. To haunt. And in my branches, a tiny owl with silvered green jewels for eyes.

The carpenter and his family looked from their windows. I saw amazement on their faces—and it darkened to horror. Several of the owls begin circling the house, soundless on their wings. One of them perched on a windowsill, its legs gargantuan and daunting.

Athena admired these birds for their wisdom, but she loved them for their talons, instruments of war.

“Well, my dear. What would you like from me?” asked the tiny owl, its whisper both a whistle and a coo.

I rustled at the question, torn between trembling in love and quailing in fear.

“I have summoned my paragons here—and at some cost. Would you have them bring an eclipse? Their wings could darken the sky. Or I could transform the mortals into owls. A fitting ending, yes? Some modern mythology.”

The owl on the windowsill pecked (perhaps) playfully at the glass, and the carpenter’s wife recoiled.

“Or I could kill them? I have here a thousand talons. They were meant to rake, and their beaks were meant to tear.”

No, I shuddered.

“Well, then, I ask again—what would you like from me? I have come, as summoned. You haven’t spoken a word to me. I can feel your ‘no,’ but you won’t voice it.” Then, more gently. “So, my dear, tell me. What would you like from me?”

I watched the faces of the family inside, their fear growing. “I don’t know. I was scared, and I don’t want to die.”

“Die?” A laugh chilled to breaking. “You are nigh immortal! I don’t think you need to worry about dying. Pain, yes. Boredom. Oh, yes. But ending? That is not what awaits you.”

“But he’s going to carve me! I might not die, but I don’t think that counts as life. I’ve tried what I could try. I’ve spoken, but they’ve not listened. I’ve tried to frighten them, but they felt no fear. They have no heart for poetry or divine signs. I can’t move. I can’t act.”

The owl pecked me. Hard. I couldn’t be certain if she meant to kiss me or split my forehead open. Whatever the case, my words and worries slowed.

“You beautiful fool. You were meant to be worshipped.”

A thought sprung out.

“Make them worship you.”

***

So I grew.

***

I clenched and unclenched my roots, stretching them as far as they could move. With my root tips, I lovingly caressed the roots of my neighbors. I gathered in their joy, their sunlight, and their memories. I consumed the cedar chips, the mulched lives that the carpenter placed around me to sustain me. With them, I grew stronger. Grander.

Taller.

I sent my roots spiraling into the garden, uprooting the carrots, tomatoes, and flowers. I shattered sidewalks and overturned lawns—perhaps dandelions would grow again. The swingset I caught in my branches, bending its rusting metal into a shape of my desire. It too became a part of me, and I grew wider.

The owls launched themselves from their perches as my body creaked with my growth. It was quick; it was violent; it was a magic that was wholly mine. They ceased their vigil of the house and began circling me instead.

As I subsumed these new selves into me, I could almost taste the sea air.

I bent my trunk around his workshop. I listened to the boards splinter and fed them into my center. I heard the forgotten music of planks laid to rest and the plaintive notes of his sculptures. As I incorporated them into myself, I appreciated his artistry for the first time. But no mortal hand would carve me. I was my own carpenter.

I sculpted myself into my own cathedral.

I sang my own hymns. My resin became my incense. I vowed that every morning I would anoint myself anew, for I was holy. I broke through the boundaries that had kept me silent, and I chanted myself into a new divinity.

***

Those who worshiped in me trailed their fingers against the delicate wood grain of my interior. They marveled at its whorls and whimsies—the very stuff of my life. As they sang their praises (of Athena, of me, of their own burled and twining lives), my love echoed back, a love that had first sounded so many years and miles ago. As they left, they felt the blessing of a hundred owls’ munificence upon their shoulders. Some lucky few received a fluting, fleeting kiss from a small, emerald-eyed owl.

As the waves of pilgrimage ebbed and flowed, I sat, content in my quiet. I watched the girl swing from my branches. She may or may not have been wearing a sandal. I cradled their home within my roots, sinking us all into safety that would not erode. Our roots now entwined, we could feed upon each other’s love and stories for generations to come.

I longed for those new stories.

There is strength in such waiting and in such patient silence.


© 2023 by Samara Auman

2980 words

Author’s Note: We create our sense of ourselves through the stories that we hear as well as those we tell. I have been irrevocably shaped by childhood days flipping through the yellowed pages of books of myth, legend, and folklore that I borrowed from the library. They have changed the rhythms and patterns of me. “The Dryad and the Carpenter” allowed me the space to play with the stuff of myth in a modern context while asking questions that are always fluttering about me. What does it mean to be? To become? What does it mean to have (or be) a body? How can one’s voice and one’s will overcome the shrieking of oppression? How do we define the limits of ourselves (and how do we push past those limits)? “Love” showed up more often in the answers to those questions than I expected, but it is the nature of stories that they reveal more than we consciously know.

Samara Auman is a speculative fiction writer who is always cultivating new intellectual curiosities: currently, that means how we define consciousness and the nature of the uncanny. She lives in the mossy Pacific Northwest with her husband and two appropriately mischievous cats. Her work has previously appeared in Fireside Magazine and Clarkesworld.


If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

Announcement: New Assistant Editor! (Part 2)

written by David Steffen

Hello!

I am here today to announce another new Diabolical Plots staff member: Hal Y Zhang!

Hal Y. Zhang is a lapsed physicist and international transplant who splits her time between the east coast of the United States and the Internet, where she can be found at halyzhang.com. In addition to being the guest editor for the Spring 2022 issue of Fireside Magazine, she was also on the editorial staff at Reckoning and sub-Q. Her speculative prose and poetry have appeared in places such as Uncanny MagazineStrange HorizonsEscape Pod, and Future Tense. She is a fan of mild tea and sharp words.

We are looking forward to working with Hal and Chelle in the upcoming submission window. Join ust in giving a warm welcome!

DP FICTION #101A: “Glass Moon Water” by Linda Niehoff

edited by Phoebe Wood and David Steffen

It’s a Kool-Aid summer. We’ve gone through grape and cherry and fruit punch and blueberry. Even tried dying our hair with them. And for about three days we had pink and blue and purple strands. Didn’t turn out in Finley’s. Her hair is too dark, but she tried.

The afternoons are sprinklers in the backyard and ice-pops while our sisters and mothers watch flickering soap operas in cold, tomb-like rooms, cold from the AC cranked so low. The nights are sleeping out in the backyard in a tent or a sleeping bag unrolled on porches and decks or even in the grass and looking up at the stars. Listening to the AC click on and hum its silver song through the night.

And late late late sneaking into the pool and swimming with the dead.

There is a rash of them this summer. For some reason they all want water.

At first, the mothers got on the phone during commercials of The Guiding Light and chattered about what to do.

No pool, they said in unison when we walked through our doors.

No creek. No water of any kind.

What would summer be without sunburnt skin? Half-frozen Snickers bars when the life guards blow the whistle for afternoon swim check?

You can set up sprinklers, they said. Because that wasn’t really like being in water.

We met on bikes down at the big empty lot by the post office and each of us reported the same thing.

“Sprinklers,” said Marc and spat in the dirt.

The mothers must have come up with that all together.

Hoses were hooked up in every backyard behind every wooden privacy fence and even in the two trailer parks. We went to each other’s houses and ran through their sprinklers which were much the same as ours — even if that mother had bought a ladybug one at the Dollar General. The water shoots out all the same.

Sprinklers are fun for about five minutes and less fun when they are your only choice. Play in one up at the First National Bank’s yard and that’s fun. It’s dangerous and forbidden. Plus you’re in your regular clothes. Mr. Hahn might come out personally to yell at you. But in your own backyard?

We bike in packs past the pool, slowing down, craning our heads dramatically. We rarely stop.

Once we do. We even hook our fingers into the chain link fence, looking for the dead. Hardly anyone is there.

Nothing in the shallow end.

We follow the sidewalk along to the deeper end with the diving boards. We try to peer into the depths of the water. But Erin Grimley sees us and tells her mother. By nightfall, all the mothers have names of the ones who were down there.

