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Let’s face it: Furry fans are going to notice a manga with a title like Reborn As A Polar Bear (aka The Legend of How I Became a Forest Guardian). Check out this description: “After devoted mountain climber Kumakichi Kumada falls into a ravine, he wakes up in the middle of a forest in another world… as a polar bear! Now this tough Ursus maritimus is looking after six werewolf sisters on the run from the humans tyrannizing their clan. Keeping his wits about him and using his knowledge from his past life, the next ‘mountain’ for him to climb will be making a comfortable life in the forest for everyone!” It’s written in by Chihiro Mishima, and illustrated in black & white (with some color pages) by Houki Kusano and Kururi. Take a look over at Yen Press.

image c. 2020 Yen Press

We’re excited about the new open source AV1 video & image codec. Nearly every major tech company seems to be behind it, so what’s the motivation? Our sysadmin doggo Riley and software developer wolf s0ph0s join to go on a deep dive on the history of AV1, what features it will bring, when it will start to appear, and how it even works.

FurCast is sponsored by Twin Tail Creations. Use coupon codes REDWOLF or BLUEFOX to save 15% on silicone products during checkout. Free FurCast Themed Colorations are also available which can be applied as a color choice to your toy purchase.

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Discussed:

• AV1 is a free video codec with more intelligent image compression that takes advantage of how good computing power is getting, while being 50%+ more efficient in bandwidth than most existing solutions
  • Developed by Alliance for Open Media
  • Backed by: Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Samsung, Tencent
    • More support from: BBC, AMD, Adobe, Hulu, CableLabs, Polycom, VideoLAN, Vimeo, Twitch, AND MORE….
  • Built off a foundation of Google’s already deployed VP9, Google’s planned VP10, Cisco’s Thor, and Xiph’s Daala
• Existing codecs:
  • Today’s older H.264 is a licensing nightmare, the successor H.265 is even worse
  • Apple didn’t like VP9’s licensing or battery consumption
  • DVD uses H.262 (MPEG-2), Blu-ray uses H.264, and UHD Blu-ray uses H.265
  • Cisco’s OpenH264 decoder announced in 2013 saved Mozilla $9.75 million a year
  • H.265 carries 23 patents
  • NVIDIA’s matrix of codec support for encoding & decoding on various GPU models
• AV1 is already here!
  • YouTube has a beta setting you can enable, plus a playlist of videos known to support AV1
  • Netflix has started deploying AV1
  • LG’s latest gen SmartTV models have native AV1 decoding
  • AOM’s timeline has hit phase 4.
  • It is rumored Apple will announce AV1 support at the next WWDC or hardware release
  • Chrome and Firefox are getting AVIF support
  • AV1 bit-stream frozen in December 2018
  • AV1 encoding with SVT-AV1 is now faster than H.265
• AV1 uses Opus for audio by default, which sounds good compared to other codecs
• Netflix wrote a tech blog on using AV1 for images, aka AVIF format
  • Farm photo example
  • Barn door photo example
• AV1 is very smart
  • Perceptual Vector Quantization
  • Variably Sized Blocks
  • Lapped Transforms
  • Chroma from Luma Prediction
  • Support for new motion types such as warped motion
  • Film grain synthesis
  • and much much more
  • JPEG in comparison primarily uses Discreet Cosine Transform
  • Do I look like I know what a JPEG is?
• Three encoders:
  • Reference encoder (proves every concept but very slow)
  • rav1e backed by Xiph Mozilla and Vimeo
  • SVT-AV1 backed by Netflix and Intel

[Tech] The New AV1 Codec

According to the Wikipedia page, Jungle Beat is a CGI animated TV series out of South Africa, featuring the dialogue-free adventures and antics of various African animals. Later, the series was expanded into the adventures of Munki and Trunk. (No prizes for guessing what species they are…) Well now this year Munki and Trunk are on their way in their own feature film as Sunrise Productions presents Jungle Beat: The Movie. “One morning, the animals of the jungle wake up to discover that they can speak. They’re even more amazed when they learn the reason why: There’s an alien in the jungle! Little Fneep has come to conquer the planet and has brought some crazy tech with him, including a translation device that lets them talk for the first time. Unfortunately for the intergalactic Scaldronian empire, but fortunately for the jungle, Fneep is a terrible conqueror: He’s homesick, he’s crashed his ship, and he’s no match for the antics of Munki, Trunk, and the gang.” Keep your eyes open: The producers are planning a world-wide on-line release party at the end of this month.

image c. 2020 Sunrise Productions

Been a hell of a week. 

We have a terrible D&D party, people doing what needs to be done with confederate monuments and relics, Savrin relates a tale of them having a fake $20, and the Gamers(tm) are upset.

Stay safe, and Black lives matter.

LINKS Black Visions Collective -  https://secure.everyaction.com/4omQDAR0oUiUagTu0EG-Ig2 

Reclaim The Block -  https://secure.everyaction.com/zae4prEeKESHBy0MKXTIcQ2 

MOODI -  https://www.givemn.org/story/Mxmjeg 

One Petulant Gamer -  https://onepetulantgamer.net/  

Episode 465 - Defund The Police - Been a hell of a week.  We have a terrible D&D party, people doing what needs to be done with confederate monuments and relics, Savrin relates a tale of them having a fake $20, and the Gamers(tm) are upset. Stay safe, and

MOOBARKFLUFF! Click here to send us a comment or message about the show!

This week Taebyn may have actually caught his tail. We chat with Zarafa about furry life and things, and just what is a paradox?  Join us once again for some time spent.

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Thanks to all our listeners and to our staff: Bearly Normal, Rayne Raccoon, Taebyn, Cheetaro, TickTock, and Ziggy the Meme Weasel.

You can send us a message on Telegram at BFFT Chat, or via email at: bearlyfurcasting@gmail.com

Bearly Furcasting #6 - Catch the Tail, Zarafa, and Math

Here’s an “offered again” item that slipped right by us the first time around: Kyrra, Alien Jungle Girl. “Left for dead on an alien planet, Kyrra was taken in and raised by a primitive tribe of demon apes. She has no memory of her previous life and has assimilated to the ways of her adopted family, yet she still looks to the stars and wonders… Where did she come from? What’s out there for her? On her 16th birthday she gets a clue to her origins and sets out for an adventure that will take her beyond the Alien Jungle Girl she knows.” Dark Horse Press collected the original comic series (written by Rich Woodall and illustrated by Craig Rousseau) together in one trade paperback graphic novel, which is available now.

image c. 2020 Dark Horse Press

Hello readers and welcome to the first of many Furry Writers’ Guild spotlights for Pride Month! Today we’ll be interviewing Al Song! His pronouns are he/him/his. He has been published in such anthologies as Fang 8, Roar 9, Tales from the Guild: World Tour, The Furry Cookbook, Foxers or Beariefs, Sensory De-Tails, Howloween, and Difursity. As it was also Asian Pacific American Heritage Month just a few days prior, we want to present this interview as an intersectional look a Pride alongside Asian Heritage. So what are we waiting for, let’s dive in!

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Al Song: I’m a gay red kangaroo living near the caffeine-fueled city of Seattle. My parents are refugees from Laos, and they had me while they lived in Hawaii. I majored in German Studies and Comparative Literature when I was in college. I also took some French, Japanese, and Italian courses, since I fell in love with learning new languages. Culturally speaking, I’m a vegetarian charcuterie board of various foods that seem like they typically shouldn’t belong together. At least it always gives me something new to write about. I typically write and read queer slice of life romance and am editor or such works at Thurston Howl Publications. My other artistic love is music, which is another topic I truly enjoy writing about. Between fretboards and keyboards my fingers probably don’t like me very much.  

Off topic, but I love escape rooms. I’ve done forty of them, and they never get tiring.

FWG: What is your favorite work that you have written?

Al Song: “Rekindling” in Difursity is definitely a story I hold close to my heart. I put a lot of my identities and struggles into that short story. The protagonist is a gay, Laotian-American college student, and the story discusses the intersectionality of being both gay and Asian-American along with some issues my family and I have been through. 

“Serenity in Blue” in Fang volume 8 is another story I’m proud of, since it’s the first story I ever published, and Fang is the first furry anthology I read when I was in college. This story discusses the struggles of life after graduating from college in the modern world, along with the big topics of queerness and mental health, which are subjects that unfortunately are not often discussed in Lao culture. 

When it comes to both of these stories I wanted to bring up things that are rarely discussed and brought to light. Despite all the heaviness, these stories also contain romance and love. I’ve set out to expose audiences to new perspectives identities, while also trying to show those who have been pushed down that there can be hope out there. 

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Al Song: If a story makes a lasting impact (typically a positive one) in my mind, then it’s usually a pretty good one. I’ve read short comics, poems and have listened to songs with concise stories that have left me with more profound thoughts and emotions than some novel series or even shows that lasted multiple seasons. If it’s been a few years, and I’m still thinking about a story, then it’s done something right. I’m not talking about stories that have left me with a bad impression or have triggered me and won’t leave my memory banks. I typically read YA, romance, and slice of life novels that take place in the present, so when a book or short story can stand out amongst all the other books in a positive manner, then I’ll know it was worth my time. If it can also give me a smile when I think about it, then it gets bonus points.

FWG: How long have you been in the guild, and what changes have you seen with regards to how writing is handled since joining?

Al Song: I’ve been in the guild for about two years or so, but I’ve been following it for much longer, since I have friends and peers in within the guild. It feels like there are more opportunities and places to submit stories, and there are more and more diverse voices in the guild itself, which is definitely important. It also seems like there are even more opportunities to learn from one another in the guild.

FWG: What does your Asian Heritage mean to you?

Al Song: It means a lot to me, since it’s shaped my life and its experiences in so many different ways. Being born and raised in the US with a Laotian background has its challenges, but I would never trade my ability to speak Lao for another language or trade my culture in for another one. When I grew up I wished that I could just be like everyone else, but I realized that my identities are incredibly important. I’ve been exposed to so much good food, music, and people who have built me up and helped me through life. It also seems like many people within the US don’t know anything about Laos. I recently had to explain to someone where Laos is located and that Lao is a language. It gives me a chance to teach people something new about the world and broaden their horizons. 

Unfortunately, being both gay and Lao-American can make things more difficult than they need to be. I don’t feel like very many people in queer circles can understand what I go through as an Asian-American, and in Lao spheres queerness is usually a taboo topic, so it feels like I can’t really discuss it with my family. The toughest thing is that I usually don’t feel like I have a place where I can truly belong. Despite all of this I think my identities have helped me become more empathetic with others and what they go through, since I’m always a fish out of water.

FWG: How has being gay affected or inspired the stories you write? Have you written gay characters into your stories?

Al Song: So far I’ve exclusively written queer characters as protagonists, since I’m gay, and there are just so many stories featuring straight protagonists and characters out there, and I want my readers to be able to see parts of themselves within my characters and what they go through, and I want them to be able to ship characters without having to make them queer, since they’re already queer characters. There have been so many times I wished a series or a novel I really enjoyed had more queer representation, so I wanted go out and make that happen.

FWG: How about your heritage? Does it and your gay identity ever mix in terms of inspiration for your stories?

Al Song: Most of my protagonists are Lao-American and Gay. This intersection is probably one of the biggest topics I talk about. Not many people will know what it’s like, and I definitely want to get that experience out there, especially through such a fun medium. Furry editors I’ve worked with have mostly reacted positively to this less common perspective. It’s not often you read about queer Asian-Americans in literature, and whenever I see these characters portrayed positively it definitely brings a smile to my face. Even though I’m focused on creating stories for other queer folk and people of color, I also want my stories to resonate with those who don’t share my identities as well. I write about universal things like rejection, creative struggles, and love, but giving the stories a gay and Asian twist seems to help them show a unique perspective. I’ve taken a lot of my personal experiences as a gay man along with my Laotian heritage and have put them into my stories, because I do want to make a positive impact and to show others like me that we’re not alone in this world.

FWG: Do you feel like the issues that affect the outside world involving your identity or heritage affect your writing within the fandom or not?

Al Song: Definitely, the mainstream media could really do a better job with representation of both Asian-Americans and queer characters, since there’s a huge lack of both identities in TV and film, and as much as I love YA novels it’s not that often that I get to see queer people of color as protagonists. Sometimes we do see a character who is gay or Asian, then they end up becoming a side character and it makes me even sadder when they get all the stereotypes applied to them. In my stories I want to undo this and to show off characters who share my identities in a positive manner.

FWG: What kinds of intersectional issues have you had to deal with while being a gay Asian author? What would you like people to know about these issues and how could they help to improve to make these less to deal with?

Al Song: I’ve been around a lot of authors who think they can just write whatever they want about a marginalized group or identity that the author doesn’t share without any consultations. I understand that this is a heated topic, so let’s talk about music for a second. It’s very cringeworthy to see an actor play an instrument incorrectly on the screen, and if you’re going to write technical aspects of a musical performance or the life of a musician, then please do your research and reach out to some musicians and have them look over your work. Violin bows need to be rosined, and fretboards and fingerboards are different things. There have been times when I’ve read a musical description and felt a lot disappointment and realized the author probably wasn’t a musician. If you’re going to talk about a group of people who don’t share your identities, and you don’t want to look foolish, then maybe you should reach out. 

