Why, in the pages of Sybil’s Garage No. 7, of course.

In this seventh issue of the highly acclaimed series, you will find twenty-seven original works of fiction and poetry from today’s top talent, with suggested musical accompaniment, our trademark design aesthetic, and much more. But be sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs on your way into Sybil’s Garage, or you may not find your way out.

6″x9″, 206pp
ISBN: 978-0-9796246-1-2

$9.99 (ePub Version) — Click here

You may also purchase Sybil’s Garage No. 7 on Amazon.com, or Barnes & Noble.com

In the UK and Europe: Amazon.co.uk.

Table of Contents

Fiction

“By Some Illusion” — Kathryn E. Baker
“Suicide Club” — Amy Sisson
“The Noise” — Richard Larson
“A History of Worms” — Amelia Shackelford
“Thinking Woman’s Crop of Fools” — Tom Crosshill
“The Unbeing of Once-Leela” — Swapna Kishore
“How the Future Got Better” — Eric Schaller
“The Telescope” — Megan Kurashige
“Under the Leaves” — A.C. Wise
“The Ferryman’s Toll” — Sam Ferree
“The Tale of the Six Monkeys’ Tails” — Hal Duncan
“The Poincaré Sutra” — Anil Menon
“Kid Despair in Love” — M.K. Hobson
“My Father’s Eyes” — E.C. Myers
“An Orange Tree Framed Your Body” — Alex Dally MacFarlane
“The Watcher Thorn” — Cheryl Barkauskas
“Other Things” — Terence Kuch
“The Dead Boy’s Last Poem” — Kelly Barnhill

Poetry

“Seven League”s — Lyn C. A. Gardner
“One October Night in Baltimore” — Jaqueline West
“Indian Delight” — Alexandra Seidel
“Candle for the Tetragrammaton” — Sonya Taaffe
“Emigrant” — Linsdey Duncan
“Schehirrazade” — Amal El-Mohtar
“The Hyacinth Girl” — Adrienne J. Odasso
“Pathways Marked in Silver” — Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
“Rain ” — Juliet Gillies

Non-Fiction

“Glourious Homage: Quentin Tarantino’s Love Letter to Cinema” — Avi Kotzer — ««click to read now

Press and Reviews

For Issue No. 6

“Sybil’s Garage [is] one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…”
-  Escape Pod, Stephen Eley, Editor, (listen to podcast)

“It’s a stylishly put together magazine, There’s plenty of poetry, art, and nonfiction in addition to the stories…My favorites included Simon Petrie’s “Downdraft”, set on another planet with intelligent zeppelins and flying human-like people. This story is about a young flyer’s ill-advised attack on one of the zeppelins — a story really about misunderstanding, with no bad guys. Also, Becca de la Rosa’s “Not the West Wind”, about, variously, and among other things: a woman in love with a guitar, the west wind, Ireland, and a foundling girl; and Sean Markey’s “Waiting for the Green Woman”, about a man with a tree for a daughter. Other strong work came from Eric Del Carlo, Genevieve Valentine, and Stephanie Campisi.”
- Rich Horton, on his blog (read the full review)

“Another grouping of SF/fantasy little magazines could perhaps be described as the Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet circle. One fine fairly new example is Sybil’s Garage. Its sixth outing has plenty of fine stories and poems.”
- Locus, Rich Horton (print only)

“Issue six of Sybil’s Garage from Senses Five Press is fun. ..Reading it is like wandering into a house party where you not only mingle with the guests, you peruse the décor and absorb the mix of tunes emanating from the stereo.”
-The Fix, Dan Alamia (read the full review)

“This is the most interstitial volume of the innovative magazine to date.  From the composite front photograph of a scarecrow emerging from a New York subway station (the G line) into a lonely pumpkin field to Susannah Mandel’s surreal page entitled “Metamorphic Megafauna” …this issue ranges widely through genres and your brain.”
- The Interstitial Arts Foundation, Delia Sherman (read the full review)

“The stories were varied and all worth reading. It’s moved its home from Hoboken to Brooklyn but is still a unique mix of unusual stories, poems and articles, all with suggestions on the appropriate music to play while reading…Sybil’s Garage is still a strange little magazine with old-fashioned illustrations accompanying the text. For those that want their fiction to be truly different, this is for you.”
- SFRevu, Sam Tomaino (read the full review)

