Category: Fiction

DP FICTION #52A: “The Ceiling of the World” by Nicole Crucial

This is important. When Margaret moved to the city, you see, the office she worked in was on the top floor, five stories up. The train took twenty-five minutes to travel between Bleek Street—where her office was—and Swallow Avenue—where she lived. She took a room in a basement, and that basement room was ten feet below the ground, and through the eighteen-inch windows at the top of the room, daylight filtered in. The reassuring whisper-hum of the underground trains tickled the soles of her feet every few minutes. 

She’d kept hearing the city was growing. She figured, that’s where the jobs are—so she’d moved there. And yes, it was true, there were all kinds of jobs. You could be a copywriter, or a production assistant, or a construction worker, or pharmaceutical saleswoman, or a waitress at a fancy restaurant, or a waitress at a cheap diner, or a mail woman, or a graphic designer, or a barista, or a zookeeper, or a city planner, or an executive assistant, or a plumber, or an engineer, or a nail technician, or a food truck driver. That was part of the excitement: the possibility. The city was big enough for anything, bold enough to swallow anyone and spit back out a well-adapted spider monkey to climb the skyscrapers. Folks moved with an animal grace through the streets, stepping lithe around the potholes and trash, extracting quarters from their pockets without fumbling when the homeless people jangled their coffee cups. 

She’d liked the office with the view—the bumpy horizon of skyscrapers, historic and glassy-obsidian-new; the obstructed but beautiful sky; the surrealist haze that lingered and that was equal parts factory, cigarette, and vape shop. She’d taken the job at the office with the view without really knowing what the job was about. It had something to do with spreadsheets and calendars. It didn’t much matter what she did. 

“Every morning I walk out of the train platform, and I look straight up and can hardly take my eyes off the ceiling of the world till I walk inside the building,” Margaret told her mother. 

The five-story building was a walkup, and Margaret didn’t mind. She hummed in the stairwell, failing to count her steps. 

This is important. She was distracted and dying to be enchanted. So it took her a while to notice. 

*

One evening Margaret came home and descended the stairs to her basement alcove. Her legs were powerful now, after a few weeks of climbing those five stories, the stairs to the subways, this path to her bed. 

At the bottom, she put her foot down, expecting the tile floor. Instead her pump found the slick edge of another worn stair. She stumbled, barely caught herself on the railing in time to avoid a face plant.

Strange, she thought. 

“These godforsaken shoes,” she said to her mother on the phone. 

The light falling from the high, squat windows seemed a little dimmer. 

*

She noticed, eventually, that where once she’d only been able to hum her favorite Johnny Cash song’s chorus three times while claiming the stairs at work, she now could almost finish a fourth repetition. 

Outside the gilt-edged windows in the historic office building, the construction workers and cheap diner waitresses and engineers looked a little smaller. 

“Nothing is ever finished, is it?” said her boss, dropping a stack of papers on Margaret’s desk. 

The factory-cigarette-vape shop haze shimmered outside the windows.

This is important—or rather, it’s not. In the evenings, when she got home and eased her heels carefully over the unexpected last step into the basement, Margaret could not have told you what she’d done all day. 

*

She noticed the clock more now. How the quiet, stuffy minutes in the train seemed to stretch out between the stops, unfurling, leisurely, absent-minded. When she looked up from the sidewalk, the edges of buildings hemmed the once-unbounded ceiling of the world, the perspective making them narrow dramatically toward the sun. 

Mail began coming in bins, directed to the “6th floor.” 

“Should we change our address on the website?” asked Margaret, who, she remembered in this moment, was in charge of such things. “Facebook?” 

“What do you mean?” asked her boss. He pointed to the website open on her computer—6713 Bleek Street, 6th floor. “It’s always been the sixth floor.”

Margaret read every address on every piece of mail backward, from the bottom line up, to be extra sure that her brain wasn’t automatically filling in a number. Still, the number 6 made her bones feel brittle, fragile. She was glad she took the 8 train home.

*

In her basement room, which she swore now sat two steps lower into the ground, she heard the train passing the wall directly next to her bed. Strange. It didn’t seem like sinking two steps should bring her bedroom latitudinal with the train. 

But, you see, she liked how the rumble had moved from under her feet to level with her chest as she faced the wall at night. It began to feel like the gentle but deep vibrations of a snoring lover, perched next to her under the sheets. 

*

On a Thursday night, she went out. The bar she ended up at was three blocks from her heightening office, a puzzling intentional mix of hole-in-the-wall-dive and classily dim-lit, marble surfaces.

She sat alone at the bar stirring a gin and tonic until some man decided she looked lonely enough. It was an accurate observation. He settled into the stool on her immediate left.

“Where are you from?” 

It was a question no one had ever asked in her hometown. 

She gave its name; added, sheepishly, as one was supposed to do if they hadn’t been raised in the city: “It’s just this little town. I moved to the city a few months ago.”

“Oh? What for?” he said, rolling the tiny straw from his drink between his thumb and forefinger. It was not a frenetic motion—it was something unhurried. 

This was where she was supposed to say what her job was, or admit she had attended an expensive university here. Even though she knew this, Margaret found that the question clotted in her ears, plugged her throat. 

“I work on Bleek Street,” she said. She was changing the subject; the man did not know this. 

“Oh—I work two blocks over.” He held her eyes. Margaret noticed, startled, that he’d looked her straight in the eye for their whole conversation. 

He smiled, a toothy, guileless, out-of-place smile. As if the proximity of office spaces were a serendipitous coincidence, not the rational result of two people wanting to drink after work and not wanting to take a train across the ever-widening midtown expanse just for that. Margaret stared at him, the pads of her fingers dripping condensation on her glass. She felt as if she were on the train again. Trapped in the split second of darkness and encroaching bodies in which she feared, irrationally, that she would never get off, that this was eternity. That the moment would never end, or if it did, that it would never leave her. 

“Have you noticed the buildings?”

“The buildings,” he repeated. 

“They’re… growing.” 

“Growing?” He leaned closer, placing his palm on the stool that separated them to steady himself. 

Strange: a stool, separating them.

“And sinking,” Margaret continued, unable to stop herself. “And moving further apart. The train takes longer. The underground sank deeper.”

He tilted his head. 

“Buildings,” he said again. “Growing.”

*

In the coming months, her office changed its address from the 6th floor to the 7th, then the 8th, 9th, 10th. It remained a walk-up. 

Four more stops appeared on the train between Bleek Street and Swallow Avenue. The stairs leading down to Margaret’s basement room added a platform and doubled back in a second flight, and she had to crouch while descending in darkness. No more light reached her from the small windows. 

She didn’t see the man from the bar again. He’d entered his number into her phone and texted himself from it—a process that made her wrinkle her nose, but remain silent. But when she looked in her messages later, the conversation had disappeared. All her conversations had disappeared. 

Above her, the trains whispered and hummed. The vibrations fell on her as gossamer-light and chilling as spiderwebs. 

*

When she called her mother, the line rang indefinitely. She didn’t pick up; no robotic voicemail came to save her from the anxiety-adrenaline of waiting for the next ring, the silent begging for a dial tone.

Margaret waited for almost an hour, letting each ring saw on her nerves as if a nail file on a piece of string. 

“I miss you,” she said between tones. 

Ring. 

“I met a guy,” she tried. It felt hollow and she was glad, for a moment, that there was nobody on the line. She shook her head, hung up, and redialed: a clean slate. 

Ring. 

“I read a poem once—”

Ring.

“—something about, you know, city as lover.”

Ring. 

“Like how people are home.”

Ring.

“Um, okay, that’s not important.”

Ring.

“This is important.”

Ring.

“Do you remember when I was little?”

Ring.

“And I counted the cracks in the ceiling—”

Ring.

“Every night before I slept.”

Ring. 

“There were seventy-seven.”

Ring.

“I can’t find cracks to count anymore.”

After that, the phone stopped ringing. Only the laden, breathing silence of a receiver, depositing soundbytes into some irretrievable void. Maybe at least the phone company was recording. It comforted her to think that somewhere her voice was frozen, trembling over the syllables in “seventy-seven.” Finally a number that couldn’t change. 

*

A growing city requires all kinds, devours all kinds. Margaret passed the storefronts, caught the job classifieds in her periphery as she handed the morning paper to her boss. You could be an instigator, or a message, or a cookie tin containing only buttons, or a nosejob critic, or a law, or a grocery store mapmaker, or an Internet hoax, or a governess, or a pushpin collector, or a pocket square, or a bottle, or a ringbearer, or a liar, or a mathematician, or a lying mathematician, or a butterfly effect. 

That was part of the excitement: the possibility. The city was big enough for anything, bold enough to swallow anyone. Something about a primate with a prehensile tail. And you see, these days, you really needed to climb, and you really needed that extra limb to hold on with. There was nothing to do but climb. There was nothing to do but be swallowed.

Margaret did something with spreadsheets and calendars. It didn’t much matter what she did. 

*

On a Monday morning, six months after Margaret moved to the city, she stepped onto the sidewalk after a three-hour train ride.

She looked up at the ceiling of the world. She hadn’t been able to sigh about it to her mother for six weeks. Above her, a tiny misshapen circle of sky and an edge of blinding sun peeked from the encroaching gargantuan skyscrapers. The sky was more brick than blue now.

Margaret opened the door in her office building. She took a deep breath. 

She began the climb. She did not hum, because she knew if she did, her voice would give out on the way up. She failed to count her steps. 

She was distracted and enchanted to be dying. 

This is important.

© 2019 by Nicole Crucial

Author’s Note: I was living in New York City for a summer internship. Unsurprisingly, I felt like a very small and young and alone person in a very big city. Unlike other places I’d lived, New York only seemed to get bigger with time—not smaller—and I thought, what if that was literal? This piece was a way for me to work out my loneliness and frustration, the disappointment with myself and with the environment I was in. I’ve since gone happily back to living in and writing zany, semi-magical fiction about the South.

Nikki Kroushl (writing as Nicole Crucial) is finishing up her senior year as a student of various dark arts (one of them creative writing) at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She writes fabulist fiction and self-indulgent personal essays. She is far too enthusiastic about planners, punctuation, pasta, caffeine, and Instagramming her cat. Read more of Nikki’s work at nicolecrucial.com.

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BOOK REVIEW: Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams

written by David Steffen

Tailchaser’s Song is a fantasy novel by Tad Williams, published by DAW books in 1985.  The story is set in a world of anthropomorphized cats, a quest fantasy with the young cat Fritti Tailchaser as the hero.  It is set in something like the real world, but from the perspective of cats, where humans are known as the race of M’an, descendents of cats who have been deformed by an ancient curse.

Tailchaser is a young feral cat, living near one of the towns of M’an, but not in a house.  He has always been an ambitious cat, wanting to make a name for himself, though he is happy with his life, and with his female companion Hushpad.  Local cats have started disappearing mysteriously, and the local leadership of the cats organizes a delegation to the royal feline court of Harar to report the disappearances and solve the mystery.  Soon after the start of the story Hushpad and the family of M’an who fed her mysteriously disappear.  Something insidious is afoot, and Tailchaser sets out to find out what it is, he is not included as part of the delegation so he sets out alone.  Soon he befriends a troublemaking kitten Pouncequick in the wilderness, who joins him in his journey.