“But Erin Grimley gets to go!” we whine to each of our mothers in each of our kitchens while they fry hamburgers and mix Kool-Aid, toss salads and slice onions.

And are we Erin Grimley’s mother? They say in a chorus that we don’t hear all at once but piece together later in secret calls and porch visits and bike rides.

Eventually, even Erin Grimley isn’t allowed to go.

But she tells us what she saw. And we want to see, too.

We slow pedal bikes as we crane our heads. Lovelorn and despondent over the blue rippling water. Over the summer that is lost but waiting for us over the chain link fence, untouched.

The lifeguards in their matching red one-pieces and trunks twirl silver whistles unblown over the empty pool from up on their stands or while pacing the sides while the dead float underneath.

The city won’t let the pool close.

The mothers won’t let us go.

A stand-off.

We drink enough Kool-Aid for rainbow mustaches, the endless pitchers born of the mothers’ guilt even though their rule was non-negotiable and unchangeable.

We ride loops around town, out by the silver water tower and then back again, and always patrolling the pool. Meeting up at the post office. Dashing through sprinklers in each of our backyards when it gets too hot.

Then Finley gets the idea: we could all camp out, meet up.

Then Johnna says: we could go down to the pool.

Then Iris says: we could go swimming in the dark.

#

We are used to the dead.

They’ve always been with us. They leave messages on the community board down by the pool, sometimes on yellowed paper. We don’t know if the messages are for us. The edges are crumbling and torn. Mostly indecipherable things. Words written out of any kind of order.

We’ve stood in shivering huddles, chilly from evening swims before the mothers forbade it, goosebumps prickling our arms and legs, our hair slicked back or spiked in all directions. Lips blue. The lush green trees turning black with the night all around us. Katydids haunting the air.Trying to make out their words in the last low light of a summer evening. Trying to figure out why they’re suddenly floating in the pool.

“Maybe the dead just like the water,” Derrick finally said. “Maybe it’s just the same as we do.”

But it feels like there’s more to it than that.

Like they’re gathering for something.

#

Iris thinks their words are secret codes. As far as I can tell they are only lists. Maybe memories. Marc says they look like poems we’ve read at school. There’s a rhythm that seems like it’s supposed to be there but you can’t really understand it.

Sometimes when no one is looking I reach out, touching the fragile paper. My hand tracing the words.

Appleglass. Meanwhile reticent things. Happens over and once a lot.

“What does that mean?” my fingers ask, tracing the crooked lines. “What are you trying to say?”

Maybe they are simply saying, We don’t want to be gone.

#

They all wear sheets in the afterlife. Or something that looks like that. And we speculate. Is that what we have to look forward to? Sheets? Sheets and floating in the pool?

They are different in death than what they were. The place for eyes is dark, their faces are featureless, smooth flesh so you can’t tell who they were. It’s like if someone were painting a picture and used the same pattern for all of them. Only their height is different and their hair — short or long or brown or bald. Some have tried to guess at who they are. Some have looked for loved ones, but you never can be sure. They are no one and everyone all at once. Sometimes one of them becomes familiar like a casual acquaintance. Then after a while you don’t see them anymore. Maybe they’ve found the thing they were looking for. The thing they wrote on the board. Maybe they’ve moved on. But we don’t know where “on” is or what it looks like or why it’s not good enough for them to go to in the first place.

We find them everywhere. Drifting along the highway. Hovering in the frozen food section at the store. In the winter they blend in with the snow. In the summer they sometimes stand in night windows. They are at the school in the trees and behind the library and now at the pool.

When I was little I thought they’d scrape at my window. Try to get in.

But all they ever do is drift.

#

We pedal hard right in the middle of the road, in and out of puddles of street lights full of leaf shadow. We ride silent. ACs pop on all around us as we pass, singing their silver hum. Cocooning all the sleepers inside. The outside air smells like earth and sky. Our breath is Kool-Aid sweet. We are coasting down hills, some of us riding no-handed, our arms folded over our chests as we glide. We are in and out of formation. Single lines and clusters. No one watching over us. No one telling us no. The whir of pedals and speed and night air rushing past.

We are free.

We are floating in the air.

#

From the chain link fence, we see them hovering underneath. From here it looks like the greenish pool is a stormy sky and they are wispy clouds floating through it. The city has kept the underwater lights on all night. For us? For them? We already know about the lights from our twilight patrols. We’ve already seen the ghoulish water lit from below.

We stand looking, our fingers hooked in the chains like the day when Erin Grimley caught us and told her mother.

We don’t make a move to climb over, not yet.

We’re not afraid exactly.

The dead won’t hurt you.

Everyone says that.

They’ve never done anything to any one of us.

But still, the mothers don’t like us near them.

It’s not that what they have is catching. It is and it isn’t. We’re all going the way they went. But we won’t get there by being near them. Still it’s not right, the mothers say. Not yet.

#

We spread out all over the pool.

Finley by the slippery slide.

Marc wading in the shallow end.

Iris waist-high, walking across the lap lanes.

I swim to the deep end to scare myself.

Because I like the shiver of not being able to see all the way down. Of knowing there are shadows there.

Underwater, they’re all flowy, like the ragged edge of a tattered sail fluttering in slow motion in an invisible wind. The underwater glass globes of pool light mixed with the blue water make an eerie green. Graveyard light. A strange Kool-Aid flavor.

The one I find is beautiful. Or so she looks, emerging from the deep. She was huddled in the corner underneath the high dive where it’s murky and with the light this low you can’t see the bottom. She was a jagged outline that glided toward me.

I can’t say why she’s beautiful.

Maybe because she’s my age, I think, though it’s hard to tell. She seems smaller than the other ones. Both of us hover in the water, lit by a glass globe like moonlight on a green water night. Our hair undulating. Her sheet flowing. Regarding one another.

She is a mystery, hovering there. And maybe I am, too.

And maybe that’s why they like the water.

Maybe in the water, we are all floating.

Maybe in the water, we all look the same.

I run out of air and kick to the surface.

“I’m sorry,” I say after I burst back up, gulping air, water falling from my lips. “But I have to breathe.”

#

We emerge dripping wet, one by one. Leaving the dead like they are clouds floating in the glass moon water.

Silent. Because any words would break this.

We pedal slowly home to backyards and porches and grass-stained sleeping bags.

This night is the story we’ll tell over and over to ourselves and to each other. Huddled down into sleeping bags. Around a campfire when we’re old enough for stolen beers and sneaking out in cars. When we light our fathers’ Marlboros and pass them all around.

When we’re older still.

Passing each other in the grocery store, pushing silver carts, our eyes purple-stained, tired. Worn. Older.

We’ll nod at one another. Stop in front of rows of canned peaches. We’ll remember:

The way the underwater looked like a night sky with ten full moons shining in.

The way you could feel the creek water running past outside the fence, dank and murky and full of dark things.

The way we could feel the mothers wishing us still young and asleep in backyards under stars and not out looking for anything. Not out wanting.

The story will get told and retold, sitting on barstools, standing in frozen food aisles. Over the years it will get shortened down into the barest possible words. That night, the dead, how we floated.

We’ll say, Remember when there was nothing between us and them?

Then it’ll all get cut down to just: Remember? And a nod, nod, nod will be the answer.

And that one bare word will conjure the whole night.

We’ll wish it back. All together and one by one.

And maybe.

Maybe one day we’ll scrawl it on a yellowing piece of fragile paper, tack it up on the community board:

Glass moon water. Kool-Aid summer. Floating. Floating. Floating.

And someone else will trace the words and wonder what we mean.