Unfortunately, within the fandom I’ve seen Asian characters not always presented in a great light. I’ve read stories where we’ve been heavily stereotyped and speak in broken English, ones where we become exoticized and fetishized, and at times we get shown in a negative light as the antagonist. Sometimes it’s a combination of these things. It’s definitely disheartening to see this happen within the fandom, since it’s a place I love so much. For some reason explaining to people that I don’t want someone to be attracted to me because of my race is more confusing than an AP Calculus class. It would be nice to have more writers and editors who are cognizant of this when they’re crafting stories and are publishing them. Telling someone that their lived experience is incorrect is definitely not helpful. The same thing applies to straight people who write queer characters. At least reach out to someone.

FWG: Do you have favorite Asian and/or queer authors and has their literature affected your writing in the fandom?

Al Song: Shawn Wong is probably my favorite Asian author, since he was also my intermediate prose instructor at the University of Washington. He taught me so much about the importance of writing a story with a message, along with his own struggles as an Asian-American writer with immigrant parents. He really shaped my understanding of what stories are along with how to have a more critical view of them. He also helped me realize that writing about my issues and experiences is extremely crucial, and that those things shouldn’t be hidden. One of my favorite gay authors is David Levithan. After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson during my senior year of high school I was inspired to write similar slice of life gay romance stories that also dealt with mental health. The novel was so sad and funny, and it just made me so happy. This made me want to create joy in the hearts of those who read my stories. 

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Al Song: “Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel,” by Sara Farizan. It’s a smart and hilarious YA novel about being a nerdy, young, queer, person of color, with immigrant parents in modern day America. I got to meet the author while I was a student librarian at the Q Center of the University of Washington. She gave me some of the best advice that I continue to follow today when it comes to writing. This was during a time when I had some people tell me that I was writing too much about music and romance, so she pretty much told me to keep writing about those things if it’s what I love doing. Thanks to her advice I’ve been published in multiple anthologies. 

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Al Song: Honest art is something I really enjoy, and it’s been the thing that’s helped me garner a modicum of success when it comes to writing in the fandom. I definitely write what I know, and I’m sure most people know a good amount about themselves along with the issues they’ve been through. Every person is different and unique, so when we each put ourselves into our art it allows us to shine and stand out. It’s definitely understandable that vulnerability is a tough and scary thing, but between putting ourselves and our works out there, dealing with rejection, and facing heart-rending critiques; vulnerability is at the forefront of all of this. It can be used to strengthen us and our creativity. As cliché as it sounds, maybe you should just be your true self.

We would like to thank Al once again for this interview! If you’d like to follow him or his works you can do so on Twitter @song_roo, or on his FurAffinity page or SoFurry page. Stay tuned for next week when we feature another member of the guild for pride! Until we meet again, may your words flow like water.

Dragon Whisperer is a new full-color comic miniseries from Red 5 Comics. “In a world of clockwork and steam, cursed airship captain, Alexander Faulk, endures his centuries-long quest for an end to his torment: A Dragon! His ceaseless pursuit bears scarce reward, that is until Faulk discovers the bridge between the world of man, and the world of monsters. Her name is Rosalinda Eberhardt, and she is the Dragon Whisperer.” Written by Alex Deluca and illustrated Glen Fernandez, issues should be available now as comic stores slowly re-open.

image c. 2020 Red 5 Comics

 

Hello there FWG members! For those of you that have been with us for a long time, you will be excited to hear that we are bringing back the monthly newsletters! For those newer to the guild, we once produced monthly newsletters to tell people about things like new open markets and guild news. We’re hoping to bring this back to give all our members information to help them thrive while writing anthropomorphic fiction!

First it’s been a very busy month for the guild. We updated our website, got a new logo, opened up a new Discord channel, updated our membership listings, and voted on new by-laws and a new code of conduct. With all of our listing updates, we are showing 114 active members! We’ll keep accepting any updates as they come in, but we’re happy so many of you got the form filled out fast.

The vote to implement our new by-laws and code of conduct passed with over a 90% majority of members, so these will now be put into place. You can now see them on our website. With this in mind, this opens up several new officer positions within the guild. If you might be interested in becoming our Public Relations Officer, Markets Manager, or potentially the Cóyotl Awards Chair, please get in contact with a guild officer so we can talk to you!

Speaking of the Cóyotl Awards, where are they? We did hold our vote for the 2019 awards and have the results tallied. Issues with the current Covid 19 pandemic have made getting our normal supplies for our special coyote trophies a bit difficult as well as makes sending them out to winners tough. We are considering a special awards stream for the winners hopefully very soon and we promise to keep you posted.

If you haven’t joined the new official FWG Discord, you’re missing out on a lot of fun. One of the new features on the Discord is our special beta reading program, so we would like to spotlight Rockie Thiger (@Thiger on Discord) for providing the most beta reads for fellow authors this month! If you’d like to learn more about this new program or simply jump into the conversation come join us on Discord.

We would also like to welcome the newest members of our guild: Rockie Thiger, David “Ryft Sarri” Yenser, Resolute, Stacy Bender / P.C. Hatter, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Jensyn Grayves, Metassus, and Herr Wozzeck! We are very excited to have these wonderful writers join our ranks.

In honor of Asian Pacific Heritage Month, we interviewed FWG member Allison Thai! You can find that full interview here. We’ll also be featuring some authors during Pride Month on the blog, so keep an eye out!

One last bit of guild business, we would like to remind our members about our Microfiction Monday initiative. Any writer, non-members included, that can write a Tweet sized story has the opportunity to have it featured on our Twitter! You can learn more about the program and how to submit here.

Several new books have been released over the last couple of months including:

• Furry Haiku edited by Thurston Howl
• Whip and Boot by Herr Wozzeck
• The Complete Dragonsbane Saga by Ian Madison Keller
• Gruesome Games: Howlers Volume 3 Edited by Thurston Howl
• Purgatorio: The Ten Regions Of Furry Purgatory Edited by Weasel
• Species: Wildcats edited by KC Alpinus, 
• Difursity: Stories by Furries of Color edited by Weasel

Goal Publications also has two novels available for pre-order now including:

• Ritual of the Ancients by Ian Madison Keller
• When a Cat Loves a Dog by Mary E. Lowd

We want to express some particular excitement for Awoo, Who’s This? Coming from Bound Tales, this special anthology features members of the Furry Writers’ Guild trying to write in the style of other members. Funds from this anthology go to help the guild so consider giving it a look!

Part of our website update was making our Furry Writers’ Market better than ever before! You can find all of open markets for furry writing we can track down here: https://furrywritersguild.com/furry-writers-market/

Currently, these anthology markets are open:

• The Furry Gameshow Network (Deadline: July 10, 2020)
• Leave The Lights On (Deadline: July 20, 2020)
• Dread Volume 2. (Deadline: August 7, 2020)
• 1921: Furries In Fedoras (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Reclamation Project: Year Two (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Electric Sewer 2: Boogie Nights (Deadline: December 1, 2020)

Consider checking out our page for details and writing up a story for one of these awesome anthologies!

We know there’s been a lot going on lately, but we hope the guild can keep working together to keep making this an awesome space for all of our members. If you have any ideas for special programs we could work on, be sure to let us know! We have more projects around the corner that we’re very excited to show off when they are ready. Stay safe all of you wonderful furry writers!

– FWG President Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps

Welcome to Issue 7 of Zooscape!

If you’re reading this issue of Zooscape, then you’ve survived the long, hard spring that lasted ten thousand years.  You’ll need some provisions before continuing on your journey.  So, please, take these stories with you on your way…

* * *

The God-Smoker by Dylan Craine

Maker Space by Adele Gardner

When the Horse Came to the Open House by K. C. Mead-Brewer

Love From Goldie by David Steffen

Riding Through the Desert by Laurence Raphael Brothers

Fur and Feather by Ingrid L. Taylor

* * *

Each of these stories is a journey in miniature, and the characters are changed by the end.  Much as you may be changed, hopefully for the better, by reading them.

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, we have a Patreon.  We’re closing to submissions for the summer, but we’ll see you in September when the season turns!

by Ingrid L. Taylor

“The hummingbird flew to the coyote and hovered above his muzzle, which was flecked with shell fragments and sea salt.”

The meadow had been hers for as long as it had taken the flowers to pass through one cycle of blooming and fading. She had defended against the larger birds, the crows and the sparrows, as yellow sun had given way to the pale autumn. The memory of her mother’s nest had dimmed, and she learned to treasure the solitary rustle of the grasses and the slow darkening of days. The coyote came with the smell of rain. She heard him at night as he passed around the edge of her meadow, keeping to the shelter of the trees.

Though it was not in the hummingbird’s nature to seek companionship, she felt a fascination for the coyote that slowly grew into love as the sleeting winter rains faded into the warm drizzle of spring. She loved him for his lonely howl that rang clear and mournful on the cold nights when she was tucked away in her nest, and she thought that someone who made a sound so beautiful surely couldn’t be bad. She was a creature of the daytime, of sunlight and flowers and sweet nectar. She was flighty as well, dashing from one flower to the next, never wanting to give a single bloom too much of her attention. She sensed a depth and steadiness in the coyote where she might rest her pounding wings and calm her racing heart.

The coyote came to the beach at the edge of the woods in the early mornings. He ate the crabs that washed up on the shore, and she watched him savor the salty crunch of their shells. Sometimes he ate the seaweed too, when hunting was lean. She imagined the cool sand was soft on the pads of his feet, and the brine soothed his throat, hoarse from his nightly offerings to the moon.

She found excuses to leave her meadow and come down to the beach, hovering over the white flowers of blackberry bushes that tangled the border from forest to shore and taking in their sparse nourishment. The coyote lay down in the sand with a crab shell propped between his paws. His canines gleamed in the early light of morning. The surf sang its endless song. It was the hour of possibility, when the moon and sun touched fingertips before they went their separate ways, and their children, the stars, closed their luminous eyes.

The hummingbird flew to the coyote and hovered above his muzzle, which was flecked with shell fragments and sea salt. His ears pricked forward, and he lifted a paw to swat at her. She avoided it easily—she was fast. The coyote stretched his lips back, and his tongue lolled from the side of his mouth.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She did not often speak to the four-legged animals, only the birds that shared the air with her, and once, a wayward cat that had passed through her meadow. She had fluffed out all of her feathers and buzzed the cat’s head, shrieking at him to leave her territory. Now unsure what to say to the coyote, she took off down the beach, zigging and zagging. He chased her, his body stretched to full length as his feet pounded the sand.

She paused above a fallen log, and he sat and panted at her with his pink tongue. The sunlight slanted off her, and the wet sand steamed as the sun rose in the sky. Soon it would be time for him to go.

The coyote rested his chin on the log, his eyes a soft brown like chestnuts that fell to the forest floor. She perched on the log and folded her wings, certain now he wouldn’t hurt her. He blew his hot breath on her. Her feathers lifted with the force of it, and she was changed in that moment—no longer a creature of air and light but weighted by the burden of meat and bone and soil that invited the decaying flesh.

The heat of the new day pressed upon her, and the coyote was gone. She caught a last glimpse of his bushy tail as he disappeared into the forest.

Day after day, the hummingbird and coyote played together on the beach. Sometimes the chase was long and sometimes it lasted for only a few minutes. At those times, they rested together on the log. She gripped his wiry fur in her tiny feet and curled up on his back, and worried about the outline of his ribs that showed beneath his coat. His food was taken by creatures who left shiny metal teeth on the forest floor, mouths that didn’t devour but maimed and imprisoned. She had heard the cries of the animals caught. The creatures brought the scent of panic and fear, so strong that even she could smell it. It permeated the forest, and darkness spread. Flowers bloomed less brightly, their nectar was less sweet, and she had to fly farther every day to find fuel for her demanding body.

One morning the coyote didn’t come to the beach. She waited on the log, wings folded, until the sun was high overhead and the aroma of rotting kelp and dead fish choked the air. The surf rushed in and covered the sand. Pebbles, caught helpless in the unyielding grip of the waves, tumbled and rolled. The hummingbird watched them as the air closed around her. She looked behind her to the woods. She knew its meadows and clearings, but she had never ventured into the entangled mass of trees and underbrush that made up its dense center. Her heart fluttered, and she was afraid.

Dewdrops clung to blades of grass in defiance of the rising heat of the day. The meadow sparkled in the morning light. Petals swayed in choruses of white, purple, and yellow. She dipped her tongue into a bloom and lapped up the nectar. Its energy flowed through her, and her wings pumped harder and faster. She ascended, higher and higher, until the individual flowers coalesced into a rainbow of color below her. She flew into the woods.

She had always imagined dark and impenetrable undergrowth, but beneath the redwood canopy she saw a loamy path dappled with sunlight and dotted with small bushes. The air was wet. Pale mushrooms sprouted around the trunks of the trees, which were covered on one side with a carpet of green moss. She hovered, weighted by the ancient feel of the forest, and for the first time in her life the hummingbird sensed the depth of time, that all things pass into darkness.