The feel of the story as a whole is very epic fantasy, though it takes place in something like our world, it will be very familiar in tone to some of Williams’s later books, like the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series.  It’s interesting that “praise for the author” quotes on the cover refer to Watership Down by Richard Adams, about a group of anthropomorphized rabbits trying to find a new home after being driven from their own by impending disaster.  They are similar in a lot of ways, but this goes more into the fantasy realm–Watership Down was only fantastical in the sense that one of the rabbits had premonitions and the rabbits had some social structures that seemed unlikely in the wild.  Tailchaser’s Song, on the other hand, has entirely fantastical elements.

I love Williams’s work (the Otherland series being my favorite thus far) and so I’ve been meaning to go back and read his first published book.  I can definitely see similarity in the style and how that grew from there.  This one has some pacing issues, in my opinion, it takes a while to get going, and it takes a while after that to really get into what I’d call the main conflict of the story, and it frustrated me how little the stated quest really had to do with the story, in large part because Tailchaser really has no clue what’s happened to Hushpad so he’s really just setting out in a random direction hoping someone will know, without really any clear idea why they would.  Overall, it’s an enjoyable book and a reasonably quick read, and will especially appeal to you if you like anthropomorphic animals and quest fantasies.

DP FICTION #51B: “Dogwood Stories” by Nicole Givens Kurtz

Content note(click for details)

Content note: harm to children

“Late bloomers have the prettiest blooms,” Sadie’s momma said, after she tapped her on the head with the comb. “So, stop squirmin’.”

“It’s too tight.” Sadie winced, sucking in air to offset the pain. Her scalp burned like someone had set fire to it. She put her hands in her lap and tried to weather the storm, her hands rubbing each other to soothe the pain.

“Tenderheaded. That’s all.” Her momma pinched off a section of hair, and began another braid.

Sadie stifled a groan and squeezed her eyes tight. Once her momma finished the braid, she rubbed a finger full of grease along the parts, oiling her scalp and providing a balm to her irritated skin. The braids still hurt; the hair pulled taut and confined in the creative style.

With her hands sweating, Sadie gritted her teeth and stopped complaining. Not cause her momma’s braiding had stopped hurting. It did, but she wanted to look nice for the Dogwood Arts Festival. It happened once a year in Knoxville and she loved the early spring weather. Fresh grass, the flowers’ sweet smells and the pollen, giving everything a yellow hue.

Other places had festivals honoring dogwoods, cotton, and barbeque. Heck even bacon. Here in East Tennessee, beneath the Great Smoky Mountains’ rolling hills and purple mountains, the dogwood reigned.

Knoxville laid at the foot of the Smokies, in the valley. Protected to the east by mountains and blessed by the Tennessee River on the west, the city of Knoxville bloomed after the 1982 World’s Fair. Sadie only heard stories. The impact on the small county — the town, according to her momma, caused the town to morph into a metropolis.

“Momma?”

“Yeah baby?” Her momma popped her gum. The rush of spearmint tickled Sadie’s nose. Her hands rested heavy against Sadie’s head.

“Tell me about the dogwoods.” Sadie opened her eyes and waited. She loved when her momma read or told her stories about their people. The truth and all its messy bits her teachers didn’t tell her about in school. That’s what her momma called it—messy bits.

Momma’s stories went back as far as the Dogwood Arts Festival itself. Some of the stories Momma got from Grandmomma, Sadie’s Nana. Knoxville didn’t have a lot of folks who looked like her. Most of Sadie’s schooling had been by middle class white women, some well-meaning, but confined by stereotypical beliefs and hatred, both festering inside and foaming outside in whitewashed facts. So, when her momma talked about history, their history, in her rich, southern drawl, Sadie would disappear into those words melting into the past. Those logs fueled her inner fire to burn through the present’s challenges.

“Well, back in the days, a long time ago, the dogwood was strong, as strong as the oak tree. The people who kilt Jesus used the dogwood to make the crosses people was crucified on. The dogwood was a killin’ tree. So when they kilt Jesus on the cross, God twisted the dogwood, punished it by making its limbs thin and skinny…”

“So no one could be crucified on them any more,” Sadie finished, her heart hammering in glee.

“Right. But just so folk don’t forget, God made the white petals of the dogwood look like a cross, four points, with blood bracketed on the tips where they put the nails in Jesus.” Her momma breathed deep and sad as she started braiding again. “Dunno why you like that story so much. It’s sad, Sadie.”

“It isn’t sad, Momma. It’s beautiful.” Sadie sat up straighter against the couch.

“You a strange child.” Her momma tapped her shoulder. “You done.”

Sadie stood. Her legs ached from sitting, but the searing of her scalp blotted that out. Still, she took the stairs two at a time to get changed. Soon, her cousin, Tina, would be by and together they’d make their way downtown to the festival.

As she changed clothes from her pajama bottoms and tee-shirt and into jeans and a long-sleeved, white University of Tennessee tee-shirt. The words “Go Big Orange” spelled out in vibrant U.T. orange. Sadie thought about the dogwoods. She loved the story, not because of God’s punishment of the dogwood. The trees had been changed. Their strength had been used for evil, to hurt people, to inflict suffering. Unable to stop the people from using them for this purpose, the dogwood had been relieved of the burden. She didn’t see it as a punishment, so much as the dogwood being freed.

No, the dogwoods did not belong to white Jesus or his believers. The dogwood belonged to black folks—southern black folks. Like the dogwood, they’d suffered, blooms of potential sliced off by hatred vile and black as the skin of those they despised. Such “nice folks” capable of such monstrous acts as decorating beautiful grand oak and magnolia trees with bodies as ornaments. Smiling families lined up to take pictures in front of those macabre Christmas trees. Those dark, empty husks, dusty and lifeless, had been her family, her people, her kin.

Sadie sat down on the edge of her bed. Not the dogwood. Its petals already bore the blood stain of death. Mostly, the thick oaks and redwoods found themselves defined by evil.

The faint knocks announced Tina’s arrival.

Sadie slapped on her gold bangle bracelets and her big gold hoop earrings.

“You comin’, Sadie?” Her momma shouted up the stairs to her. “Tina’s down here waitin’.”

Sadie checked her braids in the mirror. Her hoops glistened along with the glossy and thick braids. Her head ached a little, but the rising excitement flooded her with a glow that numbed the pain.

“Yeah. Ready.” She scooped up her pocketbook and headed downstairs.

Once Sadie reached the bottom of the stairs, she found Tina and her momma in the living room. The front door stood ajar, but the screen door remained open. Outside, the lemon-yellow sun beamed in the early afternoon sky. Sadie rounded the short corner and walked into the living room—and a debate.

“That’s so 80s. We done did that.” Her momma stood with her arms akimbo on her wide hips, watching Tina. Her satin, multi-colored headwrap hid most of her hair, except her tight spiral curls around her face. She wore a loose blue dress with pockets and house shoes she wore outside.

Her cousin’s box braids swung about her flared hips as she rotated in a circle, shaking her hip-hugging and strategically ripped jeans. Sadie’s momma laughed, throwing back her head, mouth wide, and humor crinkling the corners of her momma’s eyes.

Sadie shrugged. “Everything dies. But then it comes back.”

The chuckles stopped. Tina turned to peer at Sadie, her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

“You such a weird child.” Sadie’s mom shook her head and with scrunched eyebrows turned back to straightening the living room. The smile left and shadows formed on her momma’s face.

Remnants of the shed hair, combs, and decorative beads littered the couch and rug where Sadie had sat.

Sadie let the words glide off of her. Those labels, strange, and, weird, had become worn and faded to her ears. Blunted like a knife that had been used too much.

“It’s a cycle, like spring. Renewal…”Sadie explained to the back of her momma’s head.

Tina rolled her eyes. “Get your pocketbook.” Her voice dipped so low only Sadie could hear. “Sassy Sadie, let’s go.”

“Bye Momma.” Sadie waved goodbye. The screen door slammed with a whap.

Once they got to Tina’s little Honda Civic, she gave Sadie the once over. “Your braids are poppin’! Dang. They tight!”

“Yeah. Momma just finished them.” Sadie shoved her hands into her jean pockets. Eager to go, she fought to keep her hands busy while Tina fished her car keys out of her pocketbook. The silence filled her with dread. Energy buzzed across her skin like lightning, like Saturday morning on Volunteer Football games.

Her cousin, Tina, lived up the street in a house that lined the edge of the projects’ apartment buildings. Older by four years, Tina had her driver’s license and an interest in art. The Dogwood Arts Festival local art show hosted a high school arts competition. Once the works were judged, students won ribbons and prizes. Tina had a few pieces showing and she wanted to show them off to Sadie. That fact alone took sheer courage. Strength. Tina had blossomed from the poor, clay dirt into a creative flower.

“Ready?” Tina unlocked the car, climbed in, and started the ignition.

“Yeah!” Sadie said with relief. At last!

It seemed to take forever, but in no time, they’d made their way from Cherry Street to downtown Market Street. As Tina parked the car, Sadie rushed out of the passenger side before Tina could remove the key from the ignition. The air felt different. It spoke to her.

“Hold ‘em horses, Sadie!” Tina called.

Sadie paused on the sidewalk. “Hurry up!”

Once she cleared the car, Tina tossed her braids. “I’m coming.”

They melded with the crowds of people streaming toward Market Square, a sea of pale faces with occasional spots of color. The Dogwood Arts Festival’s banners of white, mint green, and pink announced the celebration, but the trees showed off. Reaching high to the sky in all their splendor, they decorated Gay Street, the primary artery into Knoxville’s heart—downtown.

Sadie took in the rows of glorious trees. The tension level swelled. People bumped and jostled as people took in the new blooms, the artists, and vendors selling all manner of items. Southern fried foods’ strong aromas wafted through the air. Pink, green, and white balloons decorated vendor and artisans’ tables and booths along Market Square. The free event swelled with individuals beneath the cornflower blue sky and the occasional white cottonball clouds. Postcard perfect.

Sadie’s Nana used to say firm footing could turn to quicksand in a blink.

Whispers circulated, like snakes slithering between people, hissing in warning, when a sharp burning sensation exploded in Sadie’s chest. Her breath caught and a flash of bright light made her wince. She watched, transfixed, as a scarlet dot on her shirt blossomed across her heart, growing as if time-elapsed had been fast forwarded.

Sadie’s joy gushed out of with her blood. She couldn’t feel anything except the soft, downy dogwood petals brushing her cheeks.

For a crowd of branches, they weren’t shy about revealing themselves. Her face—hot and tight—as the whispers intensified couldn’t move. The trees leaned down close to her, their branches cracking like dry spines, shifting to mutter their wisdom into her ears. Blood roared in her ears as adrenaline flooded her system. She gave a wheezing cough. As she removed her hand from her mouth. An awareness settled on her shoulders.

I’ve been shot.

Life grinded to a halt.

Dogwoods didn’t chase ghosts away. They were ghosts. Of her ancestors, of all ancestors of the strong and betrayed.

This. Was. It!

The moment the dogwoods welcomed her into their fold. All of Sadie’s muscles strained as she lifted up her arms. They cradled her. The ivory petals stained with rust, by blood. Hers? Alarmed, she struggled, but their thin, rough bark tightened.

They whispered, “No matter. No matter. Only blood. We know it.”

With this they bobbed in the breeze, and continued to convey their knowledge, such as the wonders of weather that affected their delicate branches and blooms, their wonderful stories of steam and coal, of feasts and famines, and of freedom.