“Ever since first discovering the magazine Sybil’s Garage in 2005 after being shown it by Kris Dikeman, I’ve loved the small press magazine produced by Matt Kressel of Senses Five Press. The magazine’s steady climb in quality moves to upward from an already pretty high starting point, and this issue shows the trend continuing.”
– Fantasy Magazine, Cat Rambo (read the full review)

“One of writer Damien G. Walter’s challenges is that “We need more beautiful magazines” and Sybil’s Garage No. 6 easily fits that bill. While not as experimental as McSweeney’s, editor Matthew Kressel does a lot of outstanding things with this issue. Aside from the well-designed layout, each story/poem is preceded by a recommended song and this presentation is consistent. There’s also what seems like random scribblings by an enigmatic writer at the end of various texts but it all culminates into one meta-narrative that this reviewer found tear-jerking, even if it’s just a simple plot and conceit.”
- Bibliophile Stalker, Charles Tan (read the full review)

Sybil’s Garage No. 7
Just released Where can you find a television that sees five minutes into the future? Where can you find dragons trapped in a jar and an illness which turns people into glass? Where might you find families who sell their brainpower to corporations for penny wages, or dead relatives that sit down for family meals? Why, in the pages of Sybil’s Garage No. 7, of course. In this seventh issue of the highly acclaimed series, you will find twenty-seven original works of fiction and poetry from today’s top talent, with suggested musical accompaniment, our trademark design aesthetic, and much more. But be sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs on your way into Sybil’s Garage, or you may not find your way out.
	$12	More info »

Clarkesworld Magazine

Also today in podcasting, Vylar Kaftan’s story “Fulgurite,” which was originally published in Sybil’s Garage No. 6, is now up at Escape Pod PodCastle (Thanks Rachel!) for your listening pleasure.

The story’s genesis is an interesting one.  My father had several old reels of film from when he was a boy, back in the early 40s, which he had recently converted to DVD.  On one long weekend we added his narrative voice-overs, so he could explain who the folks in the pictures were.  I saw a window into my ancestral past that I had never seen, and it was amazing, to see how my great-grandparents dressed, strolling through New York City, or idling their summers in the country.  I saw Passover Seders and New Year’s celebrations and walks through the Central Park Zoo.  And I saw my dad as a boy, a very rare sight.  And I realized that because the videos had now been digitized, they would never be lost.  I could pass them on to my offspring without degradation.  And my children could do the same to theirs, ad infinitum.  A thousand years from now, my ancestors could watch this film, if we kept it with us.  Now mix in an article I read in Discover Magazine about the possibility of black holes spawning other universes, and the possibility of sending information into that new universe as a way to escape the heat death of ours.  About a year and several revisions later appeared the story you see up at Clarkesworld today.

Please drop me a line and let me know what you think!

CT: What made you decide to include those cryptic marginalia, or music suggestions under each story/poem? (And wouldn’t it be cool if one day each magazine came packaged with a soundtrack?)

MK: For the latest issue, I created an iTunes playlist (http://www.sensesfive.com/2009/05/30/sybils-garage-no-6-playlist/), which is about 95% accurate to what appears in the magazine. I know iTunes isn’t available or convenient for parts of the world, but it’s a start.

For the musical suggestions, it’s simply because I love music. Music has always been very inspirational for me, and I thought it would be a fun way to see what others were listening to and inspired by. Kind of like peeking into someone’s record collection. Crap, I just dated myself. I should say “mp3 collection.”

For the marginalia, I’m not sure I can answer that simply. I think part of the reason I pepper it throughout the pages has to do with my obsession with detail, a desire to fill in every nook and cranny. I also think it has to do with the joy I’ve felt in finding similar cryptic messages or imagery in song lyrics, album art, comics, books, films, and other media. And then, as I dig in further, discovering what they mean. I’m purposely trying to invoke that in Sybil’s, that unexpected frisson when you suddenly discover three quarters of the way through the magazine that there’s a story written in the margins, for example. It’s no secret that my favorite film is Blade Runner, and I’ve always admired Ridley Scott’s obsessive attention to detail, the intense layering of objects, so I guess in a way I’m emulating that too.