© 2023 by Linda Niehoff

2099 words

Author’s Note: Years ago I was walking through the East Village in New York and saw a community board along a side walk. I was instantly smitten with it – how the notes left on it had yellowed and were curling at the edges. Nothing about it seemed modern or even current. I snapped a photo and took the memory home with me. For several years I wondered on and off about a strange community board in a small town and what might be on it besides the usual babysitting offers with pull tabs and the notices for lost cats. Community boards seem mysterious, almost sinister, to me. Anyone can walk out of the shadows and leave any kind of message to anyone else. Both the sender and the receiver are invisible to each other. And so, for me anyway, the next natural question is: what if you could leave a message after you’d died? What would you say? What memory would haunt you so much that you needed to write it down? To say it to someone, to anyone? Somehow that morphed into a small town where the dead live right alongside the living. And how one strange summer they come together at the pool, right next to that community board and its offbeat words.

Linda Niehoff is a writer and photographer living in a small Kansas town. She loves ghost stories, severe weather, and is an accidental collector of vintage cameras. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter: @lindaniehoff


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Announcement: New Assistant Editor!

written by David Steffen

Hello!

I am here today to announce a new Diabolical Plots staff member: Chelle Parker!

Chelle Parker is a disabled Canadian queerdo with over fifteen years of editing experience, including five at the recently-closed Fireside Magazine. Projects they’ve worked on have been finalists for the Hugo, Locus, Eisner, and Norma K. Hemming Awards, and winners of the Aurealis and Angoulême Awards. Chelle has lived all over the world, learned seven languages, and run through a number of careers, including librarian, teacher, and radio DJ. They thrive on kindness, sarcasm, and Camellia sinensis. When they’re not hoarding books and advocating for the serial comma (seriously, they WILL die on that hill), you’ll find them out camping with their dog, who never judges them for putting their foot in their mouth. You can read more about them at www.mparkerediting.com.

Join me in giving Chelle Parker a warm welcome! 🙂

DP FICTION #100B: “Interstate Mohinis” by M.L. Krishnan

edited by Kel Coleman

Content note (click for details) Content note: gender-based violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, death

In the way of Death runs the Vaitaraṇī river. We are flayed open to its woe. We are always aware of its currents in gurgling lungfuls of unease.

Time spun in recursive loops since I died in a scream of metal and flame and asphalt on the Parthibanur State Highway. There was no cremation. What could they consign to the flame? A scorched knob of my torso? My jawbone, still glued with tissue? A lone filling snugly hidden within a lone tooth?

Sometimes, I dreamed about flowing water. About where I would be—not here, anywhere but here—if my body had survived the accident. Mushed, but still recognizable. With its vestigial humanness that demanded respect, especially in death. My ashes would have been tossed into an ocean or a river in a coursing procession of night-blooming jasmine garlands, women who keened and thumped their chests, and drunken louts who gyrated around my urn until they foamed at the mouth. Until they collapsed in exhaustion or pleasure.

When I first began feeding, I wondered if I was a vetāla or a piśāca. But I felt no urge to sway from bael trees or dart into a hedge of thathapoo with its ray-toothed flowers. Besides, I did not have an appetite for birds or small rodents. I only hungered for certain kinds of men.

Maybe I was a mohini.

Still, I had no idea of what that involved. My life before death kaleidoscoped in and out of my field of vision, shimmery and indistinct. My knowledge of mohinis was from B-grade movies that appeared in torn lesions of memory—of sullen heroines with thick, kohl-rimmed eyes and billowing hair who always wore chiffon saris, leaving little to the imagination. Their dark areolas were signal-flares, beckoning the film hero through transparent fabric. And they always ambushed him along a quiet road, devouring the hero in more ways than one.

I did not know how to seduce the men I wanted to eat, but they came willingly enough as soon as they recognized a somewhat feminine shape under my soiled clothes. The lorry drivers who were lean and sharp as machetes, with their drug-glazed eyes and arrack breaths. The college students tweaking on tabs of acid who slid off their motorcycles and into my arms. The married men in respectable cars who were the easiest, who didn’t even pretend to notice the windshield wiper piercing the larvae-rimmed void in my neck. I gorged on them all, sucked the marrow out of each knuckle and each toenail until they were reduced to papery, crumbling husks.

For a brief moment, my hunger would lessen. My skin felt supple, but I distrusted this newness, this heft, because I was nothing. A nothing death for a nothing life that I couldn’t even fathom. So, I walked and fed along the highway, along this momentary emptiness. This was all I knew.

***

The Vaitaraṇī yawns into a chasm of blistering liquid. We have valleys to ascend. A darkness like pitch, cupping our throats. We drink.

Three relevant details marked the day I first saw her.

1.

I was irritated. I had just eaten a middle-aged auditor in a safari suit; a tuft of a man with an unnaturally distended face. His skin held the waxy quality of an ash gourd. He had grabbed my windshield wiper the moment I approached him, trying to nail me in place as he frantically undid my salwar with his free hand. I snapped his neck clean in half and fed on his corpse in haste; before he inflated into a fleshy, putrescine balloon that squirted post-mortem gases and fluids everywhere. He tasted rubbery and sulfuric.

2.

Post-feeding, I began to walk. I took my time on the Parthibanur highway corridor that yoked the big city with an industrial waste landfill, a polytechnic college that was also a homeopathic dispensary after sunset, and a shantytown that buzzed with a thriving opioid trade. Flyovers latticed the sky as far as I could see. This was a slim keyhole of space carved by rushing streams of traffic. And yet, shops and tiffin centers mushroomed out of necessity along the sides of the road.

On this day, I avoided the streetlights, only weaving through deepening puddles of dusk. I stopped behind the biryani center, hoping to smell the food—crescent moons of slippery onions, sizzling fat, goat carcasses hung from hooks arrayed across the tin roof. My efforts never amounted to anything. I could only smell my human prey right before I fed—their fear and lust coating my tongue in a gummy residue.

I crossed a construction site wadded between a fancy store and the biryani center, where laborers were splayed atop one another in a ganja-induced fog. At least someone’s having fun, I thought.

Finally, I arrived at the Sri Annai Fancy Store that sold everything from hair clips to bluish-hued stage jewelry that glimmered in various states of oxidation, to jumper cables for car batteries and even tickets to the latest political rallies that zigzagged through this area. I moved behind the store where I melted into the gloom of the urine-soaked wall. Its surface was papered in flaking Kanneer Anjali posters; giant cartoon tears embellishing a printed photo of the newly-dead, so every passerby could mourn the end of a stranger’s life. I watched people mill in and out of the shop for a long time.

As the night wore on, I became restless.

3.

A sudden quietude. My irises cleaved with visions of a bloated river in spate. And just as quickly, a wall of heat sliced through the mist, chasing the images away, snapping me back into the here and now.

And then I saw her, the Beautiful One.

A Benz pulled in front of the shop. She stepped out of the car in a sari that was bioluminescent, flashing green as she moved. A tight braid sheathed in nerium buds swung down to her buttocks. Welts mapped the sides of her hips and circled around to her back. Her left eye was a faceted ruby under the streetlight, burst capillaries tinting it red.

As I watched her, my loneliness opened under my feet in a sinkhole, taking me unawares. At first, I thought it might have just been my hunger. But it turned out to be something else entirely.

***

The riverbank softens into caustic sludge. A forest winks on the far shore. The iron-leaved trees ring ceaselessly.

From that moment onwards, I staked my days around the locus of her. My life had now bisected itself into two clean halves. The first, an endless conveyor-belt of time and repetition and grasping men. And now, every moment attuned to the Beautiful One’s presence. I could not allow myself to believe that I would never see her again. Every day, I tried to observe smudges of traffic for a gunmetal-hued Benz.

Luckily, I did not have to work too hard. She had a routine, as I soon learned.

The Beautiful One visited the fancy store twice a week. Her shopping done, she would glide into the cool tomb of the Benz and leave. But sometimes, she would walk down to the biryani center and order a packet of mutton trotters and rice.

I ached for those moments when the night blinked to a standstill; the Beautiful One sheathed in green silks, waiting for her food, almost immobile. I would dissolve into the long shadow of a concrete pillar at the construction site. I could have spent several lifetimes in that ribbon of time, of vehicles and mutton parts and the form of her illumed by headlights, every time a car passed us by.

And in those instances, I would always hear rippling water, a low hum that filmed over me.