“What are you doing here, little bird?” The owl sat nearby on a thick branch. His eyes gleamed in the dim light.

The hummingbird dashed behind a broad leaf.

“I’m looking for the coyote.” Her voice was thin and high in the stillness between the trees.

The owl’s eyes followed her, immense and yellow. “You would make a tasty snack before my bedtime, little hummingbird.”

“Please—Will you help me find him?”

“Come out from behind that leaf, and I’ll consider it.”

The hummingbird moved from the leaf’s camouflage, forcing herself to hover in front of the owl while her instincts screamed at her to flee.

“Have you seen him?”

The owl looked long and hard at her, then with a shake that ruffled all of his feathers, he settled deeper onto the branch. “You’re lucky that I had a good night hunting. I won’t eat you today. But your coyote was not so lucky. You’ll find him ahead. Look for the biggest tree in the woods.” The owl closed his eyes.

The hummingbird waited a moment, but the owl appeared to be asleep. As she zoomed past him, the owl muttered, “Evil roots in our home. Take care, little one.”

She found the coyote beneath an ancient redwood. He lay on his side, his ribs heaving with each rasping breath. The metal teeth, no longer shiny but stained dark with his blood, gripped his front leg. He lay in a pool of mud and hair and torn skin. There were grooves in the dirt around him where he had dug in his claws, trying to escape.

“My love,” she hovered over him, “how can I free you?”

He had bitten his tongue in his pain and frenzy, and his words were thick with blood. “I must chew my leg free, but I am too weak.”

The hummingbird brought him drops of water from a nearby stream, held carefully in a leaf that she tipped into his mouth. She found some berries nearby and carried them, one by one to his lips, until she dropped exhausted onto a low bush.

“It is not enough.” The coyote’s voice was thin and strained. “Go quickly and find the beaver. She is strong enough to chew me free.”

The hummingbird floated over him. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Hurry— before these monsters come for me.”

She flew as fast as she could to the beaver’s den, though she was heavy with the scent of his blood and rent flesh.

The beaver poked her nose out. “What is all this shrieking and fluttering?”

“The coyote is trapped, and he can’t free his leg. Come and chew him free with your powerful teeth.”

“Why would I do that? He might devour me once he’s free.”

“Please, we don’t have much time. He’ll die if you don’t help.”

The beaver squatted on her round haunches. “Besides, I don’t eat meat. I can’t imagine the taste of it in my teeth. It’s horrifying.”

“You can spit it out. Please… I love him, and I don’t want him to die.”

The hummingbird’s feathers drooped as the beaver gazed off into the distance. A breeze passed through, carrying the smell of dead fish and rotted wood. She thought of their walks on the beach, and her heart crashed against her ribcage as if it would burst from the confines of her chest.

“All right. I’ll do it, but he has to promise that he won’t eat me.”

The beaver’s steady plod through the forest was agonizing for the hummingbird. The sun slanted low in the sky when they reached the place where the coyote was trapped.

He was gone. Only a scattered pile of bloody leaves remained. A strange sensation permeated the air, sharp and violent, like nothing the hummingbird had encountered before. She flew in furious circles over the area, looking for any sign of him. There was only the silence of the darkening forest. The beaver hung her head, and after a moment she ambled back in the direction of her den. The hummingbird watched her go and knew no word or gesture could contain this moment. There was only the bright pain that washed through her.

In the following days, the pain transformed to a sorrow that muted the shine of her feathers to a dull gray. She sat in a bush by the meadow and watched flowers nod in the wind. She thought often of the beach but couldn’t bear to return.

One early morning she could no longer stand the rustle of the meadow grass and the cloying cheerfulness of the flowers. She went to the beach, to the log where they had always met. The feel of the smooth driftwood under her feet caused fresh pain. She watched the waves topple pebbles and small sticks and thought that she could fly into those waves and disappear.

The bushes behind her rustled, and soft feet padded toward her. A four-legged creature stood on the beach looking at her. The creature had no fur, rather exposed muscle gleamed in the early light, outlined by veins and connective tissue. She drew back, frightened. It took a step towards her. She recognized the eyes of the coyote, though the long lashes and warm brown irises looked out of place in the wet redness of his face.

“I’ve waited for you,” he said.

“You were gone when I came back. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find you.”

“They have taken my skin and fur.”

A fly buzzed around the face of the coyote, then passed through his head and continued down the beach.

The hummingbird fled, beating her wings as fast as she could to escape the horrible raw thing that her coyote had become. She stopped and hovered just at the edge of the beach, where the sand mingled with coarse grass. She could return to the meadow, live out her days among the flowers and grasses, and try to forget the vision of bare muscle and blood. But the coyote’s eyes appeared before her, sad and lost. She remembered how much joy he had brought her, and she knew she couldn’t leave him to his loneliness and pain.

She turned and raced back down the beach, where the coyote waited for her.

 

* * *

About the Author

Ingrid L. Taylor is a fiction writer, poet, and veterinarian. She lives in the desert with a black cat, a Newfoundland dog, and a yard full of pigeons and hummingbirds. When she’s not writing sad and creepy stories, she provides expert veterinary commentary on animal cruelty cases for an international nonprofit. She is completing a dual MFA in fiction and nonfiction at Pacific University, and she was selected for a Playa Artist-in-Residence award in 2018, where she fell in love with the Oregon high desert. Her stories have appeared in Red Rock Review, Dies Infaustus, Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace: An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women, Gaia: Shadow and Breath, vol.3, and others. Check out her Instagram @tildybear for her writing news and adventures with her animals.

by David Steffen

“You look so close, yet we are separated by compressed infinity.”

We used to be so close.  What happened between us, Gloria?  Is it because I died?  I would never have thought our marriage was so superficial.  For Christ’s sake, we’d been married for eighteen years!  And now you won’t even talk to me, won’t even look at me.  I’d never even believed in reincarnation, but here I am.  I guess reincarnation believed in me.

I know I’ve changed.  You pass by and I watch you, unblinking, hoping for even a split second of eye contact.  After being ignored for so long, even that small acknowledgment of my existence would be amazing.  But, no, you keep walking.  As always.

You look so close, yet we are separated by compressed infinity.  The entrance on top of my prison is open, always enticing me, but outside I cannot breathe and a terrible gravity holds me down.

I push towards you again, but the invisible barrier holds me back.  You still don’t look at me, but you approach me and rain flakes of disgusting nourishment down upon me.  And I grudgingly gobble them up, resentful of my betraying hunger.

Breakfast passes in silence as you read your newspaper and I watch.  If only I could read it too, but the headlines are distorted into nonsense shapes, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

Soon you leave for work, and I have nothing to do until you return.  My new life is so empty when I’m alone.  Is this how you felt when deadlines loomed and I had to work overtime, my presence only evident by my incoming paychecks?

I return to my abode and marvel for the hundredth time at the beauty of its façade.  It is a cruel trick, but one which I allow myself to fall for time and again.  The outside is wondrous, a rainbow of colors: my castle, my home, promising even greater splendor and luxury inside.  But once across the threshold, the lie is revealed.  The inside is colorless, featureless, nothing but a hollow shell, the discarded skin of a mythical beast.  Yet it is my only refuge from the light. In here I can forget what I’ve become for a time, and can remember happier times.

My favorite memories are our trips together, once every year, a different location every time.  Backpacking across Europe, volunteering in South Africa.  My favorite trip was Australia, and diving by the Great Barrier Reef.  The vibrant colors, the lush wildlife, all existing there as it had long before people ever came across it.  How I longed to be one of those fish, living there forever in an underwater wonderland with you.

I float in the dark and remember until I can stand it no more, and I retreat from my castle.  But it is equally dark outside.  Has the sun already set?  You should have been home long before now.  I hope you didn’t get in a car accident on your way home.

I wait and wait until I feel I will die from the anticipation.  Finally, I see the door from the garage open and you come in, alive and well, thank God!  And you’re… with someone.  A man.  And… you’re holding hands.

Gloria, what are you doing, bringing a man into my house?  But I suppose it’s not my house anymore, and you are free to do what you like.  I don’t even know how long it’s been since I died.  Maybe you waited a respectful amount of time.  I can’t bring myself to look away as you kiss him, long and wet.

I grow agitated as I watch the kiss go on and on and I work myself into a froth, spinning round and round in my confinement.  I spiral up and up and I escape.  I try to run to you, to shout to you, but the poison air and crushing gravity assault me, leaving me pathetically stranded, barely able to move.

I succeed in interrupting your kiss, and you scoop me up in your hands—oh the ecstasy of your touch, the feel of your skin against mine—and then you dump me unceremoniously into my prison without a word.

You wash your hands, and then you grab him by the shirt and pull him along after you, toward the bedroom, our brief but intimate encounter already forgotten.  I am thankful, at least, that I don’t have to watch what happens next.

“I love you, Gloria,” I try to say, but there is no sound, only bubbles rising before my eyes.

 

* * *

About the Author

David Steffen is the editor of Diabolical Plots and the co-founder and administrator of The Submission Grinder.  His work has been published in very nice places like Escape Pod, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Podcastle, among others.  The rumors that he is the pupal stage of some kind of dog-cloud hybrid are exaggerations at best.

by Laurence Raphael Brothers

“Then, his mouth right by my ear, he said quietly, “This place ain’t right. I’m gonna stay a horse for a while. Just in case.””

On the third day in the desert, we stopped at a dusty old creek bed full of drift sand. I was hoping we could dig a shallow well but—”No dice,” said my horse, so we moved on.

I sighed. “At least we’re out of the rain.”

“Rain,” he said, shaking his head, “Come on, Susannah, don’t torture me like that.”

“Sorry.”

We kept going. Pioche, Nevada was supposed to be out here somewhere, said to be the last outpost of humanity in the sprawling desert covering the western half of the former United States. The change was supposed to have started around here, and the people in Pioche might have clues to reversing it. Or maybe we could call for help from the space aliens who were supposed to have landed nearby back in the day, at a place called Area 51. Both were feeble hopes, to be sure, probably no more than hoaxes or myths from a hundred years ago, but we had nothing left to us back east.

Before the change this had been scrub land, dry but livable, but now it was a barren mix of salt flats and sandy dunes. With the exception of some black specks overhead that were probably rocs or teratorns keeping watch in case we should stop moving, there was no visible sign of life, not even a cactus or a tumbleweed.

“Break time,” I said after a while. “Okay?”

“Sure thing, Sooz.” My horse formed a nipple for me in the back of his neck, just behind his silvery mane, and I sipped some of his water.

Later that night, we made a rough camp in the middle of nowhere. Since there were never any clouds or haze, the stars shone like rhinestones and the milky way shimmered overhead. My horse stood a few yards off, looking up at the sky. I wondered what he saw there, how it affected him. After a minute, he shook his head like he’d decided something, and turned to face me.

“Something’s out there,” he said.

“Really? You think so?”

“In the desert. It’s like it’s calling to me.”

I looked in his big blue eyes, put my hand on the soft skin above his nose, felt his warm breath on my cheek. Just like a regular old horse, which was pretty much the opposite of what he was.

“What about you?” he asked. “You got any feel for what’s out there?”

“Nope,” I said. “But I’m not a magical horse critter, either.”

He sighed and I petted him on the nose again. “I’m sorry, horse. Wish you didn’t have to slog all the way out here with me. I know how hard it is on you with no water around anywhere.”

“Come on, Sooz. Can’t hardly be your horse no more if we split up, now can I?”

I hugged him tight around his neck, buried my face in his mane. “Damn it, horse, don’t you make me cry.”

He snorted. “Shouldn’t waste the water. Case you were wondering, that’s why I’m still standing here on four legs stead of hugging you back the way I want to. Takes too much water for me to change right now. Got to conserve.”

“Oh. How much do you have left?”

“Three-four days at this rate.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah. This place’s as dry as I’ve ever been. You know I can dowse like anything, but it ain’t working here.”

“Shit,” I said. “It’s not your fault. It’s just— it’s not right the way you’re always doing everything for me. I don’t feel right about riding you, even.”

My horse shook his head and pulled his lips back a little from his big yellow teeth. “I go where you go. No matter what. Unless you want me to leave.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Not ever. I know when I got it good.”

“So why don’t you bind me?” he asked. “Then it really would be forever. And you could use my name, too, ‘stead of just calling me horse.”

I sighed. “We’ve been through that. It’s not fair. You’d have to do whatever I said and—”

“I’d like that, though.”

“Damn it, horse, you know I wouldn’t. And that’s why I can’t use your name, with you unbound, because maybe someone would hear me say it, and then they’d be the one to bind you.”

“I guess it makes sense,” he said. “I just— Well, let’s see what happens tomorrow. We’ll find the place for sure.”

But we didn’t. Just more desert. We started spiraling out from the place we thought Pioche should have been, looking for something, anything at all, and not finding it. On day six, we played dead for half an hour, and lured a pair of teratorns out of the sky, change-born birds so big they shouldn’t have been able to fly, but that didn’t stop them any more than being impossible stopped my horse. I got the first one with my revolver while it was considering who to take a bite out of first, and then I had to pull out my Winchester and waste a precious 30-06 cartridge on the other when it took off. My horse drained the water out of the birds in under a minute, leaving dried out husks behind.