“You been strong for so long,” one dogwood said. It sounded like Nana.

“It hurts.” Sadie croaked, mouth thick and lazy.

“Come on, chile. Rest awhile. Here…” said another dogwood tree.

“But…” Sadie said, “my momma…”

“…is gonna be alright, after a while,” still another tree explained.

Their branches swayed as if cheering on this viewpoint.

“Hush. Hush,” they soothed.

“Come. Come,” they pleaded.

She savored every promise, every whispered word.

“I dunno…” Sadie started to turn away, to see the others in the marketplace. A coldness crept in, chilling her. She shuddered. A grisly, gruesome scene unfolded around her. “Tina.”

“Come on, now. Do not be afraid.” Nana’s voice again. It sounded warm and syrupy with its Southern drawl, thick and sweet.

Sadie’s eyelids grew heavy. Her throat burned, but she managed to say. “My momma, she needs me. I can’t come with y’all, now.”

So hard to talk. Her tongue didn’t want to work right. So tired.

Sadie closed her eyes among the dogwoods’ sweet scent.

*

“This is Robin Sneed with WBIR Channel 10 at the scene of what can only be described as a mass shooting. This time at the Dogwood Arts Festival downtown in Market Square. Police are asking viewers to avoid the downtown area. The festival, usually a time for joy, spring, and renewal, now is a place of violence and death.”

A few feet away, Tina shuddered beneath the blanket the EMS tossed over her shoulders. Yellow caution tape roped off the area as if it were some exclusive club that no one wanted to belong to—a survivor of a mass shooting. No one wanted the alternative either. Fate dealt her and Sadie a cruel blow. The reporter gave vague descriptions of the shooter. Tina scoffed. That cowardly bastard’s soul was deformed. The cops muttered about his deep-seeded grudges, but Tina knew that evil took root in places folks don’t always expect—and places they do.

The crime scene was a hive of activity. KPD and others dressed in POLICE jackets, buzzed around the area, like flies among the corpses. A flurry of activity sped up and slowed down simultaneously. Was this shock?

“Blood everywhere.” So bright against the white.

Tina’s tears flowed so much her eyes swelled and burned. Noise. Wailing. Screams of sirens switched to soft humming and back again. Everything had become jumbled. Nothing made sense.

“Sadie?” she called out.

A short distance from where she stood, her little cousin, Sadie Griffin lay crumbled on the bricked plaza. She’d fell where she stood. A duo of EMS folks hovered around her, blocking her view. Tina tried to distance herself from them, as if she could melt into the blanket, a makeshift invisibility cloak.

Tina closed her eyes, stomach lurching. The scents of copper and gunpowder hung in the air, staining it with death. She couldn’t even smell the dogwoods any more.

Dogwoods.

Tina pictured Sadie’s meddling with such freedom, but it had cost her. She could still see her, Sadie, practically bouncing in her excitement to be out at the festival. Now motionless. Struck down in her moment of joy.

Tina tasted the salt on her lips. She tasted pain. Grief. Of course, they were salty. Anger burned hot at the injustice of it. The police had caught the gunman—unharmed. That murderer would live.

Would her sweet cousin?

Tina remembered Sadie’s face when the bullet plowed through her. Dogwood petals rained down on her. The wind blew them loose, but it looked like they wept at the ugliness of the day. Her dark, round eyes sparked as she watched the dogwoods sway in the breeze. Tina sighed and wiped her tears. She needed to be strong for her aunt and her family.

For Sadie.

*

“She’s awake!” Sadie’s momma’s shout seemed to be piped in from far away. Despite this, the wavering thread of relief came through clear and defined. The thick scent of night blooming jasmine hung along with the harsher hints of something else. Confused, Sadie’s eyebrows knitted together. Too much light for it to be night. Sadie’s everything hurt as she tried to move or sit up. She tried to open her eyes, but the lights hurt, too. But in that brief eyeful, she could tell she wasn’t in her bedroom.

“Where am I?” She managed through cottonmouth. Her lips crackled and she winced again. Each motion brought agony. So she tried to stay still.

“Here. Drink.” Her momma handed her a cup of water.

She leaned up on one elbow. Sadie drank, but the I.V. pulled her dry skin on her hand. It bled.

“You at U.T. Hospital.” Her momma rubbed her hair and took the cup.

Hospital? Once her eyes adjusted to the glare and the fluorescent’s harshness, she looked around the room, as much as she could without moving too much. Then, it all rushed back to the forefront of her mind. She’d been shot!

“Momma, the dogwoods!” Sadie said and struggled to sit up fully. The atmosphere shifted as if certain emotion had been vanquished by her newfound secret knowledge. “The dogwoods are alive! More than that, they spoke.”

Maybe Tina heard it too, Sadie thought.

“Shush, baby girl. They gonna be here. Just like e’ry year.” Her momma kissed her forehead.

Suddenly exhausted, Sadie shut her eyes. Those dogwoods wagging their blooms all over town, running the thread about the foolishness of men. Tossing away life like ruined and withered petals.

Sadie knew it because she could almost hear them, chattering at the end of her consciousness. She’d join the dogwoods, just like her Nana. Later. She smiled as warmth spread through her. They’d embrace her in their creaky limbs and petal soft blooms.

She’d be ready.

So would the dogwoods.

© 2019 by Nicole Givens Kurtz

Author’s Note: As a born and raised Tennessean, the Dogwood Arts Festival in Knoxville was an integral aspect of growing up southern. Over time, the festival marked many rites of passage as I grew up and this story combines the legend of the Dogwood, my  east southern roots, and my love for horror.

Nicole Givens Kurtz’s short stories have appeared in over 30 anthologies of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her work has appeared in Stoker Finalist, Sycorax’s Daughters,  Stoker Recommended Read, Black Magic Women, and in such professional anthologies as Baen’s Straight Outta Tombstone and Onyx Path’s The Endless Ages Anthology. Visit Nicole’s other worlds online at Other Worlds Pulp, www.nicolegivenskurtz.com.

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DP FICTION #51A: “What the Sea Reaps, We Must Provide” by Eleanor R. Wood

The ball bounces off the tide-packed sand and Bailey leaps to catch it with lithe grace and accuracy. He returns to deposit it at my feet for another go. It’s nearly dusk; the beach is ours on this January evening. It stretches ahead, the rising tide low enough to give us ample time to reach the sea wall.

Bailey’s devotion to his ball is second only to his pack. He is never careless with it, relinquishing it only at my command or to give Bernie the occasional chase. Bernie brings up the rear, my shaggy bear, staying close but lacking Bailey’s fierce duty to his ball.

The town belongs to us now, half a year from holidaymakers, the beach winter-rough and devoid of summer’s candy-brightness. It will return soon enough, buckets and spades hanging from shop awnings, a time for ice cream and fish and chips eaten from the paper as gulls watch for their opportunity. A time when locals lend our beach to the tourists and day-trippers, avoiding the bustle and crowds, longing for autumn’s return. It is a town of two seasons, of excitement and peace, of light and dark. 

The dark is buried deep.

We don’t discuss it. That yearly sacrifice to keep the summer safe, to protect our town’s lifeblood. But winter’s rawness reveals the primal undertow, much as we pretend otherwise.

It awes me.

It terrifies me. The town’s need. The sea’s power.

We reach the end of the beach and head up the ramped walkway to the sea wall. The tide is too high to return along the beach, but the wall’s safe height gives us passage. A moment of doubt nags me as we ascend. Darkness is falling, a light rain with it. The sea wall’s sheer drop one side and railway line on the other has always unnerved me. The waist-high wall to separate pedestrian from train has never seemed enough. A woman was hit and killed one year trying to retrieve her dog who’d gone over. I clip leads onto Bailey and Bernie. That year’s sacrifice was a harsh one.

Gazing toward the distant harbour mouth, I’m reminded of the ill-prepared yachtsman who bargained his livelihood on a madcap voyage but ultimately gave himself to the sea to save his family’s shame and destitution. He never sailed home to the town whose balance he reset.

Not every balance tips so heavily, though. The far end of the sea wall now has a gate, erected a few years ago when some fool drove their car along the wall, crashing over the edge onto the beach. They sacrificed only pride and a vehicle, although the council takes no further chances.

We walk, the rain increasing, the sea rising, the occasional train thundering between us and the cliffs that loom above all. Halfway to the promenade, I glance left and freeze. The tide is far higher than it should be, all trace of beach gone, water lapping the wall’s base. I increase my pace. So does the sea. A sudden wave crashes over the wall ahead of us, stopping me dead. Bernie tries to drag me back the other way.

But this is the only way.

The tide shouldn’t be this high. The lights of the promenade seem miles away through the wet gloom. Another train rushes past and I flinch, caught between dangers.

Another wave booms up feet away, soaking us in spray. And I know. Sacrifice is due, and I am subject to its demand.

I clutch the leads tightly. No. Not my boys. Never.

We’re almost doused by the next wave, and I know it’ll take us all if I don’t give freely. I have nothing else to give, nothing else here that matters to me.

“NO!” I shout into the rising wind and know I’m out of time.

Bailey looks at me, unspoken communication between us as ever. Bernie lives in his own world, but Bailey knows. He has always understood my moods. He has always known what’s required of him. His gaze meets mine and my throat closes in fear.

“Bailey, no.” The words are a strangled noise he doesn’t comprehend. He steps towards the wall’s edge even as I tug his lead back.

He leans over the edge. The sea roils. I scream.

He opens his mouth and lets go of his ball.

The rain patters on my hood as the waves draw back. Bailey stares into the calming surf for a long moment. The lead stretches taut between us. A small whine of longing leaves his throat before he looks at me, his sacrifice made. Perhaps only I will ever understand what it cost him. Relief drives me to my knees on the wet stone and I open my arms to him. He leans into me.

“Good boy. Such a good boy.”

The town will prosper for another year, but as I start back for home, I know I’ll never walk this wall again.

© 2019 by Eleanor R. Wood

Author’s Note: Seaside towns are places of extremes: bustling with fun and holidaymakers in the summer, quiet and hibernating in the winter. The location of this story is based on my home town, inspired after a winter walk at dusk. There are contrasting energies to a town that is so defined by the seasons, and most summer visitors never see the stark winter aspect of such a place. And a town like this does not belong solely to its humans; its large population of dogs are as much a part of the community and have their own contributions to make. Too many stories use dogs purely as foils for human emotion, but I wanted to show a dog with his own agency, whose personal sacrifice means as much to the town as that of a human.

Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Flash Fiction Online, Deep Magic, Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and various anthologies, among other places. She is an associate editor at PodCastle, where she gets to feed dragons and read a lot. She writes and eats liquorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvellous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.
She blogs at http://creativepanoply.wordpress.com.

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BOOK REVIEW: Watership Down by Richard Adams

written by David Steffen

Watership Down is a survival adventure book written by Richard Adams published in 1972 that might arguably be classified as fantasy as well, which was adapted into a well-known children’s movie in 1978.  It follows a group of young bachelor rabbits who run away from their warren when one of them has a premonition of coming disaster.  The book follows them as they try to find a suitable location for a new warren and try to settle back down.