Some weeks, the Beautiful One arrived at the biriyani center with a man. I soon realized that this was the man that owned the gunmetal Benz. Piecing together an overheard mosaic of conversations, I learned that he was an up-and-coming Big Man, a land mafia goon who also nurtured a fierce political will. With the Beautiful One by his side, he would hold kangaroo courts for his oily sycophants after he had sated himself on flattery and food. He had a wife and eight grown children.

Big Men always had perfect families, and the Beautiful One was not his wife.

Every time the Big Man visited the biryani center with his entourage, he would be seated on a clean bench as befitting his status. His hangers-on arrayed themselves around his feet. He would then present a knotted length of fresh oleander to the Beautiful One, his face slicked with anticipation. She would untie it gently. The Big Man would jerk her closer as she squirmed in his thick arm, as he bound and fastened the oleander around her hair. This was a regular show, a marquee-lit warning to his followers that were mostly made up of young men with hungry eyes and hungrier ambitions. A show to remind them that she was utterly off-limits, belonging only to him. She never spoke a word through it all.

The first time the Beautiful One saw me through the grease-grimed windowpane of the biryani center, she did not scream or flinch. She continued eating; a placid metronome of movement from hand to mouth. I had become careless, wanting a closer look. But I couldn’t help myself.

Her pale green sari faded white against the fluorescent lamp on the wall. Her neck shone purple with bruises. The Big Man was making a joke about her engorged lips, about his biting habit, about how he wanted to swallow her whole.

I do what I have to, he said. If I want a midnight snack, I must eat.

His sycophants laughed and hooted as if on cue. The Beautiful One continued to eat in silence. She never looked away from me.

As the night wore on, one of the hangers-on had whipped out a phone. Something about a cricket match. Vast, liquid streams of money being moved around in gambling bets overtook the conversation. While the Big Man hissed threats and growled sequences of numbers into several cellphones, the Beautiful One escaped onto the back porch to wash her hands.

This was my chance. I swiftly emerged near the water drum.

I’m sorry, I whispered. Please, please don’t be afraid. I’m sorr—

There you are, she said, without surprise. Valikkarutha? Does it hurt?

She gestured at my throat, the bent rod. I suddenly felt self-conscious.

No. Not really.

She smiled then. Do you have a name?

I don’t remember.

Ah, I also had one name. But he—and she pointed to the Big Man inside—gave me another.

Naa usuruoda illai. I blurted. I’m not alive.

She looked at me for what felt like a long, unbearable flue of time. A glassy-skinned lizard darted across the floor.

I know, she finally said, and walked back into the biryani center.

***

The moon is a thin, curved line over the way of Death. A smile ripped from an unwilling mouth.

The Beautiful One and I started talking to each other. Our exchanges were quiet and unobtrusive while she waited alone in the semi-opaque dimness for her mutton trotters. No one seemed to notice.

Once, she even offered to buy me food.

No no, I don’t—I can’t eat this.

She was thoughtful. If you’re dead, then you can eat rice?

I’m not sure.

At my grandma’s funeral, I made ellu saadam urundai, rolled balls of black-sesame rice.

She spoke of her grandmother often. Of how the old woman stubbornly refused to wear a blouse, choosing to only drape her sari on bare skin. Of her saucer-wide earlobes that were adorned with thandatti; earrings floating over her clavicles in tetrahedrons of gold. Of how she meticulously prepared paaya—a goat leg broth simmered for hours in coconut milk.

I used to hate it, The Beautiful One laughed.

I tried to hide my smile. But, this is what you always order.

She told me that she had despised its viscid collagen taste, its phlegm-green hue. However, once her paati died, she began to crave its smooth pepperiness. Now she ate it whenever she could.

It’s okay ma, she said. This is all I want to eat.

In that moment, I understood the shape and contour of her particular craving for this dish. I wanted to tell her that my appetite was singular as well, that I could only consume one thing. That, like her, I was also bound to a hunger not of my choosing.

It makes sense, I said.

Another night. The Beautiful One pushed a steel tiffin box into my hands.

Just try it.

Later, I opened it when I was alone. Greasy, undulating mounds of black-sesame rice spilled out of the container. I attempted to eat one, but it gummed over the section of the windshield wiper that cored my flesh. I coughed out what was left of the rice, and as if on cue, flesh flies immediately glazed it in mucus. 

I closed the box tightly. I wanted to preserve its contents for as long as I could. I wanted to ask her if I could keep it, because it was hers, because it tethered me to her in a connective skein, a talisman for when she was gone.

Maybe next time, I promised myself.

***

A well of laments, a hillock, and a cascade of spear points. How do we rent ourselves asunder?

The Big Man was angry. He twisted through the biryani center in gales of unshed rage. Back and forth, back and forth he loped, toppling chairs when his fury dribbled out of his mouth in expletives. No one dared to approach him. He crushed three cellphones in his fists.

Fear sent his entourage skittering for cover.

Investment failure.

Land deal pochchu. He is finished.

CBI raid.

I caught some murmurs from the sycophants. It appeared as though the Big Man had lost a lot of money. I did not care about the erratic ticker tape of his businesses or his ambitions. I only sought the Beautiful One. I found her on the back porch of the biryani center, leaning, as always, against the water drum. A motionless pillar wearing silence.

Inside, the beatings began.

The Big Man’s anger had detonated at last. A sycophant lost an eyeball. Another one got his nose broken. A veshti-clad octogenarian tottered up to the Big Man and softly touched his arm. This was an expensive mistake. The Big Man broke a bench over the man’s head. The octogenarian crumpled into a mess of flesh and exposed bone with an odd, burbling sound.

This was when the Beautiful One decided to intervene, decided to unsnarl the tangle of the Big Man’s brutality somehow, decided to drape herself over the octogenarian in response.

Before I could stop her, before I could shield her from the unerring finality of the Big Man’s fist, before, before, before, before everything, this night, the biryani center, the gunmetal Benz, the known arc of his violence, his hand sliced across her face. Once, twice, thrice.

The Beautiful One’s body bent at an impossible angle and folded in on itself. Her teeth rattled out of her mouth in a gasping breath. I rushed over to her and pinched my way up her arms, her neck. I begged for a thrum, a pulse, its percussive hope. There was nothing.

In that instant, madness undid me from the vacuum of survival.

I scratched away my clothes and wailed until the tin roof peeled from the scaffolding. I leaped onto the Big Man’s shoulders and held him still between my thighs. He continued to thrash with his bulk. I blurred into a wreath of hair as my jaw unhinged into his, as I impaled him in place with the windshield wiper, its usefulness finally telegraphing into view. A soupy, maggot-infested gush slopped around our feet.

I was ravenous.

But in this instance, there was no polypeptide rush that seared my bowels with hunger, no apathy at the conveyor-belt looping of men that I usually fed on. Instead, my skin thrummed with newness—a fury, lined with teeth. 

I took my time in consuming the Big Man, his innards roping over my knees in glossy coils as I slurped through every tendon and nail and gristle. I saved his hands for last.

***

We bring no payment, no supplication, no penance. The opposite of the Vaitaraṇī river cannot be seen. Twelve suns glare overhead.

At first, I was nothing. Then I felt the throb of something in me, someone even, in the presence of the Beautiful One. And with her gone, I had heaved over the cliff-face of nothings and somethings and someones altogether.

I crawled to her corpse and pulled it close, her skin to my skin. The Big Man’s blood hammered inside the double-jointed cavern of my gaunt frame.

I lay there for a long time, letting the Beautiful One’s body stiffen in my arms. Her anguish blushed into focus because I perceived her. Like tuning into the radio at the right frequency, the wavelets of our isolation looping into a mutual current of existence. A woman could succumb to a five-lane mash of traffic, and people would continue to drift along their lives, her death a transient blip. Another woman sat, her skin strobing with wounds, and everyone pretended not to see. But I did. And the Beautiful One had perceived me too. In that, we were one.

At last the river arrived, as I knew it would. 