“How much?” I asked.

“‘Nother day’s worth, maybe.”

There were no more black specks in the sky after that.

I kind of lost track of time then because I wasn’t taking near as much water as before, and I think it was making me a little crazy. Everything was hurting, especially my head and my throat. My next drink was the only thing I could think about, after a while.

It was day eight, past midnight, when my horse staggered and fell. It was either luck or him trying to spare me, because I didn’t get my leg crushed even though I wasn’t paying attention to my riding. I had to help him up, and it was scary-easy to do; he weighed no more than me by then. And where he used to be a silver-tone gray with a coat so rich it was almost like a cat’s, now he was pale, bleached white, and I could see his bones under his skin. I felt terrible, because I hadn’t noticed how bad off he was, wrapped up as I was in my own misery.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I just can’t anymore.”

The shame in his voice woke me up from the fevered trance I’d been in, and it made me as angry as I’d ever been. Angry at myself, really, but I didn’t want to admit it.

“You big old idiot!” I shouted at him, though it made my throat hurt even worse. “Why’n’t you tell me you were out of water?”

“You know why,” he said.

“Damn you. You think I want to leave you behind?”

“You got to.”

“Well, I’m not going to. You better take some water from me, and we’ll go on together till we both can’t anymore.”

“From you? No way—”

“Listen,” I said, “I know you love me. I do, okay? But you got to admit I love you too. So for once, let me be the one to give you something.”

“But—”

“God damn, horse, do what I tell you.”

I thought I was dying, but for his sake I didn’t cry out or flinch, even though I could feel the water draining out of my blood and muscles and guts and eyes and everything. But he started filling out a little, getting a touch of color back in his coat, so that was okay, and when he was done, I was still standing, so that was okay too.

We walked on, side by side, me leaning on him, and I don’t know which of us was slowing the other down, but it wasn’t exactly speedy travel. Then the sun came up, and all I saw in four directions was the hazy flat desert horizon.

“Camp?” asked my horse.

“Nah,” I said, choking on the words. “No point.”

The sun was halfway up to the zenith, and it was already hot as hell and way drier, when my horse shuddered. I thought he was going to collapse again, but he raised his head and I could see his sunken blue eyes gazing fiercely off to the west.

“Water,” he said. “That way. If I ain’t crazy, anyhow.”

I looked, but it was all flat dry sandy nothing. Any other time I’d give him shit, but not today. So we changed course and kept going.

Noon. We were neither of us going to last much longer, and I was wondering if it was okay to just quit. But my horse was still trudging onward, and I decided I’d be damned if I gave up before he did. And just like that, there it was, a big old crater not more than a hundred yards away. I was on my last legs, sure, and so was my horse, but no way could we have missed seeing it from miles off. We went up to the lip and there was just a shallow grade down to the crater floor, and half a mile away a cluster of small structures.

It took us a good fifteen minutes to make it that far. The town wasn’t much, a dozen clapboard buildings. That was strange, because where’d they get the wood from anyway, but just then neither of us was wasting time on little things like that. My map said Pioche was supposed to have a couple hundred buildings spread out over a few square miles of ground, but then it was a pre-change map, so who knew, anyway.

My horse said “Water: there,” and there turned out to be an old-timey trough with a lever pump beside it. And don’t you know it pulled water on the first swing of the handle? Yeah, right, impossible, except we were both head-down in the trough drinking the impossible water instead of arguing with it.

Half an hour later, I recovered enough to realize how messed up I’d been, and how close to dying. My head was pounding, I had the worst sore throat ever, my eyes were burning, and when I got up, the world spun around for a minute before settling down. It was wonderful. I never felt so good in my life, despite feeling like hell, because I was still alive. And my horse was… he was beautiful. He’d filled out back to normal, drinking at least twenty gallons, maybe sucking even more out of the ground or wherever the pump was connected to, and his hair was perfect. I mean, he could have been coming from some horse beauty pageant or whatever like they used to have before the change.

But he was still a horse when he didn’t need to be, and I was going to ask why when he whinnied and slobbered his tongue over my face. Then, his mouth right by my ear, he said quietly, “This place ain’t right. I’m gonna stay a horse for a while. Just in case.”

It only took five minutes to survey the buildings from the outside. It was an old-west town in miniature, with a saloon, a general store, a telegraph office (but no wires or poles), and a stage station with an attached stable that housed neither horses nor coaches. The rest of the buildings were either private homes or just didn’t have signs outside saying what they were. Back east when I was a kid, I used to watch old movies on one of the last videoplasts that was still working at Chapel Hill, and this place had the look of the westerns they made before the change.

There wasn’t a single person to be seen anywhere around. Looking through the glass window of the general store (the other establishments had wooden windows latched shut), I saw it was dark inside. The door was locked, so I went on to the saloon. That door opened when I pushed on it, but with the windows shuttered I couldn’t see much to begin with.

“What the hell,” I said, not specifically to my horse, who just happened to be standing nearby, and I walked inside.

The room was pretty dark, but apart from the light through the doorway which cut off as the door swung closed, some sunlight filtered through cracks in the shutters. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, but then I could see well enough not to trip over anything. A bunch of wood tables were scattered around the room. Behind the brass-railed bar on the far wall, there were shelves of shot-glasses and steins, two big kegs and a double row of bottles. There was no debris, no sand, no dust even. Couldn’t be more than a couple of days since it was cleaned. But the place was obviously empty, so I headed out again.

Back with my horse, I pretended to mess around with his cinch and so on, in case anyone was watching, and under my breath I muttered. “You’re right. This place is impossible. If we hadn’t just almost gotten killed getting here, if there wasn’t a chance of finding something to help the folks back east, I’d want to turn around right now. You got any ideas?”

He shook his silver-maned head. “Nothing. What’re you gonna —” He jerked a little and I saw the way he was looking. There was motion behind the windows of the general store.

“I’m checking it out,” I said, and walked that way, my hand not far from my holster. My horse ambled along behind me, casual like he was just following me the way any old horse might do. I got close and saw a man in there, standing behind a counter. Well, what was I going to do? I opened the door and walked inside.

“Howdy, miss.” The man was around fifty, salt and pepper hair with a walrus mustache. He was wearing an apron over a gray three-piece suit with a black ribbon tie. Except that he was dressed like an actor in one of those old movies, he seemed pretty normal to me. “What can I do you for?”

“I, uh….”

“New in town, miss? Just come in?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we got a little of everything in this shop. But if we don’t got it, you ain’t getting it, cause this’s the only shop in town.” He chuckled. “Now then, want some rolling tobacco? Some snuff? Trail rations? Ammo?”

I’d got some of my composure back by now.

“Some information would be nice,” I said.

“I got some of that. And it’s on sale, too: free today. What you want to know?”

“Okay. First off, where is everybody?”

The man frowned. “Not sure what you mean by that, missy. This ain’t exactly a big town.”

“I mean you’re the only person I’ve seen so far.”

“Oh, well…. No one in their right mind’s going to walk around at noon in the high summer, are they? But you check out the saloon, I’m sure you’ll find a passel of folk. And if you’re new in town, I recommend it, cause you can probably get a room there for the night too.”

I was going to complain that I just had, but I decided to leave it be.

“Second thing, I heard Pioche was bigger than this. Like ten times bigger.”

“Pioche?” He laughed, cut himself off. “Not laughing at you, miss. But this here is Rachel. Population 34. Don’t know about no Pioche, ‘mafraid.”

I traded him a .45 cartridge for a string of rock candy and got out of there without asking him about where he got all his stuff, or about the telegraph office with no wire and the stage station with no horses. The whole deal was too weird for me just then.

When I got back to him, my horse told me, “Just saw someone go into the saloon. And now there’s music coming out of the place.”

“Uh, huh.” I told him what the shopkeeper had told me. That this was Rachel, not Pioche.

“Don’t make much difference to me. Shouldn’t be here, either way.”

“I know.”

“I’m scared,” he said. “There’s something bad here.”

I’d never even imagined my horse might be scared of anything. I wanted to hug and comfort him, but I didn’t because it would’ve looked weird if anyone was watching. So I just muttered in his ear, instead.

“I’m scared, too. But I guess we better check out that saloon again. Be silly to run away without finding anything out, right?”

“Suppose so,” he said, but he didn’t mean it.

Before I even got to the door, I could see the window shutters were open, and I could hear a piano playing inside. And when I entered, there wasn’t just one person in the room but eight, the saloon keeper behind the bar, two cowboy-looking men bellied up to the bar with a bottle between them, four townies sitting around a table playing cards, and a piano-player at a small upright I hadn’t noticed the first time through. He was smoking a cheroot and playing “Beautiful Dreamer.” But where had they come from? My horse had only mentioned one person going in, and he could hardly have missed the others.

There’s a standard scene in those old movies where the gunslinger steps into the saloon and the music stops and everyone stares at him. Not this time. Everyone just kept on doing what they were doing. None of them looked to be armed, and at first glance they seemed like ordinary folks except for the old-time outfits. I hesitated because right now more than anything I wanted to get on my horse and head on out of this place. But I steeled myself and walked up to the bar.

“Howdy,” I said, because that’s how it goes in the movies, and the saloon keeper nodded at me. She was a tall woman with weathered brown skin and rich russet hair, not young or old, and her eyes were an amazing apple green. But there was something cold about her appearance, something cruel hiding behind her smile. I realized I’d seen the same thing in the shopkeeper’s face, but I’d shrugged it off. In the woman, it seemed more blatant, more forceful, and more terrifying too.

“What’ll you have?” she asked.

“Whiskey,” I managed, still pretending I was in a movie. “Straight up.”

She slapped a shot-glass down on the bar top with a satisfying crack and filled it just to the rim from an unlabeled bottle. I tapped it back. Not bad. At this point something was supposed to happen, like a bad guy barging in, but nothing did.

“You take barter?” I asked.

She shook her head. “We don’t get many visitors. Your drinks’re free. Welcome to Rachel.”

She poured me another; I drank it in two sips. Warmth blossomed in my throat and belly. I could feel the buzz, which was alarming after just two shots, but I guess the almost-dying-of-thirst thing takes it out of you. No one paid me much attention; the saloon keeper didn’t say anything more; and no gunmen showed up, either. I sighed. Wasn’t going to get anywhere this way.

At last I said, “Little town like this, I figure if anyone’s in charge, it’s the saloon keeper.”

She smiled, showing white, even teeth. “Mebbe so.”

“Don’t want to be rude,” I said.

“You ain’t been yet.”

“Okay, then. What the actual fuck is going on here?”

I said that pretty loud, and this time I got a reaction from the room. The piano guy stopped playing; the four at the table turned to look at me; and the two men further down the bar turned, too. No one spoke at all for a moment.

“Fair question,” said the saloon keeper, then, and the others turned back to their piano, their drinks, and their game. “I ain’t gonna answer it today.”

“But—”

“Gonna set you up with a boarding house room across the way, draw you a bath, get you some dinner later, let you have a night’s rest on a proper bed, then tomorrow’ll be for answers. ‘Kay?”

I hesitated. All those things sounded pretty good, I had to admit. I was worn down with travel and dehydration, not to mention a whole lot of worrying. It wasn’t like I could just make her talk if she didn’t want to, anyway. “Okay.”

“Good! Petey, show her a room, make sure it’s set up nice, and Jen, you do her bath, you hear?”

Two of the card-players got up. They all looked different from one another, but I thought they had the same hard eyes, the same meanness lurking behind their bland expressions. The man tipped his hat, and the woman smiled at me. “I’ll start the hot water,” she said, and left ahead of me.

“Right this way,” said the man, and I followed him outside.

“Got to see to my horse, first.”

“Sure thing. Stable ain’t seen much use lately, but there should be some oats and dried fruit and like that still there.” He pointed across the way. “That place’ll be yours tonight. I’ll just make sure you got clean sheets and all, and when you’re done with your horse, Jen’ll have your bath ready for you too.”

I led my horse over to the little stable, caught him up to date on what was going on.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just ain’t natural, none of this is.”

I thumped his side. “You should talk, horse.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. I know. And I know you’re natural, too; just a little weird, is all.”

He licked my face and I had to laugh. “Want some rock candy?”

“That stuff’ll rot your teeth,” he said. “But I’ll keep watch. Anything come up, just shout and I’ll get you out of it.”

“Will do.”

The hot bath turned out to be the third nicest thing I’d ever had done for me. The second nicest was dinner: a delicious roast with greens and potatoes on the side plus a bowl of cold ice cream afterwards. The nicest came when the sun finally set, and I went to bed. Just as I’d settled in among the crisp white linens and the fluffy pillows and the soft down comforter, I heard a rapping at the shuttered window. I went to look with my gun in my hand, and there he was.

“Horse!”

“Sorry,” he said, “I just couldn’t bear it no more. You gonna let me in?”

“Get in, quick, before someone sees you!”