Multiple rabbits are point of view characters throughout the book, but the most important rabbit to the story is Fiver, the one who has the premonition of disaster (an upcoming construction site where the warren is located), which might be psychic or might just be intuition based on the sudden incursion of signs announcing the construction project.  Hazel is the one who first believed Fiver’s warning and helped convinced the others to make their escape.  Most of the group are pretty scrawny, secondary members of the warren, except for Bigwig, who is a member of the Owsla, the warren’s internal enforcers.  And then there’s Blueberry who seems to not think like a rabbit at all, coming up with new strategies that no other rabbit would even consider.

As they travel across the English countryside they come across other dangers, and meet rabbits from other warrens, and try to avoid humans as much as possible.  Before their flight, they have never left the area immediately surrounding their warren, so they come across many things that seem fantastical from their points of view.  All they really want is a stable and happy place to live, trying to find food and eventually mates (can’t establish much of a warren with only male rabbits!).

The book is marginally speculative, if you like to have something of the fantastical in the stories.  Fiver’s premonitions and Blueberry’s unrabbitlike thinking are the sort of things that might be considered speculative.  And the ease with with different species of animals communicate with each other and rabbits strategize their actions together.  Besides that the rabbits have a rich tradition of storytelling wherein they tell trickster myths about El-ahrairah, the greatest of rabbits, Prince of a Thousand Enemies.  The story as a whole is given a sense of realism despite this speculation, because the author apparently did a lot of research into rabbit behavior and rabbit social structures and the like in preparation to write this story, that it all feels very real.

I’ve heard the book/movie referenced often enough that I wanted to give it a try. I had so few preconceptions about the story that I assumed that it was a nautical tale from the title.  The myths were my favorite part of the book, to the point that I was always disappointed when one of the myths ended–the real-world stuff was interesting enough, but paled next to the myths for me. Overall I’d recommend it, especially if you like to get references to classic literature, since this one does seem to come up pretty regularly.  It’s a compelling tale of survival.

 

DP FICTION #50B: “One Part Per Billion” by Samantha Mills

There were already two Irene Boswells onboard and a third in the making.

Radiation poured out of the Omaha Device in an endless stream of buttery yellow light, and Irene (the Irene in the containment room) knew they were doomed. But she slapped patch after patch over the ruinous crack in the device’s shell because she hadn’t come twenty billion miles to sit and wait for death.

Huang’s voice came through over the intercom, tinny with horror. “Your hair,” he said.

It was on fire, or close enough. The strange light lifted it away from her face in a rippling wave. The ends were burning down like the fuses of a hundred thousand bombs. Her arms were smooth and hairless, her face the same.

“Just tell me what to do next,” she said.

There were no more patches in the kit. A six inch gap remained in the smooth white shell but it may as well have been a mile long. The Omaha Device just sat there, as unyielding and enigmatic as a ceramic tortoise, and still that noxious light poured forth. Irene squinted but she couldn’t see past the light, she couldn’t see what was inside. Dammit, if she was going to die today she wanted to know what she was dying for.

But Huang was telling her to get to the controls, just rip off the back panel and do what I say, and Irene wasn’t about to argue because he was the computer specialist, wasn’t he? He stood on the outside of the containment room with his palms pressed flat to the glass. Begging.

She tore herself from the toxic mystery and dropped to her knees beside the control panel. She was sweating and starting to shake, and it took three tries to wrestle the slick casing open. What she found inside looked more like an engine than a computer, full of pipes and valves and a cooling unit that had seen better days.

At Huang’s urging, she tore open the manual that was chained to the device. She had nothing but a wrench and a screwdriver sealed in the room with her, and as she skimmed the first elaborate diagram she didn’t think they’d do the job.

It was selfish to wish she had stayed in navigation. If she had, there would be somebody else trapped here instead.

She hadn’t abandoned her post though, not really, because the other Irene was still at the wheel (well, the console), and just thinking about that other Irene made her hands shake worse.

It wasn’t right, it wasn’t natural, it was a mistake.

At the other end of the ship, in navigation, Irene looked over the ship’s readings, and they didn’t make a bit of sense. The ship was accelerating, but it wasn’t changing position. Bandile was in the room with her, a stun gun aimed loosely in her direction, but he didn’t have the nerve to take her down. Her mind began to wander. Her thoughts flitted back and forth to the containment room, where a computer like an engine was coming apart under her hands. She jerked free of it. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her responsibility.

Because honestly? Irene had really wanted to be a dancer, if only she hadn’t sprained her knee so badly in tenth grade—and it was entirely possible her parents had lied when they said the injury was fatal to her aspirations. They’d always wanted their kids to pursue a STEM career.

Funnily enough, the knee hadn’t bothered her one bit during mission training.

This Irene had always resented being funneled into the sciences. It was the other Irene who had embraced her studies wholeheartedly. It was the other Irene’s fault they were both here.

*

First, there was a spaceship. A rather large and complex spaceship (because how else are you going to travel that far?) built precisely for eight crewmembers.

Three were Americans, because the message was received in Nebraska of all places, and the remaining five were representatives from around the world, because the message specified ambassadors of genetic and cultural diversity—and also because let’s face it, this sort of mission was mind-bogglingly expensive, and anyone with a checkbook was invited to try out.

The other delegates included: a Russian man, a Chinese man, an Italian man, a South African man, and a man from South America (let’s say…Brazil).

There was also a girl (because there is always one girl). She was one of the Americans. She was technically the navigator, because everyone had to fill a role, but for the purpose of the mission she was also the anatomical female. One uterus, two ovaries, check.

So, first, there was a spaceship. Well, first there were plans for a spaceship, and they fell from the sky in northern Nebraska, attached to a device that resembled a ceramic tortoise. There was quite the welcome party there, full of scientific and military personnel, because an interplanetary correspondence had been going on for decades, and this was their first tangible gift from space. They knew what it was supposed to be, but it could have been an elaborate Trojan horse instead.

It wasn’t.

The ship was another ten years in the making, which wasn’t bad all things considered. It gave the entire world time to agonize over the selection of a crew. After all, the ship was only designed to carry eight. Who was qualified to represent Earth in the first face-to-face meeting with their distant friends?

*

The alien light flowed through Irene and tugged strands from her hair, her memories, her thoughts, her DNA. The Omaha Device was still desperately trying to process and package, to collate and collect. It bled radiation and took in great gasping gulps of Irene Boswell.

Her fingers reddened and blistered from the heat of the wires, but she didn’t have any pliers and Huang was insisting that control had to be transferred out of the room now, right now, no time to let the equipment cool even if they could risk going to standby.

“You have to hurry,” said Huang.

And Irene screamed, “Tell him to stop looking at me!”

On the other side of the glass, a man lay trussed on the ground, his head and shoulders twisted in her direction. His eyes bulged in their sockets. A shadow covered half his face, contracting and contorting with the soundless yammering of his jaw. His name was Michael—or Miguel, or Mikhail, depending on which country he was from. That wasn’t important.

Mi/gu/ail lost it, plain and simple. He couldn’t handle the dreams being tugged like loose threads from his brain every night. He couldn’t handle the theory tentatively formulated by their own computer—the computer they kludged into the alien system out of nervousness, suspicion, unwillingness to rely entirely on alien design. The mission probably would have gone a lot better if they hadn’t tried to guess what it was doing.

They found him attacking the Omaha Device with a wrench. Huang and Parker dragged him from the room, but Irene was still inside when the casing cracked. She should have been in navigation, but she’d answered the distress call, and now she was trapped.

Irene felt herself splitting again. She shut her eyes, her mouth, her fists. She held her breath and clamped her thighs. But the pull was relentless. It scanned the heart of her and jotted her down in ones and zeroes or whatever the aliens used. It should have only filed the information away for future reference, but that idiot had broken the storage unit. Now there was a big fat crack in the tortoise leaking bits of crewmember, and Irene was splitting again.

For a moment there were four hands fisted in the wires, and then there were two.

Down in the sleep deck of the ship, another girl appeared. A full-figured shadow girl named Irene Boswell. This Irene resented each and every one of the crew. For two months she had put up with their pet peeves and their bad jokes and their bravado masking fear. They were friends and colleagues, but if she never saw a single one of their faces again she’d be gladder for it. She was sick of this crew and sick of this mission and sick of this ship.

Irene ran to the nearest communication panel and ripped it from the wall. She liked the way the wires snapped in her grip. She set off to tear something else apart.

*

Before they became a crew, they spent years trying to destroy one another.

Eight thousand candidates whittled down to eight hundred whittled down to eight dozen whittled down to eight. A ludicrously small crew, but the message said eight would go, and eight would be sampled, and it would all be perfectly safe.

In theory they were all jockeying equally for a slot, but everyone knew how the selection would shake out. The Chinese candidates were competing with the Chinese candidates (and several other Asian nations, but it was always going to be China). The Europeans were competing with the other Europeans. Africa and South America were probably lucky they snagged one spot apiece. If there had been a more genuine commitment to representing the world then the Middle East should have been there, but the Americans got greedy in the end and held three spots for themselves. Nebraska, remember?

And within and across these continental divides, all of the women eyed one another sidelong, because in addition to their national colleagues they were also competing with each another. A thousand voices insisted, “I am unlike the rest of these women. I am the best of us.” And maybe some of them felt a nagging guilt, because it seemed a shame to earn her place among the men by trashing the qualifications of the other women, but let’s be real. There were only going to be eight spots, and in all likelihood only one would go to a woman, and goddamn if any of them came this far to see it go to someone else.

When Irene Boswell was named navigator at the final roll call, she wanted to cry with joy, but she kept it contained because she had spent a great deal of time proving her emotional unflappability to the psych evaluator. Several of the men smiled and let the tears roll happily down their cheeks, but that was all right.

That was different.

The psych team was meant to reject the worst and prepare the best, but stress did amazing things to the brain, and long-term voyages had a way of amplifying hidden qualities. Somehow, no matter what you did, you always ended up with a hothead, a depressive, a workaholic, and that one guy who totally buckled under the pressure.

*

The ventilation system couldn’t keep up. The walls of the containment room flickered and groaned. Red lights strobed and klaxons wailed. The ship was breaking, breaking, breaking.

More of them stood outside the glass now: Huang and Parker and Freddie. Even Bandile had come up from navigation. They had nowhere else to go. Either Irene neutralized the device, or the walls shattered and they all broke apart beneath the accelerated effects of the Omaha Device.

Irene slammed her bloody fists against the glass. She said, “You have to get me another patch kit.”

At least, that’s what she thought she said. Her lips were numb and her words came out garbled, but she was still lucid, dammit, she knew what needed to be done. Huang stood by the outer door, shaking his head.

“The inner door’s breached,” he said. “We can’t use the airlock.”

In the navigation room, Irene danced beneath the strobe lights. She rose slowly on her toes and then down again, in lithe stretches and remembered turns. There was not one twinge of pain in her knee, Mother. Her eyes drifted shut. She extended her arms and twirled. The klaxons faded to background noise and she danced for the young woman she’d once been.

In the sleep deck, another Irene ripped photos off the walls of her crewmates’ bunks. She was a furious shadow girl screaming louder than the ship itself. Parker’s reading tablet: smashed. Freddie’s ukulele: oh, definitely smashed. The floor filled with debris, pictures and letters and electronics in a thousand pieces, and each piece was a tiny kernel of her pent-up fury, the inevitable explosion of the perfectionist pursuing an impossible goal.

