DP FICTION #123B: “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Ableism

The Super-Abled 501 Local Union building wasn’t ADA compliant.

I sat in my wheelchair next to the three steps that led to their front door, and groaned. My brand new laser eyes didn’t exactly fix my mobility problems.

Two weeks ago, I’d been zapped by a falling piece of alien spaceship debris and developed laser eyes. Ten days ago, I’d lost my job at the City Planner’s office because of budget cuts. I wasn’t even mad though, because I could never push my projects through and you know who gets stuff done without anyone getting in their way? The super-abled. As soon as I got home I filled in my union application.

Yesterday I’d gotten notice that I could join after I demonstrated my new laser eyes in person. And now here I was. Stuck.

A rubbery guy walked out the front door, legs stretching and compressing like a slinky.

“Excuse me!” I said, brandishing my paperwork. “Is there another way into the building?”

Stretchy-legs looked me up and down. “You sure you’re in the right place?”

I sighed and took off my sunglasses, then lasered the small patch of grass next to the sidewalk. “Yeah. So. Is there another way in?”

He shook his head.

“Sooooo could you get someone to come out? Nobody’s answering the phones.”

“Right. Sure. Hey, why are you in a wheelchair if you’re super-abled?”

I took a deep breath and reminded myself that ignorance wasn’t malice. “Laser eyes ain’t everything. Can you go grab someone?”

Eventually a harried intern came and explained that testing had to be done inside where specialized equipment made sure nobody was cheating, but if I wanted we could get one of their super-strong members to carry me and my chair in.

Normally I’d never submit to such indignity. But, figuring I could get this sorted more effectively as a member than a non-member, I said OK.

A large woman who looked like she was made of striped sedimentary rocks clomped over and gathered me up, wheelchair and all, like I was just a bag of groceries. Humiliating, dehumanizing, and not exactly the best first impression in a professional context. Once she put me back down I hoped that everyone, myself included, would forget that ever happened.

Inside, in a room full of lenses and sensors, I lasered things. I turned paper into ashes, melted concrete into a glowing blob, and then, because nobody was saying anything, with great care I lasered the wobbly words ‘is this enough’ in char marks on the wall.

My application was approved.

***

I’d been trying to get traffic circles built since I’d started at the City Planner’s office. As an assistant I hadn’t had much sway over anything.

Each time there was a different reason. Sometimes there was no budget. Sometimes it wasn’t what the voters wanted, though, had anyone actually asked the voters? Of course not. Sometimes there was no time to spend on this and really I should be focusing on the important things like fixing the coffee machine.

But the super-abled? They could do anything they wanted. They had no bosses to tell them no, and what were you gonna do, try to stop a super-abled person from doing, well, anything?

Over the next week I went through the list of superheroes in the union roster and started contacting them, one by one. I introduced myself and gave my little spiel about how traffic circles save lives compared to regular intersections, and how this little change could make a big difference, and weren’t we super-abled all in the business of saving lives…?

The responses weren’t encouraging.

ExpandiRay wouldn’t lend me his raygun to grow an intersection wider so that I could carve it into a circle after, because insurance wouldn’t cover it.

AscendAnt said she was too busy with an autograph signing to get ants to dismantle bits of pavement and carry them to a new orientation.

NiteFlite wouldn’t lift and move sections of street without consulting with the union PR rep, who wrote that redoing city infrastructure wasn’t “on brand” for the union and maybe I should just find a nice supervillain to fight instead.

The Smash sent me back an email that looked like she’d mashed her fists all over the keyboard and called it a day.

But most of them didn’t respond at all.

***

They still hadn’t built a ramp, and meetings were in-person, so I joined the union meeting by video. The HR rep made a big deal about making a “special exception” for me since I “didn’t really need this accommodation” because “someone could always carry me in like before.” I managed to keep my smile plastered on my face.

The union leader, a woman named “Big Dig” with hands like gopher claws, went through the agenda. Most of it was assigning press stuff. But eventually we got to the one real thing on the agenda—the union wanted to defeat Doctor Croc, a green scaly menace who’d been razing buildings, most recently a conference center.

I knew that place well. Its front doors were too narrow for my chair, and the one time I’d gone to a conference I’d had to get in near the dumpsters in the back. Which had meant waiting by the dumpsters for an hour, until I too smelled like garbage, until someone brought up the service elevator. Which meant my boss was so grossed out he’d sent me home to shower.

Destroying a conference center wasn’t great, but if you absolutely had to, I’d choose this one.

When it was time, I introduced myself and said “Sorry I’m not there in person to meet everyone. I’ll be glad to join you once there’s a ramp!”

Crickets.

“So I was wondering when there was a chance to suggest new business? Traffic circles save lives over intersections, and I was thinking that if someone like PhazeMatter could turn an intersection’s pavement into a liquid and then we reroute it and solidify it back, we could make a big difference to the city without a lot of effort… I have a research paper on traffic circles… if anyone’s interested…”

I trailed off. Nobody was listening.

The union leader ahemmed and said “Everyone, there’s snacks outside, mingle and enjoy! RazorBeam, can you stay on a minute?”

She waited until everyone else filed out of the room. “I wanted to touch base. The 501 really cares about accessibility. But with dues the way they are, we can’t afford to put in a ramp right now.”

“But the ADA says—”

“This building is old enough to be grandfathered in. Besides, if we built a ramp for you, we’d have to make adjustments for everybody. Backless chairs for Lizzardbeth so her tail would fit better, upgrade the bathroom plumbing for RockGal, you get the idea. The budget would explode! There’s even a rule in the union handbook, from about seven years ago, that says we don’t do accommodations when it’s for just one member.”

Temporary ramps were pretty cheap, but I tried switching tactics. Maybe I could still get something else done. “Can we talk about traffic circles then?”

“Unfortunately it’s not on our list of priorities for the year, so maybe some other time. And we’d rather you not bug all the other union members about it. But hopefully you can join us in person for the next meeting! You’re missing out on the networking,” she chirped, and hung up.

I breathed deeply. Then lasered a hole in my living room wall.

***

Throughout the next week, I waited for my union-issued superwatch to vibrate and call me into action. On Friday it finally did, telling me to come to HQ.

Yet again, I hit the problem of the stairs, but it turned out not to matter. They wanted me for an outdoor photo shoot as the newest member of the team, together with an interview with a local journalist.

During the interview, the PR rep held giant cue cards with what I was supposed to say to the journalist. The whole exercise seemed pretty meaningless.

But then the journalist asked, “And RazorBeam, how do you feel about Doctor Croc getting away yesterday, after he smashed up the craft supplies store on Main Street?”

The PR rep’s eyes widened. Probably the journalist hadn’t vetted this question with them. And I was taken aback too—I’d had no idea that there was a new Doctor Croc incident.

“Uhhhh… I’m sure we’ll get him next time?”

“What’s really important here,” jumped in the PR rep, “is that we have a wonderful new member of the team. Our diversity makes us stronger, and that lets us better serve the people of this city. Thank you for your time!”

After the journalist was hurried out, I asked the rep what had happened.

“Oh it’s just a craft store, don’t worry about it.”

“Why wasn’t I called to help? I was free, and maybe if I was there he wouldn’t have gotten away.”

“Oh well.” They looked me up and down. “We want to save your abilities for the projects that use them best. I’m sure the next time you’ll be called. See you then!”

As they sauntered away, I lasered a patch of grass into a charred black splotch in frustration.

But why a craft supplies store? What would a supervillain have against pipe cleaners and construction paper and rolls of fabric? A convention center was the center of big meetups and commerce, it was a big deal to a city to get that destroyed. But a little craft shop?

I wasn’t a fan of that store, not that I needed a lot of craft supplies. But I’d gone once to get poster board and thick markers to make a sign for a rally, and the aisles of supplies were crammed so close together that I couldn’t really maneuver in there.

Still, a craft store made no sense.

***

Two weeks later, at the next union meeting (still via video), I came prepared with a proposal.

If I could get help blocking traffic, I could sort of make traffic circles happen myself. I’d spent the last few weeks experimenting with asphalt and found that after I melted it I could sort of push it around with a shovel. It wasn’t the most efficient, but it could work.

I never got to talk. There’d been another Doctor Croc attack that nobody had invited me to, and it was at a perfectly wheelchair-accessible gym. This time they put up some photos from the gym fight. (They’d brought the journalist! But not me!)

I’d been to that gym. It was a crappy old place where the windows didn’t properly close and all the fluorescent lights flickered and there was a greasy sheen of something on all surfaces, so not that many people went to it anyway and I doubt many people were sad it was destroyed. What was Doctor Croc’s goal here, anyway?

Nobody was trying to figure out what the pattern was, though. And it seemed like nobody could stop the guy. ExpandiRay was in the hospital with a shattered femur from some barbells Doctor Croc had thrown at him during the fight. And RockGal had some new epoxy-filled cracks on her face.

I didn’t even try to bring up traffic circles.

***

The attacks kept coming, and I kept not getting an invitation to come help.

I did experiments in my own backyard on how far I could accurately laser things, and sent the results to Big Dig. It didn’t change anything, even though I was pretty sure I had the most reach out of any of the super-abled who had distance or projectile abilities. (I got an angry letter from my landlord who saw the charred remains of my experiments and I had to buy a fire extinguisher, so I guess one change. But that was it.)

If I couldn’t help fight, perhaps I could help predict. I went to the library and read all I could about Doctor Croc, and found nothing that made sense. There was no obvious vendetta I could find, nothing about past grudges, or feuds, or specific needs for revenge. As a twentysomething he’d had an airboat accident in a swamp and had been bitten by a mutated crocodile. The toxic waste plant that had oozed its sludge into the swamp to affect the crocodiles had long since been dealt with. There’d been lawsuits, cleanup efforts, the works, and it hadn’t been in business in years. It looked like the site was now an ecology museum with exhibits about the dangers of pollution in wetlands.

So I needed a new theory. I made one of those conspiracy boards at home, with the printed out pictures and thumbtacks and pieces of string connecting pieces of information. He’d destroyed the conference center, craft supplies store, and gym, and previously had demolished an ancient movie theater that showed old movies on a rattling old projector, and a little hardware store crammed full of tools and paints all the way to the ceiling, with really high checkout counters that displayed even more goods beneath them. After weeks of trying to put together the puzzle pieces, I still had nothing.

***

Chez Louisette was the one fancy restaurant in town. And it was having a grand re-opening on Wednesday. It was no crappy gym or dusty craft store, but it was an opportunity with a lot of press so maybe, just maybe, Doctor Croc would be there? Maybe?

So on Wednesday morning I sent a note to Big Dig about my theory, then went to stake the place out.

Not only was I right, but Doctor Croc had beat me there. As soon as I got near I heard a big crash. And another. And then two green scaly fists burst through its wall, raining down bits of brick.

Nobody else was here, but this was my chance! Maybe if I could take him down alone, the union would take me seriously, and we could get something done.

I lasered a giant hole in the wall, which then tottered and fell forward, revealing a very angry crocodile man. He was about eight feet tall, mostly a torso on stubby green legs, and his arms were muscular, massive, and gearing up for another punch.

“Hey!” I said. “Doctor Croc! Put your hands in the air!” I remembered protocol, and pushed the button on my new superwatch for the union to send backup to my location.

He looked me up and down. “You?” he said. “YOU. Of all people. Are trying to stop ME.”

I suppressed a scream. Why were people so difficult everywhere! “Disabled people can be super-abled too, you know. Now I can laser you dead from here in less time than it’d take you to throw a chunk of wall at me, so I suggest you put your hands up.”

“You don’t get it. Do you know what this restaurant’s been doing?”

“Uh, being snooty?”

“They won’t reveal their ingredients, which is dangerous for people with allergies and Celiacs and whatnot.” He looked smug, as though this magically explained everything.

“I mean, that’s awful, but that’s no reason to destroy the whole building. Or any of the other places you’ve been smashing up. Now, you’re under arrest, by the order of the Super-Abled 501 Local Union! Hands up!”

He scoffed, but slowly raised his hands and stepped out towards me. Behind him were the twisted stainless steel remains of what had been a kitchen. “Still a believer, huh? Tell me, did the 501 ever add any outdoor handrails?”

“What does that have to do with anything? No…”

“I was a member seven years ago. Asked for some accommodations so my kid could join on Take Your Child to Work Day. They never added any. Each time it was ‘there’s no budget’ or ‘that decision was made by the previous leadership’ and nothing. Ever. Changed. Eventually they had a vote that said that any changes to the union of any kind, which benefit only one person, were out. Specifically to shut me up. Even though accessibility accommodations help loads of people, and they wouldn’t even know how many people weren’t applying in the first place because the building was inaccessible.”

Sounded familiar. And enraging. “It’s crappy,” I said, “but still no reason to destroy everything.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked, moving closer. “Have they built you a ramp yet?”

“Um. No…”

“Didn’t think so. They just can’t be bothered.”

“OK so they suck, fine, but why destroy all these other buildings?”

Doctor Croc continued, “Nobody can be bothered to make accommodations. The ADA’s only enforced when people bring lawsuits. I’m in a giant Facebook group of parents with disabled kids and basically nobody has the time and money to sue, ever. And even then most lawsuits fail. But when I destroy an inaccessible building, the insurance covers it, and when they rebuild, it’s no longer so old that it gets an accessibility exemption. Plus, it’s safe since everyone gets evacuated. No people get harmed, and we get the accessibility we need. There was nobody here this morning when I started smashing.”