It coursed through my body in long, deafening sheets of sound. And then the heat, rupturing the eventide and the stars and the deepest dark as it split the night wide-open across the waters.

We waded into the boiling flood, the Beautiful One and I. I held her corpse taut against mine. The river scoured away the last bits of us in burning rinds of flesh and hair. Marrow-laced foam filled my throat. It tasted of smelted copper ore, the embers of a long-ago life. It tasted of relief. Maybe even joy, though I could not remember what that was anymore.


© 2023 by M.L. Krishnan

3030 words

Author’s Note: I wanted to write about a kind of visceral loneliness that underpins queer identities, especially in spaces where concealing yourself is both necessary and integral to survival. I wanted to write about left-behind women, about being unseen—the invisibility that cloaks over a person even with their flesh-and-blood presence in the room. Growing up in Tamil Nadu, I have always been fascinated by the Mohini mythos whose lore continues to weave through the axes of the divine, the profane, and almost every cultural mundanity in-between. My memory is very visual, so I knew that I had a story in my hands when I kept seeing a persistent image of a woman in my head, trawling a highway in order to sate her hunger. And so I found a way to weave all these threads together when I sat down to write her into existence.

M. L. Krishnan originally hails from the coastal shores of Tamil Nadu, India. She is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, a 2022 recipient of the Millay Arts Fellowship, and a 2022-2023 MacDowell Fellow. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Offing, PodCastle, Baffling MagazineThe Best Microfiction 2022 Anthology and elsewhere. You can find her at: mlkrishnan.com.


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DP FICTION #100A: “They Were Wonderful, Once” by Lily Watson

edited by Maria Joannou and David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Content note: body horror

Even by the third hot, sticky day into our road trip, the humans in the back of the transportation trucks remain fascinating. Theoretically, we know where our blood comes from. But this is different, seeing the little bits of them, poking through the slots on the sides of their container, pressed against the grates for lack of room.

“They didn’t used to be like that, you know,” our grandma shouts at us over the wind of the open windows for the third time in ten minutes, as another truck passes by. “They used to rule the world, back in the day. They were wonderful, I think.”

In the middle of the country, it seems that there’s nothing but trucks. There’s not even humans in the vast fields they pass, just dead grass and the occasional wild pig. They’re kept inside, but none of us can guess where.

Grandma is losing it, Mandy speaks into our minds from the front seat. Max is behind grandma, knees pressed to the fabric of the seat in front of them, to accommodate grandma’s long legs. None of us got this trait from her. The car is tiny, solar-powered, rented from a shop in Colorado Springs, where we started our journey.

Our grandma is getting more restless by the second, making us three restless along with her. There was no stopping our grandma from going on this trip, despite all of us knowing it would be bad for her. We’ve seen the pictures in school, the ones that she’s apparently avoided, of the Statue of Liberty, the surrounding water at her navel. And yet, grandma had the mindset of someone that would go back to the exact same city, livable, superb, bustling with humans, filled to the brim with life of all kinds.

And then we arrived. Suitcases in hand, grandma wearing a sunhat bought from a yard sale from Ohio on her hand. We found the city destroyed, in tatters from a hurricane, most of it underwater, the only tourist attraction a boat tour of the city that ran through the streets. We could look down from our spot on the dock where we drove up to the cars at the bottom, stalled on the road a hundred feet below, rusted and warped by the brown water.

Our grandma’s expression was so desolate it scared us, and we all piled back into a car, without a word said.

We don’t understand our grandma, exactly, as much as we would like. We’ve spent lots of our lives fantasizing about what it must be like to be an old vampire, as few and far between as they are. The kind that stopped popping up around a hundred years ago to make way for the new kinds of vampires, the ones that we are.  Grandma’s type can go into the sun without an enormous amount of fanfare, where we cast light like prisms. Where grandma can speak clearly aloud, we talk into minds, finding it difficult to make our mouths form words. Grandma has always walked and danced with grace, where every time we try to dance, our limbs hurt from twisting and we feel so self-conscious we could die, even if it’s just around each other.

Grandma is fascinating and worldly, and everything she says could be either very true or completely made up. We’ll never know, and that’s the best part of her stories. She can’t hear us speaking into each other’s minds and, though we can talk, it takes an incredible amount of energy, and makes us almost as self-conscious as dancing. We can’t hope to make those captivating facial expressions that grandma can make, eyes widening when she’s shocked, or wants us to be, nose scrunching when she’s disgusted, taking big deep breaths to throw her head back and laugh.

Our grandma requires every single window in the car rolled down so she can “get some fresh air, finally,” but we’re pretty certain she’s claustrophobic in the car with us. We’re the best company she has, and always say yes to spending time with her, but we’re silent and still and casting rainbows all around the tiny car, our dark skin refracting the sunlight. We never think much of it but our grandma, whose skin is lighter than ours and altogether different in texture and strength, is shocked every time she sees it. In the sun, her skin only glows a little bit, as if a candle is lighting her from the inside.

We never think about how we look more than when we’re with our grandma. She’s lighter than us, her skin a warm brown rather than an inky near-black. And our skin has little texture, smooth as glass, where grandma has a scar on her left temple, freckles on her nose. But what really sets us apart, if grandma’s reaction is an indication, is the intensity of the way our skin reflects the light. In the sun, her skin only glows slightly, as if a candle is lighting her from the inside.

To talk to us, our grandma shouts over the noise of the wind rushing in via the open windows, pushing her dark sunglasses back up her nose, as close to her face as possible, so that the light we cast won’t impair her ability to see the road.

We pass another truck, and the four of us ease our bodies to the right, trying to peek in to see the humans being transported. All we can see are dimpled thighs, matted golden or red or brown hair, the occasional freckled elbow. Our grandma, who slows the car down to specifically let us see into the back of the truck, speeds up once more, and we relax back into our seats.

“Why were they wonderful?” Mandy asks quietly. Our grandma jumps in her seat at the sound of another being speaking, whipping her head around. She smiles brightly then, and we’re reminded that everyone she would’ve been able to talk to, the vampires she went to Broadway shows with, had since died, too bored or anxious or depressed to continue.

Our grandma rolls all the windows up so she doesn’t have to shout. We all lean forward in eager anticipation, happy to see our grandma in such high spirits for the first time since we left New York.

“They moved, girls. They all had knives to their throats, they had expiration dates, so they moved. They innovated and they dreamed and they…made things.”

“They dreamed?” Max asks, slowly enunciating every letter. “You dream.”

We nod, remembering all the times grandma tells us about her dreams. Only old vampires like our grandma could dream or sleep at all. Only old vampires could put their minds at rest for hours on end, could do somewhere else while they were laying down. Oftentimes we watch over grandma when she sleeps, peeking in every once in a while to put our finger under her nose, leaving only when her soft breaths cooled the skin there, to make sure she was still alive.

She wants to continue speaking as another truck comes into view and, again, she slows down as we pass, lingering so we can all have a look. We see long, elegant fingers with dirt caked underneath the cracked nails, hairy shins, the sides of breasts. The car is silent while we look through the fist-sized holes on the transportation container, until grandma speeds up again. The truck gets ever smaller in the rearview mirror until we can’t see it at all. Grandma pushes the car to just over one-twenty.

“The dreaming I do is minute in comparison, barely even worth mentioning. I dream moments, they dreamed worlds.” She pauses, taking a sip from the bottle  of blood in the cupholder, shuddering at its “god-awful flavor” that she claims is much worse than the blood of the old humans that she would get “straight from the tap.” Farming them, she tells us constantly, makes them taste like chemicals, like bleach. The rainbows we emit blink out as we pass under a cloud, blocking the sun completely for a few moments before it reappears.

We mentally nudge each other, trying to figure out what to say to her, knowing that her mood has fallen again. Grandma accelerates, faster than we thought the car could go, and we come across another transportation truck. We see bellies, the dips of lower backsides and…an eye. A green one, looking directly at the three of us. It’s squinting at the sun on our skin, but not looking away. Its plump fingers rise to grip the edges of one of the holes.

