surreal – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #128A: “(Skin)” by Chelsea Sutton

Content note (click for details)

Death, grieving, medical abuse

edited by Ziv Wities

When Estelle Irby died (at the young age of 43), her Skin did not. When the last bit of breath left the lungs, when the heart and brain had gone quiet and the limbs still and stiff, a shudder went down the length of the body that was once Estelle Irby (though, according to her hospice doctor Carter Rannow, the shudder was a normal thing, not an indication of any imminent abnormality or strange occurrence, such as the Skin leaving the body, which it did within moments of the aforementioned shudder).

And so, in those quiet seconds after her death, Estelle Irby’s wife August and their teenage daughter Yumi and Dr. Rannow watched as a piece of Estelle Irby removed itself from the body, like an out-of-body experience might be demonstrated in a film (you know, the soul lifting up and out, toward the ceiling, toward the heavens, as it were), only this was a kind of body-out-of-body situation. They watched as Estelle Irby’s Skin lifted itself up and off what had been Estelle’s internal hidden bits and pieces, and detached its hypodermis from the muscle and bone beneath, leaving behind a few stray hair follicles, sweat glands, fat layers, and nerve endings (because we all lose a bit of ourselves in this kind of process, one supposes).

The Skin was gentle with the (dead) body, pulling each living cell slowly away from its (dead) counterparts, and the sound was like a billion tiny kisses. This sound distracted August enough that what she might have found a horrific spectacle became instead a tearful remembering (in grief, yes, even in the earliest moments of grief, the smallest things may trigger an onslaught of emotions, and so it was with August). The sounds peeled through layers of memories of August and Estelle lying in bed at the end of a long day, Estelle kissing August in all manner of silly places, sending August into tired giggles, Estelle smacking August’s stomach with her lips (each new move goofier than the next), both of them collapsing into exhausted laughter.

For their daughter Yumi, the sound of the Skin extracting itself from her (dead, from now on) mother’s body kindled memories of Estelle Irby’s (once alive) lips as she tried to open particularly stubborn jar lids. Or when she contemplated a project problem in her woodworking shop, sucking and biting at the insides of her cheeks until they were raw and her mouth was coated lightly with blood (a habit she had had since she was five years old, the cheek walls never quite healing in her lifetime). But mostly, the sound of the Skin reminded Yumi of how Estelle clicked her tongue whenever Yumi presented her latest painting, almost always a dramatic affair (if sparsely catered with last night’s leftovers) in the family living room. August would applaud and praise, but Estelle would put on a show of being The Critic, clicking and puckering her mouth in all sorts of strange sounds meant to withhold Estelle’s true (always proud, always warm) feelings for as long as she was able, which kept Yumi on edge (and was all in good fun, but Yumi still, always, worried that that next painting would be a true disappointment, and Estelle, in that moment, may not be able to mask such a thing).

The Skin removing itself was a long process, but a necessary one (so it seems) to keep the Skin intact, so that it could step away from the body as one full human-shaped skin suit, the hair that was once Estelle Irby’s salt-and-pepper mane (she had started going gray early, in her 20s) flowing down to the top of what was once the skin of her lowermost back. And while August and Yumi were lost in their memories, Dr. Rannow watched the process closely, and sent a quick text to his nurse, who was downstairs, to ready a sedative and a large roll of plastic wrap (the nurse’s name was Carol, but he never remembered this, always called her Kristy with a K or some such thing, and she’d stopped correcting him).

The nurse, oblivious to what was happening with the Skin (though knowing Estelle Irby was bound to expire any minute, and hoping it would be soon, as she had a pre-paid Zumba class to go to that evening and did not want to lose that $30), was a bit confused at Dr. Rannow’s text, but supposed that August would need something to calm her, and perhaps there was more cleanup than expected.

Once fully removed, the Skin turned its face to the body and considered the exposed muscle and bone, not with human eyes but with each cell in itself (they somehow knew this, this way of looking, all who were in the room), and sweat began to prick ever so slowly from the Skin’s pores. Yumi would later suggest that this dribbling made the Skin look like it was crying, though August would only half-heartedly agree with this sentiment, as the smell of Estelle’s sweat did not make her think of tears but of something else more intimate, a mix of sex and days on the beach, and the extraordinary work of dying (no one talks about the sheer muscle it takes, death), of carrying Estelle up the stairs, of hot flashes in the middle of the night, sheets soaked.