In the kitchen, yet another Irene flickered ghostly and half-formed on the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest and cried and cried and cried. Her armor had cracked, as surely as that of a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle. The cabinets rattled madly overhead, and she wished something would just fall on her skull and be done with it.

There were four Irenes, then five, then six. Each one a little different. Each one the same woman. In the containment room, Irene Boswell watched the color leach from her hands and she knew there wasn’t much time left before she’d be too thinned out to wield the wrench.

Her mouth trembled, then firmed. She said to Huang, “I’m so sorry.”

*

It was a deal that couldn’t be refused.

But.

Nobody could read the terms and not feel a bit of self-doubt.

The little gray men (their color was unknown, their gender unlikely to be binary, but play along)—the little gray men were engaged in research. They wanted a sample. They would send along the collection device and the means to deliver it back. In exchange, humanity would keep the design for a ship capable of intergalactic travel. Eight lives (and they wouldn’t even be harmed, it isn’t harmful, it’s only a sample), and in exchange you get the universe.

It was ludicrous, of course. How could Huang stand in for Asia? How could Bandile speak for all of Africa? How could eight represent eight billion? It wasn’t just the potential sacrifice that made people uncomfortable (would they even come back?), it was the limited data set. The entire human species was about to be filed away in some universal library, and they only got eight volumes to tell their story.

Because that was what the little gray men wanted, right? Not endless sociological footnotes, not a thousand characters yammering for attention so you couldn’t even remember their names. They wanted a simple narrative. The story of humanity, condensed. But they weren’t going to get that with a crew of eight or a crew of eight hundred.

The only way to understand the people of Earth was not by wedging more people into this mission. It was to launch a hundred million missions with a hundred million different crews.

*

“Boswell! Irene!” Huang screamed through the intercom as though he could stop her if he only said it loud enough. In addition to the hothead, the depressive, the workaholic, and the coward, there was always a romantic.

Irene had resisted him for a year, ever the consummate professional (and deep down she suspected the aliens were keen to observe a mating ritual; hell no). Now she stepped close to the glass, with her burning hair and smooth arms and bloody hands, and she pressed a kiss to the glass. She said goodbye with her eyes. Then she picked up the wrench.

It was impossible to distinguish between the trembling in her body and the shaking of the ship. She couldn’t patch the device. She couldn’t turn it off. She couldn’t reroute the controls. All she could do was close the overflow valve before it reached the rest of the crew.

Even now, the smooth white shell was cool to the touch. Irene fell to her knees beside it, groping along a crack she could barely see, ripping off the patches that hadn’t dried solid yet. She almost stopped there, caught in the thick persuasion of alien radiation. It was only trying to fulfill its purpose, after all. For two months it had sent subtle waves throughout the ship, recording their interactions, their thoughts, their dreams. Somewhere inside this husk were samples of their DNA, the better for syncing data. The better for recreating subjects for future study.

Inside this lump of alien technology lived all of Irene’s hopes and fears. Her confidence and her hesitation. That weird dream where she was an opera singer climbing up the walls of the opera house, bellowing love and grief directly into the faces of the people in the balcony seats, and she woke up strangely aroused and almost went knocking at Huang’s bunk.

Maybe the data was still salvageable. Maybe, when this was all over, Irene Boswell would continue to exist somewhere in the universe, although in what form and under what conditions she refused to contemplate.

Huang was yelling and trying to breach the outer door. Irene couldn’t hear him anymore but she knew what he was saying. She turned her back, to make it easier. Parker and Freddie were there to restrain him. They knew what needed to be done.

A thin pipe snaked out beneath the Omaha Device. A scant foot of it was accessible before it burrowed into the wall. Irene wedged herself into position, half-concealed behind the device, and struck the pipe with the wrench. She struck again, and again, and again. She was sweating and crying and her hands kept flickering and threatening to drop the wrench, but the pipe dented once, dented twice, pinched halfway shut. A high-pitched whistling sound escaped through the crack. Everything was yellow light.

The pressure built until the device vibrated madly at her side. Hot air shrieked through, panicked, desperate, scrabbling for release like a fisherman fallen beneath the ice.

She felt it envelop her, when the device finally gave out. Vaguely, she knew that it had exploded. She knew that a large chunk of the shell had pinned her to the wall. But she only felt the hot cushion of power wrap around her body, in its dying throes still trying to collect and quantify. It poured down her throat and in her ears. It raced through her blood, scanning, testing, plucking out sample after sample. It wrapped around her heart and her brain and her knee, and it squeezed.

Irene Boswell shattered into a million pieces.

One by one, Irene Boswell disappeared from the ship. They were entangled, after all. She was all of them simultaneously: the good student and the dancer and the angry girl and the grief. And she was more than that. She was the half-formed wraiths who didn’t quite split off in the containment room: the lonely woman, the daughter, the good friend and the bad lover. But even in all her complexity she was not nearly all the women left behind on Earth, any more than their captain was all of the American Midwest or their communications specialist was all of South America.

She was only Irene, and she was gone.

*

The ship limped along, sans navigator. The crew left the Omaha Device in pieces. The ventilation system cleared the lingering radiation, making it safe to enter the containment room, but nobody did.

A week later they saw it, flickering in and out of radar on their ailing machines: the other ship. And then they really saw it through the transparent hull of the navigation room: a strange and beautiful emissary, far larger and more advanced than the little exploration vessel whose plans they had traded for human samples.

The remaining crewmembers put on crisp uniforms. They combed their hair and cut their nails. They assembled in the docking room antechamber with all the solemnity of funeral attendees. None of them had slept in days, and the captain couldn’t stop the nervous tic in his cheek. The coward—whose name was almost definitely Michael—had deep circles under his eyes and red marks where his wrists had been tied until recently.

Whatever data the Omaha Device gathered was gone, disintegrated and vented off the ship. No computer simulacrums. No travel narrative. No biological samples except what they carried in their own bodies. Despite their best efforts to fulfill the terms of the deal they were seven now, not eight, and their anatomy woefully misrepresentative.

They really should have brought another girl.

© 2019 by Samantha Mills

Samantha Mills lives in Southern California with her husband and babies and cats, in a house that might be haunted by a demented handyman and his loyal army of spiders. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and LampLight Magazine. She blogs about life, reading, writing, and pop culture at www.samtasticbooks.com, or come by and chat on Twitter @samtasticbooks.

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DP FICTION #50A: “Why Aren’t Millennials Continuing Traditional Worship of the Elder Dark?” by Matt Dovey

In a generational shift that some claim threatens the fabric of existence and the sanity of all humanity, surveys show that worship of the Elder Dark is at a record low for one particular group—millennials.

Bob Rawlins is worried. “When I was growing up in the 1950s, I made my obeisance before the Manifold Insanity every night, uttering the invocations to satiate the Watchers Just Beyond and keep them at bay for one day longer. But young people now aren’t prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”

I remind him that human sacrifice was deemed unnecessary and illegal in 1985, and animal sacrifice in 2009.

“Well I don’t mean literally,” he says, though there’s a note of longing to his tone.

Bob is showing me round his inner sanctum, a converted basement given over to the worship and appeasement of the Unknowable Gods. He’s the Grand Dark Supplicant of his local chapter, and is continuing a long family tradition: men of his bloodline have been bound to the service of the Elder Dark since the days of the Pilgrims.

“Our ranks are already thin,” he says, resting a hand intimately on an idol of the Ten Thousand Staring Eyes. “I worry the world I’ll leave behind will be overrun by the gibbering horrors of the between spaces, ushering in a never-ending age of nightmares and insurmountable monstrosities. It breaks my heart to think of the Eight Palms golf course getting swallowed by a roiling pit of blackness. Hole five’s a real beauty.”

In town, I talk with a group of twenty-somethings working in the local coffee shop. Aren’t they anxious about the impending immolation of mankind and the eternal night of the Elder Dark?

“Well, I guess,” says Luiz, shaking chocolate onto my cappuccino in a cephalopodan design. “But it’s hard to get worked up about such a distant prospect when I’m mostly worried about making rent next month.”

“Yeah, yeah,” agrees Deema, another barista. “And even if I had the brainspace to worry, I haven’t got the roomspace in my apartment for a shrine. I make my obeisance when I visit my parents at the weekend, but my apartment’s so cramped the shower’s in the kitchen. Where am I meant to find the space for the Eighteen Forms of Frozen Madness?”

“Not that I have any time for the complete incantations anyway,” says Luiz. “As soon as I finish here I start a shift at the Midnight Dark Bar on 8th. Do you know how much mess is made by people burying the futility of their infinitesimal existence in drugs and debauchery? By the time I get home from cleaning that up I’ve only got five hours before I’m back here. It’s hard to muster the energy for self-flagellation on four hours’ sleep a night.”

These responses may sound cynical and resigned, but talking to Luiz and Deema, there’s a sense of frustration: they want to be doing more. But some millennials have other reasons for abandoning the worship of the Elder Dark.

“These old dudes—and they’re always old dudes, you notice that?—they’re all caught up in this spiel, like, ‘If you don’t perform the rituals of devotion then the world will fall to lunacy’, and I’m like, dude, look around already!”

Ace shakes their long dreads dismissively and sips a green tea, looking over the gray ocean from their dilapidated RV. Their parents were members of the ultra-orthodox Church of the Nineteenth Insanity; Ace left home at seventeen, sent on their mission to witness the madness of the wider world. It was meant to reinforce the importance of keeping to the convoluted strictures of the Nineteenth Insanity, necessary to resist the influence of the Watchers Just Beyond.

But instead, says Ace, they saw only human madness.

“Like, all the suffering and hurt and injustice, that’s not coming from beyond the Pierced Veil, ya know? It’s caused by politicians and corporations on this side! People are blind to the roots of their problems, blaming it all on these creatures they’ve never even seen, right?”

“It’s sad to hear,” says Kathy Halton, Honorary Senator for the Sunken State of Hggibbia. “I represent the Many Drowned Dead, so I know better than most what the cost of failure is.”

Senator Halton looks up at the huge oil-on-canvas that hangs behind her mahogany desk, The Sinking of Dead Men’s Deeds, that infamous night when eighty thousand souls were lost to the sea. The eye is drawn irresistibly to the dark slash that hangs in the sky, the Pierced Veil itself, and the indescribable creatures of the Entropic Menagerie that spill forth—and it is surely an unparalleled artistic feat to paint a creature that cannot be described—and there is a strange sensation of being drawn into the painting, as if the soul itself is being pulled out through the eyes and reeled into that perversely dark hole on the canvas. Only Halton’s smooth voice breaks the spell; she seems used to the painting, immune to its attraction.

“Some people are so desperate for a mundane explanation they’ll ignore the evidence of their souls,” she says. “The irony is many of this country’s problems can be traced back to a disturbing lack of faith in the younger generation.”

But isn’t there an increasing consensus on grassroots social media that neoliberal government policies of the last thirty years are to blame for irrevocably leading us to this point of critical failure, where the very substance of the multiverse is threatened with annihilation by wage stagnation and an untenable housing market leading to unrealistic work expectations?

“If only it were that simple,” she responds. “We’re doing everything we can to encourage participation despite the economic downturn, including state-funded glossolalia lessons and mandatory flagellation breaks for government employees. But we can’t force a free soul to act.”