“And they were all so loud! The world was loud back then, the streets filled with music and conversation. I was never bored, not one time. Now it’s like…to be alive is to be bored. You’re bored or you’re dead.”

I roll my window down, and lean my torso outside of the car, and grandma drifts towards the truck seamlessly, knowing exactly what I want without having to say so. I extend my hand, rainbows arching through the air as I move, and everyone in the car watches as the soft hand of the human, so dull and pink, stretches towards mine. Grandma gets a hair closer, and then closer, until finally my fingertip gently presses against the human’s.

The violent honk startles us, and I quickly retract, pulling my body back into the car as the truck veers off the road, flinging up dust before careening onto its side. Grandma slams her foot on the brake as the truck lands, our tires screeching on the pavement. We’re out before it stops all the way, running over to the truck. Before we can get there, we see the back door pop open, and we freeze.

After a few moments, a head of long, red hair peeks up over the side of the truck The human’s face dripped with blood its lungs inflating and deflating so rapidly that we can see them move under its flesh. One by one, other humans peek out, disoriented and wobbly on their legs as they walk on hot pavement for the first time. We watch, transfixed, as the humans begin, one-by-one, to run hard in the opposite direction, not looking back, sprinting into the cyan blue of the methane in the sky.


© 2023 by Lily Watson

1730 words

Author’s Note: This story started as an assignment for a class I took senior year of college — Eating Animals — when I was deep into my vampire phase (still am). It was inspired by my road trip from Washington to Connecticut, and how many trucks I saw transporting cows to slaughterhouses, particularly as I’ve been vegan for my whole adult life. 

Lily Watson is a writer based in Seattle. Her work has been published in the Baffler, the Longleaf Review, and Fiyah Litmag. She graduated with a degree in Sociology in 2019 from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She is beautiful and kind. Everyone loves her. 


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DP Submission Window, and “AI” Writing Policy

written by David Steffen

Hello! I know it has been a long time since we were open for submissions, but we are now ready to announce the next submission window. This one will be an unthemed general submission window, and will run for 2 weeks, from July 17-31st, 2023. Rules and terms are generally the same as before. One submission per writer in the window. Simultaneous submissions are allowed.

Since we had our last two windows both in July 2022, AI software has made leaps and strides in what it is capable of. So, planning this window feels like an appropriate time to update our submisssion terms on the subject of AI writing.

We have updated our guidelines to state clearly that we are not interested in receiving submissions of AI written or AI assisted writing. I will quote the relevant section here as well.

CAN I SUBMIT AI-WRITTEN WORK?

No.  You cannot submit work that was written or assisted by AI writing programs.  This includes ChatGPT and SudoWrite.  There are many reasons we have made this decision, but a large part of it that these programs are based on pulling their data from publicly available including many copyrighted works without the authors’ consent, and then being used to take away publishing opportunities from those same authors.  If some new kind of AI program is produced that is built on some other kind of technology, then we may revisit the policy at that time with the information available.  But until we update our guidelines to say otherwise we are not interested.  We prefer to support artists. If you disagree, we wish you the best of luck at other publications.

To be clear: when we speak of AI writing programs, we are not referring to spell-check, grammar-check, thesaurus, or prompt generators which may be helpful to a writer but for which the writer is still doing the writing.

Also, if you have written a story using AI and are thinking of submitting it anyway: keep in mind that you will need to confirm at time of submission that it was not written using AI.  And if your story were accepted, to be published you would need to sign a contract confirming it as well.  You won’t be doing yourself any favors, if what the AI produced was appealing, to put yourself in a place where you would have to knowingly breach a contract to publish it.

DP FICTION #99B: “Diamondback V. Tunnelrat” by Nick Thomas

edited by Ziv Wities

Diamondback v. Tunnelrat et. Axeteeth

Parish Court of Quan, 3rd District

Ignatious P. Fizzlewig, Esq. Presiding

Cite as: Diamondback V. Tunnelrat, 245 3rdPar (1107)

The case before us concerns questions of property, ownership, and personhood.

It also concerns the sale of an ear.

The plaintiff is one Mr. Trawler A. Diamondback, member of the Diamondback clan of trolls of the Brass-Tree Mountains. The co-defendants are a Ms. Beardlynn Tunnelrat and a Mx. Aewyn Axeteeth, both dwarves, also of the Brass-Tree Mountains.

Mx. Axeteeth is currently in possession of an ear which was the previous property of Mr. Diamondback. The ear was sold to Axeteeth by Tunnelrat.

Diamondback makes the following claim: allowing Axeteeth to possess the ear constitutes a harm to himself. He seeks the return of the ear and requests the funds associated with its sale to be relinquished unto him.

All parties agree to the following facts. A skirmish broke out between the Diamondbacks and the dwarves during the Brass-Tree autumnal equinox fete. The fete is a centuries-old tradition, occurring every year and held in the foothills alongside the Cenen river. Brawls are as much a part of the festivities as the paper lanterns, the stewing of chicken heads, and the traditional weasel-peasel dance. Neither party makes complaint about the violence done to them or by them at the skirmish.

“Popped me right in the kisser,” said Tunnelrat, whistling through the gap in her teeth. “A great shot. Couldn’t let it go though. So I took a slash at his ear.”

“Very clean cut. Sliced it right off,” Diamondback responded, displaying to the court the new ear that had grown in place of the old. “Barely any scar and no complications. Amazing technique.”

Around the second hour of morning, the skirmish died down. All parties involved resumed the festivities and collected their winnings. Diamondback’s ear was amongst Tunnelrat’s trophies.

Usually prizes such as ears are valued for their ornamentation, which often include jewels of substantial value. Neither side disputes that the jewels and other baubles found on Diamondback’s ear were Tunnelrat’s to claim as spoils of the skirmish. In the usual course of things, however, the ornamentation and other valuables are removed and the appendage is discarded, left to petrify upon the next rising of the sun.

Such are the healing powers of trolls that, if the appendage were retrieved prior to petrification, it could be reattached without much issue. However, since most troll appendages will grow back without intervention, trolls seldom attempt to find their lost flesh. Diamondback affirmed this observation, stating “I simply could not be bothered to find it.”

The dispute therefore centers around what occurred next.

Axeteeth, an acquaintance of Tunnelrat’s, suffered damage similar to that of Diamondback, losing a left ear in the skirmish. In spite of their wounds, Axeteeth sought out Tunnelrat for dance and frivolity.

Tunnelrat explained, “I was in the middle of lifting the shinies from the ear when ol’ Axey showed up and asked if I wasn’t up for a bit of grog and grunge. Axey was bleeding pretty bad. A rockhead had gashed them up how I’d gashed up Mr. Diamondback, but not near so pretty. But they didn’t seem bothered by it and I already had a fair bit of blood on me, so a little more wasn’t going to hurt, so I said, ‘Aye,’ stuffed the ear in my pocket, and went off with them.

“Later, after we’d sank a fair few, we was laughing and chatting and they says, ‘I won’t be half so pretty or hear half as well, now that I’m down an ear.’ And me, being more than a little wheezed, pulls the troll ear out of my pocket and says, ‘Well, for fifteen and three I’ll stitch this here one on for you.’

“Well, we had a good laugh about that. And then drank some more. And then some more. And then perhaps a wee bit more. And ole Axey slapped fifteen and three down on the table and says, ‘Do yer damndest!’ And then flops their head down on the table, like a lamb laying down to slaughter.

“Now, any reasonable person would have told ‘em to sit up and stop playing the fool. But, as I was saying, we’d drank well beyond the point of reason. And I happened to have a pin of iron and a scrap o’ silk on me. So…I stitched it up. And I will admit: it was a wretched bit of stitching.”

“Aye,” Axeface here interjected, “Looks like she was trying to quilt during an earthquake.”

Tunnelrat shrugged. “As I say, it was a wretched bit of stitching. But welded on firm and tight. And didn’t seem like it would droop or go flying off during a spin o’ dancing. So, laughing fit to die, we went to join the others. Everyone thought it was a good bit o’ fun. Even the trolls laughed and cheered Axey on.”