After many minutes of (damp but silent) grieving, the Skin turned to leave. August and Yumi didn’t move to stop it, too overcome with the shock of Estelle Irby really being gone, her exposed insides lying quietly on the hospice-provided bed (like the quiet aside within a parenthesis left suddenly bare and exposed, Yumi would later suggest, and indeed, several of her paintings would play with such a textual theme). August quietly felt grateful that the bed would be taken away, that they had not allowed Estelle Irby to die in their shared bed (especially now) when she would, she was sure, turn over in her sleep toward Estelle’s side of the bed and see a skinned version of her wife rather than the whole person she wanted to remember.

During all this, Dr. Rannow made a list of the many ways he could retire on this discovery (the whole business of dying was tedious, boring, and certainly he couldn’t spend another thirty years doing this). What would the Skin reveal about humanity, about health, about what comes after (good or bad)? And how much would people pay for such a thing (has to be a lot, right)? The quickest way (he finally concluded) was to just sell off the ingredient itself (i.e. the Skin) and let other people figure it out. He realized (and this was indeed an epiphany of self, in this moment) that he didn’t much care what people did or discovered with it (a potion for long-life or immortality, real proof of a heaven or hell, a special spice for a barbecue, whatever, it was no skin off his nose, hahaha) as long as he got paid.

The good doctor was doing math in his head as the Skin grieved and Estelle Irby’s wife remembered their giggling late-night kisses, and Estelle Irby’s daughter thought about how she wouldn’t be able to show her next painting to her dead mother and she didn’t know what that would feel like (and she didn’t want to know, in fact she was thinking maybe she’d never paint again).

Estelle Irby was worth more dead than alive, Dr. Rannow thought as the Skin turned and headed down the stairs (how it could see those stairs was not something that those in the room considered, but you cannot discount muscle memory, and there were a few slices of muscle clinging to the Skin’s underside that could very well be part of its navigation).

As the Skin landed at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the front door, glancing only momentarily toward the living room, the nurse (with the plastic and the sedative ready in a syringe) was struck cold for a moment (perhaps the only one who had such a reaction, or whose mind was blank enough to truly receive the shock of a walking human skin suit). The nurse looked instinctively into the Skin’s eyes (oh boy, it did not have eyes) and, finding only darkness, immediately thought of her husband, whose dark nature had only become obvious to her in the last few years, now that she was too old (she thought) to leave, especially when she was the breadwinner, when he would most assuredly get half of what she owned in a divorce and would give her no peace, anyway.

And so, rather than thoughts of awe or money or sweet memories, the nurse focused on the present moment and how the Skin was smooth (Estelle Irby was young but still⁠—she had great skin care too! wow!) and the head and eyes so hollow and the heart most obviously gone, left upstairs to rot, and she felt an anger she didn’t know she could feel. And so when the Skin reached the front door, the nurse was already behind it, poking it in the neck with the needle, careful not to go as far as she would when muscle lived under the skin (and bone and organs and so on), knowing she would have to strike where she thought major veins might still exist in some way. The Skin did not react, did not stop, in fact, but kept on, leaving (lightly) bloody footprints (because the extraction had been as gentle as described) in its wake. The nurse followed close behind with the plastic (counting down the six to eight seconds she expected it would take the sedative to kick in) until the Skin stopped and lost its balance, falling still and sleepy just as it was taking its first steps down the driveway. The nurse wrapped the Skin in the plastic (it was relatively light though heavier than you might expect, and easy to fold) and shoved it into the back of Dr. Rannow’s car long before August or Yumi or Dr. Rannow came downstairs. And by the look of the footprints, they figured the Skin had kept going (the lightly-bloody footprints having dried and disappeared into the oil-stained cement of the driveway), and wandered off to hide, like a dog who knows its time is near.