But yeah, a Sybil’s Garage soundtrack would be brilliant. I’m actually working on something related to that, interestingly enough.

You can read the full interview here.

by Sean Markey
to the sound of “True Love Waits” by Radiohead…

This story appears in Sybil’s Garage No. 6.

MY DAUGHTER IS a tree in the desert. She doesn’t move; the world rushes past her. I sit in her thin, angular shade, against her diluted-green trunk, and listen as she gossips about the grains of sand as if she knows each one by name. I try not to think about her mother, the green woman, but cannot help myself.

I sit with her and nurse a beer until the sun starts to set behind the red mountains.  The sun colors the sky like pastel chalk.

“They love this part,” she says of the sand. “They call it the grand ball, the costume party.”

I am silent, because I know what’s coming next; it’s what she says every day at sunset.

“I wish I could dance.”

I get up from my place and brush the sand from my clothing. I tuck a beat-up copy of The Jungle Book I’ve been reading her into my back pocket. I kiss her rough bark and wonder why I ever told her about dancing.

“Wait,” she says. “Don’t go yet.”

This, too, is a part of our ritual.

“But I have to. You know I can’t be here after sunset.”  I think once more of the green woman and am ashamed. If I had been a better father, everything would be different, and I would be able to see her without restrictions. I try to change the subject.

“I’ll turn into a pumpkin if I stay any longer.”

Her laughter is the sound of quaking leaves.

“Then who will decorate your leaves at Christmas?” I ask. “Or sit in your shade all day and read you stories?”

A bird calls out somewhere above us, its voice brighter than the sinking sun. The mood changes, and that invisible line between afternoon and evening is crossed, but quietly.

“I have to go,” I say again, unable to keep the guilt from my voice.

“Okay, fine,” my daughter says. “But first, tell me a story.”

I stop myself from sighing. I know exactly where this is going.

“A story it is,” I say. “But it has to be quick. Look at the sun.”

The last of the sun is being swallowed behind the mountains, and low pink clouds are striking against the afterglow. I lean against her and close my eyes.

“Tell me about Mom again,” she says.

“Your mom is a green woman with no name. Sometimes, though, she is a crocodile. And sometimes she is the thunder, the bent wheat stalks, a black widow’s spinneret, African violets. We spent the night together once and watched the stars come out. In the morning she gave me a seed, told me it was you.”

It didn’t happen quite like that, but almost.

“She sounds funny,” my daughter says. “I want to meet her someday.”

I pour the rest of my warm beer out. “I’m sure you will,” I say. I brush my fingers across her trunk as I hurry away. I have to be in my car, driving toward the city or… what? The green women left me only with the threat, and I was too afraid, too ashamed to ask about the consequences.

My imagination fills in the blanks as I leave the desert, exit the freeway, and drive under the string of orange street lights. Maybe I’ll die, or maybe I won’t be allowed to see my daughter any more. They amount to the same thing, really, and I can’t think of anything worse.

Long ago, the green woman kissed my face one last time in the blue morning, her tongue the filaments of a flower, her lips two soft petals. She smiled, and I tried to memorize her heart-shaped flower face, the cedar and pine scent of her. She dropped a seed into my hand.

“Our daughter,” she said. “Take care of her.”

I dropped the seed to the ground, unconcerned. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, we could live together in the wild. I would, I promise.”  I begged until the words no longer made sense.

“Don’t leave me, I have arachnophobia. I’ll empty my 401k. I’ll live off rain and honey. I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid to be alone. I love how you wear the green.”

The green woman laughed. It was not the last time I would hear her voice, but she left me then, and I was broken for a long time afterward.

Everyday I rush out of work, so I can spend time with my daughter before nightfall. I pick up a six pack of beer on the way out and drive into the desert. I exit the interstate at exit 4 onto a small road.

The sun is bright at five in the afternoon, and I have plenty of time to visit her.

As I get closer, I see her shedding leaves like green tears, her branches trembling. I jog the last few steps and find her weeping, inconsolable. She wilts like a flower. It takes an hour to finally calm her down.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

“A bird,” she says, her voice raw from crying.

“What? What about it? Did one make a nest on you?”  I cannot slow myself down. “You want me to get rid of it?”