He clambered through the window in his human form, silver-blue skin and long shimmery-metallic hair and every other part of him exposed because he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

I was going to play at being angry with him, but the truth is I couldn’t wait any more myself, so I threw myself at him, and he caught me like I was nothing; and he carried me to that bed. You don’t need to know any more than that what we did, except I’ll say he didn’t ever get tired, he could tell, somehow, everything I wanted and when I wanted it, and when what I wanted was to satisfy him, he let me do that too. In the end, I knew that I had done just that, satisfied him I mean, and I went to sleep in his arms.

When I got up the next morning, the new-risen sun pouring bloody light through my open window, I felt kind of tragic not having my horse there. Of course, he’d snuck out after I fell asleep to go back to being a horse again and not alarm the locals, assuming the locals were capable of being alarmed, which I wasn’t so sure of.

I walked over to the stable first thing, and my horse was fine, but “Ghost town again,” he said. “I’m pretty sure there was nobody in any of the houses overnight.”

“Shit. You’re the one who knows about magic. And you got no idea?”

“I didn’t go to no school for this stuff,” he said. “So I don’t know what all is going on here. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I did figure out.”

“Yeah?”

“You know I can dowse pretty good. Well, when we first got here, I was so thirsty I didn’t stop to wonder where all this water they had was coming from.”

“I don’t blame you. I think I lost half an hour myself, just pumping and drinking.”

“Ha,” he said. “The two of us, snuffling around in that trough together. I bet we looked cute.”

“You think they were watching?”

“Dunno. Probably maybe, I guess? But what I wanted to say is on the way back here last night, I stopped by the trough again, cause water’s good, right? Except this time I tried to figure out where it was coming from. In my head, like. And I followed it a long way. There’s some kind of cistern thing right there below the pump, but it’s got a channel the water feeds into. And it ain’t like regular groundwater, a layer down there mixed in with the earth. It’s like a goddamn pipe is what it is. It goes down and down all the way.”

“All the way?”

“All the way to the center.”

“You don’t mean the center of the Earth, do you, horse?”

He tossed his head. “Dunno. Know it’s impossible, but that’s what it seemed like to me. But that’s not all. I was following that water channel and I felt it, something else down there. Something mixed in with the water”

“You don’t know what it was?”

“Nope. Powerful stuff, though. Almost scary. I had the feeling I knew it from somewhere, too. But I couldn’t remember where. Frustrating.”

“Okaaay. Anything you think I should do about it?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I really got no idea. Just thought you should know.”

I left him then and ambled over to the saloon. The door was open, but with no one inside. There was a platter on one of the tables, though, with griddle cakes, eggs, bacon, hash-browns, and coffee, piping hot like it just came out of the kitchen, not that this saloon even had a kitchen. Like whoever made it knew I was going to be coming just this minute and started cooking it at the right moment fifteen minutes ago or whatever. And it occurred to me I hadn’t wondered last night where my dinner came from, either. No animals here, no crops, and all this food looked and tasted fresh and delicious.

“Hope you liked it.”

I’d just finished my last bite. I looked up and there she was, the saloon keeper behind the bar like she’d always been there.

“It was great,” I said. “Haven’t eaten this well since— all my life, I guess.”

“Thanks. Always like to see a person who enjoys their food.”

Her words were just what you’d want them to be if you were me, friendly and kind and all that. But there was that something in her face that scared me. I wished I didn’t have to be there, that I didn’t have to be beholden to her, but I couldn’t think of any way out of this situation.

At last I said, “I guess you’re not even pretending anymore you’re regular folks.”

“Never said we were, did we?”

She had me there. “But why all the play-acting and… why all this?”

“We going to get started on real talking, we better have your friend here too, don’t you think?”

Figures she knew all along. I got hot for a minute, thinking maybe she was watching us last night, and then I shrugged inside. Not like it mattered, really.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get him.”

“No need. I’ll do it.” But she didn’t move, just smiled at me in a way she might have meant to be kindly, but I thought looked downright vicious. Like a cougar, maybe, or one of those griffins we were starting to get back east, contemplating a deer with a broken leg, anticipating a meal. A minute later the man she’d called Petey led my horse into the saloon. He was in his human form, dressed this time in clean new denim, cowboy boots, and a T-shirt that read “Welcome to the Little A’Le’Inn” and had a picture of a bug-eyed critter on it.

My horse took a chair at my table, scooted it over so I could feel his presence and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt nerves I didn’t know were tensed up calming down, and I put my hand on his, and we just looked in each other’s eyes for a bit. It was rude, maybe, but whatever. I glanced up and Petey was gone, vanished I guess back to wherever he’d come from, but the saloon keeper was still there, staring at us.

“I promised I’d give you answers,” she said, “but first, tell me why you came. I mean, I know why, but it wasn’t no easy journey, that’s for sure.”

“I guess that’s fair,” I said. “You know how fucked up things are back east?”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “But tell me, anyway.”

“Every year, the desert takes more land. Crops are failing, they never grew right after the change, but lately they’re even worse. Seed’s no good anymore. What wildlife is left is mostly mutants and monsters. The ocean’s poisoned too, it’s all salt and green slime, and there’s no fish left. We’re dying out, is what’s happening.”

“Bad news,” she said. “But why come here?”

“We still got a few things left over from before the change. Videoplasts and some comps and phones and stuff that run on solar and don’t need a network. Some folks who study the old times, they were looking into how the change started. And they found out two things. First, the change seems like it began here, a hundred years ago or so. Second, before the change there was a place around here called Area 51. Supposed to be a place where aliens came, space aliens, you know?”

“Like on this shirt your Petey gave me,” offered my horse.

The saloon keeper said. “Yep. That’s a gen-u-ine pre-change tourist-trade shirt you got there, boy.”

I took a closer look at it. I wasn’t impressed. Seemed kinda shoddy, really. But then it was over a hundred years old.

“Anyway,” I said, “It wasn’t much of a hope, but those… those scholars figured that there was nothing else they could do to fix things, and there was at least a chance something could be found out from around here. They asked me because with my horse we stood a chance of getting through the desert. And if there were such things as space aliens, they might be the only ones who could help us, if we could just convince them to do it.”

“Seems mighty thin to me.”

“Yeah. But we had nothing better to try. And as we traveled out west, we began to hear stories about a town still hanging on in the middle of nowhere. No one had been out that far west for years and years because of the desert, but there were still stories being told. Last settlement with people was Grand Junction, and they named the place. Pioche, they said it was. So we wanted to find out if the stories were true, and—”

“And you found us.”

“Yeah. Is it my turn to ask questions yet?”

“Almost. What about you, Mr. Kayful Door? Why are you here?”

“That ain’t my name,” said my horse.

“No, but it’s what you are. What the old-time Celts used to call your kind. Water-horse. And if you got a name, why don’t your girl here use it?”

“She ain’t my girl. I’m her horse.”

“The hell I’m not,” I said. And he looked at me and I looked at him, and we had another of those moments, but this time we were sharing something, something that said don’t trust her more than you can throw her.

The saloon keeper walked out from behind her bar and sat down at our table. I had to force myself not to shy away from her.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said. “Lemme give you some ancient history. Once upon a time history, right?”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Once upon a time, there was something big and scary outside the world, and it wanted to eat all the world’s magic.”

“Wait up. There wasn’t any magic before the change.”

“But there was. Way far back. Anyhow, the world-spirit back then figured she couldn’t fight the thing, the eater, so she hid all the magic away in a secret world down deep inside this one where the bad old thing couldn’t find it. That was the first change, when all the magic in the world went away. And almost all the magic folk with it. Like you, Mr. Horse.”

“Hold up,” he said. “I never—”

“Yeah, you’re special. Stubborn-like, I bet, so you didn’t go with ’em, and you must’ve turned into a dumb old horse for a long time before the change woke you back up again. Wonder how you got here from Wales, anyhow. Must have been quite a story.”

“Don’t remember,” he said. “Don’t remember anything from back then. Only thing I remember now is Sooz finding me running wild a couple years back. She woke me right up.”

The saloon-keeper shrugged. “Anyhow, the world-spirit’s trick worked for a time. The eater went away and ate some other worlds instead. Just sucked ’em dry. But after a while it come back. Cause it was starving by then, starving to death almost. It had run out of food, and even with no magic around it still liked eating the life out of a world, ’cause that was better than nothing. So it latched onto this world, eating and eating, and after a while it found the secret world where the great spirit was hiding, and it drug her back out again. So we got the second change, the two worlds connected again, with magic coming back and all, but with the world pretty well ruined due to all the eating the big bad had already done.”

“That sucks for us, then.”

“Don’t it? But anyways, there’s always been a few connecting spots between the worlds, because they were never completely separate. And it turns out this place is one of them.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The eater struck here first, ’cause it sensed a way down to the spirit world. That’s why it’s so dead everywhere around here ‘cept this little spot, where there’s a link all the way down there.”

“You sure got a way of not answering a question and taking forever about it, too,” said my horse.

The saloon keeper kept her face calm, but inside I felt like she was snarling. It took her a moment to answer, then she said, “You got me there. Been a long time since I had anyone to talk to but my own shadows. What did you want to know that I ain’t telling?”

My horse said, “First off, what’s the deal with this place? Why the fake town and fake people? And second, we need help, not stories. We’re dying off. We don’t care about the old world, where magic come from, nothing like that. We don’t got the time to care.”

“I was getting there. But to answer you straight, I’ve been stuck here for a hundred years all alone. Maybe I went a little crazy after a while. Got to distracting myself with games and such, but all this time I was sending out a calling, too. Hoping to snag some folks like you to brave the desert and make it here. Anyhow, it took me a while to wake up and get back to myself after you finally showed. Sorry ’bout that.”

She smiled again, and it seemed to me like she was showing her fangs more than being polite, but she didn’t seem to realize what it looked like, just kept on talking.

“So that was your number one. Number two, I got all this reserve… essence you could call it, magical stuff, stored up from back when the two worlds were separate. Stored way down deep, along with all that other world’s water. But I’m stuck here ’cause of this damn desert.”

“That’s a problem for you?”

“Yeah. See it’s totally dead, so I can’t cross it myself. I can only go where there’s living stuff, at least a little of it. Been stuck here all this time, hoping someone like you would come. And here you are. So all you got to do is carry me across…. And I’ll do it. I’ll fix the world.”

I guess she’d been building to this the whole time, but it still felt like she hit me between the eyes with a mallet. I had to ask. “You’re her? The world-spirit you were talking about?”

“Used to be, anyways. Maybe will be again someday.”

“Okay. Okay. What about the eater? Isn’t it still waiting to get you?”

“Oh no,” she said. “It’s dead now. Or it’s gone. Think it starved to death. So I can come out. That’s why you’re here, you understand? I called you. Your scholars back east, they heard me, and those refugees in Colorado, they heard me, and you heard me too, down deep somewhere, which is why you came all this way across the desert even though you nearly got yourselves killed doing it.”

My horse took my hand, and he didn’t say anything, but I could tell what he was thinking. Not because magic or whatever but because, well, yeah. There was no way we were going to have any chance to talk this out without her listening in on us. I just had to hope she didn’t know what I was thinking, and that she didn’t know people enough to be able to guess, either. So I squeezed my horse’s hand, and he smiled at the saloon keeper and said, “So, what do we gotta do, then?”

* * *

Three days later, we were back in that damn desert again, this time heading straight home instead of wandering around like before. By my reckoning, we were about halfway between Rachel and the beginning of the regular kind of desert with scrub and scorpions and groundwater, where the saloon keeper said she wanted to get to. She’d jogged beside us for three days, totally unaffected by the heat, the lack of water, everything. She just kept a hand on my horse the whole time, even while we were sleeping, I guess because of that connection to something living she said she needed.

The sun was just setting, the red orb glowering on the western horizon like a bloodshot eye. My horse pulled up to a stop, and I dismounted. Around here, the desert was a flat salt plain, broken up into big cracked tiles like someone’s messed up bathroom floor from before the change. There was a thin layer of fine sand on top of everything, but not so much you couldn’t feel the hard desert floor under your feet. Hard enough so my horse clip-clopped on top of it, instead of punching through the crust with his hooves.

“Time to camp?” asked the saloon keeper.

“Nope,” I said. “Time to say goodbye.”

“Say what, now?”

I drew my revolver and pointed it at her, just in case it would do some good. You never know. “This is where you get off.”

Give her credit. She didn’t waste our time pretending she had no idea what I was talking about.

“How long did you know?”

“Almost from the start,” I said. “I mean, you’re creepy as hell. But when you said the eater had died just like that, I was certain.”

“Damn. I went to a lot of trouble making that food for you, too. Didn’t work, huh?”

“Yeah, no. Figures you’d put in extra effort on stuff to eat.”

She shrugged. “So, what’s your plan? Going to shoot me? Is that it?”

“Plan?” I shook my head. “No plan. Just figured you can’t get across the desert without us, and it’d be best to ditch you right in the middle of it. And that part of what you told us must be true, too, or you’d already’ve eaten us all up, back east. Somehow you got trapped here, I guess. Maybe the real world-spirit sucked you in, if you didn’t make her up. But either way, best if you just die right here, I mean, begging your pardon.”

“You figuring to die along with me?”

My horse flinched at that, and I think he would have reared up and pulled back from her, but the saloon keeper was keeping some kind of grip on him, even though she just had a hand up on his withers, and he shuddered and rolled his eyes when he found he couldn’t break away.