“That can’t be right,” I said, as his hands started floating downwards. “Hey, hands stay up! Look, I used to work for the city. There are plenty of avenues to ask for accommodations. And besides, what was so inaccessible about that gym? Or the other places?”

He put his hands up again. “That gym had flickering lights, which can trigger migraines, seizures, or meltdowns. The movie theater never bothered to add closed captioning devices. The hardware store had high checkout counters and never let its cashiers sit even when one of them broke a leg.”

“OK, that makes no sense. Why not just destroy the gym’s lights? Or the hardware store’s checkout counters? There’s no reason they couldn’t rebuild with the same exact problems. Plus I doubt anyone even knows that this is why stuff’s getting destroyed. You’re not exactly getting headlines that say ‘Doctor Croc Destroys Another Inaccessible Building’.”

“Huh,” he said, lowering his hands briefly then thinking better of it and shoving them up again. “Yeah that’s a good point. Probably should’ve just smashed up those counters, and probably should’ve left a note or something. Hey you’re good at this! You should join me!”

“I’m not going to start smashing up buildings! I’m one of the good guys.”

“Oh yeah? Those good guys that can’t even get you a ramp? Those things cost what, like $200 at Home Depot?”

He had a point. With the union taking a percentage of all sponsorships and deals, and members working with giant brands like Nike, they could absolutely find space in their budget for a measly $200. They could get a single backless stool for Lizzardbeth for cheap. They just weren’t bothering to take those two minutes to think of solutions to help. Even I hadn’t thought of the problems with flickering lights and old movie equipment.

Most of all, nothing was getting done. The local 501 was so busy with its public image it wasn’t doing jack. Here I was, talking to their archenemy for a good five minutes, and nobody else was showing up.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered.

“It is ridiculous! We’d make great partners, you and me, actually make some changes around here. What would you do about the movie theater?”

“Huh? I don’t know, I guess I’d laser ‘GET CAPTIONING DEVICES OR ELSE’ on their walls. Or send a note to local insurance companies that says that their clients are at risk of expensive damages if they don’t shore up accessibility, and they have two weeks to fix things.” I shook my head. “But that’s irrelevant!”

“See? Those are great ideas. You’re full of them. So join me, whaddaya think? No more smashing up buildings when you’ve got a better plan, I promise.” He gave me a crocodiley grin, showing all his teeth. “My garage is fully accessible and is a great place to meet. And I make a mean dairy-free hot chocolate.”

Something inside me snapped. It had been years since someone thought about accessibility for me without me having to even ask. And maybe this way I could actually get something done, especially if Doctor Croc was willing to let me focus him. Get him laser-focused, if you will. And with a bit of time I could probably come up with some better plans that were less destructive and more effective.

“Hell,” I said. “Only if we make some traffic circles too.”

“Oh I read those things save a lot of lives! Great idea, let’s do that next. You in?”

“Why not,” I said, and grinned back.

And just for some much-needed catharsis, I lasered an already-wrecked piece of kitchen behind him. The metal melted into a ramp-like shape.

© 2025 by Effie Seiberg

3479 words

Author’s Note: In 2017 I became disabled with ME/CFS, turning me into an ambulatory wheelchair user. The transition from abled to disabled is a tough one, and one of the hardest things is seeing people refuse to make even super easy accommodations. I’ve seen every one of the excuses in this story—there’s no budget, but then we’d have to do things for everyone and that’s just too much, there’s no bandwidth to deal with this but maybe later, this is an old building with an ADA exception, etc. (Don’t get me started on a lack of Covid mitigation policies… even if nobody wears a mask, you can do cheap and easy things to help air filtration/circulation.) And this part really sucks, because it excludes people like me from stuff we otherwise could still do, effectively making our disabilities even more disabling. So this story is my frustration about the lack of easy-to-accomplish accessibility accommodations that still just don’t happen. 

Effie Seiberg is an ambulatory wheelchair user, and a fantasy and science fiction writer. Her stories can be found in Lightspeed, Galaxy’s Edge, Analog, Fantasy Magazine, and PodCastle, amongst others. Her stories include a finalist in the AnLab Awards, a nomination for the Subjective Chaos Kind Of Award, and an honorable mention in the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction. 

She encourages anyone who cares about US disability rights to call their elected representatives (it’s easy at 5calls.org) and ask them to reject cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, all services critical for disabled folks. 

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

DP FICTION #123A: “The Rat King Who Wasn’t” by Stephen Granade

edited by David Steffen

Summer had been unseasonably hot, rats taking refuge in the covered canals where the drunk and homeless hid, and the rat-catchers had unleashed schipperkes, dogs that hunted with flared noses and bared teeth, and then Nicolaas, who had only ruled for a year, abdicated as Rat King.

It fell to Hannes to resume the throne he had so recently vacated in favor of his offspring. He was angry, his bodies hissing and clacking teeth, a promise of violence. Nicolaas was in hiding, so Hannes’s anger fell on Teodoer, for Teodoer was Nicolaas’s closest friend and Hannes had no better target for his outrage. Teodoer cowered, his bodies trying to hide behind each other. Hannes’s command to Teodoer was as simple as it was impossible: find Nicolaas. Return him to his ordained place.

It is difficult to find a rat that does not wish to be found, even a rat king like Nicolaas with a surfeit of bodies linked by their tails. Teodoer roamed the city, careful to avoid the areas frequented by dogs or rat-catchers or, worse, the rat-baiter. He talked with other rats, singletons unaffiliated with any member of the rat court, but even they had heard of Teodoer’s unsolvable task and feared Hannes’s anger when Teodoer unavoidably failed and so would not speak to him.

Teodoer too was afraid. If he failed to deliver Nicolaas to Hannes in a timely fashion, the King who was and now was again could demand his dissolution. His tails would be unlinked and individual bodies scattered, the awareness that was Teodoer fading like blood in rain, the water red, then pink, then clear.

Desperate, Teodoer released some of his bodies so he could search the city more rapidly. His bodies squeaked protest, for to be alone was to be prey, but it was a necessary sacrifice. Teodoer felt himself dim as they left, carrying away enough of his awareness to remain part of him, but he had not risen in the court by shying away from what was necessary.

The rumors Teodoer brought back to himself were mist and smoke. Rats across the city gossiped about Nicolaas; the machinations of the court were entertainment as well as news, the court dependent on the labor of singletons who in return received the court’s guidance and protection. But the gossip had no substance. None of the claimed sightings of Nicolaas had the ring of truth.

Nevertheless, Teodoer investigated them, a fruitless endeavor. And then he heard of how the rat-baiter had died.

Rat baiting was new, brought by Englishmen who had settled in the city and found it too lacking in cruelty. A pit was built; dogs were trained; rats were caught. After, the bodies were tossed behind the building, a furry pile of lives cut short in fear and pain.

Rats had approached the court, and the courtiers and King Hannes had made a show of their concern. They wished to put an end to rat-baiting, of course, but feared the repercussions should they act against humans. In truth, they found in rat-baiting a useful method to keep singletons obedient. It forced them to seek the shelter of the court’s protection. The most promising rats were forcibly added to King Hannes and his courtiers. Teodoer had some among his bodies who had fled the rat-baiter. Other singleton rats worked to fulfill the court’s wishes. So it remained, even when Nicolaas ascended to the throne.

But now the man who organized the fights was dead—rat poison, slipped into his nightly wine. He had been dead long enough for rats to chew his face, the humans said.

A rumor, wispy as the others. But Teodoer scented Nicolaas’s involvement. Nicolaas had fought for the court to act against the rat-baiter, to no avail. Even a Rat King’s powers have limits. Eventually Nicolaas had given up the fight.

But poison spoke to intelligence and intent, and the bites were an announcement meant for other rats. And so it was that Teodoer made his way under gloom of night to the rat-baiter’s home.

The house was a hovel, tight and dark. Crumbs of food littered the floor. Teodoer took pleasure in scavenging them, feeding his bodies on the dead man’s spoils. He sniffed the discarded wine cup and ran twitching whiskers over the bed where the rat-baiter had thrashed out his life. Scents of Nicolaas, a musk he had grown up with. His friend had been here.

As he followed Nicolaas’s winding trail along buildings and through corners of storerooms where rats had gnawed openings, excitement gave way to caution. Nicolaas would not welcome Teodoer’s presence, as close as they had been. Would their friendship keep Nicolaas from pulling apart Teodoer’s bodies and adding them, and aspects of Teodor’s mind, to his? It was a danger when a lesser displeased a greater, and though Nicolaas had fled the Kingship, he was still the greatest of them all.

Teodoer reached the city’s outer fortifications, crumbling mason allowing passage into a cavernous space. He paused outside. He wanted to risk but one body, and argued with himself about which one and how much of his awareness to leave in that body. Too little and the body would no longer be him; too much and he might lose that part of himself to Nicolaas were he to take the body. Eventually he reached agreement. Teodoer poured himself into the quickest and sneakiest of them. She unwound her tail and scampered ahead. Teodoer bided his time, fears growing—would she be caught? Had he sent her to become part of Nicolaas?—until she returned, eyes bright, nose twitching, and rejoined her tail to the others, completing him again. Knowledge flowed into him.

Nicolaas wished to talk.

Teodoer’s shock grew upon seeing Nicolaas. His friend and one-time King was still groomed neatly, as befit royalty, but he’d grown more numerous, and several of his new bodies were unworthy of him. One’s eyes had a milky film. Another was so ancient that her black fur was patchy and thin. “My lord.”

Nicolaas bruxed, the quiet grinding of teeth signaling contentment, as if he was relaxing in his royal crawlspace and not hiding in the city’s outer walls. “Hannes sent you, of course, and of course you could not refuse his command. But I will not return to the court.”

“My lord,” Teodoer repeated, still reeling. He and Nicolaas had been close, spending so much time together after Hannes had made them that Hannes had laughed that they would become one, half a joke, half a warning. The Nicolaas he thought he knew would never have sullied himself with lesser bodies.

A singleton limped through the masonry hole. His back foot dragged—bumblefoot, by the smell. He had the audacity to approach Nicolaas, head low, with soft squeaks of supplication. Teodoer recoiled to see Nicolaas allowing the rat to link tails. Nicolaas’s other bodies closed their eyes. “Fresh from a barge. Welcome to our city.”

Multiple of Nicolaas’s bodies had spoken in unison, unsettling and wrong. “Stop it!” Teodoer snapped. “Stop this perversion, restore yourself, and take back up your throne and your duties.”

“I continue my duties,” Nicolaas said with one voice. For the first time he sounded like the commanding King he had been. “Better than I could at court. You tracked me from the rat-baiter’s?” At Teodoer’s nod, Nicolaas continued, “In one night I did more to make rats’ lives better than I did in my entire year as King.”

“Untrue!” Teodoer said, unwilling to hear his friend diminish his accomplishments. “You improved the court. With time you would have done more.”

“With time.” Nicolaas sneezed as if scenting peppermint.

“And debasing yourself will help?”

Nicolaas reared up with a terrible scream. Teodoer flattened his bodies to the rough ground. He should have been more temperate. His lone hope was that Nicolaas would leave him enough bodies to remain himself.

Three of Nicolaas’s bodies pulled their tails free and nipped at the remaining bodies’ necks to chide them. To Teodoer’s amazement, Nicolaas quieted. With remonstrative squeaks, the three bodies rejoined Nicolaas, who said, “I am sorry. Old habits.”

Nicolaas had returned to speaking with multiple bodies. Teodoer squeaked in distress. His friend couldn’t even hold himself together. “You’re unwell. Please, let me help you.”

“I am more myself than I have been since I became King.” Nicolaas drew close, bodies nestling against Teodoer’s, as they had done since they were young but had not since Nicolaas became King. It brought memories of happier times. “I will explain. If you cannot understand, then none can. After, you may decide if I am mad.”

Nicolaas’s explanation, given as he led Teodoer by canals and along walls, made no sense. He had of late been issuing invitations to any singleton who would listen. They were free to join him for a time, and just as free to leave when they wished. A recipe for contagion and madness, Teodoer thought. It took careful balance to maintain yourself as new bodies joined. The court thoroughly examined rats to make sure only the most impressive ones joined a courtier. It was why duels between courtiers, though rare, often ended with the victor taking bodies from the loser, spoils from the fight. Another courtier was a fertile source of worthy bodies and, no matter how hard they tried to keep their mind out of those lost bodies, knowledge of that courtier’s schemes.

The two of them sheltered beneath a cart near the port. The air smelled of the sea and carried on it the creak-slap of boats nestled tight together. “Most who join me are newcomers,” Nicolaas said.

“Of course they are!” Teodoer squeaked. No city rat would debase themself so, and if they did, then the court would destroy them.

At Teodoer’s distress, Nicolaas began to groom him, feet and blunt snouts moving over him, soothing and cleaning fur. Despite Teodoer’s fear for Nicolaas, the ministrations calmed him. “There is so much to be done to help rats—all rats. The court has lost sight of that, if indeed they ever knew it.”

Nicolaas and Teodoer had long argued about how to change the court to better serve rats. Nicolaas had burned like a hot fire, ready to change the court or turn it to ashes. Teodoer had counseled a slower approach, one less likely to rally courtiers to resist them. Teodoer had been afraid for his friend when he became King, and whether the courtiers would rise in opposition. He needn’t have worried. Nicolaas had been constrained by the court, as well as the firm guidance of Hannes, who directed Nicolaas with words and, when needed, nips. Nicolaas had let his ambitious plans give way to the pragmatic and the possible, or so Teodoer had thought. Instead, he had run away to enact his most ambitious plan ever.