“It was quite diverting,” Diamondback acknowledged. “And very poorly stitched.”

“We all had a bit of a laugh and figured it would calcify as soon as the sun came up and fall off like an old scab.”

But this was not the case.

“When I woke up the next morning,” Axeteeth explained. “It felt like I had an axe buried in my skull. And the side of my head itched like someone had poured a gourd full of ants down my ear. But I chalked it up to drink and went down to the forge for work. When I walk in, my boss looks at me like I’m taking a squat on his floor and says, ‘What the hell have you done to your face?’ Even then I barely knew what he was talking about. It wasn’t until I found a mirror that I remembered exactly what happened.”

As indicated by Axeteeth’s testimony, the ear had grafted itself onto their face, wholly and completely.

“I tried my damndest to pull the thing back off. But it was welded on tight. And, after a good bit of tugging, I realized that the beastly thing was working too—I could hear.”

Axeteeth consulted a dwarf physician. He indicated that such a thing wasn’t completely without precedent. That there were stories of similar incidents happening long ago.

“He prodded at it with a wee metal pin and tugged at it with his tweezers and then he recommended that I get some pretties for it, ‘cause it wasn’t going anywhere. He did offer to cut it off, though. But he was going to charge me twenty and four, which is more than I paid to have the thing stitched on!” Axeteeth paused here to muse, “Though he was sober, I suppose.”

Though the ear looked out of place, Axeteeth was able to resume activities as normal.

“I actually hear better now than before. I can hear a fly pinching a loaf in the next room. Which is…about as exciting as it sounds. Though it does come in handy down in the tunnels.” Axeteeth paused. “Super hearing generally, I mean. Not the hearing flies shit part.”

Axeteeth indicated that they suffered derision and mockery from some of the other dwarves, but were otherwise able to return to a normal and productive life. Many dwarves actually sought them out, seeking information and advice on how to graft on troll appendages so as to heal similar ailments.

Word about Axeteeth’s luck spread throughout the tunnels and of the Brass-Tree Mountains. It found its way to the trolls and, eventually, back to Diamondback.

“At first I believed that the stories were just nonsense and hearsay. But then an associate said that he’d seen the ear and knew for a certainty it was mine. Then I had to go check for myself. I sought Axeteeth out at their business establishment. When I saw, the truth was undeniable—it was my very own ear. The twin and match to this one,” Diamond back said, displaying again the ear that had regrown.

“I’m afraid that I became quite irate. I acknowledge that I said some things that were regrettable.”

“He called me a dog-twaddling ear thief!” Axeteeth interjected.

Diamondback was removed from the property by the local security forces. After regaining his composure, he returned to Axeteeth and asked for the ear back. They refused, saying it was fairly bought and fairly owned. Diamondback then went to Tunnelrat, claiming the money from the sale of the ear was rightfully his. When she refused, he sought the advice of counsel. No agreement could be found between the parties, resulting in our hearing of this case.

Diamondback asserts that allowing another to own and wear his own flesh constitutes a harm to himself. When we posed to him that the ear was spoils of a fair and well-fought skirmish, he argued that “flesh was intimate and sacred.” That it should hold a special status, above ordinary property and goods. In doing so, he proposes to separate flesh into a distinct and elevated class, when compared with ordinary spoils. Diamondback requested to speak personally before the court and made the following plea:

“The ear is a part of me, indivisible as I am indivisible. It has been with me since I was born. It was the instrument through which I heard all the sweetest sounds of life. The first cries of my rock children. The whispers of my beloved shale mate. It has kept me safe in the deepest depths of the Brass-Tree—alerting me to the shifting of the rocks and the hissing of venomous shade spiders, to whom not even a troll is immune. It was into that ear that my rock father made his final utterances.

“To see a part of myself on another is greatly distressing. Displacing. What am I if I am both here and there? Am I unified and discrete? Or am I myriad and diffuse? Am I stone or am I sand?

“As a troll, I must be stone. I must have all my parts and pieces gathered together. The ear is a part of my person, sacrosanct and irreplaceable.”

The counsel of Axeteeth responded thus—“Irreplaceable my fanny! He grew another friggin’ one! Besides, them trolls never go looking for their bits and pieces. They don’t want them, so why shouldn’t we take ‘em?”

Indeed, the prevalence of abandoned and petrified body parts throughout the paths and passes of the Brass-Tree Mountains is well documented and commonly known. It was not two years ago that this court presided over Calcite v. McGrew, in which a Lacy McGrew from a nearby township complained that the prevalence of troll appendages of a particularly personal and intimate nature, in particular one member that the local birds had taken to using as a favorite perch, made the Koleolee Pass an unsuitable hiking grounds for her children. To keep her little ones from seeing “the naughty troll bits,” she made them wear dark glasses. The result of which was a small pack of children bumping into trees, tripping over roots, and hugging bears.

Axeteeth was allowed to personally respond to Diamondback’s arguments. “I ain’t got no pretty speech, like Diamondback. But I’ve heard pretty things out of this here ear. And I expect to hear a bunch more. And takin’ that away from me would be just plain wrong. It kept him safe down in the mines; well, it’ll keep me safe too. And in the forests, where hearing a fotex or a lyger or a tredulo can mean life or death. And I got babies of my own. And I wanna hear them too. In both ears, if I can. I wanna hear their love on all sides of me, comin’ at me from all around. ‘Cause that’s the way love flows.”

Axeteeth then cleared their throat and said, “Plus it’s welded to my face. And I’ll stab any fucker that tries to cut it off.”

And though perhaps not so eloquently put, Axeteeth’s point is well made—returning the ear would be a severe and extraordinary hardship. Indeed, it would be punitive. And this court can find no wrong in their actions.

However, prior to making our judgment, we posed to Diamondback the following questions:

“You assert that your personhood is being assaulted—without the ear, you are no longer the person you were before?”

“Indeed.”

“But people lose parts and pieces every day! Indeed, even now you are shedding little pebbles in our courtroom. Are you a different person now? How is it that the loss of an ear has disrupted your personhood, but the loss of these pebbles has not?”

Diamondback paused here to confer with counsel. Finally, he responded, “The pebbles fall from my body, are struck by the sun and calcify. They are inert. The ear is still alive. It is still flesh. My flesh.”

“Even though it is on the body of another? If the ear had been left to calcify, would you still be altered? Would you still be the same person?”

After a moment’s thought, Diamondback replied, “I would be a different person, but not in a way that I found distressing.”

“Merely seeing the ear on another is enough to cause you distress?”

Diamondback shook his head. “I can feel it. Its presence is an itch in the ether that I cannot scratch. Sometimes I hear snatches of sounds that are not there.”

We find that this is the crux of the argument—distress. And though we do not dismiss Diamondback’s distress (we certainly would not want to see our nose stitched onto the face of another), we do not feel that the degree of distress outweighs the harm that would come to Axeteeth should the ear be forcibly removed. It is unfortunately often that the law is enforced in a way that one party or another finds to be distressing. Particularly when it comes to property rights.

Diamondback admits that he discarded the ear. The fact that it was later discovered to have a greater value than he estimated is immaterial.

And thus we would have dismissed Diamondback’s claim and found in favor of Axeteeth and Tunnelrat. Indeed, we were raising our gavel, about to issue the order when Diamondback interrupted to make a final argument.

“Safety! And protection. The ear must be returned to me for safety and protection.”

“He already tried that!” shouted Axeteeth. “And I already said: me not having an ear makes me less safe.”

Diamondback raised a hand. “Not simply for me, but for all trolls. If it becomes known that our flesh can be used to replace lost or defective flesh in others, we shall never know a moment’s peace. We shall be hunted, our guts and appendages sold in every black market. If others are allowed to buy and sell our flesh, we will be domesticated, animals kept for slaughter.”

When we pressed Axeteeth and Tunnelrat for a reply to this charge, Axeteeth simply shrugged. “Ain’t my problem.”