“We only got a few years left anyways,” I said. “No sense in dragging it out. Best night I’m ever going to have I already had, thanks to you. It’s all gonna be downhill from there. But we’ll see what you can do in a minute. Maybe we won’t die after all. Maybe you’re just bluffing.”

“The best night of your life, thanks to me. You don’t feel bad about that? About stranding me here to die?”

“I sure do.” I thumbed back the hammer on my gun. “Makes me sick to think about it. What you did for me. For us. Not so sick I’m not going to kill you, though.”

The saloon keeper laughed. It was mean laughter, but it was honest, too. She really thought it was funny.

“All right,” she said. “All right. You got me fair and square, but it don’t matter. See, it was all over and done with when you got into Rachel and woke me up. Nothing you can do to me here. Guns sure won’t work. I mean, you know what I am.”

I looked into her eyes, and all at once I saw it. The spaces between the stars. The place she came from. The void. The darkness. The hunger. It was all there. I knew she was right. There wasn’t any point in pulling the trigger.

“Okay,” I said. “But you’re still stuck here. If you could have crossed the desert on your own, you’d already have done it. We sure ain’t taking you any further.”

“Oh,” she said. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t need you, girl. I was just taking you with me for fun, so you could see what I was gonna do when I got free. What I need is him. And I got him, too.”

My horse screamed then, and he did rear up, but she kept her grip on him. That’s when I pulled the trigger. Six times, and I put six bullets in her, two in the chest, two in the head, right through her mean, snarling mouth, and two in the chest again. She staggered back, and blood gushed out of her, and for a moment I thought I might actually have done something. But then her body just fell apart into black smoky stuff, and it all swirled around my horse and into his nostrils and his eyes and like that, and he came down on his hooves all at once, like he wasn’t comfortable with four feet anymore.

“Now, girl,” he said, or she did, “you get up on my back, and I’ll show you how the world ends.”

A compulsion grabbed me, like I’d turned into a marionette. I dropped the gun I was trying to reload, and I stumbled over to my horse, herky-jerky. I found I could still talk, which was a relief. “What have you done to him?”

“Same thing I did to the world spirit. I’m inside your sweet little stallion, and he’s inside me. And soon all of you little grub people will be in me, too. And every animal and every tree and every paramecium, but you’ll be last of all. Ain’t you lucky? And then I’ll be moving on, and maybe I’ll find somewhere new to eat, and maybe I won’t, but you won’t be around to care.”

“You’re inside him, too?” She was trying to make me mount up, but it was awkward, because she was having trouble getting my foot into the stirrup. It slipped out and I fell, and she made him laugh while she forced me back to my feet.

“That’s right, girl. We’re two parts of a whole, but I’m a million times stronger. That’s how it goes. Everything I eat becomes me, sooner or later. He’s fighting back, you know, but there ain’t nothing he can do because I’ve eaten a million worlds and even diminished as I am, he’s just one little old water-horse. Takes a while to digest folks, till they’re all gone, you know. He’ll be screaming on the inside, and you’ll be screaming on the outside. Until the end of the world, and I eat you too. Ain’t that nice?”

She got my foot seated in the stirrup this time, and she started puppeting me into the saddle.

“Well, okay then,” I said. “In that case, Milafon Ysbrid, I name your true name, and I bind you to me.”

“What?”

My horse reared up, and since I wasn’t seated properly yet I just fell backwards off his rump. I landed hard, smacking my head against the salt tile floor, but nothing was broken. I could still talk, so I said, “Milafon Ysbrid, I name you. You are mine, and you always will be mine.”

She screamed a terrible equine scream with his lungs, and I think she was trying to do something, to control me, to shut me up, maybe, but whatever magic or power she’d been using on me didn’t work anymore, because it couldn’t. I struggled to my feet. Too late it occurred to her, she was in a horse’s body, and she could maybe stomp me with it, but even as she was turning to try it, I told her, “Milafon Ysbrid! I’ve named you three times! You’re mine, now and forever!”

And it was true. I could feel him now, and her too, like they were both part of me. It was like I’d grown a second heart, a huge and powerful one too, only it was rotten with cancer, shot through with corruption, and in its center, a kernel, a seed, a mote of infinite coldness and darkness— An awful thing, the eater of worlds, but she was mine now, just like he was, and there was nothing she could do to resist my will.

I took a step toward my horse, and I put my hand on his soft nose. He made a terrible choking noise, and he snorted out a writhing wormy thing, cold from the depths of interstellar space, right into my hand. I dropped her to the ground, and ground my boot heel into her, and because she was part of me, I could feel her breaking up, dissipating, and fading away. It was like having my heart cut out of me then, and I staggered and would have fallen except my horse had his arms around me and was holding me up.

“Told you I wanted you to bind me,” he whispered into my ear.

“Oh yeah? What’s my name, then?”

“Susannah, but— oh, you don’t mean it, do you?”

“I do,” I said. “My full name. Three times.”

“It ain’t gonna work,” he said. “It can’t work. You’re a human. You’re not the kind to be bound. And even if it could, I couldn’t be the one to bind you. It don’t work that way.”

“Try it.”

“But—”

“For me,” I said. “Please. It’s what I want.”

He stopped protesting. “Susannah Leah Apterbach, will you be mine?”

“Forever,” I said.

He told me my name twice more; and I could feel the balance shifting, and like that I was a part of him, the same way he was a part of me. For a while we just sat there together holding hands, he in his human form, me in mine, exploring one another from the inside out, and by the time we were done, it was full dark and the stars were out, shining bright in the sky overhead.

“Well, okay, then,” he said at last. “So it did work. But about that forever thing, the world you know, we only got—”

“A few more years? I think we got more than that, horse.”

“What?”

I pointed. “Three days, thataway. All the water the world-spirit got stowed away in her secret world. All the essence stuff the eater latched onto to make that faked-up town. It’s all there, and it’s waiting for us.”

“But—”

“You’ll see. It’s all going to work out. We’re two parts of a whole, now, can’t you feel it? It’s all there waiting for us.”

“Oh… oh, yeah. It really is.”

“Come on then,” I told him. And a minute later, if you’d been there, you’d’ve seen two horses, a stallion and a mare, galloping side by side through the desert, galloping together under the bright shining stars.

 

* * *

About the Author

Laurence Raphael Brothers (he/him) is a writer and a technologist. He has published around 30 short stories in magazines such as Nature, PodCastle, and Galaxy’s Edge. His WWI-era fantasy novel Twilight Patrol and his romantic urban fantasy novella The Demons of Wall Street are available on Amazon.

by K. C. Mead-Brewer

“They begin to wonder if a horse can also be a witch.”

No one gave it a second thought. Lots of people attend Open House events for the free cookies or wine, or maybe just to admire a stranger’s shiplap and crown molding, bathroom mirrors in the shapes of seashells. No, the neighborhood didn’t begin to worry until a few days later when the zippy little realtor came out of the house smiling at the horse and the horse nodding back at him.

What does a horse want with the house on the corner? It normally wouldn’t be a big deal except that more than a few people in the neighborhood are allergic to hay and the horse’s (truly exceptional) diamond shoes keep cracking the sidewalk.

“Her head weighs the same as my entire brother!” the Lightfoot’s girl was heard whispering to another. The neighborhood children are mystified by all the new horse-facts they’re learning now. (It never really occurred to them to look up horse stuff before.) How much does a horse heart weigh? How much do horses poop? Has a horse ever been to outer-space? How many lungs do horses have? Are horses good at keeping secrets?

* * *

They begin to wonder if the horse might be keeping secrets.

* * *

Spying children must be startled off the horse’s porch like birds nearly every day now. The clever ones have started throwing toys over the horse’s fence for the excuse to climb into her yard and fetch them.

Scaling her fence, the children look in upon the lushest garden: all kinds of lettuces, lumpy rainbow tomatoes, an apple tree dotted with tiny red and yellow apples, strange herbs with sticky leaves, and a long row of—one of the Robertson girls calls it right away, probably thanks to all those Girl Empowerment camps where they learn about medicinal plants and old myths and—rampion. “It’s also known as Rapunzel,” she explains with some importance.

They try to remember how long the horse’s mane is, if they could use it to climb a tower. They begin to wonder if a horse can also be a witch. (Perhaps this is one of her secrets.)

The children hush each other as they explore the horse’s garden, smelling its savory muds and fruits, looking for things to steal. Instead they find themselves wondering where all these other trees came from and what about those rain-slicked boulders and how long have they been walking?

* * *

As you might imagine, the neighborhood parents want to know what’s become of their children.

“Where did you leave them?” the horse replies. “Next time try stacking them like the books at the library. Alphabetical order is so reassuring, don’t you think? Like a smile full of strong, healthy teeth.”

The horse bares her great teeth in example, but it isn’t at all reassuring to the parents.

The parents wander the neighborhood that’s suddenly empty of their children, the planned and unplanned offspring they built their lives around. They can’t remember their own Open Houses or why they settled here. They weren’t trained for this. They weren’t prepared to think of themselves as their own future.

“What now?” they ask back and forth, a desperate echolocation. “What now?” “What now?”

* * *

The children age as they venture deeper into the horse’s garden, deeper and deeper until they come out the other side and discover themselves on the moon.

“This sure isn’t Kansas,” they joke, turning in circles. They’re as tall as adults now, muscled and boobed and hairy. They hold hands, they kiss. They smell like old bedsheets.

Examining their dusty path, they realize the moon’s craters aren’t craters at all but ancient hoofprints.

It never occurred to them to wonder where horses came from before Earth, nor what it might be like to live on the moon. Will they need special shoes? Will they meet many astronauts? When did the horses first leave the moon, and has it always been this lovely? Its shadows so deep and gentle? Its dirt so soft and cool?

They begin to wonder if they might have secret knowledge of their own now, to find so much promise in a world that others have left for dead.

 

* * *

About the Author

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, NY. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

by Adele Gardner

“When Nigel was five, he told her that for his next birthday present, he wanted to be a cat.”

On his second birthday, Carolina Wannemacher took her son out in his stroller to shop for a new suit.  She had instructed him carefully.  When the clerk arrived, Nigel lay inert in the harness, just a trifle more still than a soundly sleeping toddler.  As Carolina carefully worked the suit onto the artificially stiff limbs, the clerk gave her an odd look.  “Are you sure you want to spend the money?  A little one like that grows so fast.”

“He’s a doll, you see,” Carolina said seriously, keeping her attention focused on Nigel.  He was being so good.  Following his programming perfectly.  Not an eyelash twitched.

The tag on the clerk’s navy blue jacket named her Lotte.  She seemed happy with Carolina’s explanation.  Lotte scarcely even batted an eye when Carolina said she wanted the suits a size too large, as if the doll would grow into them.

When Lotte retreated behind the staff doors, Carolina heard laughter and caught a glimpse of Lotte talking to another clerk.  Of course, Lotte would want to share the eccentricities of her client.  Carolina took the opportunity to confer with Nigel about his likes and dislikes.

When Lotte returned with several more suits to try, she told Carolina that every woman was entitled to a hobby, and that she herself was making a family of ball-jointed dolls from her favorite fantasy series and sewing the clothes herself.  She’d won an award at Dragon Con.

Lotte admired the delicate, realistic modeling of Nigel’s face, her finger tracing the weave of the pinstripe on Nigel’s baby limbs.  Lotte murmured, a wistful note in her voice, “He looks so alive.  I wish I knew how you did it.”

Carolina smiled slightly.  “That’s a trade secret.”

Lotte’s face fell.  She drew back, her mouth pinched.  “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Carolina said.  “I’ve been building prototypes since I was about his size.  After a while you just get good at something.”

Lotte’s face brightened, as if Carolina had said the magic words.  “Well, there’s hope for me then,” she said.  And as Carolina made her choices and checked out, Lotte added, “I hope you don’t mind, but I wish you’d think about sharing your patterns online.  I mean, you’re really talented.”

Feeling acutely aware of the store camera and Lotte’s shy smile, Carolina said, “You might have something there.”

She wheeled the stroller onto the sidewalk.  Passersby chatted to invisible friends via Bluetooth, but Carolina waited a block before she said, “Good job, Nigel.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“I should have done a better job.  She actually believed you were a doll.”

Those uncannily human blue eyes looked up at her.  “Don’t worry, Mom, you did the best you could.”

“Next birthday, Nigel.  Next birthday I’ll do better, I promise.”

“Can we have friends over?  I’d like to invite Audrey.  She seems nice.”

Carolina fell silent as a man in a business suit passed her with a half-smiling nod, which she returned gravely.  She considered.  Audrey was fifteen, an online pal of Nigel’s, compatible in many ways.  Home-schooled, a child prodigy who played cello with the symphony, Audrey would probably sympathize with Nigel’s differences from other children, especially his advanced intelligence.  But she was sheltered, and quite close to her mom.  Was it wise to trust her with the secret?

Nigel was a healthy, growing boy, but arranging playdates was difficult.  Though plenty of adults in Carolina’s generation had been enthusiastically building robots since they were tiny tots receiving their robotics and circuits kits from Santa, most of these were far more limited than Nigel.  Carolina didn’t want to reveal just how advanced he was.  And the human kids who might be more intellectually compatible carried too much risk of letting the cat out of the bag.