Once Estelle Irby’s leftover body had been taken away by the funeral home, and the hospice materials cleaned from the house, the good (ha) doctor and the nurse brought the Skin back to the office. The nurse had forgotten all about her Zumba class that evening (she would eat that $30 if it meant getting to cut into the Skin), and the good doctor was eager to get the Skin doled out in pieces to the highest bidders (a full-size skin suit would certainly draw attention). In the hours between the shuddering and the arriving at the office, the good doctor had settled into this new understanding of himself, realizing that most all of his scientific curiosity had drained out of him after his fourth year of med school and he was convinced that there was no improving this world (no matter what the Skin decided to reveal about the universe, or what products it led to), and he was eager, desperately so, for comfortable retirement.

And so Dr. Rannow called his colleagues and the businessmen he knew, and the businessmen his colleagues knew, as the nurse tied the Skin to an exam table (she delighted in the way the Skin struggled but had no strength to push her away). The nurse had to flatten the wrists entirely to strap the arms securely, and even when the Skin tried to bunch itself up (like the dead skin of a snake, perhaps, or a slinky) it was not thin enough to wriggle away. As the nurse waited for the good doctor to finish his phone calls, she watched that contraction (the wriggling) and imagined the Skin screaming (in truth it made no sound except for that soft scraping that your hands might make when you rub them together to warm up). She imagined the screaming of a bearded male voice (even though she knew very well the Skin was from Estelle Irby, whose voice was not gruff and who had no beard) and let that imagined scream wash over her as the Skin twitched and jerked and she collected the sharpest instruments in the office, the ones that could cut most precisely (the good doctor hadn’t directed her to do this but was quite pleased when he’d seen it done).

And so throughout the night, Dr. Rannow and his nurse cut into the (wriggling, slinking, silently screaming) Skin. Small cleanly-sliced chunks (that fit neatly into specimen bottles); long strips (to be wrapped in gauze); a box of the odd shapes (the ears, the nose, the toenails, nipples); ragged cuts of the scalp and pubic area (a high price for the sections of Skin with tangible, coiled hair, so different from the peach fuzz of the arms); and two big flat sections of the back and stomach (flat enough to stretch and roll like a map, or a decree from a king). All the while the Skin stayed alive under their fingers, spurting blood and fat at them like the pores were little mouths (the nurse reveled in what she imagined they were saying to her). Dr. Rannow’s clients came and went, handing wads of cash to the good doctor (nothing traceable, you never heard of me, said his texts, tickled by being a black market salesman of some sort, a dangerous business to be sure, and he felt more alive now than he had since he started med school).

By 4am there were only the two big rolled up patches (the back and the stomach) and the eye sockets left, the latter of which were the last to be cut around, once the nose and forehead gave way, so that there were only these donuts of Skin, stitched together with eyebrows. The nurse stared into the holes in the Skin donuts for several minutes as Dr. Rannow argued with one of the last businessmen to visit, a crank doctor he knew who ran an apothecary down on Venice Beach (‘holistic’ was in the name, holistic healing something something). The crank doctor wanted one of the larger pieces, but had only brought enough cash for the eye sockets (on purpose) and a gun he’d traded some (“organic”) cocaine for (a gun he didn’t intend to use, and indeed didn’t know how to use).

The nurse’s thoughts were so lost in those eye sockets that she didn’t even notice that the good doctor had been shot through the neck, and the bullet had gone clean through him to hit her in the back of the brain and straight out her left eye (the shock of death is never easy to absorb, no matter how slow or quick it comes on). And so the nurse fell to the floor, her good eye watching as Dr. Rannow rammed into the crank doctor with the last of his strength, another gunshot (and another), the gun jamming and exploding in the crank doctor’s hand (it was not a great quality gun), hand bits exploding every which way as the crank doctor’s left temple slammed into the edge of the sink. And this was the nurse’s last view⁠—the two doctors lying in their own blood, a box of cash threatening to tip from the exam bed and onto the floor (and then, of course, darkness, and whatever comes after, if anything—the nurse had somehow never given it much thought).