When Nicolaas completed his grooming, content with the state of all of Teodoer’s fur, he pointed his noses towards the distant dock. “The world is so much larger than we knew, Teodoer. It goes on and on. I wonder if it has an end.” Half of Nicolaas’s faces turned to Teodoer. “I would show you for a moment, if you would let me.”

By giving Teodoer one of his bodies. Tension ran through Teodoer, carried from tail to tail to tail. He was of too many minds. Some of him wished to flee Nicolaas’s invitation. Others wanted to attack. But more, deep down, were curious.

Nicolaas had kept himself despite his new bodies. One could not hurt. Teodoer nodded, quickly, before his minds could change again.

Nicolaas regarded himself in silent consultation, until the bumblefoot rat tugged free its tail and offered it to Teodoer. Teodoer held very still, as if a cat stalked him, as the rat wove its tail into his.

Nicolaas saw the rat’s history. The scurry and leap onto a boat from a dock whose smells were so unlike the ones Teodoer had known that he could scarce believe they were real. Hiding below with others, having chewed a hole in a sack that carried food he had never before tasted. Traveling from city to city, each one more different and fantastic than the last. And now here.

He also saw how rats lived on boats and in other cities. None had courts, or even rat kings. Instead, they scavenged and fought and loved and died in complex arrangements that were a plank thin enough to flex but thick enough to hold them all and keep them peaceful and safe. For the first time in Teodoer’s life, he wondered why the court existed.

The bumblefoot rat withdrew his tail. It was like drawing out a splinter, relief that left an ache. Teodoer couldn’t speak. It was no small thing to have glimpsed the world.

“That is why.” Nicolaas allowed the bumblefoot rat to re-join him.

Teodoer found his voice. “I can’t tell them. About you. About what you are doing. About what I—” He stopped as if, by not speaking it aloud, his transgression would not exist.

“You must. Not about what you did or what you saw, but about me. Hannes will have it out of you. And word is spreading. Not all of my rats have come from newly-arrived boats.”

“You can hide!”

But Nicolaas shook his many heads. “They will find me, unless I give up what I am doing, and I will not.”

“Then we fight!” Teodoer said with the zeal of the newly-converted.

“We would lose. And nothing would change.”

It came to Teodoer that he had brought death to Nicolaas the moment he stepped into the rat-baiter’s home. His squeaks of distress were piercingly high.

Nicolaas’s bodies enmeshed with Teodoer’s. “Friend, forgive me. I must ask one last, hardest thing. When Hannes orders my death, you must be the one. Do it swiftly, and do not stint on the victor’s spoils.”

He could not take his friend’s bodies. “Nicolaas—”

“It must be you. Only you will show me the mercy of a swift end.”

That end could not be changed as long as Nicolaas held to his decisions, and though Teodoer argued and argued, Nicolaas was unmoved. He would not abandon his project.

It fell to Teodoer to return to court and deliver testimony of what he witnessed regarding Nicolaas. His voice trembled and his tails pulled taut and then slack. The court took his distress to be for Nicolaas’s heresy, a mistake that Teodoer did not correct.

From the throne mound, Hannes rendered implacable judgement just as Nicolaas had predicted: “Nicolaas must die.”

“Let it be me who performs that duty.” Teodoer risked Hannes’s anger in speaking, and the court hissed in surprise, but he had promised Nicolaas. “He has shamed both this court and me. I, who was so close to him, could not make him give up this madness and return.”

“As you say.” Hannes’s eyes glittered in the light that filtered through the boards of the house where the court had made its home. “But I will accompany. Lead me to him.”

Teodoer’s hope that he would be sent alone died. Reprieve was impossible. He would have to kill his friend.

Hannes was silent as guilt behind Teodoer as they crossed the city. Nicolaas waited for them in the fortifications. He dipped a bow as they entered. “Hannes. Teodoer.”

“Dispatch him,” Hannes ordered.

Teodoer trembled, but Nicolaas took the decision from Teodoer by rushing at him. Teodoer reacted without thinking, nipping at Nicolaas’s bodies, flipping them on their backs and putting teeth to their throats to force their submission.

And like that, Nicolaas was gone, tails unwinding, leaving no trace of Teodoer’s friend beyond the now-singletons fleeing for their lives. He encircled two who, despite looking the strongest, had not run as the others had, and added them to his body.

Hannes watched the other bodies scamper. “Are you sure you wish to add any of his to your own?”

“I’m unchanged,” Teodoer said, answering the unspoken question.

“Then come.” Hannes took the lead for the return journey. Before they entered the court, Hannes laid restraining paws on Teodoer. “We will need a new Rat King to continue the court. I am tired, and am ready to unlink tails for good once I have properly trained someone to follow me. I think that should be you.”

Teodoer dipped his heads in humility. “If you think me worthy.”

“We shall see.”

Teodoer said no more, and allowed Hannes to tell the others what had transpired, all the while turning over in his mind how to show Hannes that he was indeed worthy. For he had lied to Hannes. He was changed. He had taken on more of Nicolaas than he had let Hannes see. Nicolaas, clever Nicolaas, had poured all he could into the two bodies that stayed behind. His friend was gone, but his ideas remained, waiting for Teodoer to return them to the city. Nicolaas had decisively won his argument with Teodoer.

After Teodoer became Rat King, he would tear down the court entire.

© 2025 by Stephen Granade

2847 words

Author’s Note: I’ve been fascinated by rats since my youngest kid started keeping them as pets. I started musing about what a rat society organized around rat kings would look like, and what would happen if the Rat King wanted to abdicate. Those musing collided with me wanting to write a story in a more formal, archaic voice than I’d ever tried before, and before I knew it “The Rat King Who Wasn’t” popped out.

Stephen Granade is a physicist and writer from Huntsville, Alabama, the city with a Saturn V rocket in its skyline. Their stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Baffling Magazine, and Escape Pod. Their game, Professor of Magical Studies, is available from Choice of Games, and they co-edit Small Wonders, an SFF magazine for flash fiction and poetry. Find them on Bluesky (@granades.com), Mastodon (@sargent@wandering.shop), and their website (https://stephen.granades.com).

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Submission Grinder April Fool’s Recap Number Two

written by David Steffen

In 2020, on April 1st, we’ve had a recurring gag on the site where we “rebrand” by replacing the banner from a list of joke banners that sound kindof like “The Grinder” but pick a different title, different subtitle, and different logo. There were nine banners created by our original banner artist M.S. Corley (with a little help from me with my mad MS Paint skills for a couple of them). See the previous April Fool’s Recap for those original 9 banners.

In case you didn’t happen to be on the site that day or you didn’t have the time to try to see them all, you can see them all here right in this recap.

We started it in that particular year because everyone was extremely stressed with the still-new pandemic, mass layoffs, social isolation, and we thought that if we could make someone laugh it would be a little something good. Since we had the banners we’ve been running the same recurring gag for the few years since then, and people still seem to enjoy them and there’s always someone new finding them.

This year again we are super extra stressed with the *gestures wearily at the everything*, we thought it would be a good time to expand and add more all new banners.

At the time of our last recap, the main logo on the site was a meat grinder:

Title: “The Grinder”
Subtitle: “Milling your submissions into something useful…”
Logo: meat grinder with paper with unreadable writing feeding into it, and loose sheets flying through the air above the text

Since the last recap we have actually changed our main banner a couple of times. We decided that maybe the meat grinder wasn’t the most welcoming image, especially for people who don’t eat meat. For a short while we actually had a logo that was a sandwich (you know, a grinder like a sub sandwich?):

Title: The Grinder
Subtitle: Munching your submissions into something useful…
Logo: sub sandwich, with a toothpick and an olive on top, and sandwich ingredients are flying through the air above the text.

This last for a few months, but we ended up changing the main logo again to a coffee grinder. While, yes, there are people and cultures that don’t drink coffee, coffee is often associated with writers toiling away at their work so the image seemed to fit:

Title: “The Grinder”.
Subtitle: “Brewing your submissions into something useful…”.
Logo: old-fashioned manual coffee grinder, and coffee beans are flying through the air above the text.

Although some of these might be funny, these were actual logos used on the site for a period of time.

The Joke Banners

Again, see the previous April Fool’s Recap for the original nine joke banners. Those stayed in the rotation, but we added nine all-new banners for a total of 18 banners. Every time the page loaded after you took some action it would load one randomly from the 18.

The Grounder

Title: The Grounder
Subtitle: Fielding your submissions into something useful…
Logo: A baseball mitt holding a baseball.

This one is less silly than many others, but the word was actually so close that it made sense to include it.

The Linger

Title: The Linger
Subtitle: Refreshing your submissions into something useful…
Logo: a circular arrow shape, reminiscent of the logo used on most web browsers to refresh a page

This was a joke about the site itself, and got responses from the users on social media like “called out!”. Users of the Submission Grinder track their own submissions on the site, but then each user can also see new anonymized (except for acceptances if the user chooses to show some name) responses from other writers. If writers are anxious about the results of a particular submission, they may refresh the page over and over again. This is something that we see writers talking about pretty often, how it’s hard not to just keep refreshing, so this banner was very relatable for people!

The Minder

Title: The Minder
Subtitle: Caretaking your submissions into something useful…
Logo: The silhouette of Mary Poppins, wearing a hat and an old fashioned dress, carrying a bag in one hand, and flying through the air using an umbrella in her other hand.

The Pomander

Title: The Pomander
Subtitle: Orange you glad we scent your submissions into something useful…?
Logo: A pomander of the variety that is an orange studded with cloves. A slice of orange sits next to it, and loose cloves lie around it

I did not know what a pomander was, though I had heard of them. They were meant to ward off bad smells that were thought at the time to be the cause of illnesses.

But what really sold me on this one was the pair of terrible puns. (Yes the subtitle strays from the usual subtitle pattern, but I think that helps the comic effect by subverting expectations)

The Flinders

Title: The Flinders
Subtitle: Smashing your submissions into something useful…
Logo: Based on the main coffee grinder image, but this one has been smashed to pieces, and coffee beans are lying all around.

This one has been in my head since we did the first April Fool’s run as one that I wanted to do if we did another round. I just think the word “flinders” is funny. I don’t know why.

The Go Mind Yer

Title: The Go Mind Yer
Subtitle: It’s none of your dang business!
Logo: A closed door with cartoon sound lines that imply that the door has just been slammed shut.

As in “Go Mind Yer Own Business”. I like this one in part because it reminds me of my grandmother-in-law who when in a mood would say “It’s none of your damned business” pretty often.

The Gyrer

Title: The Gyrer
Subtitle: Outgrabing your rembishuns into something extructful…
Logo: The mock turtle from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, a sea turtle/cow chimera with the body and front flippers of a sea turtle and the head, back legs, and tail of a cow.

I do love Alice in Wonderland, and the Jabberwocky in particular. “Gyrer” as in “gyre” from “‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”. And “outgrabing” as in “and the mome raths outgrabe”. The other two nonsense words were portmanteau words of my own devising. “rembishuns” as in “rejected submissions”. “extructful” as sort of a combination of “useful” and “instructive”, but “instructive” is reversed, because your submissions don’t instruct you, they instruct others, so since the instruction is outgoing instead of incoming, the “in” goes to “ex” and becomes “extructful”.

The NANDer

Title: The NANDer
Subtitle: Gotta not catch all them rejections!
Logo: A sphere with a dark top half and a light bottom half, separating the two colors is an image of a NAND gate.

This is a pretty niche geek joke, and my second favorite. I’m curious how many people got this one without me explaining it.

What is a NAND gate?
Logic gates are components in computer engineering and computer software that can be used to cause different behaviors. The easier ones to understand are the AND gate (which will activate if all of its inputs are on), the OR gate (which will activate if any of its inputs are on), and the NOT gat (which will activate if its input is not on). There are also the NOR gate (which is a combination of an OR and a NOT gate, and will activate if none of the inputs are on) and the NAND gate (which is a combination of an AND and a NOT gate, and will activate if not all of the inputs are on). I like the NAND gate best because you can technically build all the other gates if you only have a NAND gate. The image on the sphere is a NAND gate, the two lines on the left represent the inputs to the gate. The single line on the right represents the single output of the gate. The “D” shaped object is an AND gate, the circle immediately after it is a NOT gate, so combined they make a NAND gate.

How does a NAND gate apply to this joke?
Of course the sphere is meant to look like a Pokéball and the subtitle is meant to be a parody of the Pokémon catchphrase “Gotta catch ’em all!”. Writers who are using the site and trying to get published, it can serve them well if they enthusiastically send submissions out in an ongoing basis, you could look at it as a sort of Pokémon creature collection scenario. You expect to collect many many rejections in the course of submissions, which is a normal part of the submission process as frustrating as that can be. The actual catchphrase “Gotta catch ’em all!” could be represented by an AND gate, because you have not met your goal unless all the inputs are activated (if you see “collecting a creature” as a yes/no input). When submitting, you should be prepared to collect many rejections but of course you don’t want them all to always be rejections, so you don’t want to catch all rejections. In the end, a writer can be seen as successful if they get some acceptances, no matter how many rejections they had to get to get there. So, a NAND gate seemed appropriate for this scenario, to have a chance of success you have to be ready to get a lot of rejections but with the goal of not getting only rejections, hence the modified phrase. I thought about simply negating the original catchphrase as “Gotta not catch ’em all!” but I thought it was unclear what “’em” I was referring to, so a slight rearrangement makes it more explicit, with “Gotta not catch all them rejections!” and yes the modified phrase is a little clunky, but in this case I thought it was clunky in a funny way so it was perfect.