Two days later we’re standing on the windy beach at Chatham, Massachusetts for the annual Sunken Memorial, facing the steel-blue Atlantic where Hggibbia once stood. Senator Halton leads a group of representatives through the Silent Evocations of the Eighteen Forms, their dark trench coats snapping in the wind like ravens fighting over scraps. Two assistants have to help the elderly Health Secretary Johnson through the movements, sometimes physically lifting him to position his limbs correctly.

Fifty yards away, behind a mesh fence and a police line, there’s a protest taking place. I’m not surprised to see Ace at the front, leading a chant of WE’RE NOT INSANE, WE’RE JUST MAD, WE BLAME YOU FOR A  WORLD GONE BAD.”It’s all a distraction!” they tell me to a chorus of agreement from their fellow protestors. “They’re using the myth of the Elder Dark to stop you noticing their corruption!”

“Yeah,” interjects another protestor, her pink hair straggling over a loose-fit chunky sweater. “Like, did you know they used this stuff to justify some super racist ideas? Most people can’t spot the subtext now, but if you read the old stuff they basically claimed Jews were in league with the Watchers Just Beyond, right? It’s unbelievable!”

Ace picks up the argument, a real bitterness in their voice. “They like, try and handwave that racism away now, ya know, claim you have to understand it in the historical context, but it just proves how they fit it to their agenda at the time. It’s all bullshit. You can’t trust them.”

I go back to see Bob Rawlins. He’s invited me up for the traditional orgy that marks the Approach of Winterdark, more commonly called the fall equinox. He prepares for the night by stripping naked, beating his tattooed skin raw with a branch of Hggibbian driftwood, and pulling a tight red hood on that covers his eyes.

He offers me the branch and a spare hood, but I respectfully decline.

There’s fifty or more participants gathered at the edge of town for the ritual, all naked bar that same red hood. It’s meant to evoke a feeling of insignificance, reminding supplicants they are only anonymous flesh to the Watchers Just Beyond, but the effect is undercut somewhat by small town America: everyone is easily identifiable from their voice and body shape, and Bob chats casually about DIY projects and school district elections as the sun sets.

Once dusk grows dark and a chill settles in, Bob climbs onto a flame-lit stage set up for the event, reminds everyone to stick around for the barbecue afterwards, then begins the Rituals of Unending Vigilance. I find myself talking to a late arrival: Eric Rawlins—Bob’s son.

“I’m only back for the weekend,” he explains, shuffling uncomfortably. “It means a lot to Dad that I get involved.” He’s eschewed the naked dedication of his father and kept his jeans on, a single Screaming Gshvaddath tattooed in Shifting Ink just below his red hood, dancing wildly in contrast to Eric’s diffidence. 

Presumably his father is grooming him to continue the family tradition?

“Yeah, he’s really enthusiastic about the whole thing. Dad’s worried that if I’m not ready to continue his work the next time his back gives out then the Elder Dark will flood the world and shackle humanity to an eternal yoke of madness while he waits on his pain relief prescription. He honestly believes he’s the only one holding it back right now.”

Does Eric think participation is down because people are coming to terms with the history of it and stepping away? I repeat some of the theories I heard at the rally.

“Yeah, I’ve heard those ideas too. I agree with them, to be honest, with the people saying the Worship has racist underpinnings, but don’t tell Dad. He thinks the texts are sacrosanct, and it’s like, if you criticise them, you’re criticising him. But there’s a growing online movement to embrace the original truth of the Unknowable Scriptures, peeling back the layers of human influence and prejudice. We’re all just meat to the Watchers after all, regardless of our skin or beliefs, beneath the notice of an unfathomable Universe made of madness and unending time. I can show you some really interesting Subreddits after this.”

On stage, Bob is in an awkward crab position, thrusting his flaccid penis towards the night sky and howling in ecstasy. Blood drips from his back where a bed of nails beneath him pierces his flesh over and over; volunteers in hi-viz jackets wait at the edge of the stage with antiseptic cream, stood before signs reminding participants to PRACTICE SAFE SUPPLICATION.

Eric looks anywhere but the stage as the crowd shrieks back, lacerating their own flesh with a variety of pointed implements. There are spiked paddles in ornately carved mahogany, hand-sharpened sticks of blasted elm, and one Hello Kitty cat o’ nine tails.

“Dad worries too much, to be honest,” says Eric. “I’ve met a lot of people at college, and at the end of the day people are decent. They do what they can when they can, even if it’s just carving Escherian shapes into their avocados at breakfast. We’re not gonna let the world run to shit with shambling horrors at the bus stop and tentacles blocking up the plumbing. We’ve gotta live here too, after all.”

Eric finally responds to his father’s exhortations with a self-conscious howl, and pricks his thumb with a pocket knife. Bob looks out from the stage, and spots his son; he lifts a hand in greeting, then, unbalanced, slips and lands heavily on the bed of nails. His scream of pain is answered faithfully by the crowd, but Eric runs forward and clambers on stage. He eases his father off the nails and they limp to the side, where a volunteer frantically unpacks a first aid kit.

A brief yet intense exchange follows. The body language is clear: Bob wants Eric to finish leading the worship. The crowd is wavering, their flagellation tools drooping like their middle-aged bodies. I see the moment Eric takes the burden on: his back straightens, his jaw clenches, his shoulders square. He’s doing a good impression of being ready for this, and I find myself hoping it convinces Bob.

Eric strips off and positions himself over the nails. He picks up the chant perfectly from where his father left off, closing out the ceremony with vigour, athleticism and rather more—shall we say—rigidity than his father could manage. 

Off to the side, Bob stands with his legs wide as his bleeding scrotum is gingerly nursed by the volunteer paramedic. He’s removed his red hood, and he watches Eric lambaste the crowd with a final chant of “Yhiu! Kaftagh falln!” and receive the answer of “Engibbigth valectia!”

His face shines with paternal pride.

© 2019 by Matt Dovey

Author’s Note: If you can’t spot the inspiration for this story, I envy you. I can’t go a week without seeing some new article blaming millennials for some natural shift in an evolving world (my favourite from my research: millennials are killing bar soap. WHO EVEN CARES). That said, it was actually reading another parody article that triggered the idea: Why Aren’t Baby Boomers Eating Pho? Given that Lovecraft pastiche is never far from my mind anyway, it only took another hour for the first draft of this to flood out of my fingertips in some indescribable frenzy, typing like a man possessed, suddenly granted ideas beyond my mortal comprehension. My mind has never been the same since, scarred by the knowledge of what lies beyond my temporal horizon: younger generations, acting differently from me. Truly, a cosmic horror to chill the soul.

Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He has a scar on his arm from a ritual performed unto the Watchers Just Beyond, imploring them for the boon of great knowledge, but all he got were the lyrics to Dashboard Confessional’s watershed album The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife & three children, and despite being a writer he still hasn’t found the right words to fully express the delight he finds in this wonderful arrangement.

His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He’s an associate editor at PodCastle, a member of Codex and Villa Diodati, and has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place, including all four Escape Artists podcasts, Flash Fiction Online and Daily SF. You can keep up with it all at mattdovey.com, or follow along on Twitter and Facebook both as @mattdoveywriter.

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

DP FICTION #49B: “The Last Death” by Sahara Frost

I stare into the endless dark, watching, waiting. It’s like all those years ago, when I was a kid on Christmas Eve. Me, lying in bed, wide-eyed with anticipation, listening for the clatter of eight tiny reindeer landing overhead. Only this time, it’s not jolly old Saint Nick I’m expecting. Nor is it sugar plums that dance inside my head, keeping sleep at bay.

The silent night drags on, one moment melding seamlessly into the next until I think the world must have stopped. Only the stars show me different, each glance out my window revealing their gradual progress across the sky. Then, at long last, it’s over. The dull gleam of first light crests the horizon, and once more, the world begins to move.

“Well,” I say to myself, “Suppose I might as well get ready.”

Heart fluttering with a giddy tingle, I throw back the covers and sit up. Immediately, my poor old bones creak in protest, reminding me to slow down. “Easy, girl. Easy!” I chide, quelling the urge to spring from my bed like some youngster, “No sense in falling and breaking a hip. ‘Specially not today of all days.” I release my impatience with a huff and bob my head in a reluctant nod. Then I plant my feet firmly on the floor, reach for my cane, and carefully hoist myself up.

Once my balance is sure, I begin to move about my home, preparing for the day. There isn’t much to be done. There never is, these days. Still, I want everything to be absolutely perfect. So I throw open all the doors and windows to let in light and fresh air. Then I busy myself with one last tidying-up, straightening the bed, sweeping the floor, and wiping a rag over any surface that might have collected dust overnight.

The next time I look up, my heart skips a beat. Slashes of crimson and gold have already begun to streak the sky. It won’t be long now. Going to the front door, I search the skeletal remains of what had once been a thriving subdivision with bated breath. “Today is the day,” I insist, the words hissing through my teeth like a prayer, “Surely, today is the day.”

I sweep my eyes back and forth for only a moment longer before spying what I seek. There, where the empty street curves out of sight behind a thinning copse of bone white trees, is the stark outline of a shadow. A shadow with which I am now quite familiar. Every morning, it appears on my horizon and, throughout the day, makes its slow approach. When the sun sets, it runs away, but by the next morning, it’s back again, a little closer than the day before. Yesterday, it nearly reached my doorstep before it turned and fled. “It has to be today. It has to!”

Knowing there’s not much time left, I go to my bookcase and take down the lone photo album occupying its shelves. I turn it over and over in my hands, slowly tracing my fingers over the familiar creases in its soft, worn cover. When at last I crack it open, I do so with my eyes closed, breathing deep the sweet, musty tang wafting up from its yellowed pages. Then I open my eyes again and finally allow myself to look at the smiling ghosts trapped within.

An old pain twinges deep within my chest at the same time that a smile tugs at my lips. “Hello, loves,” I say, “It’s been too long, hasn’t it?” I gently turn the album’s pages, pausing to touch the faces captured in each photograph. “Yes, far too long indeed.” When I finish going through and greeting them all, I shut the photo album and clutch it tight to my chest. “But it won’t be much longer now,” I promise, “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

As the words leave my mouth, I am again seized by a giddy feeling. “Soon,” I say to myself, as though repeating the word will make it that much more real to me, “Soon!” Bolstered by my own words, I stand a little straighter and even allow myself a small, excited grin. Returning the photo album to its shelf, I let go my last earthly treasure. There’s only one thing left to do now. Just one last thing. Filled with a sense of renewed determination, I turn to go outside.

“Good heavens!” I cry, heart leaping into my throat when I see the pintsized, hooded figure now standing in my doorway. Thinking I’ve lost track of time again, I ask, “Is it that late, already?” and glance over its head. The sun’s bright eye meets my gaze through the open door. “Oh,” I say, understanding dawning with a bittersweet twinge of disappointment, “You’re early.”

“No, not early,” the figure sighs with a soft, mournful wisp of a voice, “Quite late, actually.”

“Ah,” I say, not entirely sure how to respond, “Well I’m sure you had your reasons.”

“Reasons,” replies the figure, a tremor now audible in its voice, “Excuses.”

“You’re here now,” I try, “That’s what’s really important, right?”

In a gesture reminiscent of a sullen child, the figure twitches its slumped shoulders in an indifferent shrug. I wait for it to say something, but no word comes, and soon, the silence grows awkward. I’m not really sure what it is I envisaged for this moment. A word or a beckoning hand. I just know I’m waiting for something. Anything. But the figure says nothing, does nothing, and we just stand there facing each other, a chasm of silent expectation growing ever wider between us.