“No,” she yells, and her voice shakes the sand like a little shock wave. “No, no, no, no, no.”  She starts crying again, though she doesn’t have any leaves left to lose.

“Okay, all right. I’m sorry. I promise I won’t do that.”  I wait for her to calm down again. “Is that what’s wrong?”

“A bird died on my branches. It landed on me and preened its feathers, and…and then it just died. I felt it.”  Her voice drops to a whisper. There are no other sounds in the desert. “It just fell over against my trunk. Its feathers tickled me. I felt its feet brush my bark. It died, Dad.”

I comfort her as best I can. It takes awhile, and the sun doesn’t stop along its track behind the red mountains to the west. Damn the day, and damn the way time never stops for anyone.

As she calms down, she keeps her silence, and I think of the green woman. Many years had passed since that first night, until she came to me again, but it wasn’t the reunion I had hoped for. The vines around her arms had sprouted red berries which shook when she spoke. She accused me of losing her daughter, and it took me a long time to remember what she was talking about. Too long.

“I wanted her to grow up near you, in your yard, around the other green life in your garden. I wanted more for her than the desert!”

She cursed me, crushed me with her words. This is the part I never tell my daughter. The green woman told me I could only visit our daughter when the sun was out. Because of my neglect, I could only enjoy our daughter’s company in the harsh sunlight . I must always leave before the light disappears completely.

When her tone softened, she charged me with taking care of our daughter and promised she would see me again.

My daughter speaks, and pulls me from my thoughts.

“Can you bury it?”

“Bury it? The bird?”

“Yeah. Right beside me. Please?”

I hesitate. I look at the sun, all the way behind the mountains. I know if I stay too much longer, I’ll have to face down the green woman’s threat.

“Please, Dad? Don’t leave me.”

I hear the desperation in her voice, the way my own voice must have sounded to the green woman so long ago.

“Okay,” I say. Maybe I’ll see the green woman sooner than I imagined.

I climb up to fetch the bird. Her limbs feel more brittle than I remember, and she has shed all her leaves in grief. I reach the bird, near the top branches, a black and brown woodpecker. The bird is cold and stiff in my hand.

Beside my daughter’s trunk, I kneel on the ground and push at the sand. The red mountains drink the sun down, and there is only a sapphire afterglow. I couldn’t have left her here alone, to mourn all night by herself. What kind of father would I be? The green woman would understand. I hoped.

I lay the woodpecker gently into the hole, and cover it with sand. Its grey legs stick straight up toward the sky. This strikes me as wrong, so I flip it over, feet first, and lay it back in the shallow grave. I imagine it shooting through a sky the color of sand, its wings tucked close to its side, bullet shaped.

I push sand back over the hole and stand up. It’s almost completely night now.

“Say something,” my daughter says. “Say something for the bird.”

I try to think of words to say, but all I can think about is how dark it is in the desert at night, even though the stars sparkle fiercely overhead.

“Uhm…it really was a beautiful bird. It’s a shame it died.”

“Yeah,” my daughter says and drags out the word like a gust of wind.

Then something familiar touches my skin, and I can smell honeysuckle and citrus, and overwhelming green.

I turn around and see her again, my green woman, framed by the night.

“Hello,” I manage.

“Stars came out,” the green woman says.

“I know, but, our daughter. A bird died. I—I couldn’t leave.”

The green woman silences me with a shake of her head. Her petals and leaves bounce in the quickly cooling desert air.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have made that rule. I was angry.”  She reaches out a soft green hand and touches my face. “I can’t undo those words. If I break my word once, everything comes undone.”

I look away from her. I lean against my daughter for support, and even through my sadness, and the shock of seeing the green woman again, I’m surprised at how quiet she’s been.

“Please,” I whisper. “I just want to be with her. I just want to take care of her. I’m sorry. Don’t make me leave. Don’t leave me again.”

The green woman smiles and sits on the ground. She pulls me down with her. I curl up beside her and watch the stars overhead. They turn in blurry circles, like an overexposed picture.

When night becomes morning, I am awakened by the sound of my daughter sleeping. Her soft snore is branches scraping together. Once I emerge from the stupor of sleep and realize that I’m still alive after all, I notice how big everything appears. Green has returned to my daughter’s branches, and among the new leaves, pink and white flowers twine, like ribbons woven into hair.