The Pander

Title: The Pander
Subtitle: Panding your submissions into something useful…
Logo: A panda bear sitting on its butt, holding a frying pan in one front paw.

This is my favorite one. I laugh whenever this one comes up again. It’s a pander bear! And it’s holding a frying pan! It’s such a terrible joke, and I love it entirely too much, and I hope you either love this terrible joke, or groan at how terrible it is (which just makes me laugh more).

DP FICTION #122B: “The Octopus Dreams of Personhood” by Hannah Yang

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Addiction, suicidal ideation, body horror

The octopus comes into Shun’s bedroom on a brisk winter morning. It squeezes through the open window and onto her desk, where Shun is filling out an application for a job she doesn’t want just so her day doesn’t feel entirely wasted.

Shun stares at the octopus, and the octopus stares back. It has tentacles as thick as her wrists, which coil and uncoil in constant motion. Plum-dark skin, wet and molten and pulsing. A glinting yellow eye, rectangular-pupiled, watches her in the soft light.

She’s not sure how the octopus got here. Her apartment complex is miles away from the ocean, and even further from the aquarium. But it feels rude to ask where it came from.

What are you doing here? she says instead.

I want to borrow your body, says the octopus.

Why?

To find out what it’s like to be a person.

But it’s my body, says Shun. I’m using it.

So? says the octopus. What are you using it for that’s so important, anyway?

It’s true that Shun has no plans for the rest of the afternoon. It’s been four months since she was laid off from her corporate job, and her last Hinge date ended alone in her bedroom with her vibrator. She doesn’t even have close friends in the area, just acquaintances she occasionally meets for dinner or drinks. No one will miss her if she lends her body to an octopus for a few hours.

And the octopus seems so hopeful, so expectant. Like she could make all its dreams come true, just by acquiescing to this one thing.

Why me? says Shun.

Because look at you. You’re perfect.

Shun hasn’t heard anyone say that to her in a long time. Blushing, she says, how does this work, exactly?

It’s easy, says the octopus. Just say ahh and let me in.

Shun opens her mouth. Headfirst, membrane-slick, the octopus injects itself between her teeth and burrows down her throat.

***

Shun wakes up in a fetal position under her desk, her cheek pressed against the cold floorboards. The octopus is nowhere to be seen.

The window is still open, the world outside wet-whisked and gray. Her skin goosebumps in protest. There’s no central heating in her two-bedroom apartment, and she and her roommate Olivia have to take turns using their space heaters so they don’t burn out the power. She must have missed her turn to have the space heater on.

She checks her phone. It’s 4 p.m. The octopus must have occupied her body for almost five hours. She doesn’t remember those five hours, but they left her with a pleasant aftertaste: like she had no control, and by extension no responsibilities.

There’s a spate of notifications on her lockscreen. She has a form rejection letter from a job she applied to last week: Thank you for considering us, but we’ve selected other candidates to move forward with. Four new matches on Hinge, a girl and three guys, people reduced to profiles; she doesn’t even remember swiping right on them. Two missed calls from her mother, who still lives in the sunny California suburb where Shun grew up.

She calls her mother back.

Did you see the pictures I sent you on WeChat? says her mother.

What pictures?

Your cousin Matthew just got a promotion. He’s a manager now, so exciting. To celebrate, he took us all out to that new Beijing restaurant I told you about last week.

That’s great, Mom.

The restaurant was disappointing, her mother goes on. I don’t know where the owners were from, but I bet they weren’t even real Beijingers. The youtiao didn’t taste didao at all. But that’s not Matthew’s fault.

Shun makes the appropriate noises of sympathy and appreciation. She’s only half paying attention. Mostly she’s thinking about the octopus, about how easily she was able to satisfy its request.

Anyway, says her mother, have you gotten any job interviews yet?

I’m trying.

Trying, trying, says her mother. You’ve been trying for so long. Why did we spend so much on your college tuition, if you can’t even get a job with it? Maybe you can ask Matthew for a referral.

Matthew’s a software engineer, Mom. I’m a graphic designer.

So what? You can learn how to do his job. You’re smart.

Shun zones out and thinks about the octopus again.

Her purpose in life used to feel so clear. She was her parents’ only child, and she always knew they were proud of her. Success was measurable. Report cards and gold stars and gymnastics trophies. How devastating it had been, to grow up and find herself lost; to realize that all those things she’d devoted so much effort to had nothing to do with real life at all.

With the octopus inside her, things felt simple again. When she closes her eyes, she can still taste it, that milk-drunk reverie of knowing she had only one purpose to serve and that she could do it well.

***

Shun leaves her bedroom window cracked open a few inches, despite the chilly weather, in case the octopus wants to come back. To compensate, she wears extra sweaters during the day and long underwear at night.

A few days later, she finds the octopus perched on her desk again.

I didn’t know if you were coming back, she says.

Are you happy I did? says the octopus.

Very much so.

Of course I came back, says the octopus. It was wonderful to be you.

Nobody has said that to Shun before. She feels strangely proud, like she’s accomplished something, even though all she really did was agree to let the octopus in.

What did you do while you were me? says Shun.

A little bit of everything, says the octopus. Can I borrow your body again this evening?

Sure, says Shun.

This time, can you cook something for me? Something delicious? I didn’t get to try any people food last time.

Shun’s surprised that the octopus is bold enough to ask her for more, when she’s already giving it so much. But then again, why wouldn’t she? It’s not like she has other plans, really. Just job applications and video games and maybe a walk to the nearest restaurant, plans so pathetic they hardly constitute plans at all.

She looks up what octopuses eat. Snails, sea slugs, shrimp. Mussels, crabs, clams. A vast array of fish.

She decides to make hong shao yu for the octopus, a recipe her mother only prepares for special occasions, like Chinese New Year or large family reunions. Surely the octopus’s first human meal counts as a special occasion.

She makes the half-hour trek to the closest Asian grocery store and buys two pounds of tilapia, ginger, scallions, soy sauce, cooking wine, a whole jar of chili oil. In the hot steam of the kitchen, she spoons sizzling liquid over the fish, one ladleful at a time, until it’s so tender that the flesh unclasps off the bone.

***

This time, she wakes up at the gym, draped over one of the benches in the back, in an undignified kneeling position. A man next to her lets out alarmingly loud grunts every time he finishes a deadlift. People scroll on their phones at the cable machines, waiting between sets. A couple in matching gray hoodies run on the treadmills together, their feet slapping the moving tape in syncopated rhythm. Nobody pays any attention to her.

Shun sits up and looks at herself. The octopus dressed her in an ordinary gym outfit: sweatpants and a t-shirt. But she’s not wearing sneakers, just her winter boots, which she never usually wears to the gym.

She stretches and feels the ache in her shoulders, her calves, her back. Whatever workout the octopus did, it was a surprisingly punishing one.

When she gets home, Olivia is sitting on the couch, eating a salad and watching a rerun of an old sitcom on the TV. She looks annoyed when Shun joins her. I did your dishes, she says curtly.

Oh, says Shun. You didn’t have to do that.

I literally did have to, actually. The kitchen was unusable. When you cooked yesterday, you used so many dishes and left such a mess.

Shun had meant to clean up, but she hadn’t gotten a chance before the octopus came back. Sorry, she says. Were there any leftovers?

Don’t you remember?

Shun shrugs.

Olivia furrows her brow. I didn’t see any leftovers. You ate it all.

Shun nods. She hopes that means the octopus liked the hong shao yu. If it ate the whole two pounds, she must have done a good job.

You’re so weird, says Olivia. Also, don’t forget rent’s due tomorrow.

Shun thinks sometimes that she and Olivia could be friends, if they didn’t live together. All of her friends live far away, in cities like New York and San Francisco. Maybe it’s easier this way, when she can lend her body to the octopus without having to make up excuses for anybody.

***

When the octopus returns, it doesn’t even mention eating the hong shao yu, except by asking Shun to cook more food next time.

Shun figures it’s a good sign that the octopus is asking for more. As long as it enjoys Shun’s cooking, it’ll keep coming back. It won’t get bored of her.

But the octopus still doesn’t seem fully satisfied. It sits on her windowsill and looks her up and down.

You have all these weird hairs, the octopus says, pressing a tentacle against her arm. Will you make them go away for me?

Everyone has hair on their arms, says Shun.

I don’t like them. My tentacles have no hairs.

Okay, says Shun. I’ll get rid of mine for you.

In the shower, she shaves her arms smooth. Her cheap razor trudges slowly over her forearms, unable to catch everything. Blood beads in the places she nicks herself by accident. Afterward, she takes a tweezer under the bright light of her desk lamp and plucks the hairs the razor missed, one tiny strand at a time, wincing as each one leaves her skin.

***

Shun starts anticipating the octopus’s needs before it arrives. It’s gotten more demanding over time, but she’s gotten better at figuring out what it wants from her, better at keeping it happy.

She dips into her dwindling savings to buy new brand-name sneakers, so the octopus can go back to the gym again.

She goes back to the Asian grocery store and fills up her cart with fresh ingredients so the octopus can sample all her favorite dishes: beef noodle soup, scallion pancakes, pig ear.

She buys exfoliating cleanser and scrubs her entire body, especially her arms, to make sure her skin stays soft and smooth.

The octopus uses her for ten hours next time. And then sixteen. And then a full day. Blank stretches populate Shun’s calendar, selfhood discontinued and resumed. Each time she wakes up, Shun’s rewarded with the sugar-sheened feeling of having done the one thing she’s meant to do.

***

You forgot to take out the trash again, Olivia says. You were home all day, it wouldn’t have been hard.

I just forgot, says Shun. It’s not a big deal.

I’m too tired to do your chores for you, says Olivia. You remember what corporate life is like. My boss put three unnecessary last-minute meetings on my calendar today. It’s like, hello, couldn’t we have accomplished all of this over email?

Shun doesn’t feel particularly sympathetic to Olivia’s corporate struggles right now. She doesn’t like being reminded that even if she succeeds at her endless job search, the light at the end of the tunnel is just Olivia’s brand of misery instead of her own.

Olivia scoops leftover pad thai out of the takeout tub in her lap. She says, are you seeing someone?

Kind of, Shun says.

You must really like them. You’re barely ever around anymore.

I guess I do, says Shun.

But when she really thinks about it, it’s not that she likes the octopus, exactly, or its presence in her life. It’s just that she knows how to make the octopus happy.

She can’t explain that to Olivia, or even to her mother. Her mother left her several missed calls yesterday, while Shun’s body was being occupied by the octopus, but the thought of talking to her mother again feels exhausting, especially since Shun hasn’t submitted any new job applications in weeks. It won’t help to mention that the last company she interviewed with decided not to hire a designer at all, opting instead to generate their graphics with a free AI program.

Instead of calling her mother back, Shun sits on the couch and scrolls through TikTok, which she always does when she needs to relax. A video about child refugees makes her cry, and when it’s over she scrolls on, and a minute later while watching a funny video about a hamster eating a burrito she notices there are tears on her cheeks but she’s already forgotten why.

***

Shun wakes up on the beach, lying faceup on a pile of driftwood. In her mouth, the taste of salt.

She has no idea how she got here. Maybe the octopus found itself homesick while it was wearing her body.

Waves slurp at the shore just a few feet away from her, spraying white mist into the air. It’s an unusually warm day, so the beach is full of families. Children wade in the surf, making suction holes in the sand with their bare feet. Gulls wing overhead.

It’s the type of seascape that makes her fingers itch for a paintbrush. She used to love painting seascapes. She majored in graphic design because it seemed like the most financially sustainable way to pursue her love of art, but after she got her first job she never had time to create for herself anymore, and over the years that impulse atrophied away.

Shun sits up and inspects herself. She’s barefoot, wearing a sweater and jeans. It feels like someone is pounding a battering ram into her skull, just above the right temple. Sunburns cover her neck and shoulders, painful to touch; bruises mottle her left shin.

She has no phone, no wallet. Just a ten-dollar bill she finds crumpled inside her back pocket.

Her stomach mutinies with hunger. The octopus must not have eaten anything in a while. On the closest street, she uses her ten-dollar bill to purchase a family-sized basket of fish and chips and starts shoveling it into her mouth as soon as it’s served.

What day is it today? she asks the vendor.

The vendor looks alarmed, maybe by the fact that she needed to ask that question, or maybe by how fast she’s gorging herself. It’s Saturday.

Shun thinks back. It was a Wednesday, wasn’t it, the last time she let the octopus borrow her body? Or was it a Tuesday? She doesn’t remember. Has she really been possessed by the octopus for three or four days?

She could have drowned. She could have starved. She could have never even woken up at all. Part of her would have been willing to pay that price, but it’s not the part she wants to let win.

She takes the bus back to her apartment and walks inside, ignoring Olivia’s angry queries about where she’s been. She goes to her bedroom, where she steps over the piles of dirty clothes the octopus has left strewn all over the floor. On the top shelf of her overcrowded closet, she finds a box of her old painting supplies. She lays them out on her desk: soft-bristled brushes, a pad of paper, a few thin-squeezed tubes of raw sienna and prussian blue. For the first time in weeks, she closes her window and latches it shut.

***

Shun wakes to the sound of tapping. A soft tentacle against hard glass.

She feels nauseous. Her stomach roils as she sits up. Maybe it’s all the fish and chips she gorged herself on.

The octopus is waiting outside the window, sprawled out to its full length, clinging to the glass.