Though we find Axeteeth’s lack of empathy to be repugnant, dislike cannot be a deciding factor in a case. At the same time, we cannot so blithely dismiss Diamondback’s concerns.

The courts exist to interpret laws. And the tragic essence of our existence is this: in interpreting the law, we must choose winners and losers. However, we cannot do so blithely—we must do so in a way that causes as little harm as possible.

Diamondback’s assertion already seems to be bearing out. Indeed, even we have heard whispers of increased attacks in the Brass-Tree Mountains on the trolls. And though it is not certain that this violence is connected to the discovery that troll appendages can be grafted onto others, it is possible and even likely.

But what are we to do? Creating a separate class of property for body parts, subject to separate rules, requirements, and penalties, is the purview of the legislature. Any court doing so would be guilty of gross overreach.

We found ourselves at the center of a great moral dilemma. If we do not protect the trolls we have failed ethically; if we classify body parts as a separate class of property, we have failed legally. Our brain fairly burned itself to cinders turning the problem over and over. Indeed we might have collapsed from the strain, had it not been for one small serendipitous event:

Diamondback, itching at some fly or stuck piece of wax, poked a finger in his ear.

But it was Axeteeth who flinched.

Addressing Axeteeth, we asked, “Are you alright?”

“Just a twinge in my earhole. Happens every once in a while.”

Addressing Diamondback, we asked, “You say that you can feel the ear. You can feel it now?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Diamondback said.

We saw it plainly then—the sympathetic link between the ears was obvious. Diamondback was digging in his ear with the gusto of a miner who has stumbled across a fresh vein of gold. But it was Axeteeth who winced in discomfort. It brought to mind some of the fetish dolls made by the priests of the northern isles. And if a lock of hair or a drop of blood can forge a link between a person and a stuffed scrap of rag, how much stronger must the link be between a person and their own living flesh?

And while it is outside the purview of the courts to legislate, it is not beyond our mandate to inform. We would even argue that it is the essence of our duty.

“Mr. Diamondback, do you think that you could, perhaps, wiggle your ear?”

All persons in the court looked at us in a manner most confused. And so we continued. “If you could just humor us one small experiment. Mr. Diamondback said that he could feel Axeteeth’s ear. Even across great distances. We thought it might be interesting to see just how strong of a connection there is between the two ears. So, if you please, Mr. Diamondback–wiggle your ear?”

Diamondback wiggled his own left ear, looking as if he were trying to solve a most challenging riddle. And, after a moment’s pause, Axeteeth’s ear began to move in sympathy.

“Hey now!” Axeteeth shouted. “Don’t you go fiddling with my ear!”

“And do you think,” we said, continuing to address Diamondback, “that if you felt significant pain in that ear, that such pain might be transferred to its twin?”

Understanding spread across Diamondback’s face. “Perhaps, Your Grace. It might just be so.”

We turned then to Axeteeth. “And would you, Mx. Axeteeth, be willing to pay a small, monthly stipend for the privilege of not receiving, perhaps, random stabs of pain and wiggling ears?”

“This is extortion!” shouted Axeteeth’s counsel.

“Mx. Axeteeth is welcome to dispose of the ear if they choose. And Mr. Diamondback here is welcome to do with his person as he likes. Including, perhaps, piercing their own ear in the middle of the night when most people would be sleeping?”

“But what if I do the same thing back to him?” Axeteeth said, pinching at their new ear.

“Then I think that would encourage Mr. Diamondback not to abuse the power he has over you. I think this will encourage you both to arrive at a mutually beneficial arrangement. You, Mx. Axeteeth, will have a new, fully functional ear. And you, Mr. Diamondback, will receive some compensation.

“And, I believe, knowing that someone else can cause you significant pain or control the movements of any stolen appendage or organ will discourage the illegal harvesting and trade of such, would you not agree, Mr. Diamondback?”

After taking a moment to confer, Diamondback and his counsel responded that this indeed would likely be a sufficient deterrent.

Thus, we dismiss Diamondback’s claim. The ear in question shall remain the property of Mx. Axeteeth and the proceeds from the sale of which shall remain with Ms. Tunnelrat. Any contract providing Diamondback compensation for the lease and peaceful use of the ear shall be between the two parties.

Such is our ruling. And here be it:

Signed

Ignatious P. Fizzlewig, Esq. Presiding Judge

Third Parish

Quan

Southern Isles

Summer of Cherries and Year of the Duck, 1107


© 2023 by Nick Thomas

3363 words

Author’s Note: I spend a lot of time reading case law for work. Some of the cases are super dry, but some are incredibly compelling–high drama with strong narrative arcs. One day, while staring out the window, I imagined a court case in which one party was trying to sell an ear they had found. The idea made me snort out loud and made me want to see if I could tell a similar story using the structure of a court opinion.

Nick Thomas spends his days building geodomes, playing squash, and drafting legislation for the Ohio General Assembly. He aspires to write stories that capture all the wonderful, weird beauty of life. He lives in Columbus, Ohio in a ramshackle old house with his wife, two children, and one little ghost, all of whom he loves very dearly. 


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DP FICTION #99A: “Six Reasons Why Bots Make the Worst Asteroid Miners” by Matt Bliss

edited by David Steffen

1. They think they know everything. Like your twenty years of mining experience is useless compared to a high-acting neural processing drive. Like you’re nothing but a softer, weaker liability, and the only thing you’re good for is greasing their joints and blowing out their compressors. Just one bot and one human to babysit them.

2. They have no personality. Stuck on an asteroid is bad enough without having a pencil sharpener as your only company. Every joke goes over their finely-polished head. Every vent of frustration is met with a vent of auxiliary heat instead. They tell you their name and pronouns, but it doesn’t help. They don’t know calloused hands. They don’t have a family back planetside who depends on that paycheck, hoping every day that you make it back in one piece because they are the only reason you left in the first place.

3. They don’t understand privacy. They’re always there, always watching, even when you don’t want them to be. When you eat and their lens follows each bite. When you sleep and hear their parts whirring in the bunk beside you. They never leave you alone. Even when news of your father’s death comes, and you miss him like hell and just want to scream in the blackness of space because the next resupply ship is forty-two light-years away and won’t get back in time to make the service. Even when you’re at your loneliest, they never leave your side.

4. They squeeze too tight. When you finally give in and cry on their shoulder, they hold you and somehow squeeze every buried memory to the surface. Even as tears leave rust splotches along their dented casing. You start to think that maybe this box of nuts and bolts knows you more than anyone. Maybe they’ve been piston to shoulder with you all along, and are as hardworking and caring as any other miner you’ve known. Maybe you’ll get through this… together.

5. They leave too soon. When you finally get home, you think of them each night you stare into the sky. Because you know everything about that arrogant prick by then. The way they laughed at your bad welds. The way their lens retracted when they were glum. So when the drill bit was stuck, you knew they’d give you that funny little chortle as they worked the stubborn thing free. But neither of you expected it to roar to life, catching their shell in its carbide-teeth. How you tried to stop it, but seconds too late. How you could only watch as your co-worker, friend, best friend perhaps, was mangled beyond repair, and all that’s left is an oil stain on the asteroid’s mine face. Leaving you alone, with no one to hold you too tight, or buzz in the bunk beside you at night, or even laugh at your bad welds. Alone… until it’s time to go home.

6. Because bot or not, they become family, and losing them hurts. And it should’ve been you left out there. It should’ve been you.


© 2023 by Matt Bliss

512 words

Author’s Note: I have worked in mining and construction for nearly twenty years, and have unfortunately seen firsthand the impact of death and injury among my colleagues and coworkers. With this story, I wanted to capture some of the complex emotions that arise from such a loss, and reflect upon the true toll of working in a blue-collar industry.

Matt Bliss is a miner and construction worker (on Earth) turned speculative fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in MetaStellar, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and a number of other magazines and anthologies. When he’s not daydreaming about robots or rocket ships, you can find him on Twitter at @MattJBliss.


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