It took until about 6am for the Eye Socket Skin to inch its way over to the nurse’s face and settle into place over her own eyes (one shot through with a bullet, one glazed and white with death). The Eye Socket Skin sent its little tendrils of nerves into the dead flesh of the nurse and shakily moved her head, and then her limbs, (finally) getting her body to move onto its knees, lift its arms, and grasp the rolls of the Back Skin and Stomach Skin, which shuddered with anticipation.

Slowly, the Eye Socket Skin steered the nurse’s body (clinging to the maps of Back Skin and Stomach Skin) out of the exam room door, into the hall, the waiting room, out the front and (stumbling) down the sidewalk in the dappled light of dawn. As the sun rose further into the sky, the nurse and the Skin shambled back in the direction of Estelle Irby’s home, though not directly there, instead stumbling (exhausted) toward a park a few miles from the house, to a small clearing among a thick collection of trees (a secret hiding spot where Yumi used to play with Estelle Irby, when Yumi was still little and still played with her mother). Yumi would make her sit in the clearing of sun in the thicket of trees and draw her using thick dull crayons, and Estelle Irby would pucker her lips and click her tongue before saying how beautiful this crayon drawing was, how absolutely perfect it all was (and it was).

So the Skin laid the nurse’s body in the shady grass, and the Eye Socket Skin watched in exhausted dryness as the Back Skin and Stomach Skin unfurled itself in the grass, as thin and flat as it could be, perfectly centered in the opening of sun among the trees, as if waiting to enter a portal of heaven (though the Skin did not know if it believed in heaven in this moment, at least not the kind so often spoken of). The Eye Socket Skin curled around itself and expired in a little heap of dust beside the nurse’s face, having expended all of its energy to get itself (all the leftover pieces of itself) here. And there the last of the Skin sat for a week or two (who knows exactly), some period of time after the bodies of the doctors were found, after a search party went out for the nurse, after the funeral of Estelle Irby (well-attended), and the funerals of the doctors (not so well-attended). During that time, the Back Skin and Stomach Skin stretched themselves in the sun, drying thin and pale and smooth like leather until they felt done, until they felt ready (which is hard to explain, this feeling, when you’re ready, and perhaps because the Stomach Skin had been a stomach once, it was used to the feeling of the gut, saying, now, it’s time).

And so the Skin rolled itself up and began the difficult journey of inching and rolling and scooting its way back to Estelle Irby’s house, which took a long while (after Yumi was sure she’d given up painting, after August finally had a good night’s sleep and no longer saw her skinless wife beside her in bed). But one evening the Skin rolled itself onto the front porch, where it rapped quietly on the door and then tucked its rolled-up self against the wall (like a special delivery) and fell asleep for the first time since it became Skin.

In the months following the black market events in the good doctor’s office, new life-extending products seemed to hit the shelves with gusto⁠—skin creams and healing potions, research studies promising something just adjacent to immortality (linked with a new fad diet and book tie-in), skin grafts that became all the rage for beauty treatments. A new church that focused on consuming human skin popped up (a documentary was done quite quickly, and it was forced underground, but it still has its devotees). None of these were particularly successful (though plenty of money was made).

Yumi, however, found two rolls of handmade canvas on the porch one morning, a gift, she assumed from a friend (from her mother, Estelle Irby, is what she actually thought, though she wouldn’t admit it, as that was impossible, surely). And though she’d told herself she would never paint again after Estelle Irby’s death, the canvas was too good to waste and she painted once again (and indeed this was the start of her open or empty parentheses period, which she would be asked about in an interview later in her career, when she had reached Estelle Irby’s age).

Her explanation can be summarized not in so many words (as most things cannot) but in the spaces between them, and when forced to write this thought down, she expressed this idea by something to the tune of ((() ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )

3350 words

Author’s Note: The image of a skin suit was the first thing that came to me⁠—the idea of the Skin of a person living past the rest of the body, and the parallel that image has to grief, how it hollows you out, how you seem to be living on even though it feels unnatural to do so. Skin holds memories differently than other organs, and is also so tied to our own self image, vanity, and self-protection. Of course, once I had this image, I thought about how the most vain and greedy among us would ruin something as wondrous as skin walking around on its own. I do wonder⁠—if I was ripped apart and sold off, would I still give freely of what I have left over? And I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m a better person than a skin suit.