They look so perfect, those heart-shaped flowers. They look sweet, and the shelter of leaves and branches is inviting. I reach up to them and am there quickly, hovering, drinking from the flowers.

“Hi Daddy,” my daughter says. I land on a branch, and fold my bright wings. My hummingbird feet clutch at her bark.

I attempt to speak, but my words have been replaced by feathers, tiny black eyes, a long hooked beak. I try to understand how much I lost when I chose to stay last night. Instead I think about what I gained. I can take shelter in my daughter’s maze of leaves, and drink nectar from the sweet flowers. She laughs at my acrobatics and is tickled by my feathers when they brush her. All year, in every season, green leaves and flowers decorate my daughter’s branches.

Day pass in the beat of a wing, and the stars shine in the beat of another. I wait for the green woman like an afterthought, but still, I wait. I see the green woman’s touch everywhere, taste her sweetness in the heart-shaped flowers, hear her in the sound of always-distant coyotes howling, smell her when the storm fronts carry the scent of rain on their edges.

“Tell me a story about Mom,” my daughter says.

I settle on a branch and start to chatter.

<end>

Sean Markey lives in Salt Lake City, UT. He is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education from Westminster College, and is very close to being finished. His stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons. For more about him and his work, please visit his website: http://www.mrmarkey.com.

Sybil’s Garage No. 6
“Sybil’s Garage is one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…” - Escape Pod, Stephen Eley, Editor
	$7.95	More info »

As soon as I stepped downstairs the car service I had reserved pulled up, and next thing I knew I was off, speeding out of Greenpoint towards the BQE.  I told the cabbie to listen to WBAI, 99.5 FM and he immediately tuned in to a reggae/talk politic show.  “Do you like science fiction and fantasy?” I asked.  “No, not really,” he said.  But he seemed more than happy to tune into the station and listen, I suppose because most of the folks he picked up at this quiet hour were either drunk or business folk worried about catching their flight.  How many had asked him what he liked?  Or perhaps he just wanted a good tip.

The caffeine kicked in as we sped along the BQE.  I felt high, superb.  It had been a long time since I was up this early, long before my circadian rhythm would have me, and as we sped over the Brooklyn Bridge, I glanced over at Manhattan, half-asleep, city lights dimmed for the night.  It felt magical, surreal, wonderful.

When I pulled up to the WBAI station, out pops Jim Freund from his car service.  With bagels.

We went upstairs and noshed and chatted and soon the rest of Altered Fluid showed up.  This time it was Rajan Khanna’s time to read on the air.  We shuffled into the studio, introduced ourselves to the listeners, and then Raj began “School Bus,” a story of a bus driver whose mother is dying from cancer and enrolls in an experimental drug program to get money to support her treatments.  But the drug, it seems, has unintended side-effects.  It was interesting, I recall as I write this, that in the car on the way to the studio, the talk-show host was talking about how prescription drugs often have side-effects which cause the same symptoms they are trying to cure.  Sometimes the universe just synchronizes that way.

Rajan has an excellent radio voice and did a superb job with his story.  (He’s recorded podcasts for Jeffrey Ford, among others.)  Then it was time for our critiques.  Eugene Myers, who was traveling, could not attend.  But thanks to the magic of Google Voice, Jim was able to play Eugene’s critique live on the air while we read a mostly accurate speech-to-text conversion of his voice.  Had we not prompted him, the casual listener might have thought he was present.

Overall, the morning went extremely well.  We even got to take several calls.  (Though, sadly, no trolls.)  Before we knew it, it was 7am, the show had ended, and the sun had risen over New York, and the East River, dark before, was now flooded with light.  All too fast, I thought.  All too fast.  Not to worry, though, I told myself.  We’d be back before long to do it again.  It’s become a regular thing.

For those interested, you can listen to a recording of the show here.  And you can see some of my photos from the show here.

by K. Tempest Bradford
to the sound of “Rock Me To Sleep” by Jill Sobule…

This story appears in Sybil’s Garage No. 6.

For Marjorie; I still have that dream.