Keen to go, my impatience starts to get the better of me. I begin to wonder if I shouldn’t say something. After all, maybe it’s not just me that’s waiting. Perhaps I need to give some sort of sign to show that I’m ready. “Or,” my second-guessing mind whispers. Or maybe I was wrong about today. Maybe my time hasn’t come after all. Maybe it never will. “Or,” it whispers again. Or maybe it already has. Maybe my time came and went long ago. Maybe I’ll wait here forever, suffering in this lonely hell. “Or.”

Panic twists my stomach into a knot and tightens its claws around my throat. I struggle to catch my breath, my lungs dragging painfully, desperate for air. My mind whirls, and I feel myself slipping into a tailspin. As the room seems to tilt around me, I squeeze my eyes shut and hold onto my cane for dear life. It is then, just as I think the chaos will devour me whole, that a sound cuts through the silent screaming in my mind, the soft sobbing of a weeping child.

Opening my eyes, I cast about for the source of the sound. But my home is empty. Nobody else is here. Nobody but me and my strange, small companion. A closer look shows me that it is, indeed, my visitor who weeps. Its shaking form is evident, even beneath the concealing folds of its several-sizes-too-large robe.

As I look at the pitiable creature trembling in my doorway, my panic loosens its grip upon me, giving way to another emotion. One I have not felt in far too long. Compassion. “Oh, come now!” I say, “No need for that! Here, why don’t you come in and sit awhile with me. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to talk to.” Moving to my kitchen table, I slowly lower myself into one of the two chairs I had already pulled out in preparation for today. When I look up to see that my visitor has made no move to join me, I gently add, “Besides, you’re already late. I’m sure it won’t matter if you’re a little later.”

My words apparently afford some small measure of comfort. Though my visitor still hesitates in the doorway, its sobbing subsides into a quieter snuffling. “I suppose that’s true,” I hear it say, pinpricks of hope stippling its muffled words, “Maybe if it’s only for a moment or two.” Then, as though expecting to be struck by a divine bolt of lightning, the figure ducks its head, hunches its shoulders, and takes one tentative step forward. Then another. Then another. When it at last climbs into the empty seat next to me and still nothing happens, it allows itself to relax once more.

“So,” I start, only to discover I haven’t actually thought of what to say, and thus petering out with a lamely trailing, “so…” A moment later, I open my mouth to try again, but having failed to solve the initial problem, am forced to shut it once more. Again and again, this cycle repeats itself, resulting in a long silence that my visitor shows no intention of helping to break. Until, at last tiring of my tongue-tying indecision, I throw all caution to the wind and begin spitting out my every thought as it comes to mind.

“Huh. Well what do you know. Here I am with someone to finally talk to, and I can’t seem to find a single thing to say. It’s not like I don’t have anything to say. I’ve got loads to say! I just can’t seem to decide where to begin. After all this time to think about it—and believe you me, I’ve had plenty of time—you’d think I’d have that part figured out. And maybe I did, once. But now that it’s come to it, I just don’t know. I just don’t know!”

Laughing softly to myself, I shake my head and give my silent companion a wry smile. “Sorry, kiddo. Guess I’m a little out of practice with this whole conversation thing. What about you? What’s your excuse?”

A beat passes in silence. Two beats. Three. Just as I am ready to give up waiting for a response, my companion shrugs and says, “You humans don’t usually want to talk to me.”

“Really?” I ask, genuinely surprised, “Why not? I’d think they’d have all sorts of questions for you. I know I do.”

Another stretch of silence, then, “Some have questions. But they’re usually the kind I can’t answer.”

“And the ones you can?”

“They still don’t often lead to a conversation. Demanding. Cursing. Pleading. But not a conversation.”

“O-Oh. I…I see.” I falter, unsure of where to go from there, but I’m saved the trouble.

“But most people,” my companion continues without prodding, “don’t say anything at all. They can’t. They’re too shocked or sad or scared. And besides, I don’t get to be with any of them that long. So by the time they realize there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s too late to talk. They’ve already moved on.”

As I listen to all of this with rapt interest, I become aware of a sensation like a knot being loosened within myself. It starts in my chest, works its way up the muscles of my neck, then spreads into my shoulders and down my back. I’m free, I realize. Free of a weight I hadn’t even realized I was carrying. Free of a fear that I’d long ago buried and forgotten. The very same fear that I now recognize being reflected in the figure sitting next to me.

“Sounds like lonely work,” I say, “Must be tough.”

“Yes, sometimes, but I don’t mind,” it replies, a new vitality entering its voice so that it practically gushes, “After all, I was made for this work, and it for me. Only I can do this. No one else was made to endure the responsibility. And besides, the reward more than makes up for the hardship. I know it might be difficult for you to understand, but there’s nothing quite like the sight of a soul when it realizes it’s been brought home. Nothing quite like it at all.”

“I can only imagine,” I say, wondering what sort of expression now hides behind the cowl, “It sounds like you really love your work.”

“I do,” enthuses my companion, then more subdued, “I did.”

“You did?” I question, a touch incredulous, “You mean to tell me you don’t love it anymore? I find that hard to believe.”

“Oh, no. Never that,” assures my companion, “Never that.”

“Then…?”

For a long moment, my companion doesn’t answer, picking at its robes in silence. Then, in a voice so quiet I almost don’t hear it, it slowly whispers, “I always knew, even from the very beginning, that it wouldn’t last forever. That my work…my role…my purpose…would eventually end.”

“End?” I repeat, slow to understand, “But wait…then wouldn’t that mean—?”

“Yes,” interjects my companion, anticipating my question before I even fully realize what it is I’m asking, “It is exactly as you suspect.” Then, without warning, it begins to speak in a foreign tongue. “KAÌ Ὁ THΆNATOS KAÌ Ὁ HAÍDĒS,” it says, its tone deepening and expanding, “EBLĒTHĒSAN EIS TḖN LIMNÉ TOŨ PYRÓS.” Its voice continues to grow, reaching a powerful timbre of such magnitude that the walls around me begin to shake. “OὟTOS ESTIN.” And though I cannot understand the words, “Ὁ DEÚTERÓS THΆNATOS,” they reverberate through me, speaking to my very core.

In the silence that follows, my ears ache with a painful ringing. For a moment, I fear that I have gone deaf. But then I hear my companion, in a low voice, say, “Then Death and the Grave were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.” Almost as an afterthought, it adds, “The last death.”

“The death of Death,” I murmur, at last understanding. I pause, contemplating this new development, then ask, “So I really am the last?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” I reply, inwardly marveling at how calmly I accept this confirmation of my long-held suspicions, “I had thought so, but there was no real way for me to know for sure.” I pause again, longer this time, reluctant to ask my next question. Finally, though, I manage, “So if I am the last, then that must mean when I…” Here I stumble, unable to bring myself to say the word. “…you also—?”

“Yes.”

This time, the confirmation hits hard, and I am unable to say anymore for a long while. When I finally do find my voice again, it comes out weak and fearful as I ask, “Is that why it took you so long to come for me?”

The silence that follows is all the answer I need. All at once, I am overwhelmed by the powerful sense of relief that washes over me. Dropping my face into my hands, I cry, “Thank God! Thank you, thank you, God! I had thought that maybe…but no. Thank you, Lord. Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!”

I continue like that for a time, letting out all my years of built-up feelings in a catharsis of tears. When I at last finish crying out all my fear, doubt, frustration, and despair, I dry my eyes and start, “I’m sorry, I—”

“No,” interrupts my companion, its tone heavy with shame, “It is I who should be s-sorry.” Voice breaking on this last word, it sobs, “I’ve been so afraid. I let my fear get in the way of my duty and have caused you such suffering. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry for what I have done to you.”

I listen to these profuse apologies in solemn silence, unsure how to accept them. Part of me is tempted to wave them away with a blithely assuring, “It’s okay,” but that would ring false. Because the truth is it isn’t okay. It hasn’t been okay for a very long time. So rather than try to bandage over my pain with comforting lies, I instead reach out in the spirit of solidarity and say, “I think we all do sometimes. I know I’ve said and done things I’m not exactly proud of, all because I was afraid.”

“But you’re human!”

“And you’re…well, I guess I don’t really know what you are…but you’re not God, are you?”

“No.”

“Then I think it’s probably fair to assume that you’re forgiven a mistake from time to time too.”

“Maybe,” my companion relents, though still sounding unconvinced, “I don’t know.”

“Well why not? You’re sorry aren’t you?”

It nods.

“And you’re here to repair your mistake, aren’t you?”

It starts to nod again, then hesitates.

“You are here to repair your mistake,” I repeat with a jolt of panic, “Right?”

It hesitates another moment, then finally dips its head, finishing its nod.

Releasing my held breath in a nervous laugh of relief, I say, “Well that’s all anyone can really ask for. Just gotta give it our best shot and trust God to take care of the rest.”

Speaking slowly, painfully, as though each word is a struggle to say, my companion admits, “What you say is true, but…” Its voice lowers to a whisper. “…but I am still afraid.”

Leaning forward, I reach out my hand and, with a small smile, whisper, “Me too.”

For a long moment, my companion sits there, staring at my outstretched hand. Then slowly, ever so slowly, it reaches out and takes my hand in its own. The moment our hands meet, my companion finds its courage. Before my very eyes, it undergoes a sort of transformation, straightening its back, squaring its shoulders, and lifting its head. Then, taking a deep breath, it looks me in the eye and bravely quavers, “Y-You have nothing to be afraid of. I-I’ll stay with you every step of the way.”

“And I with you,” I promise, giving its hand a gentle squeeze, “I’ll stay with you too. Every step of the way.”

“O-Okay,” it stammers, with a small frantic nod, “I-I’m ready.”

“Okay,” I say.

Getting to my feet, I help my companion down from its chair. Then, hand in trembling hand, we walk to the front door. When we step up to the threshold, we are met by a vision so breathtakingly glorious that I am momentarily stunned to stillness. As I look upon this final sunset, I am filled to overflowing with a profound sense of peace. I am ready.

We look at each other then, my companion and I.

“Together?” I ask.

“Together,” it agrees.

Then, holding fast to each other’s hands, we cross the threshold and step into bright, burning light.

© 2018 by Sahara Frost

Author’s Note:    I originally wrote this story in response to a call for submissions from Zombies Need Brains. They were looking for short stories to publish in a few themed anthologies, including one dedicated to exploring Death as a character. From the moment I read the prompt, I knew that I wanted to write Death as a sympathetic character, particularly as a child (or at least a child-like entity). The idea for my short story didn’t fully form, though, until I stumbled across a Bible verse in Revelations that describes Death being thrown into a lake of fire at the end of days. When I read that verse, I suppose you could say I felt a bit of sympathy for Death. The lake of fire struck me as a pretty raw deal for someone just doing their job. I thought about how if that was the future waiting for me, I would probably be living in constant terror. With that, an idea began to grow in my mind, and my story came to life.

Sahara Frost grew up in the foothills of Tennessee, reading anything and everything she could find. When books were not enough to feed her ravenous imagination, she began to write her own. An M.A. in English and an M.S. in Information Science later, she now supports her reading addiction by daylighting as a librarian while staying up all hours of the night to pursue her real job: writing fantasy. Fortunately, her supportive husband tolerates her many obsessions and makes sure her coffee mug stays full so that she can continue writing.