Chelsea Sutton is a Los Angeles-based writer and director of what she likes to call gothic whimsy. She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a Humanitas PlayLA award-winner, a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, CRAFT Literary, Bourbon Penn, Willow Springs, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing and her debut novella is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press in 2026. Find her at chelseasutton.com.

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DP FICTION #125A: “Please Properly Cage Your Words” by Beth Goder

edited by Amanda Helms

The structure of the house was Jane’s first indication that anything was wrong. She walked through the upper floor, with the bay window looking out onto the candy box houses of San Francisco, smooshed together like so many love letters. The office and kitchen hugged the bedroom, and the backyard divided itself into three neat sections, contrasting with the wilderness across the fence.

On the top floor, all was fine.

It was the lower floor that whispered, full of secrets. The garage twisted into a bedroom and back again. Squeezed into the side of the garage was the room that was not a room, but a hallway closed at one end, shadowed where shadows should not be.

Jane had thought, “What luck,” when she found the house available on such short notice. Fully furnished, ready to rent for the month. She’d forgotten that luck goes both ways.

When she wasn’t consulting at the Botanical Garden, Jane lounged on the upper floor, reading the science fiction books kept in their mounted cubbies. As she flipped through the pages, she told herself she could not sense the lower floor, with the room which was not a room directly beneath the hanging books. She told herself not to think about it.

On her third night, wanting desperately to get out, anywhere, she went to see a metafictional play which had no title and refused to refer to itself in the playbill. It seemed like the sort of thing one did in San Francisco. The actors kept reaching out to touch her hair and whisper in her ear that the air was full of words, words that flew and never settled, words that glided past in syllabic silence. After the performance, the audience shuffled into a reception hall, where everyone was served lukewarm wine. An actor with a beard told her about his wife, who was forever touching his hair and whispering in his ear, and Jane nodded along, not sure if this was still part of the performance. Not sure if she had become part of the play. “I hate it when people touch my hair,” she said, giving him a significant look.

***

Words are difficult things because they tend to get out of the places you put them. This is why it is best to use a cage of quotation marks around dialogue. For example, I might say, “An author who breaks the fourth wall asks a beneficence of the reader.” (Look at all those words, staying where they’ve been written.)

Other punctuation can be useful, such as parentheses (which can be put almost anywhere in a sentence without trouble). Paragraphs keep words in regimented lines from which it is hard to escape. In poetry, the words tend to get around the page. This is very dangerous, which is why one should never read poetry.

***

Jane had never liked the shape of the monkey puzzle tree. All those spines, going outward. All those shadows. And underneath, what was hidden? Araucaria araucana. The evergreen with symmetrical branches. The living fossil.

It was an unfair prejudice.

The room that was not a room, under the house, reminded Jane of the monkey puzzle tree. All those unnatural shadows, made from shapes that should not exist.

On her fifth day, Jane forced herself into the lower house. The room that was not a room glowed dimly in the light from the garage. Fear crept up her spine, but she’d had so much practice ignoring her fears that it barely registered. She had not yet realized that fear was a gift.

In the back of the room, the un-room, sat a bookshelf.

“Reach up and grab a monkey puzzle tree,” she thought, touching the scar on her hand. The scar was shaped like a parenthesis—an ink-dark curve left open, without a partner. She did not go closer to the bookshelf to see what it contained.

On the way out, she noticed the door had a lock which could only be used from the outside.

***

Reality.

***

Everyone, quiet.

Quiet now.

Did you notice that, too?

A word got out.

Please remain calm. Please do not repeat the word, even if you have a desire to do so, even if you can feel your lips pursing to form that ‘r.’ Even if you desire the delicious release of that long ‘e’.

That is not a word we are going to say any longer. The word wants to be spoken. We shall not encourage it.