Sybil’s Garage No. 6
“Sybil’s Garage is one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…” - Escape Pod, Stephen Eley, Editor
	$7.95	More info »

by Devin Poore
to the sound of Bob Mould, Life and Times…

This interview appears in Sybil’s Garage No. 6.

Sybil’s Garage No. 6
“Sybil’s Garage is one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…” - Escape Pod, Stephen Eley, Editor
	$7.95	More info »

by Paul Jessup
to the sound of “Love Her Madly” by the Doors…

This story appears in Sybil’s Garage No. 6.

ME AND JAZZ

Jazz sat against the tree, woomph, eyes lit up and his hand rubbing his bare chest. “Man, that Mary Mary May is some girl.”

I pulled out a joint and lit it. The smell was sweet, like flowers. “Yeah, you could say that. She’s not going to be back for another twenty or so years. And then we’ll be old, and she’ll still be young. But at least she’ll be safe. Those fucking molts will have purged her from the datamines by then, and she’ll be safe.”

“So it goes,” said Jazz, “So it goes. I’ll miss her madly.”

“We both will,” I said and watched as she hit the stratosphere, the last of the paint peeling and crackling in the heat of exit.

Bear was back in the station, not paying attention to us, his face buried in the guts of a robotic body. Spent vacuum tubes lay scattered across the floor in a circle, ringing around a pile of filthy sparkplugs.

He turned his bushy head round to see us. “Couldn’t convince her to stay, eh?”

Jazz kicked a rusted mechanical hand across the floor. “Nope. The molts have a scent on her code, man. You know how it goes. Once they sniff ya, it’s over on this planet.”

Bear put his head back into the machine. “Yeah, fuck. Why are we still here, then? They snuffed our code out ages ago, and now we can’t sleep in the same place twice without being hunted. Why do we keep on fighting on? Why can’t we go to Zappa, or Firebell, or even Skydew? Any of those stations are better than this. They say they share all, no greed, no law, no fucking molts. You know? Why can’t we have that?”

I reached over and grabbed the microwave rifle from the wall, feeling the power and weight of it in my hands. It was beat down, old and angry. Just like me. Just like Bear and Jazz. “Someone has to do this. Someone needs to stop the molts. We keep running into the stars, Bear — we keep running into the stars and they will move out after us, take the war away from those alien worlds and focus it on the stations. They will take their hands and squish the rings of moons, smash down the other stars. Those peaceful communes won’t last, not when the molts land and start opening up. Consider what we do a diversion, a sacrifice for their existence.”

Bear threw a wrench at the ground; it clanged and sparkled as it spun, sucking in the light. “Fuck. I know you’re right, right? I know you’re speaking good stuff. But — why does it have to be us? I’m sick of fighting. I’m sick of being revived. I’m sick of all this shit. Why can’t we just lay back and live on one of those stars? With Mary Mary May, or Silver Kitty, or Dopeling? Let some kids do our work for us.”

Jazz walked forward, his eyes on a poster on the back wall. Dylan in bright blues, Dylan holding a rally, and underneath it written in brilliantly curving balloon letters: Take Hold of Freedom.

“Because of Dylan, that’s why.”

Bear was quiet. The name of our patron saint, the king of the Weathermen — Dylan. He who died for our cause so many years ago, back when the first wave of molts came in and war was announced, before we stole the gene base and the revita chambers from the military compounds. We were the first to fight back, the first to say no to the molts, say no to the war. We won’t go and rape the alien planets, we won’t kill ourselves on the soil of relic worlds for the molts to pillage, we won’t play their games, live their lies.

We were the Weathermen. And Dylan was our leader, guitar in one hand and pipe bomb in the other. We blew holes in their buildings, had our heads knocked about by the molts and their machines. But in the end there are more of us, growing each day.

Bear didn’t say anything. He just went back inside the guts of that machine and tinkered about, the sparks of his soldering shooting out blue and leaving the air tasting like sweet ozone.

It didn’t take long for the molt dogs to sniff out our code and hunt us down in the ratted ruins of a bus station we had called home for the past week or so. We had to run that night Mary Mary May left, leaving our old home behind us, the metallic barking under the light of the full moon, the sound of pistons and steam wooshing into the forest winds. We each had a backpack slung over our shoulders, microwave rifles in hand.