At her continued silence, a cloud passed over Nigel’s face.  “Mom?  Her cello sounds so beautiful with my harpsichord.  I thought we might have a concert.”

Her heart hurt.  Was she doing right by him?  He looked up at her with such trust in that little-boy face, his skin as creamy as her own, his hair in blond curls modeled on her little brother’s at that age.  “She’s a little young for you, honey.  Maybe next year.  A lot of girls mature when they turn sixteen.”

Nigel sighed, a mannerism he’d picked up from her.  But he settled back in the stroller contentedly enough.  He started humming Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecins en Concert, performing both the harpsichord and cello parts, adding improvisations in the baroque style and harmonizing with himself, his tripled and quadrupled voice eerie and beautiful in his perfect, little-boy pitch.

Buying a suit had been his birthday wish.  He wanted to follow Audrey’s lead and take up the traditional position of the child prodigy, sharing his skills with an audience, even if only a virtual one.  He was too young to be self-conscious enough for stage fright.  He didn’t even know he should be scared.

Or what he, her robot child, had to fear.

* * *

Carolina Wannemacher worked at Hilliard Public Library and lived with five cats, who loved her fiercely and followed her from room to room with loud purrs, rubbing her legs and nuzzling her feet and ankles.

The library was good to her.  She enjoyed the supportive, creative atmosphere.  Among the treats she prized most was the chance to lead and attend Maker programs.  Coding, robotics, 3-D printing—she had plenty of skills to share with their patrons.  Carolina had been designing robots since childhood.  Her son Nigel was the great project of her life, and she built him in the Maker Spaces of many libraries.  She was careful to create only individual parts at each location, staying within the printing limits per patron while avoiding anyone guessing what she built.

Each year she made Nigel a new birthday suit, a human frame one developmental step up from his prior body, with an expanded brain to match.  She reasoned that his best chance to acquire not just sentience but wisdom would be to start as a little child, then grow as any human would.  She’d teach him all she could about what was good in life, how to love, what mistakes to avoid; she’d share memories of family and the best of human culture.  She wanted him to have the chance to appreciate this wonderful life, not simply receive a data dump.  The best way she knew to create depth was the same lifetime commitment her parents had made to her.

When Nigel was five, he told her that for his next birthday present, he wanted to be a cat.  She smiled and pretended surprise.  Though she wondered if it was a good idea at this developmental stage, she loved cats and preferred their company to that of most humans.  Her five cats were highly affectionate, creative, and intelligent, and Nigel needed to build his socialization skills.

Human science had come a long way in translating the complex speech of fellow Earthlings, but with at least as many multisensory as verbal cues, Cat was a tough nut to crack.  Carolina started with a translation algorithm based on the latest in talking cat collars from Japan and added data from veterinarians, cat behaviorists, and her own experience.  Maybe Nigel could fill in some of the blanks.

Nigel loved being a cat.  Carolina had thought he would.  He’d been romping with the cats on all fours since birth; in many ways, he grew up speaking Cat.  He chose to be a calico female whom he named Duchess.  Carolina let him help sculpt the details, just as she’d helped her grandma quilt when she was little.

Though she equipped Duchess with a voice synthesizer for human speech, the new calico sported all the feline communication devices—vocal, olfactory, tactile, and body language.  When Duchess talked to Carolina, the other cats shied away from the mysterious human voice issuing from the cat’s body.  Soon Duchess lifted her furry chin, held her whiskers high, and spoke to Carolina only in Cat with other felines present.

Duchess imitated the other cats, learning the delicate language of touch and brush, the infinite meanings in the quirk of a whisker.  She palled around, tangled with them, snuggled and slept with them.  She shared their food, water, and litterboxes as part of the cat communications network.

Carolina worried at first that Duchess needed more intellectual stimulation, both for education and entertainment, but her child pleaded earnestly for the Cat Immersion Experience.  Being a cat was a full-time job.

Embracing the cats’ Eternal Present, Duchess joined in group grooming, cleaning Moonie’s ears, then submitting to Sebastian’s face-wash.  She formed part of the patchwork fur pattern when the cats curled in a sunny heap, nestling her chin in Cleo’s side while Rocco draped his arm across her back.  In the evenings, Duchess rushed with all the cats to greet Carolina and sit with her.  It felt strange at first to stroke her child’s silky head and scratch around cat ears and chin, but Duchess purred, looking up at Carolina with a cat’s pure love.

One day, when Carolina tossed tiny toy mice and fishes, Max’s acrobatic leap landed him on Duchess’s back.  Duchess yowled in pain and flattened to the ground.  Carolina ran over and scooped her up.  Not for the first time as a robot’s mother, worry smote Carolina.  To fit all of Nigel’s boy-sized brain in the cat, Carolina had positioned parts in places normally reserved for internal organs.  “Baby, are you all right?”

Duchess meowed a complaint.  What to do?  No emergency vet would treat a robot cat.

Talking to Duchess soothingly—she always kept her cats informed—Carolina said, “Don’t worry, Duchess.  I’m just going to do some diagnostics.  Make sure everything’s okay.”

Duchess issued a raspy protest; her claws lightly pricked Carolina’s arm.  Carolina ignored this, stroking her synthetic fur as she hooked Duchess up.  Rocco ran over to check on the calico, who hid her face in Rocco’s ruff.

Fortunately, the spine had protected the brain, as it should.  But when Carolina released the calico, Duchess skittered away, then ignored Carolina, grooming herself with total concentration as if the examination had been an affront to feline dignity.

Carolina’s anxiety did not disperse as easily.  She’d been too lax.  Introducing a robot into a clowder of cats might be just as dangerous as it was fun.  Now that she looked more sharply, she thought Moonie might be losing weight.  Maybe he’d just been playing extra hard with a sixth cat in the house, or faced too much competition for food.  She hovered, making sure the big cats didn’t chase him from his bowl.  But Moonie ate less and less, though he still ran to her when she dished out wet food.

No one could discover what was wrong.  The specialist prescribed medicines against every possible illness; this only made his appetite worse.  Carolina dropped everything to care for him, but he slipped through her fingers like water.

The other cats worried.  Whenever Moonie emerged from Carolina’s cat-hospital bedroom, they washed him, touched noses, and snuggled close, offering comfort.  Duchess followed Moonie everywhere.  Carolina took her child aside, holding Duchess on her shoulder and petting her while she explained how sick Moonie was.  Duchess purred into Carolina’s ear.  The little calico licked Carolina’s face.

Then, all at once, there was no more time.  Packing Moonie in his carrier for the emergency vet, she walked him around to the other cats for a chance to say goodbye, just in case.  But he couldn’t be saved.  Too much had gone wrong.  Carolina sang to Moonie as he died.

When she returned, her weeping scared the cats away.  She wanted to explain to Duchess, at least.  With wide eyes, laid-back ears, and puffy tail, Duchess looked thoroughly spooked.  The little calico hid her head in Carolina’s armpit while Rocco howled from the kitchen, hunting for his missing friend.

By night, Duchess curled in a tight little ball against her side.  By day, Duchess followed Carolina as if afraid to let her out of sight.  Duchess let her batteries run low, though Nigel had been responsibly charging himself since he was four.  Carolina began plugging Duchess in while the calico hunkered beneath the desk—one of Moonie’s favorite spots.  How horrible grief must be for a cat, who lived in the Eternal Present, where there was nothing but this love, this loss.  A cat couldn’t distract the grief with a book, TV, or solid work.  Duchess seemed exhausted by it, pressed down to the ground by an overwhelming force of gravity.

At last Carolina took action.  She returned Duchess to Nigel’s most recent body—she always saved the last two for emergency spares.  The six-year-old robot boy wouldn’t speak.  Carolina held him on her lap and stroked his hair and spoke to him softly about their friend Moonie, how much they missed him, and how unfair it was that cats should have such brief lives, their great hearts leaving little record on this earth except in the hearts that loved them.  Nigel cried with her, silently at first.  At last he whispered, “Please, Mom, I want to be a girl now.”

“That’s fine, honey.”  Carolina set to work.  She thought she understood: it would be both a reminder of his life as a cat, and a complete switch from the life he’d known, which had been flipped upside down by death.

And maybe, just maybe, it showed a desire to get closer to her.  For that was the year they started to truly bond, as Duchess had done with her fellow cats.  With relief, Carolina found that this continued, even after Nigel returned to being a boy.

* * *

Year by year, Nigel had gone to his body fittings without complaint.  Carolina tried not to let him see how she worried.  So many things might go wrong during the annual transfer.  She backed him up on several computers, but that wasn’t his consciousness—she couldn’t duplicate that spark.  There was only one Nigel Wannemacher in the universe.

Near the end of each year’s body, Nigel moved more slowly.  He looked listless, dispirited, sick: too much wear and tear on the joints, the body materials grown fragile, not enough energy.  He limped.  He called for her in the night, terrified, though usually his dreams delighted him—the stranger, the better.  Carolina considered turning off the dreaming module, though she considered it essential to an artificial human intelligence.  With the dreams came imagination, poetry, playing pretend, and flights of fancy she’d never achieved for the logic-bound robots of her youth.  Nigel felt the novels he read, rather than simply understanding or analyzing them.

She had to do more to help him.  Her funds meagre, Carolina ranged farther afield to take turns in the Maker Spaces of more libraries.  She tried pushing up the replacement schedule, working hard to create parts and make him a full body faster, proactively substituting components before they had a chance to wear down.  To raise funds for more parts, she finally began licensing her designs, concealing herself behind a handle.

Still, as his ninth birthday approached, Nigel dragged as if his body had grown too heavy.  He stayed cheerful, but his patient weariness reminded Carolina too much of lost loved ones in their last days.  “Nigel, are you feeling bad?”

“No, Mom.”  He never liked to complain.  He was like the cats that way.  But she had deliberately built him without a poker face.  Expressions were too valuable in human communications.

Carolina observed, “You don’t look well.”

“I’m all right, Mom.”  Carefully, he took a seat at the dining room table.

She pulled out a yellow chair and joined him.  “You seem tired.  I’d like to run some tests.”

“I don’t need any tests.”  His realistic silicone face looked worried, drawn in.

She sat him down that afternoon and plugged in nodes and wires.  He fidgeted.  He asked to leave.  As she dialed him back toward sleep, he lay in the chair lethargically.  She offered to replace a ball bearing in his elbow that was generating a low level of background pain.  His normally pale skin took on a greenish tinge closer to Mr. Spock’s than she’d ever achieved with her mother’s eyeshadow at Halloween.

She knelt beside him, stroking his arm.  “What’s wrong, Son?  Does it hurt you when I run these tests?  Or when I replace your parts?”

His voice was as small as that of any young boy trying to be brave.  “Not as such.”

She said, “But something about it—upsets you?”

“Disquiets,” he whispered.

“Frightens?”

He did not answer.  Dread was written all over his face.

“What happens to you when I change your body?”

The answer was simple, stark.  “It feels like dying.”

Why had she never asked this before?  Heart in her mouth, hand on his, she asked Nigel, “Are you awake the whole time?  What are you aware of?”

His voice distant, Nigel said, “Fire cuts me out of my body, like having my limbs cut off by a welding torch.  I’m left in a tiny prison.  I have no eyes, but I can peer out through the cracks.”

“The camera on my computer terminal,” Carolina whispered.

Nigel’s voice sounded tinny.  “I can’t get out.  While I’m stuck there, nothing exists but the moment of consciousness.  I am trapped there for a very, very long time.  Forever.”

With a pang, Carolina thought of that Eternal Present he’d shared with the cats, which made a cat’s suffering so unendurable.  And yet they so patiently bore it.  Like Nigel.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I love you, Mom.  I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I’m already worried.  Tell me,” she urged him, her throat tight.  She listened with a sinking feeling.

“Suffocation is not the right word,” he said.  “There’s a complete lack of air and life—like suddenly being snuffed out—as though the world is far away, down a long, dark tunnel—I can’t stretch far enough to reach the light—I’m fading away like Moonie—”  His voice faded, too.  He stopped, his mouth twitching.

Carolina said at last, “I’m so sorry, Nigel.  I wish I had known.  I’ll find some way to fix it.  Thank you for being so brave.”  She hugged him, feeling desperate at her helplessness.

Now as she designed and planned, she sought Nigel’s feedback; they worked on improvements together.  They perfected a technique of connecting him to a new body or parts before disconnecting the old, and having him make the leap himself.  But the basic problem remained: Carolina needed to construct her son out of sturdier materials.  After several years of hard work, she earned her fourth degree and got a job at the library of a space science laboratory, where she negotiated limited use of their 3-D printers as part of her compensation package.

By now, many others were building robots based on her original designs.  This community shared their research and problem-solving.  And the climate around robotics had changed enough that Carolina began to participate in interviews—online, of course, under her handle.  She earned additional funds to help Nigel by writing articles.  She still worried that someone might come after him; she protected their privacy.  But she did reveal a few facts.  People were initially surprised to learn she was a librarian rather than an engineer, but they smiled when they read about her Triple Nine IQ.