***

The reality of Jane

Jane loved clouds and hated sunsets, which looked to her like the sky bleeding across the moon. As a child, she had wanted to be a ballerina, a librarian, a botanist. She couldn’t remember all the things she had once hoped for so fervently, only that her hopes had filled her like words in a book, spilling out over the pages of her life. She listened no matter how softly someone spoke. Her favorite food was the oyster mushroom, even though it looked like a group of ears. She refused to believe in God and yet still felt, despite herself, that some intrinsic force flowed through the universe, some larger, unnamed thing. In college, she’d written poetry across her skin in eyeliner, because she liked to see what her body looked like with the words on the outside, arms and stomach and legs covered with them. Every Halloween, she wore pumpkin underwear and socks with black cats. At twenty-five, she’d ridden her bike up a mountain and cried because everything in her life was changing, but the color of the sky was still the same. In the inky depths of the night, when she could not sleep, Jane wove lanyards in the dark. Her tragic flaw was that she would load the dishwasher but never turn it on, always believing she could fit in one more spoon. These were not the things Jane would have told you about herself, but they are all true.

***

The upper floor was comfortable. Jane wasn’t sure why she couldn’t sleep. She found herself oriented to a particular point—angled downward, to the side of the house. The physical and temporal location of the room that was not a room felt like a blackhole, herself at the edge of the event horizon.

While consulting for the Botanical Garden, she couldn’t help but feel like the plants were creating their own corridors. She stayed away from the monkey puzzle tree.

It was two weeks before she went back to the un-room. Of course, she knew she would go to the bookshelf at the end. That’s how stories work. Reading, for Jane, was like breathing. Like eating. Books held the words that tied her brain together. She understood the reality of that structure, and the reality demanded that she examine the bookshelf.

In reality, the bookshelf kept its darkness, each shadow more real than the reality Jane felt in her realness as the reality she was living in passed her lips, outside of any quotation marks. Reality whispered. Reality, reality.

***

This is the trouble with words that get out. They get into our stories and into our heads. They haunt us, fill our minds, make us doubt the language that we use. Make us doubt that language was created for our use.

It is hard enough to tell a story that has all the things a good story ought to have. And finally the author gets some traction and the story is going along, but the words won’t behave as they should.

Say the author wants to describe how Jane reached out to the bookshelf and cut herself on the shiny edge. Her blood runs down and feeds the mass of shadows, and Jane becomes a shadow herself, haunting the house like a word looking for a mind to infect.

Or perhaps the ending the author has in mind concerns the book sitting on the bookshelf, which must be opened carefully, spine down, lest the words fall out. Jane doesn’t know to treat the covers of the book like a cage, and so when the words surround her, black ink flows into her ears and eyes. Black ink spirals down her throat. A river of words marches ant-like across her body. As she dies, she thinks of the monkey puzzle tree, with spines sharp as the words that puncture her skin.

Or perhaps the author only wants to say, “Why would a reader ever bring into their homes a book or page or paper or tablet or screen or anything with those hideous black marks? Now those marks are in your mind and those words are in your mind and you keep reading anyway. You can’t help it. If your eyes see words or your ears hear words or your fingers trace over braille then those words get into your head immediately, and no sort of exorcism can get them out again.” (Notice how I put that last bit in a cage of quotation marks, because it is dangerous. True things often are.)

***

Jane heard a word repeated that caught at each syllable. Reality, reality. She felt as if she was being watched by invisible eyes. She thought of how her life could be transposed to black marks on a page, and how in the end it’s all dust, bodies and books disintegrating, both forgotten.

At the end of the room that was not a room, there was a bookshelf. Jane was careful not to catch her hand on the sharp edge, remembering her experience with the monkey puzzle tree. In the darkness, it was impossible for her to know the edge was sharp. She should have cut herself, and when she did not, an inchoate murmur echoed from that unknown place that rests at the edge of sound, because that is not how the story was supposed to go, how she was supposed to—

When she picked up the book, she held its spine carefully, cracking the pages open a sliver. She should not have known to do this. Why didn’t she open the book as she normally would have, recklessly throwing open the cover? Indeed, why did Jane, who was so conversant in the structure of stories, not allow hers to continue? Why were her thoughts frustratingly obscured?

The words within the book were bright to her eyes, although no light shone from them.

She read: “The structure of the house was Jane’s first indication that anything was wrong.”