Shun unlatches the window and pulls it up a crack, just enough to be able to look the octopus in the eye.

What do you want? she says.

You know what I want, says the octopus. I’ve only ever wanted one thing.

It’s my body, says Shun. You don’t get to keep it.

Why not? You don’t like being a person anyway, and I do.

Shun doesn’t protest. She’s afraid that if she does, she’ll be able to hear the lie in her own voice.

The octopus stretches forward. It squeezes itself beak-slim, the way it does each time it enters Shun’s mouth, and in a swift glistening motion, begins prodding at the opening.

Shun slams the window shut. The octopus recoils.

You can’t shut me out, the octopus tells her through the glass. We’re the same, you and me.

Shun opens her mouth to respond, but before she can, her stomach gurgles again. Something churns inside her, a liquid sloshing.

She stumbles to the bathroom. She doesn’t know what it is, she just knows she needs to get it out, out.

She bends over the toilet, gripping its porcelain hips. The ends of her hair pool in the toilet water; she doesn’t have time to tie it back. She heaves, shoulders rising, back arched.

Wound-dark liquid gushes out of her mouth and splatters into the toilet bowl. It looks like blood. But the smell is wrong: less like iron, more like seaweed and sulfur and salt.

The realization cuts into her.

Not blood. Ink.

She looks into the mirror. Octopus ink stains her chin. There are purple bags under her eyes, thin hollows under her cheekbones. Her dark hair frames her face in unwashed clumps.

She leans back over the toilet bowl again, throat gouging, saliva glistening. As the ink leaves her body, she feels a new sort of clenching, an emptying.

Shun wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and flushes the toilet clean. She watches the blackened water swirl down, down, back toward the sea.

© 2025 by Hannah Yang

3035 words

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction author who writes about monsters, metamorphosis, and feminine rage. Her stories have been published in Apex, Analog, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies. She has a BA in Economics from Yale and works in philanthropy research. Follow her work at hannahyang.com or on Instagram at @hannahyangwrites.

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DP FICTION #122A: “The Unfactory” by Derrick Boden

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details) Mass atrocities

Date: March 10

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Mama’s Pizza & Pasta

I unmade Mama’s Pizza & Pasta today. Single-story, painted brick exterior, swaddled in garish holiday lights all year round. Same two wrought-iron tables chained out front that I used to pass on my way home from Redondo High, where the old-timers would knock back Morettis and dole out dirty jokes on Friday afternoons. Same Mama, too. Poor lady.

In the cold confines of the unmaking chamber, I donned my gear. Oculars to get me there metaphysically, a wraith on the astral breeze; wrought iron needles to tease out the loose threads of reality; hexed gloves to rip that shit apart. I started from the top, like you taught me. The rooftop exhaust fans, sticky from decades of congealed grease. The rust-gnawed floodlights, the decrepit polyurethane sign—along with every memory of every person who’d ever glanced up at it—backdropped by imported palm trees and a smoggy orange moonrise.

Then, with a flick of my hand, the roof. All the furtive moments from all the high school lovers who made out up there in the midsummer heat. Gone. Then the walls, brick by brick, paint chips flecking from the vanishing surface like pastel scabs.

The kitchen was a labor, all those outdated appliances wheezing in the summer heat. Like you said at orientation, old things are hard to forget. So I pried off my oculars and hit the vending machines. By 2 a.m., the kitchen had never existed. I swept through the dining room on a swell of Mountain Dew-induced adrenaline, vanished the foyer without a conscious thought.

I saved the two tables out front for last. Wish I hadn’t. Like you said on day one: biggest risk in this business is nostalgia.

Anyway, the tables are gone.

And for what? What did Mama do to deserve this? Was it something she said in an interview? A politician she snubbed? A customer she refused to seat?

I’ll never know. Can’t know, by design. The coin-op laundromat is shouldered up against the boxing gym now—not an inch of her old curb-space as proof to the contrary. No hard feelings, right? She’ll be back from holiday tomorrow, won’t ever know what she missed. She’s spent her whole life waiting tables at Gino’s, now, never took a chance on her own business. Mama’s Pizza is gone and nobody’s the wiser.

Nobody but me, for a few more minutes. I can’t help but relish the fleeting privilege of being the only person on Earth who knows that which has never been. By the time I hit the street, I’ll be just like everyone else. A lowly worker navigating a tidy world, oblivious to the gloved hands that tug at threads in my periphery.

When it was done, before I pried off my oculars I swept the block for loose ends. A pizza box skidded along the sidewalk, cruel trick of the pre-dawn breeze. Across the street, in the reflection off the laundromat windows, staring at that fleeting singularity where Mama’s never stood: you. Notebook clutched in your hand, scribbling.

By the time I turned, you were gone.

Just like Mama’s.

***

Date: March 22

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Perry Park

I’ll be glad to forget today.

I walk past Perry Park every morning. Used to shoot hoops there, back in junior high. Those old chain nets were so satisfying, the way they throttled the ball before letting it pass through, defying time for a single glorious moment.

What will I remember after I’ve clocked out? You say that when a thing gets unmade, the memories don’t leave a void—they transfigure. Details get slippery, new flesh grown over old wounds. Friendships unravel. Blame gets reassigned; prejudices are reborn. The world forgets a piece of itself. What did I used to do after school? Play basketball. Where did I play? The park. You know, that park.

Same for faces. Like the old man on the bench by the hoops. Sorry, guy. Just following orders.

Still, never unmade a person before.

Or have I? How do I explain those dreams, haunted with faces so familiar yet wholly unknown? A brother, a boyfriend, a daughter they never had. Only way to hang onto the unpast is to smuggle your oculars outside, catch an unmaking in progress. But nobody’s that stupid: the unfactory’s punishment for nostalgia is unerring and swift. At least my own past is protected by contract. Aside from incidental details like Perry Park.

I saw you there before work, in the reflection of a passing windshield, kicking around the baseball diamond where the big kids sling dope. Keeping tabs on me in your notebook.

I did the job, boss. Old man’s gone. His nephews never had an uncle, his partner never married.

Now leave me the fuck alone.

***

Date: March 24

Hours worked: 4.0

Project: Rudolph

It shouldn’t matter. They say dogs don’t have souls, that those droopy wet eyes aren’t sad at all but rather our own tragic compulsion to transpose human emotion onto everything we see. These vanity breeds only live seven years anyhow, and fuck you I’m a cat person.

Fuck you, I’m a cat person.

I only need to type it a few more times, and the hangover of memories will be gone from my mind just like they are from Rudolph’s doting humans, and everyone else besides. I shouldn’t have to type it at all, really, because it’s like you said on day one: can’t be sad about losing a thing that was never there. And a dog, to quote my old neighbor, is—

Now, that was unexpected. I probably shouldn’t be writing this part down, but you taught me to be ruthless with documentation. The deed is done: Rudolph the Dog is no more, unspun from the scraggly end of his tail to the tip of his side-lolling tongue. It barely took half of a shift. My mind had already begun the process of remolding itself when the thought I was typing fell right out of my head. When I glance back at what I wrote, it makes no sense at all. What old neighbor? Someone with a dog, I assume, but beyond that…who knows?

A chill runs through my body. I wrack my brain, but it’s no use. It’s okay, though. Just another incidental detail.

Besides, I’m a cat person.

***

Date: March 30

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Park Manor

Today I unmade Park and West 170th. Strapped on the oculars, pulled the gloves over my trembling hands and vanished a city block. Soup kitchen, pawn shop, four-story affordable housing complex. My biggest project to date, maybe.

The tenants at Park Manor are gone. I work graveyard, so most everyone was asleep. The ones who were out—at the bar or working late shifts—they’ll make my list tomorrow. The unfactory never leaves anything to chance. The ones that were there, I found the loose thread in each of them. Unwove their skin, reclaimed their bones, snuffed out their hearts one by one. Pretty sure the lady in 3C was my sixth-grade English teacher. Can’t be missed if you never existed.

Isn’t that right, boss?

But how many incidental details have I already lost? Why do I search for my car keys when I don’t have a license? Should I remember the name of my first love, or what I wanted to be when I grew up? The faceless mobs that haunt my dreams—are they shadows of an unpast I’ve already erased?

In a tooth of glass from the pawn shop’s busted window, through my oculars tonight, I spotted your reflection. You moved like a listless wraith.

In your eyes I saw the truth.

***

Date: March 31

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Unfactory, South Bay Branch

The city is emaciated. Gaunt. Hollowed out.

Of course, I have no basis for comparison. The things I unmade were never here. Sure, in some archived unpast maybe there was a bakery wedged between that laundromat and that boxing gym. But that’s neither here nor there. And yet, the seams of this place feel overworn. The streets sag against the weight of people they never held.

Fuck it. Our work here is done. The purpose of it all—whether we succeeded or failed—I’ll never know. I unmade the facility today from a mobile chamber across the street. They’re transferring me up north. New digs, fresh faces. They need a veteran to hold down the line. It’s a dangerous path to walk, between experience and liability. Sooner or later, the risk of a lingering memory will outweigh my upside. Old things are hard to forget.

Isn’t that right, boss?

I followed you home last night, on a hunch. Dusted your prints from the keypad, let myself in while you slept. Found your notebook under your pillow. All this time, I thought you were keeping tabs on me. Waiting for me to slip up. You never liked me. Said I lacked humility. Called me ruthless, as if I wasn’t doing exactly what you’d taught me. All this time, I thought you were trying to unmake me. Until yesterday, when I caught a glimpse of you in a reflection.

Wearing your oculars.

There’s only one reason you’d have your gear outside the chamber, and it isn’t to forget. Only one reason that notebook of yours would be warded against unmaking, all frayed and reality-stripped at the edges.

You’ve been keeping secrets. Grasping at threads of the unpast. Tasting that forbidden fruit, nostalgia.

I get it. Really, I do. I’ve been feeling it too, in the dead space between my thoughts. All those incidental details. When we’re made to forget, it isn’t to clear room for new things. We become lesser versions of ourselves. Maybe someday I’ll be the one haunting the reflections of the unmade. Scrounging for memories of a better past, with familiar smiles and unfamiliar names. But not today.

You see, I read your notebook. The lists, the addresses, the profiles. Everything you’ve directed me to unmake. All the incidental connections to my own life. Every street, building, and park. Every dog, every person.

A brother.

A boyfriend.

A daughter I never had.

Not very incidental after all. Maybe nothing is. The contract is well-crafted bullshit, I guess, and your notebook is more than nostalgia. It’s a confession. It’s everything you took from me, bound up and tucked under your pillow so you can sleep at night. It’s a blueprint for the monster you crafted of me. A monster to do your bidding, to keep your own hands clean.

Problem is, you crafted me too well. So of course I sliced a warded sheet out of that notebook, made sure it found its way into the evidence drawer posthaste. You know I’m ruthless about documentation.

I checked the logs before I strapped on my oculars today. You were the only one on-site, and there was no evacuation order given. The unfactory never leaves anything to chance. Neither do I.

I’m sure you were a pawn all the same, and I should be picking bones with your bosses instead. But I’m cold with jealousy for a life I never lived, and I crave the easy burn of retribution—before that, too, is lost to the enduring sieve of time.

On the bright side, nobody will miss you.

I promise.

© 2025 by Derrick Boden

1890 words

Author’s Note: Sometimes I like to take two unrelated ideas and mash them together. Here, I had idea #1: write a story with a narrative structure that’s menial and dull—in this case a daily work log—but in the context of something horrific. Even the apocalypse needs project managers, right? And idea #2: write a story that raises the question, “Which is worse: to forget, or be forgotten?” By the time I was done, The Unfactory was a little bit of both ideas, a little bit of neither, and hopefully still a little bit coherent.

Derrick Boden’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, and elsewhere.  Derrick is a Sturgeon Award-nominated writer, a software developer, an adventurer, and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019.  He currently calls Boston his home, although he’s lived in fourteen cities spanning four continents.  He is owned by two cats and one iron-willed daughter.  Find him at derrickboden.com and on Twitter as @derrickboden.

If you enjoyed the story you might want to read Derrick Boden’s previous story here in Diabolical Plots: “Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset”. You might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

Kickstarter for Long List Anthology Volume 9 is live!

The Kickstarter for The Long List Anthology Volume 9 is live and the campaign is scheduled to run until April 14th. Of course full details are available at the Kickstarter page, but here’s some preliminary info to get you started:

The Hugo Awards are one of the most prominent awards in speculative fiction publishing.  Nominations are cast by the fans to decide the few stories that end up on the final ballot.  After the Hugo Award ceremony every year, WSFS publishes a longer list of nominated works, works that were loved by many fans who chose to use their votes on this story.  The purpose of this annual anthology is to get those stories to more readers by collecting them together in a book for easy perusal, from the story categories to editor, magazine, and writer categories.  The anthology is a collection of eclectic tastes, rather than from the tastes of an individual editor, and so has a more varied flavor than a typical “Best Of” anthology.

This year the anthology will be co-edited by David Steffen, Chelle Parker, and Hal Y. Zhang.