Without intending to, Carolina found she’d inspired a movement.  The passionate advocacy for robot rights proved helpful: when fifteen-year-old Nigel completed the online coursework for his PhD, rather than incur a storm of protest, the university passed a memorandum that recognized that a degree-earning “identity” might be artificially constructed.  Then Nigel aced his astronaut exam.  But despite NASA’s enthusiasm for his potential, he was still legally property, not a person, and could only go to space if Carolina “sold” him to the government.  Instead, he took up robotics, going even farther than Carolina, who loved the field, but deeply enjoyed her library career, which unified her disparate interests and intellectual talents perfectly.  Her greatest pleasures were an afternoon devoted to reading a good book while listening to classical or jazz and snuggling with her cats, or having an intellectual conversation with her son and protégé, who often contradicted her in the most intriguing ways.

As ocean levels rose and devastating storms increased, many robots stepped forward to help, providing invaluable rescue efforts and dyke repairs.  Many robots selflessly gave their lives.  Their mourning human families made it abundantly clear that the robots had acted on their own initiative.  The footage went viral.

NASA eloquently pleaded the robots’ cause; indeed, Nigel’s research showed how essential the robots’ skills would be in preparing other planets for human habitation.  Congress created a conditional proposal.  With fear for human jobs and resources on the overcrowded Earth, robots might be granted U.S. citizenship provided they agreed to go to space and fulfill the missions NASA designed.

Nigel told her his plan, as nervous as any young person about to leave home for the first time.  She smoothed his blond curls, kissed his creamy cheek.  “You’re everything a son should be.  Everything I ever dreamed of in a family.  My little boy,” she said.  “I’m so proud of you.”

His dimpled chin and worried frown, so similar to her dad’s, expressed more concern for her than himself.  “Do you want me to stay with you, Mom?”

It wrenched, but she said it: “No, pursue your dreams.”

The first step was a mission to the moon.  Nigel’s face lit up, his blue eyes glowing with starlight, a new feature she’d given him for his seventeenth birthday.  Though he did his own design work now, he accepted her gifts for old times’ sake.  Carolina saw him off with other robots and their human parents, her heart lifting to see this rainbow of human and robot diversity united in one proud moment.

The mission gave NASA a chance to show off the value of their all-robot crew.  With few physical needs, the robots made great progress on the construction of the moon base, including a shielded shelter, greenhouse, and oxygen extraction facilities.  On the return voyage, NASA broke the good news—new laws prohibited discrimination against artificial versus biological humans.  Nor would the robots have to be exiled to earn their citizenship.  It only made sense: with so many humans already benefiting from artificial limbs and organs, imposing legal limits on humanity would raise too many problems.

As his departure for Mars neared, Carolina realized that Nigel’s dream would be her greatest nightmare.  She might never see him again.  From the moment she’d created him, he’d been his own, not hers.  She wanted above all else for him to be happy.  But she had to make sure he was doing it for the right reasons.  “You’re my family, Nigel.  I didn’t build you so you would sacrifice yourself for us.”

“I know,” Nigel said gently.  “You gave me free will—that’s why I’m doing it.  I love you, Mom.”  He hugged her.  “That’s why I want to save you!  You and the human species.  To make sure you’ll live on, I have to make sure there’s still a future for humanity.  And a future for Earth, so you can keep doing what you love.”  His voice broke, splitting off into harmonics, dividing into the individual notes she’d braided to create his adult baritone.

“But Nigel—”  She floundered, then decided to just say it.  “That’s beautiful, but what I’d love most is to continue to share our lives!  We’re not just family, we’re best friends.  Not to mention scientific partners.”

“I’ll still be doing our work—putting our research in action.  They need me out there.  Robots can survive the elements better.  We have less complicated atmospheric and sustenance needs.  If we can tweak Mars to create a more hospitable environment for humans, colonization can begin in earnest.  Then, with some of the pressure off Earth’s ecosystem, the planet will begin to bounce back.”

Carolina flushed.  She found herself arguing against a plan she admired in theory.  “But you’re not a farmer.  That’s essentially what you’d be—a space farmer, harnessing the natural environment, moving water around for the benefit of crops like trees.  I love trees.  But you’ll be bored out of your mind!”

His eyes twinkled.  “Admit it.  You worried about the same thing when I became a cat.  But that’s not how life is for me.  I find the minutest detail interesting.  And I can compose a sonnet in my head about the joy of having whiskers or the glory of a sunrise on Mars, then store it and call it up again later to tinker with while I’m drilling for water or sculpting mountains into underground cities.  One thing the cats taught me: to savor the moment.  I can see the stars shining in the day.”  He smiled.  “You gave me that, Mom.”  He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

She looked out the window, at the sun shining on all that green.  Virginia summers—so hot, but so very beautiful.  “You could also do a lot of good here,” Carolina said.  “If you want to help, why not stay and clean up the environment or revive endangered species?  Or you could be a poet.  A deep sea diver.  A veterinarian.  A university professor.  A ballet dancer.  A concert harpsichordist,” she urged.  “Anything you set your mind to!”

“Oh, Mom,” he said fondly.

So she took a deep breath and told him her own news.  “I guess I’ll be seeing you on the red planet then,” she said, and grinned at his surprise.  “NASA offered me and the other families first refusal on the human missions, provided we pass the tests.  Maybe I’ll found the first library on Mars.”  Exhilarating thought!  Visions of library spires danced against red cliffs.

Of course, NASA couldn’t afford to send dead weight to Mars, despite her robotics expertise.  She’d have to embark on yet another degree program and more training.  But fortunately, fifty-two was the new twenty, and she loved to learn.  She’d work it in around her library schedule.  By the time she was ready to go, he’d be ready to welcome her.  And she’d have had time to plan and advocate for the library she’d bring.

Carolina continued, “We won’t see each other right away.”  She chose to look at the bright side, the way Dad taught her.  “But we can collaborate.  And it’ll be so exciting to be working toward the same goal.”

He said, “Who knows, by the time you join me, maybe we’ll have it looking like Bradbury’s small-town Martian paradise.”

She reflected.  “That would be the time to build a library.”  She floated on the delicious thought of all those novels and movies and music, art and oral histories, scientific texts and poems from around the world, in a wide variety of formats.  “We’ll need a Maker Space,” she concluded.

“Yes!” he agreed.  His eyes twinkled.  “Highly appropriate—for two Machers in Space.”

She laughed.  “My dad would have loved that pun.”

As they moved into the living room, Sebastian and Max wove between their legs and meowed.  Despite his age, Rocco wrestled his way to the top of the cat tower to purr into her ear.

“Cats.  We’ll need cats,” Carolina said.

Nigel beamed.  “That, most of all.”

 

* * *

About the Author

Cat-loving cataloging librarian Adele Gardner (www.gardnercastle.com) is an active member of SFWA and HWA with over 400 poems, stories, art, and articles published in Strange Horizons, Deep Magic, Daily Science Fiction, PodCastle (a story about flying cats: “Fine Flying Things“), and more.  Many works draw inspiration from deep feline friendships, as well as the close-knit Gardner family, including father, mentor, and namesake, Delbert R. Gardner, for whom Adele serves as literary executor.

by Dylan Craine

“There are thousands of storyteller-deities like you, for all the thousands of insect cultures. For a being of my talent, resources, and determination, it is easy to find you and to capture you.”

“If you do this,” said the insect, “then you’ll regret it.” Her voice had a stentorian quality to it that belied its feeble pitch.

“Oh, I doubt that,” said the cheetah. He brought the meerschaum bowl of the pipe closer to his face. “You have no power over me. You may be a goddess to your people, but to mine, you’re nothing but a fancy ant.” With his other paw, he pushed his teashades up the bridge of his muzzle.

The ant squirmed against the resin that coated the bottom of the bowl. Her legs remained stuck fast. She flicked her wings, but they were no help.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “You think the spiritual potencies you’ll gain from consuming me will help you. They won’t.”

“Hmm,” said the cat. He turned the pipe around in his paws, examining the ant-goddess from all angles. As he did, he lay back on the silk couch behind him, his tail flicking out from under his red satin robes. “They won’t?” he asked. “There are an awful lot of people waiting past those curtains and down the hall in the auditorium who might think otherwise. They’ll be growing impatient soon. They came here to listen to a story. You are – were – a goddess of storytelling.”

“So you think that if you reduce me to smoke, and inhale me-”

“I know for a fact.” The cheetah smiled a wide, fang-filled smile. “I’ve done it before. There are thousands of storyteller-deities like you, for all the thousands of insect cultures. For a being of my talent, resources, and determination, it is easy to find you and to capture you. As I have done several times in the past and will do again in the future. So I know from experience that as long as your essence is in my throat, I can create, recall, and recite stories more enthralling and inventive than any mortal could hope to concoct. I’ve built my career on it, in fact.”

As he spoke, the cheetah groped absently for a filigreed firelighter that sat on the table beside him. He placed it in his lap, then turned to a drawer in the table and began rooting around in it for the next item he needed.

“You are mistaken,” said the ant. “My ‘essences’ will do no such thing. You tell only the stories you could have told unaided.”

“Not likely,” said the cheetah, lazily. He retrieved a small bag of shredded leaves, which he dumped over the head of the ant.

“All you’ll accomplish,” said the ant, “will be to create a build-up of deific-grade prana within your lungs. Eventually, they will refuse to breathe earthly air. You will suffocate yourself – or else live out the rest of your days confined to some minor place of holiness, wheezing and sputtering and questing for those spiritual vapors that might linger, untainted, in the corners of your chapel or shrine. A sad end to a promising storyteller.”

A big, black thumb-pad thrust its way into the space beside the ant as the cheetah packed the bowl with the tobacco leaves. He made sure not to injure his captive, but the leaves still pressed uncomfortably against her.

“Please,” said the ant, her tone urgent but bitter. “I have done nothing to you. You will gain nothing. You will only hurt yourself.”

“They all say that,” said the cheetah. He dumped another layer of shredded tobacco over her head. “But I have a performance to put on and a reputation to think of.”

She churned her wings to clear space for her head. “So you’re a fraud,” she said. “Not a true storyteller. You cheat. Is that what you’re content to be?”

The cheetah hesitated. He made a show of looking thoughtful. He made a show of looking around himself at the embroidered silk curtains and elaborately-lacquered furniture of the dressing room. Then he said, “Yes, I believe I am content.” He smiled again and began to pack the second layer.

“I could tell you a story,” she said. “I could tell you a long, sad story about a foolish man who wasted his talent and committed acts of evil and unfathomable stupidity before meeting a strange and bitter end.”

He paused, holding the bag of tobacco over her head, ready to pour the third and final layer. “The story of me,” he said. “Or of what you think I am. Why should I listen to it?”

“I could tell that story,” said the ant. “If you heard the whole thing, you would feel guilt and horror. You would not do what you are now doing. You would see the truth.”

“I wouldn’t let you tell it.”

“I won’t tell it,” she said.

“You won’t?”

“I won’t – but you will. Tonight. To your audience.”

The cheetah snorted. “That’s not really your decision to make,” he said. He filled the rest of the bowl with the tobacco, then began pressing it down around and over her head using his thumb-claw as a tamper. The goddess’s compound eyes staring up at him were the last part of her he saw.

He flicked the wheel on his firelighter, hesitated a moment, then lit the pipe.

 

* * *

About the Author

Dylan Craine is an aspiring wizard who lives in someone’s attic in Colorado with his three pets, all imaginary. He enjoys traveling beyond the limits of human ken, trading riddles with dragons, and reading. Every once in a galactic year, he can be spotted posting to his Twitter @dpwatrcreations or to his blog at www.deepwatercreations.com. His other work has appeared in Worlds Without Master.

Is it really the time for a cute story about the end of the world?  Well, maybe it’s just the sort of light-hearted look at things we need about now. So here is Softies — or the complete title, Softies: Stuff That Happens After The World Blows Up. It’s a new full-color graphic novel written and illustrated by Kyle Smeallie. “When planet Earth just kind of blows up without warning, 13-year-old Kay becomes the world’s youngest chunk of space debris. She’s inadvertently rescued from the vacuum by Arizona, an alien space-waste collector, and Euclid, his erudite cybernetic pet, and from there this unlikely trio blasts off for the most outlandish, hilarious, and occasionally bureaucratic adventure of their lives!” Softies is due this July from Iron Circus comics. While you’re at it, check out the creator on Behance to see the other project that he’s developing, The Actual Witch Society.

image c. 2020 Iron Circus Comics

First Second brings us a popular fantasy comic from France, collected now in one hardcover graphic novel. Kairos is written and illustrated by Ulysse Malassagne. “Nills and Anaelle are looking forward to their first night in their rustic cabin in the woods. But the couple’s idyllic vacation is suddenly thrown into turmoil when a strange flash of light bursts from the fireplace. A portal appears, and out of it spill dragon-like creatures that are armed to the teeth. They grab Anaelle and flee back through the portal, leaving a distraught Nills with a sudden decision: Stay behind, or leap through after her? He leaps. And that’s when things get really weird.” This new English translation is available now.

image c. 2020 First Second