Words appeared, rising like raindrops on the page.

She read: “In the back of the room, the un-room, sat a bookshelf.”

She read: “Did you notice that, too? A word got out.”

She had noticed. She had noticed all along.

***

The reality of this is not fair.

If Jane is meant to cut herself on the bookshelf, she does it. She should be impaled by words.

If the author says that Jane dies, she dies.

And the author says that—

***

Jane heard the whispers of reality, reality. She understood the trouble with words. The special, beneficial property of words. Once they got out, they couldn’t be caged.

Jane carefully turned the pages until she got to blank ones. Her hands trembled. Pulling a pen from her pocket, she wrote, “Jane was afraid, but she understood that fear was a gift. She was able to press on.” Jane found herself able to press on.

She wrote: “Jane was never REDACTED, she was always a botanist. The scar on her hand is from a monkey puzzle tree.” Her scar was an open parenthesis, the start of a blank space waiting for her own words.

As she wrote, she felt herself becoming.

“Jane wrote her own story.” Memories dumped into her head. It was her story, now. She had authored every page. Every word.

“The reality,” she wrote, “was that Jane was not only a collection of words.”

And in that moment, the words that were Jane became uncaged.

1995 words

Author’s Note: It seems like every time I go to San Francisco, I end up writing a story. This one was inspired by my first visit to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s new place, which is very much a charming, San Francisco house. I copied the layout of their house (including the view out to their beautiful garden), but what most piqued the interest of my writer brain was the strange room connected to the garage. Years before, I took a tour of the San Francisco Botanical Garden, where I was fascinated by the unusual architecture of the monkey puzzle tree. I smooshed all of these inputs together, along with a desire to write an experimental, metafictional thing with dangerous grammar, and this story is the result.

Beth Goder is an archivist and author. Over 40 of her short stories have appeared in venues such as Escape Pod, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, and Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as here at Diabolical Plots. You can find her online at http://www.bethgoder.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Beth Goder’s story “The Restaurant of Object Permanence” previously appeared here in Diabolical Plots.

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

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details)

Mass atrocities

Date: March 10

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Mama’s Pizza & Pasta

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, the tables are gone.

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

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

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

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

By the time I turned, you were gone.

Just like Mama’s.

***

Date: March 22

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Perry Park

I’ll be glad to forget today.

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

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

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

Still, never unmade a person before.

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

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

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

Now leave me the fuck alone.

***

Date: March 24

Hours worked: 4.0

Project: Rudolph

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

Fuck you, I’m a cat person.

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

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

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

Besides, I’m a cat person.

***

Date: March 30

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Park Manor

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

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

Isn’t that right, boss?

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

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

In your eyes I saw the truth.

***

Date: March 31

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Unfactory, South Bay Branch

The city is emaciated. Gaunt. Hollowed out.

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

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

Isn’t that right, boss?

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

Wearing your oculars.

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

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

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

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

A brother.

A boyfriend.

A daughter I never had.

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

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

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

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

On the bright side, nobody will miss you.

I promise.

1890 words

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

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

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

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

edited by Ziv Wities

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

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

***

Avie

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

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

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

***

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

We fly.

***

Avie

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

Avie

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

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

***

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

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

***

Avie

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

Avie

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

Avie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2548 words

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

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

DP FICTION #97D: “A Girl With a Planet In Her Eye” by Ruth Joffre

This story is part of our special telepathy issue, Diabolical Thoughts, edited by Ziv Wities.
Click here for the entire Diabolical Thoughts transmission.

For the first thirteen years of her life, the planet was silent. No birdsong. No construction. Only the gentle sway of an ocean pushing and pulling against the aqueous humors of her left eye. Late at night, while her parents slept, she often lay awake and listened to the dense water solidify itself, the salts forming crystals, the crystals becoming pillars in a great, cavernous hall populated at first by no one, and then: music. A pure, high note so sudden it woke her from her slumber and conjured the image of a miniature flautist performing deep in the canal of her ear. Only the sound was part of her, she realized—the first beat in a rhythm she had been unknowingly teaching these crystals as they coalesced in the spaces between words and breaths. Her body was their language. Her heartbeats, her sneezes. Her haphazard attempts to mirror her mother’s Spanish. The crystals absorbed it all and played her life back to her to say: We’re here. We exist.