The story and author list for this volume:

庄子的梦 / “Zhuangzi’s Dream” by 曹白宇 / Cao Baiyu, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu

“The Ng Yut Queen (The 五 月 Queen)” by Eliza Chan

“Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” by P.A. Cornell

“How to Cook and Eat the Rich” by Sunyi Dean

“Yung Lich and the Dance of Death” by Alex Fox

“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” by R.S.A. Garcia

“Come In, Children” by Ai Jiang

“The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones

“Day Ten Thousand” by Isabel J. Kim

“Cold Relations” by Mary Robinette Kowal

“Counting Casualties” by Yoon Ha Lee

杞忧 / “Heavens Fall” by 陆秋槎 / Lu Qiucha, translated by Hal Y. Zhang 

“The Spoil Heap” by Fiona Moore

“To Sail Beyond the Botnet” by Suzanne Palmer

“Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk

“Saturday’s Song” by Wole Talabi

“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” by Eugenia Triantafyllou

“Bad Doors” by John Wiswell

蜂鸟停在忍冬花上 / “Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles” by 杨晚晴 / Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang

DP FICTION #121B: “The Witches Who Drowned” by R.J. Becks

edited by Amanda Helms

Content note (click for details) This story contains a homophobic slur, misogynistic behavior, threats of violence towards queer people, and elements of body horror.

The day I gun my motor, slip my Walkman in the back of my jean overalls, and roar off the dock, Ronald Reagan foots the bill. It’s not the first time the Navy has slipped me some cash, and I don’t want to hear shit about that. These days, every other word in deep ocean research is ‘Typhoon Class Sub Detection’ or ‘US Naval Significance’. You want funds; you play the game. Don’t blame me because my words are clever, as clever as the hair I cropped to tell the boys at work I’m different enough from their wives to be a scientist and to pull an extra dance or two from the ladies at Maud’s.

The ocean waves roll as I put some distance between me and land. Water splashes up, since the ocean doesn’t let anyone close without getting them wet. My boat’s small enough to woman alone, just me and the growling engine. Nice and all, but nothing compared to what lies below.

I deployed deep ocean photometers a good month ago. They’ve got eyes on what I’m here for: light levels in the aphotic zone, where the only readings are from glowing bodies in the deep. I’ve observed the flashing organisms myself down there, more times than I once dreamed. With the Navy scrambling to find the Challenger’s star-worthy remains as they rust away underwater, it’s a damn good time to look down.

My automated reel drags the photometers from the deep, links of heavy chain breaching the surface one by one. I strain to maneuver the rods of complicated sensors and dripping metal. The Navy wants to explore the possibility of spotting Soviet subs by tracking the light levels of disturbed creatures, those that flash blue to confuse and hide and hunt and speak. To the right eyes, a Typhoon Class sub is subtle as Liberace at the Radio City Music Hall. The Navy wants those eyes.

And I’ll do anything to get below.

***

If anyone is dumb enough to think the ocean is ours, they should see the shit we’ve got to wear to go down deep. The WASP is a tomb of bright yellow with a fortified glass head and heavy claw arms that require a strict weight-lifting regime for me to maneuver (to the pleasure of the ladies at Maud’s). Jim Fletcher, one of my colleagues in Atchley’s lab, has to help me in. Though the supervisor will have checked the whole thing twice over, he and I catalog each vital control one more time. You can never be too careful.

The WASP is no fancy submersible. I’m an extra heavy photometer with arms, dangling from a chain. They lower me slow, all the way to the seafloor. I’ve learned from these trips that anticipation sours to anxiety to panic in sweet seconds, so I breathe calm and easy and don’t allow any drumming of fingers. Once touched down, I switch off the WASP’s lights. Step one to being welcomed into this world is relinquishing your sight. This is the place the sun doesn’t go. Act like it.

The disturbed seawater is bright around me.

Patterns differ down under. Some creatures flash; others trail light in bright lines behind them. Blue is the color of choice, and it comes in neon, though tiny organisms sparkle like snow caught in lamplight.

Surface checks in on my radio, and I talk back, but my focus is on the luminous deep. I laugh as I document it, camera shutter clicking. NASA may have spent the past few years asking who’s brave enough to touch the stars, but the stars don’t know shit about this impossible lightshow, far below the edge of their sight. The Navy, obsessed as they are with my sensors, knows even less of the life that glows, life that’s boneless, aliens of the crushing dark. The question isn’t whether there are unexplained phenomena down here: it’s who will discover them. The right answer is me.

With time, the lights fade away. The beings living here have accepted me, their translator come to study a language of light. In the utter darkness that remains, I draw my first full breaths since landing. Here,  I am limitless, mobile and flowing, edges uncertain. Free as in the moments after a dream, when you have forgotten the shape of the skin that confines you.

Something heavy thumps against the glass of the WASP. The whole body rocks. I slam my crushable shoulder against the hard exoskeleton keeping me alive, spit out a swear, switch the lights on. Going around banging the WASP off shit is a good way to die.

But my headlights don’t snag on debris or rock. Instead, two eyes press against the WASP’s glass. Puffy things, with pinprick pupils and blue irises hardly distinguishable from the surrounding white. She hovers, and I count fingers and arms amid a cloud of long hair. Everywhere there is skin, there are also cracks, gorges that slice through her but don’t bleed. A broken porcelain doll of the water.

She opens her mouth, and I lean forward, as though she’s about to speak, and I’m about to hear through glass and metal many times reinforced. But just as quick, she abandons my metal shell and vanishes from my intruding headlights. Sense knocks me hard, and I lurch forward. My finger jams against the controls and plunges me into darkness.

My breaths are ragged. I force my chest out, my lungs open, even as I curse myself to high heavens. If my physical reactions fail me now, it’ll be a twenty-minute lift while I hyperventilate.

I know the rules of the deep sea, and yet I broke them. That thing—that organism—no, that girl, for it had been a girl, too humanoid for anything evolved for the aphotic zone—came to me, and I stole her only way to speak.

My disruption brought the lights back. Though my stowed finger throbs, I clench my hands to fists. The woman is among them. Now unsilenced, she’s a shattered goddess of the sea, each fissure of her skin lined with blue, a mosaic of light and woman. Though eyes won’t matter to her down here, not like on land, I’m certain she can see me. I’m certain this is on purpose. A great reveal, rather than an accidental meeting.

A human body at these depths breaks all we know of bone and pressure, blood and air. But she exists. She wants me to know of her. I take a photo. Then she’s gone, disappeared somewhere the WASP is too clunky to follow.

On the ride up, I leave my thoughts with her in the dark.

***

In the lab, I colorize my photos and find I’ve captured a viperfish, an elusive and haunting predator. First ever clear shot of one. It’s a great victory; a popular article in the bag.

Yet I barely care, because in another photo is the woman, light sparkling down her hair, her arms, her torso. She’s not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ the owner of a story even more complex than the organisms whose lives and lights I’ve spent years pursuing. The discovery of my career, no doubt, and yet I show no one and lock her away in my drawer. When alone in the lab, I run my fingers over her like she’s a lover. My fingertips tingle each time I do, little electrical signals I can explain no better than my hiding her away.

***

The night after Reagan walks out on Gorbachev’s offer to disarm, I stare down a glass of bourbon, unsure whether I’m celebrating or in mourning. News that the Navy wants me to continue pursuing my research due to the continued chance of war comes the next morning. I’m back out at sea a week later with ever more sensitive photometers, a hydrophone, and a radio that tells me through static that a world without nuclear weapons is a Soviet dream. The girls at Maud’s wave their cigarettes and cackle at anyone who thought Reagan would put us over the biggest weapon he could make; I shut my mouth and accept any new funding the Navy sluices my way as a positive of the continued threat of destruction. I wish we could just go back to dancing, so Pattie Smith can tell us all how “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It’s a new feeling, to have solid edges in the dark.

At least I still have my research. This time, a hydrophone will record audio as my photometers work their magic. It’ll record the roar of boats, the songs of whales, the vibrations of undersea volcanoes. Most of what I care about doesn’t make noise, but I put some pretty words in my proposal about how far the sounds of Soviet subs can carry, and Jim will appreciate the data. Truth is, it feels like civic duty to eat what funds I’m offered.

***

In October, my research makes Popular Science, my picture of the viperfish in full color. My name’s under the photo but not in the article. Instead, the work is prescribed to Dr. Tedd Atchley, and though they interviewed both of us, all I get is a brief mention as a “student,” my skills a testament of Tedd’s brilliant tutelage. I know better than to complain. The article’s predictable anyway, and my photo isn’t even on the cover, which is instead dedicated to the completed retrieval of material from the Challenger. That’s the most exciting news they’ve got, the remains of a dead starship dragged from the sea. I buy the magazine because it makes me laugh. They have no idea what’s down there.

When I retrieve my new photometers, they tell the story of light and darkness, disruption and calm. At times, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organisms aglow. Flaring, pulsing, the flashes of light a thousand meters under the sea. If the Navy wants to search out Soviets, I’ve got their launchpad. It’ll keep me good and funded for a long while, able to pursue my own research, to return to the depths.

I even feel satisfied, until I listen to the hydrophone recording, and amid the whales and motors and volcanoes, I hear a human voice. She’s a crackle, a hiss, a prickle on the back of my neck and a chill like a finger down my spine. Though I listen a thousand times, I catch only a single word: “witch.” But there’s more. She says more, and I simply can’t understand it.

That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. I wade through the cool, dry air of the university archives, unsure of what I’m looking for in the records of murdered women until I find the names of those drowned rather than burned. I hear the harsh whisper of her carrying voice—again defying logic, again defying biology—does this mean she’s got lungs?—as I run my finger along the names of drowned witches and grasp that I may have the picture of one in my drawer. To reach me, she must have traversed riverways and floodwaters, careful movements obscured by the cover of water and darkness, until she’d found a place so teeming with both that she no longer needed to fear unwanted discovery. In those depths, she lived and changed and, eventually, called to me.

The only time the deep sea provides an answer like this is when it knows it’ll create a thousand more questions. They’re ablaze within me, ravenous and demanding and infinite.

Like the witch’s photo, I don’t share these results with my lab.

***

I’ve got a new supervisor for my next trip down in the WASP. This will be my last: the Navy’s grown quite fond of us by now, and we’ll acquire a submersible soon. It’s not so much a step up as a giant leap.

“You ever done this before?” I ask. The supervisor is a rugged man with uneven, freckled skin, toasted by the sun. His beard twitches whenever he speaks, which it does a whole lot now, as he takes offense to my question. Jim and I exchange looks. Arrogance is idiocy when it comes to the deep sea. But the suit is already dangling from its crane, and I get in the same way as always. We start running through safety checks—once, twice, and then we’re in constant communication as the WASP lowers, lowers, lowers.

I’m down 200 meters when I notice the water around my boots. It’s an immediate violation, this touch of cold seawater within my metal haven. “WASP to surface,” I gasp. Panic squeezes my lungs. Something slips along my fingers, and I’ve no way to check if it’s water or fear. If too much gets inside, the whole suit will collapse. 200 meters has nothing on the planned 1,500, but we’re not talking negligible pressure.

The lift is a slow reckoning. Water climbs, climbs, climbs, like it too is rising to the heavens. It’s calf-height by the time I break surface, and streams plummet from the WASP as I emerge into air, raised by hook and cord and crane and gaping like a netted fish.

I give the supervisor a solid smack to the jaw once I’m out. It takes Jim holding me back to stop, arms looped around my shoulders until I’m finished struggling. The soaked bottom of my pants slaps against my numb legs.

“He could’ve killed me,” I snarl. I’m trembling. Jim stares like I’m a rabid thing who’s played possum until this moment. Later that night, when I discover a crack running from my ankle up my calf, I’m not so certain he’s wrong.

It’s a canyon, wide as my index finger, healed over like an ancient scar and yet new. I run my finger along it, this way the seawater has changed me. A man damn near drowned me, and I cracked like a witch.

Alone in my corner of the lab, I stare into where the woman’s eyes should be and wonder just how deep she’d gotten before she began to glow.

***

In the darkness of Maud’s, where music booms and ladies come out to dance, we don’t speak with words. Our language is simply that of gleaming eyes; a flash of a grin; a slow, deliberate touch. We’re nothing fancy in this place, accepting of all from heels to sneakers. Myself, I’ve got dress shoes on, with a nice leather jacket. It was the right choice to come here tonight, to bask in the familiar darkness when I’m at my most unsettled.

I’ve just clucked my tongue at a poor song choice and kept on dancing anyway when the shouting begins. Male voices. We scatter by instinct, no more than bioluminescent shrimp under a scientist’s prickling gaze. But understanding dogs my heels. For all the threat of submarines and death stars, the Soviets have never been the country’s closest enemy.

Girls scream. Cops raise their voices ever louder. I’ve long lost the woman I was dancing with, thrown by the white-water tide of bodies. None of us are stupid enough to come here without a planned escape route. We won’t all make it out.

The street outside wails with blue and red and white. Dark-adjusted eyes stinging, I scramble into the road only for a honking car to send me sprawling back toward the sidewalk. My pants tear against the asphalt, and then I’m running, running, running, as blood spills down my leg.

My feet carry me to my lab. I take the stairs two at once and burst through the door only to stumble when I find the lights are on inside. Jim Fletcher lifts his eyes from his microscope. Dammit.

He abandons his work to approach me, though I’m more stupid dyke than clever colleague right now, bleeding all over the damn floor. He asks me something like ‘“What happened?” or “Are you okay?” but I’m breathing too hard to hear him.

If I told him, he’d believe me. About everything, maybe. Women who glow in the dark; worlds destroyed by garish headlights and strobing red and blue. The way I’m one of them. The way sucking up to the military of a country that attacks its own people tastes like blood.

Instead, I only say, “Don’t,” and to his credit, he doesn’t. In my corner, I open the drawer with her inside. Her picture. Her voice. I’m shaking too hard to touch her without destroying her.