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

MOVIE REVIEW: Ralph Breaks the Internet

written by David Steffen

Ralph Breaks the Internet is a 2018 computer-animated children’s movie by Walt Disney Pictures, a sequel to the popular 2012 film Wreck-It Ralph. Six years have passed since the events of the first movie, and Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the villain of the Fix-It Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer) game, is still best friends with Vanellope Von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), one of the player characters in Sugar Rush racing game. They work in different games in an arcade, and they meet to hang out every night when the arcade closes.

Vanellope has grown bored with her game; she knows all three tracks in her game by heart. Ralph tries to help her by making his own new track, but it all goes wrong and the steering wheel of the Sugar Rush game is broken by accident by a frustrated player. Ralph and Vanellope overhear the arcade owner Mr. Litwick (Ed O’Neill) talking with some teenagers who find a replacement wheel online for $200, but that’s more than the game makes in a year, so Mr. Litwick unplugs the game, and Vanillope and all of the others flee into the power strip, orphaned.

Meanwhile, Mr. Litwick has also added a Wi-Fi router, and Ralph and Vanellope set out into the wild unknown of the Internet to go find the wheel themselves, so they can buy it and save Vanellope’s game. With no idea how the Internet works, or anything about humanity besides what they can observe within the arcade.

Overall, this movie was fun, full of little Internet jokes, but it is nowhere near as good as the original Wreck-It-Ralph. Many of the jokes are tired, and unsubstantive, easy often-repeated jokes about spam and pop-ups, which aren’t particularly up-to-date. Almost all of the obstacles in the movie are self-made, and could’ve been avoided by just making better choices. That’s not to say that there aren’t some truly shining moments: the Disney Princesses are a particular highlight, voiced by their original Disney movie actresses!, and Shank (Gal Godot) the best racer in the Slaughter House racing game.

SPOILER SECTION

I usually don’t have a spoiler section in reviews, but there was a part of this movie that I wanted to talk about that is too far into the plot to be part of a spoiler-free review.

As Ralph and Vanellope find ways to make money to buy the steering wheel, Vanellope falls in love with the Slaughter Race game, and Ralph overhears her saying that it feels like home. Ralph is so jealous about this that he goes to dark web and buys a computer virus to let loose into the Slaughter Race game with the intent that it will slow down enough that she won’t want to stay there anymore. Predictably, this goes horribly wrong and becomes the major source of conflict for the movie. They end up working it all out and they stay friends at the end.

And I know this is a children’s movie, and forgiveness is often a big theme of children’s movies. But I think we also have to consider how kids can absorb the themes in such movies, and I think that there are some things that you can’t expect someone else to just get over. Ralph sets loose a harmful contagion because he’s jealous that his friend might take a job far away from him. The contagion gets loose and wreaks havoc. Sure, he asked questions about whether it’s really harmful or not, but he was asking them of someone selling viruses on the dark web.

DP FICTION #49A: “Heaven For Everyone” by Aimee Ogden

The summer that God came to Whartonville, I ended up trapped on the drugstore roof with only half a peanut butter sandwich and a seraph to keep me company.

The sandwich part is true! Hell, all of it is true. I’d eaten the rest of my lunch on the bus, before God’s approach hit the news. I can always buy more lunch in the hospital cafeteria. When the cafeteria and the rest of the city aren’t under three feet of water, at least. I know it was bad, and people died, but I’m still glad we got a flood instead of the plague of locusts that just hit Fargo. Two months later and you still can’t step outside without a crunch, is what I hear.

Anyway the seraph must have flown up before the rain really started coming down, and I managed to climb up onto the street light and from there to the roof. So there we were together in the middle of the storm. “I thought He didn’t do this shit anymore,” I said to the seraph. They shrugged, or at least I thought they did. It’s hard to read body language on someone who’s seven feet tall with six wings and a dozen mouths, but I’ve had practice lately. You know they can’t really speak for themselves? Sure, they talk, but everything they say is an echo from the Almighty’s own lips. Or at bare minimum from one or another of His prophets. So body language turns out to be kind of important. “There was a covenant or whatever.”

I pushed away from the ledge. I still had my umbrella at that point, I think, though with the way the rain was blowing I probably wasn’t any dryer for it. You’ve seen pictures of the flooding? They don’t do the wind justice. “I guess you probably can’t just fly us up and out of here, either.” The seraph’s burning wings were too drenched to do more than smolder. They shook their head, and a hospital ID card rattled around their neck. I knew we had a few angels working in the morgue. They liked to stay out of sight, and everyone else liked it that way too.

“Damn,” I said, because I didn’t have anything else to say. When we said we wanted heaven for everyone, you know, this wasn’t what we had in mind. We unlocked the doors and flung them wide open, but heaven didn’t let us in. Heaven came to us. “The storm’s getting worse.”

“YOU HAVE BEEN CAST DOWN, YOU THAT ONCE LAID LOW THE NATIONS,” said the seraph, and my teeth rattled in my skull. That voice had been created to level mountains and humble the mighty. I wasn’t that mighty and it didn’t make me feel humble, just headachey. I told the seraph not to rub it in and that I was pretty well aware by that point just how low I’d been cast, and they looked down at their bare leathery feet. And then I wasn’t so sure just who they’d meant.

That was when I heard the screaming. A little break in the wind, maybe. No, don’t call it the eye of the storm. What was at the center of that squall had a lot more than just one eye. But I’ll get to that. Just sit tight.

The screaming was a woman down on the street. Well, not on the street itself. The street was a riverbed by then. She’d grabbed a door somewhere, one of those interior jobs with the cork core to make it float. Might’ve been okay on a lazy river or something, but a trip down Almond Street meant real whitewater rafting.

The seraph leaned down next to me to get a view of her. They shook their head, and the long silver chains of their hair scraped against their guttering wings. “THOU SHALT NOT KILL.”

“You’re the angel,” I told them. “Do something.” But I don’t need to tell you how that rankled. I didn’t go to medical school for a million years because I like just standing around and watching people die. Did you know that most of the hospital staff were Paradisists? I don’t know the exact numbers, but upwards of eighty percent for sure. You see that many people die, you see that many people live badly, you’re going to want change. Well, we got it. First, do no harm, we said, but it turns out you can’t crack your way into heaven without screwing things up something serious.

Where was I? Oh, the woman. So the current was sweeping her down the street right in front of the drugstore and I thought, you know what? I’m already wet. So I grabbed the downspout and slid down and probably would have about broken both my ankles if there hadn’t been three feet of water to slow my fall. I’m tall but three feet of water is tall too, and it knocked me right over, and my first thought was, well, this lady and I are going to die together.

Then this huge splash, practically a tsunami, right next to me. The seraph took a cannonball right off the roof. Lucky they didn’t land on me or this story would be a lot shorter and also you’d have to hear it from my wandering soul. Assuming I’m heavenbound in the first place. That might be a big assumption for any Paradisist, I don’t know. They came down between me and the lady on the door and I was glad for that, I was halfway to the suburbs by then but at least I didn’t take the plunge for nothing, I got off the roof to save her and if my swan dive didn’t accomplish anything besides getting that seraph in gear, that’s okay.

I was underwater more than I was above, but I saw them grab her. They put her up on their shoulders like a kid riding piggyback. And then the last thing I saw before I went under again was them spreading their wings wide. And when I say wide—have you ever seen a seraph in flight? Their wingspan half filled the street. Diverted some of the water around the corner, onto Pierson Avenue—my apartment’s down that way, but that was the last thing on my mind at the moment, let me tell you. Not enough to stop the water, but enough to slow it down. I got my feet under me again, and I got to the seraph. “Now what?” I asked, because it was still raining too hard for their wings to light up. Not that a takeoff in gale winds probably would have been a great idea.

Well, that seraph picked me up like a rag doll and set me on top of the roof across the street, just a single story, and lifted the woman up right next to me. Then they started climbing up too, but lord, were they heavy. They tried stepping on the windowsill and ripped it clean out of the façade. We tried to heave them up, the two of us together, but like I said: heavy. And just then, guess who decided to come cruising around the corner? Yes, the Almighty Himself, a thousand blazing eyes and a hundred tongues professing His very own glory. You could see the rain sloughing off Him, rivers of the stuff. Literal rivers. I didn’t know then that January Lake had already burst its banks. That’s what happens when a man-made lake meets a heaven-made catastrophe. But still: could’ve been a plague of locusts.

After all of it, there’s still a part of me that wants to take a swing at the big guy. A stupid caveman gut reaction. You can’t punch a cloud, even one chock full of eyeballs. But you can want to punch it, and boy do I.

Anyway Almond Street had become Almond River at that point, really, and all we had was to hang on to the seraph like their life depended on it. Maybe it did. We hung on, together, just the three of us alone in the world for all we knew. That seraph held on so tight they broke my wrist, can you believe that? Still hurts when a storm’s coming. But we held on. That was all that mattered just then. And eventually the storm died down, and the river dried up, and the seraph lifted us down from the roof like the infants we were.

The woman looked around. “It’s still raining,” she said. “I thought it would have stopped by now. I mean—He’s gone, isn’t He?”

But I ignored her. Not at my best form just then. “It’s not fair,” I said, which was a damned stupid thing to say, because fair was never the point, was it? The idea of heaven for everyone wasn’t fair, it was just right. It was just … just.

The seraph spat a giant loogie onto the wet street. “RENDER UNTO CAESAR,” they said, and jerked a pair of wings in the general direction of where God had gone.

“You’re mad at the big man?” My wrist hurt like hell, but I remember the thing that bothered me most was that my shoes each weighed about a thousand pounds. Never occurred to me to just kick them off. “We’re the ones who pulled you down here into the mucky-muck.”

“We” was more literal than the seraph might guess. Or maybe they did know? It’s not like I’ve ever made a big secret of it. Doctors are supposed to help people, aren’t they? But they weren’t looking at me. Their stare drifted along the street, where the marble façade had come off the old theater and the windows had blown out of Martinelli’s. There were a dozen bodies left behind where the river had been.

I wondered then, what it was like in heaven before we brought the walls down. Which way the anger blew when He’d promised He wouldn’t turn it earthward again. Well, we wanted heaven for everyone. Maybe we just weren’t clear enough on the details of what heaven was supposed to look like, or who exactly counted as everyone.

The storm had passed, but there was still wreckage to clean up. Some of it human. “We’ll make things right,” I said. As right as they can be, after all this. “We’ve done harder work than this,” I said.

The seraph raised one wing. Sheets of rain slashed off the edges of their brass feathers, but I ducked underneath, and the woman—Karen, did I say that yet? Her name was Karen—anyway, she did too. They closed their wings around us and we huddled together until the last of the Almighty’s wrath had passed. Shared that PB&J, too, even if it was a little soggy, and before the rescue teams came through I gave the seraph my number in case they wanted to check out my lab. Maybe get out of morgue work. As for the Almighty, I think He headed north out of Whartonville, but I forget if that’s the summer He hit Winnipeg or Regina.

© 2018 by Aimee Ogden

Aimee Ogden is a former software tester and science teacher; now, she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. If she went to Hogwarts, she would be a Ravenclaw, and her patronus would be She-Hulk punching a nazi in the face. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, and Analog.

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