If she closed her eyes and listened, she could hear them communicate with each other. Mi nombre es Adagio. I’m Sharp. I’m Grave. I should eat. I must. I am. They fed on light through her pupil, synthesizing crystalline energies. Sunlight was best, then moonshine, then fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen. Only when starving would they eat the light from her phone, that pale ethereal glow providing no nutrients, no sustenance—just a desperate act of survival. Go outside, the crystals would shout when she stared at the screen too long, and once outside she would have to stay there an hour, maybe two, to feed them. Hungry crystals clamoring in the dark.

She hated to hear them shatter. All the little pieces lodging in the planet’s crust.

Her eye was becoming a graveyard.

Her crystals were outgrowing their castles. No one would say it out loud, but she knew. It was painfully obvious in the way their bodies hummed at night, that sullen way they poked at the crumbling pillars in the great halls, the way kids kick at pine cones, knowing how much potential for life they once held.

After so many years, she knew what they were thinking: More light.

I’m hungry.

I have to get out of here.

She didn’t know any ophthalmologists, nor any crystallographers, and when she thought of looking for one, the crystal bodies vibrated with panic, broken prisms in a microscopic lattice. No photographs, their humming said. No petri dishes, no tuning forks, no experiments. Through her, they had seen too many movies about encounters with extraterrestrial life; they knew that their sentience would be a death sentence. That in the absence of predators to keep it in line humanity viewed all other intelligence as an existential threat to its self-image. She could not allow scientists to poke and prod and strike a tuning fork to determine the exact frequency necessary to shatter the crystals from within and eliminate the enemy.

No, she would have to extract the planet on her own.

It should be simple enough. According to the internet, ophthalmologists routinely poked holes under patient eyelids to drain the eye of excess fluid and, thus, relieve the pressure that caused glaucoma. She could do much the same with only a hypodermic needle and the eye patch from last Halloween’s costume, which would help speed recovery.

While taping open her eyelids, she soothed the crystals with simple chatter. Did you know the human eye heals faster than almost any other part of the human body? An anatomical marvel produced by millions of years of evolution. Imagine the injuries my ancestors must have had and healed from; imagine their wonder in looking up into the mouth of a saber tooth tiger. The blood! The carnage! Just a little pinch. She slid the needle in so easily it frightened her. She thought the process would be more painful, the planet more difficult to extract from the universe of her body, but it just slipped out of her like a tear, all that salt whispering away before she could think to say wait.

How will I know if you survive this?

She felt the loss like a gulf opening between them. A great silence where once was music.

Is this death? She could not know. All she could do was inject the aqueous fluid from her eye into the tiny glass snow globe she had drained and refilled with saline. If the planet settled (if without the benefit of her gravity it careened through the snow globe, ricocheting off the walls as inertia drew it inexorably to the floor), she could not say. Its new container was still and quiet, no humming, no vibration. Just a pinprick, a miniscule glint of light, like a rainbow before it decides to form. Give it time, she told herself. Her planet might have survived and her crystals might well be growing in the happy medium of saline. She hoped so.

She set the snow globe down gently. Tucked it behind a potted plant on the windowsill so it would always get enough light.

And then she waited, dreaming of the day the crystals were big enough to say hi.

870 words

Author’s Note: To be perfectly honest, the title of the story comes from something my girlfriend said while we were cuddling: that a reflection in my glasses made it look like there was a planet in my eye. Obviously, I had to turn that phrase into a story! What would life be like for a girl with a planet in her eye? The story went through a couple false starts—a Star Trek: The Next Generation-inspired crystalline entity, a scary foray into the world of surveillance biometrics—before I landed on this more intimate, personal approach. Often, when we write about something growing inside us, it turns into a story of illness as invasion or pregnancy as body horror (see also: Alien). In this story, I wanted to counter that trend with something both haunting and fulfilling. Something, ultimately, hopeful.

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She co-organized the performance series Fight for Our Lives and served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell.

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