I’d always evaded questions about my work at Maud’s. Even admitting the most tangential of aid to a system the girls mocked would have earned me choice words. For a while now, I’ve known that I deserve them. I have seen the things that exist in darkness, their wonders and terrors. I have loved those women. Those who crack but will not shatter, who prefer life in shadow over selling their souls to a country trying so damn hard to fly too close to the sun. There are so few places for us anymore. I’ve discovered the path to another, and until now all I’ve done is invite the Navy to follow me inside.

Blood from my knee crusts the edges of my torn pant leg. Down lower is the crack I obtained in the WASP, the one that may glow if I go where sunlight cannot follow. Even now, in the haze of fading adrenaline, the insatiable urge for answers thrums within me. I have accomplished so much because of that drive. I have pretended to be so many things.

It’s not enough this time. Not the occasional dive when the Navy likes us, not photos in magazines, attributed to the wrong damn name. I don’t want those anymore. I’m uninterested in exposing the mysteries of that which I love to those who seek to destroy them.

By now I’m limping, the results of my recent experiments boxed in my arms. My gritty scrape burns, but I don’t stop until I reach the dock. I collapse to my knees; several months of intensive effort clatters down with me. The lapping surface water fakes true blackness, but it’s not deep enough, not yet.

It’s no small feat to get answers from the place the stars don’t see. You need focus, dedication, sacrifice.

My unpublished photos and recordings slip into the water without even a splash. No matter. I intend to speak with light.

A thousand meters beneath the sea, a witch calls.

© 2025 by R.J. Becks

3080 words

Author’s Note: I have loved bioluminescence for a long time, and reading Edith Widder’s memoir Below the Edge of Darkness cinched my desire to write about it, as well as provided many of the technical details necessary. However, the heart of this story comes from my grappling with how scientific research broadens perspectives, yet the need for research funding can push scientists toward military applications and/or corporate incentives. The main character in this story doesn’t discover a monster in the deep but instead learns more about herself there, and when she returns to the surface, finds that she is no longer willing to sell herself to a system that harms those she loves.

R.J. Becks is a writer and scientist who has studied endangered species, participated in 24-hour birding competitions, and lived on the road that inspired Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. She writes to capture the complexity of ecosystems and usually needs magic to do it. You can occasionally find her at @rjbecks.bsky.social on Bluesky.

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DP FICTION #121A: “The Matador and the Labyrinth” by C.C. Finlay

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) This story contains one memory of a homophobic slur, one memory of childhood abuse, the threat of violence to an animal, actual violence by an animal against a human being, and themes of conditioned self-hatred.

This bull was not a very good bull, and he had lost a lot of blood already. He was too reluctant to charge one instant, too eager the next, which made him unpredictable. The matador had known many bulls during his decades in the ring, and most of them, more than he had any right to know, were good bulls, some of them very good bulls. A few had been truly exceptional bulls, noble bulls. God’s own beasts, magnificent creatures shaped by His divine hand from the raw materials of strength and speed, grace and purpose.

Shaped from danger, too. One could never entirely escape the horns, not even the greatest matador. Matadors marked the bulls and the bulls marked them. He thought of the dozens of scars he carried as love letters, and he remembered, mostly with affection, every bull who had written such a carta de amor on the pale page of his flesh.

But he was no longer the greatest matador, and this hot afternoon he did not face a very good bull. Strength and speed, yes, but neither grace nor purpose. He would need to be careful. No one, he thought, would remember today’s corrida with much affection.

When he entered the ring for the tercio de muerte, the third and final act of the bullfight, he carried along with the red muleta in his left hand, the estoque de verdad in his right, three feet of perfectly tempered steel so he could end the bull quickly after only a short faena. A few passes, just for show, to please the crowd such as it was, and then his steel blade would conclude the performance mercifully. This would not last ten more minutes. It might not last two.

He kept his body very close to the passing bull, as he always did. Feet planted, back straight, hips turning ever so slightly, never more than absolutely necessary to evade the charge. The dance between man and bull had to be intimate or it was nothing. No longer man and bull, two separate beings, but man-and-bull, one being together, even if that being lasted only seconds. The first set of passes were adequate, the second less so. A few desultory cries of “¡ole!” from the stands, but truly more than the bull deserved. One loud, braying jeer, from a voice that sounded like his father.

On the last pass of the second set, the matador felt the heat of the animal brush against his thigh. For a few seconds, the bull stood panting while the matador taunted him with the red cape. Blood streamed down the bull’s left shoulder as he leapt forward for the third time. His foreleg buckled just before he reached the muleta, and he stumbled. There was no decision by the matador, only reaction, but a lifetime of experience went into that reaction: knowing it was time to finish the fight, seeing that the bull was fading swiftly and the crowd growing restless, recognizing the opening through the shoulder blade to the bull’s heart. A shadow  fell around him, as it always did, pushing back the ring and the crowd and everything except a single spot of light that contained himself and the bull.

So. The third pass. The bull stumbled near the matador’s feet. No decision, only reaction. The matador flung his left arm into the air melodramatically–it was important to remove the muleta from the tableau so that the entire crowd could see how close he stepped to the bull–and raised the sword. Which is when the bull lunged upward from his stumble, driving his left horn under the matador’s rib cage and into his heart.

The crowd gasped, but the matador could not.

They stood there, man-and-bull, transfixed, both too surprised, too exhausted, to act for at least a full second. The matador smiled. The clichés about death were wrong. It was not the past that swam before his eyes, but his lost future. The Cuban cigar he would not smoke tonight, nor any of the other future cigars. The bottle of wine he would not sip while the sky drew dark, nor all the other bottles of wine laid up in the cellar that he would never sip. The woman who would be alone tonight, instead of waiting for him in his bed, and all the other women he had yet to meet. The money he would not make, and all the luxuries and showy trinkets that would go unpurchased.

That realization, that sense of loss for all the once-future ornaments of his life, all the pleasures of his life, of a man’s life as he’d been taught to define it, came as a surprise. But he had been courting death since adolescence, and he knew well its shape. So death itself did not come as a surprise. Death did not arrive accompanied by denial or anger, or anything but acceptance. His father had always mocked him for being small, for being weak, for crying when others suffered. When he went to work in the arena to prove himself, his father called him foolish, and predicted he would come to a bad end.

This end didn’t feel so bad.

The bull’s leg buckled a second time, and he shook his head free. The horn came out of the matador’s chest with an audible squelch and a spray of blood. The crowd cried out in dismay, a sound from very far away. The matador felt, for the merest fragment of time, the vast emptiness in his chest, the hole where his heart should be, as he closed his eyes and collapsed on the blood-stained yellow sand of his beloved ring.

He felt the light first, before he saw it. Lambent, soft as warm butter, melting on his skin.

The matador opened his eyes. He found himself not on the clay of the arena, nor on the soft bench of the bullring’s medical office with the resident doctor hovering over him, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was not stretched out on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, swaying from one side to the other as the driver took the corners much too sharply. He was not sedated under the cold, bright lights of a surgical suite, surrounded by the chirping mob of machines and trauma staff. These were all places he had awakened before, after accidents in the ring. After receiving love letters from the bulls.

He had never before awoken on a stone floor. He staggered to his feet.

As best as he could tell, this was an anteroom or porch. The Mediterranean sun, honey thick, flowed through windows set high up in the wall, lending the stone a lightly golden cast, like the sand of the bullring. A long, dark corridor stretched out in front of him.

This didn’t match any vision of hell or heaven the matador had heard of or imagined. Purgatory, perhaps. Given his life, he had expected purgatory no more than he expected heaven. If this was hell, then hell was a more pleasant place than he expected. He went to make the sign of the cross, a reflex, callused fingers tapping his forehead and dropping down to—

A hole occupied the spot where his heart should be.

A tearing wound, no longer bleeding.

His chaquetilla was soaked with blood. He still wore his favorite traje de luces, the lime green taleguilla with lemon piping, the same colors that had been in the threadbare, borrowed suit he wore on the day he killed his first bull. His father mocked the colors on that day, called them girlish, called him a mondrigón, and the matador had worn the same colors ever since. His right hand still gripped, fiercely, his sword.

“Please tell me that you’re here to help him,” a voice pleaded, a woman’s voice, behind him.

He spun and backpedalled to the wall, which he leaned against like a buttress propping up a cathedral. The woman was young and beautiful, with sun-kissed skin and night-blessed hair. A diadem of pearls circled her brow. She wore purple robes, like a priest at Lent. Behind her, a table draped in purple cloth, like an altar during Lent.

If this was purgatory, perhaps he still had a chance to redeem himself.

“I prayed for a warrior to aid Theseus,” she said, her words in a language odd and unfamiliar to his ears, and yet he found he understood. “Please tell me that the gods have answered my prayers.”

The name Theseus tickled his memory, as if it should be familiar to him. But the name didn’t matter. A good torero ignored his own injuries to aid someone hurt worse. The code of the ring, that he had devoted his life to. If Theseus needed aid, the matador would help him. “Where is Theseus?”

“That way, in the house of the noble bull. He left a trail for you to follow.”

The word she spoke was ‘minotaur’, a word that he knew in another sense in his previous life, but here, in this moment, he heard it differently. He understood it differently, as a compound word, ‘mino-’, meaning king, meaning ‘noble’, and ‘-taur’, meaning ‘bull’. That word, ‘minotaur’, the noble bull, arrested his attention.

The matador clung to that word the way a drowning man clung to a thrown rope. If he could face, one last time, a truly noble bull, perhaps everything could still be put right. His second glance at the dark corridor revealed branching passages to either side. He turned back to ask the woman which one to follow but she was gone.

One end of a  thread lay on the ground, a single blood-red string leading off into the vast, dark recesses of the palace. A slender crimson line that led him toward some unknown fate. He gathered it as he went, rolling it into a scarlet ball. There could be no going back. The path turned, twisted, lunged ahead, halted, and turned again. The light grew dim, diffuse, and cool. The corridors became a chiaroscuro, a study in black and white, presence and absence, divided and held together by the thinnest of red lines that disappeared behind him.

In a room, and then a hall, and then again in other rooms and halls, stark white bones poked out from piles of tattered, dusty clothes, next to rusted swords. He recognized them as brothers in spirit, matadors who had entered the maze and been found unworthy, unequal to either the beast or the moment. That would not be his fate.

He did not know how much time had passed, but it felt like a lifetime when the thin red thread ended in a small ball, no larger than an acorn, abandoned in a long hallway. The matador nudged it with his toe, and it rolled out to a cut end. He gathered it all up into a single wadded ball that throbbed and pulsed in his hand. Not knowing what else to do with it, he jammed it into the hole in his chest.

Old pain and fresh relief surged through him, like a man shocked back to life with a defibrillator.

An echo in the distance, a snuffling sound, a snort, caught his attention. At the far end of the corridor, numinous light—the sunset, the moonrise?—cast a black shadow across the upper reaches of a whitewashed wall. A pair of horns, sitting atop the head of the tallest bull the matador had ever seen. A truly noble bull.

And there, crouched in the shadows like a rat, hiding behind a thick, immovable wall like a coward, he spied the figure of a man with a sword. A scarlet curtain snapped in front of the matador’s eyes. This was no way to treat a noble bull! Like a thief, like an assassin, leaping out of ambush to stab it in the back. No true torero would do such a thing, only an imposter.

The matador sprinted forward, flinging himself at the imposter as the imposter launched his own attack. The two of them crashed into the minotaur as he rounded the corner. All three tumbled wildly, a tangle of limbs and voices, shock and rage.

“No!” screamed the matador, stabbing, tripping, stabbing, rising, slashing. “That’s not what we do!” Butchery, that’s all it was, ugly, brutal, uncontrolled, like a drunkard’s temper, like his father with the leather belt, beating the weakness out of him. There was no elegance, no grace or purpose. Nothing to cheer or praise. He stopped, ashamed of himself.

The red curtain pulled away and vanished.

At the matador’s feet, a man in a spreading pool of blood, eyes open, a gaping hole in his still chest. The leaf-shaped sword he carried rested between his legs. He looked like a bee, its stinger pulled, lying dead in the cup of a dying rose.

He was so young, too young. A mere boy. And he wore the face of the matador, who recognized his own reflection from the day he entered the bullring, with a chip on his shoulder and everything to prove.

The matador’s sword clattered to the ground, and he kicked it away. He pulled off the chaquetilla, scattering sequins like discarded gems, and draped it across the body on the ground. The corbatin came off his neck, and he tore the seams of his camisa in his haste to rip it from his back. Here, away from the arena, he realized for the first time that he did not have to kill the bull. He could instead, kill the voice that told him the bull must die.

“Thank you,” said a soft voice behind him.

The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador spun around to find, behind him, propped up against the wall, a source of wonder. A bull’s majestic head, with its crowning horns, and soft brown eyes, atop the body of a strong, well-muscled man. His torso bore the countless scars from vara, banderillas, and sword. His own cartas de amor from the matadors.

“Are you Theseus?” the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador asked.

“No, my name is Asterion. This is my house.”

“Let me help you up. I’m sorry for what that man was about to do to you. He should not have. It was not right.”

“What was he going to do?” The voice was innocent and confused, as baffled by the sudden violence as by its cessation.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Truly, it didn’t. His hands felt small in Asterion’s hands, as he pulled the noble bull to his feet. When Asterion stood over him, the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador felt small and helpless, like a boy beside a man.

“There’s a fountain in the courtyard,” Asterion said. “Would you like to go there with me?”

“I would like that very much.”

They walked off together, choosing their own path, unmarked, along corridors where no one else could follow. The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador stared at the walls. He had not noticed the elaborate carvings before, nor the statues in niches and corners, nor the tapestries, all depictions of the minotaur. Like some great museum, collected solely for their private pleasure. Whether the art had been here all along, or only appeared just now, he could not say. But when he became too distracted, when he lingered in one spot too long, he felt Asterion’s hand gently tug his, guiding him the rest of the way.

Somewhere along the path, the man and the bull became one, man-and-bull. Just as it happened in the bullring, and not at all as it happened in the bullring.

Man-and-bull passed through an archway and entered a courtyard larger than any arena. At the center, a fountain fell in tiers, lively singing water that pooled at the bottom and overflowed to irrigate a small orchard of trees, lemon and orange and pomegranate, date and fig. The scent of citrus blossoms filled the air. The clear sky above him glittered with all the stars of the universe.

© 2025 by C.C. Finlay

2699 words

Author’s Note: I had been thinking about masculinity and our portrayals of masculinity. As a result, I found myself rereading Hemingway, specifically *Death in the Afternoon*, his non-fiction book on bull-fighting. When Hemingway writes about matadors, he is very much writing about an idealized masculinity, and the way it connects with his thoughts on fear and courage and how to live. For entirely different reasons, I had also recently reread Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” his sad fable about the fate of the Minotaur. In that story, the bull-headed creature is emblematic of both masculinity and gentle innocence. A very different view of the world and the ways we live in it. The connection between the two perspectives was so strong that this story seemed obvious, jumping into my head nearly fully formed, though the ending required a lot of reflection.

C.C. Finlay was the World Fantasy Award-winning editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 2014-2021. He’s also the author of four novels, a collection, and dozens of stories. His fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, and has been translated into sixteen languages. He can be lured to his doom with pastries.

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DP FICTION #120B: “In His Image” by R. Haven

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details) Content note: Murder-suicide.

I love Him from the instant I have eyes.

I can’t wrap my mind around the intentions of a god, but I do understand that He’s the one bringing me to life. His light brown skin, flecked with dust and paint and plaster, is the softest thing to ever make contact with my exterior. I stand scarcely a foot above Him, but His presence takes up the entire room—engulfs the world itself. He looks me over critically, irises the darkest of brown, and continues to chisel around the rough shape of my face.

My features have been sketched onto me with chalk. I’m too basic to behold Him, too crude. I would shrink away in shame if only I could move.

It’s the strangest thing. Some part of me is aware that I’m something different, that I’ve spent my existence so far as part of something bigger. I think, once, I belonged to a mountain, maybe even the face of a cliff. Something dug me out, ground me down until I was smooth. I was hoisted this way and that by hundreds of hands. I’m older than life itself; if I truly rack my memory, I can maybe pinpoint the exact age that humanity found its legs.

In all those eons, I haven’t experienced anything like this before—this awareness, and a sense of self. The emotions that go hand-in-hand with living, when I hadn’t known before that life was something worthwhile. Moreover, I haven’t encountered anyone like Him before. He looks at me with intention, with a vision, and I want to melt into something malleable in order to suit it.

I’ll do anything for Him. Be anything He wants me to be.

***

I don’t follow the passage of time by the light outside, though He seems to prefer to work when it’s streaming through the enormous windows of the studio. I don’t measure it in the subtle ticking of the timepiece situated above the doors, or gauge by the fluctuation of noises coming from outside—growling metal, blaring horns, the droning of conversation. I know the difference between night and day because He is the sun; He walks in, and everything brightens—the mosaics and murals, the blanketed easels and clay busts.

He doesn’t always work on me alone, but He does make it a point to chisel and sand sections of my form away at least once per visit. I try to be understanding. He can’t devote all His time to one thing—it’s clearly not in His nature. Where I am immovable, He is mercurial.

Today, He flits between two canvases, letting a thin base coat dry while layering details on another. I’m fascinated by His hands, especially. Slim fingers wield a paintbrush like a feather, handle it like a sword. With every stroke, beauty gushes forth. The colors He chooses are purposeful and vibrant. The placement of the paint is so careful, yet looks effortless.

I watch for hours, and only break in my admiration to reluctantly urge Him, Eat. You can’t go on for much longer without eating something.

He puts the paintbrush down. I brim with affection.

Eating is a strange thing, but I’ve come to realize it’s something He requires to keep on. It’s an unappealing prospect to have to fill oneself repeatedly, but He makes it look like a transcendent experience each time. He sits on the floor by the window, curls spilling over His forehead as He tilts forward over a plain bag.

He devours the contents. I watch the slow drip of a tangerine’s juices slide down His fingers. If I had a mouth, I could part my lips and coax His hands towards them, swallow each finger one at a time to the knuckle and clean them with my tongue.

I have never tasted before. I imagine nothing is more exquisite than the flavor and texture of Him.

He exhales, opens a bottle of water. His throat bobs as He drinks, head back and eyes closed, an expression of ecstasy if I ever saw one. I want to put that look on His face. I want to be the reason He smiles.

The wonderful thing is, He does smile at me. When He’s particularly satisfied with the shape I’m taking, He beams wide, proud. His teeth gleam like polished marble. His lips frame them in kissable perfection.

I ache, but I wouldn’t trade those smiles for anything. His happiness means more to me than my own selfish urge to touch Him, hold Him.

But I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way we could have both.

***

He focuses on my body for some time. He whittles away at rock with instruments both powerful and dainty, drilling right through stone and sending bits of rock scattering at high speeds, then refining pieces to ensure He doesn’t lose too much structure.

I’m taking the form of a human. Because that’s what He is, ‘human’ is precisely how I want to look.

What I want to be.

It takes days for Him to fashion legs, though they’re still blocky. My arms are up, framing my head, showing off what will be my torso. I don’t know what He plans to do with my hands, if I’m to have any.

I hope He’ll give me hands, so that I might one day interlock my fingers with His, draw Him near. He rests His own fingertips against me on occasion, and I swear I can feel His heartbeat all the way through them. A fluttery hot pulse.

I also decide, then, that I want Him to give me one of those. Carve me a heart. Make me one, so that I may give it to you.

He’s distracted in the days that follow, sitting at a potter’s wheel to form an odd shape, bumps deliberately formed over the curves. In the end, He winds up demolishing each one, returning them to formless clay. He seems dissatisfied with the shapes, frowning more often than not.

So I dismiss my want. I don’t need a heart. What I need is for Him to smile at me while He sands and grinds me down, to have His focus, to please Him.

He abandons the potter’s wheel and resumes His work on me.

***

It isn’t until my face truly begins to take shape that I realize every portrait, every bust He has created—they’re all of me. The long nose, the waves of my hair, the deep-set eyes. The thrill I get when it dawns on me is incomparable, like lightning striking a tree only to leave blooms behind.

It can only mean one thing. He loves me. He feels the same way.

With all the tenderness my stone gaze can muster, I watch Him work. He’s finished with my head and is working on my arms, smoothing the joint of my elbows, emphasizing the soft bulge of muscles. His face is so close to mine.

Would He kiss me, like this? Surely He wants to. If He’s been painting me all this time, He must have been longing for this before He even began sculpting.

Kiss me.

He pauses, draws back. His eyes flicker over my face with obvious emotion, but I can’t read what it is. His gaze lands on my mouth.

Please, kiss me.

Gently, He glides the sandpaper under my lower lip, just once. Then He shakes His head as though to clear it, going back to work on my biceps.

That’s okay. Perhaps He wants to wait until I’m complete. It will mean more, then—a celebration. I can wait.

***

He’s the only person to have ever come into the studio before. That’s why it’s such an unwelcome surprise to see Another Man walk in one morning, hand in hand with Him.

The Other Man flicks on the light, looking around the studio with a smile playing on his lips. “Obsessed much?”

He laughs. I’ve never heard Him do that before, and nothing could possibly compare to its chime.

“So where do you want me?” The Other Man wanders, idly inspecting all of His works of art with a soppy grin. Hot loathing pipes through my entire form, the resulting surge of strength useless to me without the means to move. While the Other Man drinks in one of the clay busts, He sets down His bag, draws open the blinds.

“Pull up a chair wherever you want,” He answers. “Clothes off.”

“Already? You aren’t going to woo me first?”

He laughs again. “Paying for breakfast was the wooing. You should probably be close to the statue, but not too close. I want to be able to see you, but…”

“Avoid any flying debris?”

“Yes, that.”

The Other Man strips his shirt off, mussing his wavy hair. He drags over a folded chair, but stops on his way past me, deep-set eyes sizing me up.

“Wild,” he murmurs. “It’s already so lifelike.”

“It’s basically blocks from the waist down,” He points out.

“I mean aside from that.” The Other Man quiets a moment. “I can’t believe this is how you see me.”

“David…” He abandons the sculpting tools He was preparing, going instead to the Other Man, arms winding around the Man from behind. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

The Other Man closes his eyes briefly, tilting his head back. “The most beautiful man with a block for a dick.”

He snorts in surprise, then buries His face in the crook of the Other Man’s neck, muffling chuckles. I want to tear the Other Man’s head right off his shoulders, frantic hurt swirling through my head like storm clouds.

“If you want your dick to be accurate, then you’ll need to take these off,” He murmurs, hands roving down to the fly of the Other Man’s jeans.

Stop it. Don’t touch him. Touch me, instead.

He lingers over the button. For a second, I think He’s heeding me.

But He ignores me, ultimately, and I can do nothing but stew in rage, watching the Other Man take everything I’ve ever wanted.

***

I stop seeing myself in the colors and curves He puts on paper. Their shapes—my shape—offends and baffles me now that I know what I am. I only exist to bear the Other Man’s likeness.

What I don’t understand is why.

The Other Man must be inadequate in some way. There’s something about him that He wants to change, perhaps, something built into the Other Man’s physicality. I beg for this to be the answer. I pray, because if He is building me to be a better version of His lover, then taking the Other Man’s place is inevitable.

Yet, if this is true, why do His canvasses not serve my purpose already? Why does He look so softly upon every depiction, like we’re all equal? Equal to each other, but so far beneath the Other Man?

Choose me, I implore Him day after day. If you can’t do that, at least give me a reason why not. Why it can’t be me.

What am I for, if not for you?

He scratches imperfect flecks of rock away from my legs, and doesn’t deign to answer.

***

The ache of betrayal, of loss, doesn’t get any easier to bear with time. He continues to work on my lower section, spending hours on each individual toe, but I can hardly stand His touch when I know it’s not exclusively mine. Every spark I experience from His hands is stolen, a dirty secret. He allows the Other Man to come into the studio every night as He finishes His work, kisses him, laughs with him. What worth I try to invent for myself is gracelessly smashed with every smile the two of them share.

I stop keeping track of when He’s here and when He’s not. It all feels equally lonely. I just know that eventually, He stops His work and takes several steps back, dragging a sleeve across His forehead and staring up at me in abject wonder.

“Finished,” He whispers.

I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel whole. But He says He’s finished with me.

I try to convince myself it’s for the best. I’ll exist forevermore, knowing He loves the shape of me, if nothing else. Maybe there’s contentment to be found in that.

But no… The more I attempt to believe it, the weaker my justification becomes. I’ll be tormented until the end of time, wondering why He would create something only to spurn its affections, wishing I had it in my power to enchant Him as He did me.

Or any power, at all.

Kiss me. Just once, I implore Him. Just to know what it’s like.

Slowly, He draws near again. I stand nearly a foot taller than Him, so to cup my face, He reaches up high. His head tilts back to look me over.

He does not kiss me. Instead, He runs His thumb across my lips.

“I can’t wait for him to see you finished,” He murmurs.

He closes up the studio. If I could cry, I would.

***

The next time He returns, it’s with the Other Man again. He’s vibrating with excitement, almost pulling in the Other Man by his hands but frequently letting go to fuss with His hair, his shirt.

“I haven’t seen you this nervous since you proposed,” the Other Man notes dryly, but it’s affectionate. Light. There’s tied cloth over his eyes.

Hatred renews itself like it’d been merely reduced to embers, and the Other Man’s breathed it back to a blaze.

“I just…I hope you’ll like it,” He says sheepishly. “I’m going to put you where I want you and then get the lights, okay? Don’t peek.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear it. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t peek.”

“I refuse. I love my mom and I won’t take that chance.”

He steers the Other Man over. “But you already promised you won’t peek! That should be nothing!”

“What if I can’t resist temptation like I think I can? Not risking it.”

He drops a kiss on the Other Man’s cheek. I stare down at the Other Man and wish nothing but pain and death upon him.

If only I could step down from the pedestal I’ve been carved into, explain to Him how much more I adore Him than the Other Man ever could—

He flits over to the windows to draw the blinds.

With one final burst of emotion, I surge forward.

When I topple, it’s straight onto the Other Man, crushing him beneath my might and mass. My body cracks on impact, but it’s nothing compared to the crunch of bone and splatter of the Other Man’s blood. It pours from his head out across the floor like watered-down paint.

My final satisfied thought is that His scream eclipses any love He ever felt for His David.

© 2025 by R. Haven

2480 words

R. Haven hails from Toronto, Canada. His short stories have been published by Canthius, Soitera Press, and TL;DR Press, among others. Last Stanza Poetry Journal and Old Moon Press have published his poetry. He also signed a contract with Renaissance Press for a standalone horror novel and is represented by Kaitlyn Katsoupis of Belcastro Literary Agency. His website is theirritablequeer.com.

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