Bear was the biggest and hung in the back, firing at the molts that ran us into the dark of the woods. The sound of the bolts from the rifle burst our ears, leaving them ringing for hours on end, the ping ping pinging of the metallic molt dogs piercing in even further than the bolt firings.

Bear was mad and yelling and hooting, his half finished baby robot Sunshine hung on his shoulders like a koala to a tree. “Come on you fuckers! You can’t kill us, you can’t cut us down! We are the fucking underground, and we will come up from all corners and smother you! The revolution is now!”

Blue lights of fissuring fire shot past us from the molt dog guns, burning the sides of my cheek and my face stinging from the pain. If I hadn’t bit some dream berries an hour ago, that would be a fuckload of hurt, but right now it was just warm and blistering and distant. Like it was all happening to someone else.

Eventually the molt dogs either all died or left us running because the blasts stopped coming at us and the barking died out until there was no sound at all. We ended up on a beach near the main lake, the lake that was larger than the moons that orbited around us. The night was gone and the sun was just beginning to rise up, painting the world in a cold blue that was both beautiful and haunting at the same time.

Cliffs lined the beach to either side, forests like a pine army lining the top of it. I saw a huge mansion on the top of the highest cliff looking dead and run down with haunted eyes. No lights, no star ships, no cars, nothing.

Above it we saw the glimmering stars that trailed the sky, disappearing with the light of day. Bear clamped his hand on mine, it was sweaty and dirty, Sunshine bot over his shoulder smiling the painted on smile, her little light eyes glowing blue. Her AI was half finished, just like her body, but she still had life, somehow. Even if it was mostly broken and artificial.

Bear laughed, heartily. “Now, that. I forgot about how much fun that could be. We were too complacent, man. Too stone still. I had forgotten about how much fun the fight is. I’m going to stay here and fight forever.”

Jazz was near the crashing waves, leaned over and panting. “We need a place guys. Need some pad to lay our heads, right?”

“Right on, right on,” I said, “You guys see what I see? Right up there. Now that’s a joint I could get used to.”

Bear shrugged. Sunshine bot mewled on his shoulders, making the only noise she knew how, blowing hot steam out of her back while the vacuum tubes that lined her shoulders flickered a soft blue and amber light. Black tubes lined her shoulders and back, clockwork gears twisting and turning the wiring. “Yeah, could do. At least until we get hunted again. Damn. You sure it’s empty though? I mean, it looks empty…”

Jazz stood up, his breathing more slow and regular, his body outlined by the grey and blue of the polluted lake. Over his shoulders was a bead blanket, keeping the bitter lake wind from biting his bare chest. “Like, looks can be deceiving though. We all know that.”

From the sky we saw a brilliant flash of light and then stars streaming down blue and gold. I felt like I was covered in honey, prickling, warm, bee filled honey. I felt the bee feet dance on my skin and I smiled. After the flash of light we saw some silver and gold object come skating down, off, behind the cliff and into the woods.

“Damn,” Bear said, “Fuck me if that ain’t a sign.”

I grinned, big pumpkin grin. “Question is — of what? Is that some moldy probe sent to kill us? Is it like some alien ship stranded down among us? Or is it some satellite that just happened to be hit and get knocked down? Could be a bad sign. Could be our death sign.”

Jazz laughed. “To hell with your astrology, man. I say it’s a sign we go and check out what it is, dig? And then we take that pad for our own. If someone lives there, it’s probably some old cat we can coerce into letting us crash. Cool?”

Bear nodded, Sunshine bot smiled and said, “Gooeygahmoo!”

I walked up the path towards the cliff, pushed my hands on the rocky face and felt a trellis of tree roots along the side like sandpaper against my palm. I grabbed it, pulled and yanked. Seemed sturdy enough for climbing. “All right, you bearded crazies. Let’s go. But I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Trees bent out like broken ballet dancers, crushed under the weight of metal and heat. Circle of ash. I held my breath, because  I recognized the ship pieces, shattered, gossamer wings caught and ripped and torn in bare branches, the knotted fingers grasping through.

I called out, no — screamed, rushed forward. The air vibrated, and I saw the lean hungry shadows of Bear and Jazz run with me, pulling off piles wreckage, sorting through the debris. It was Mary Mary May’s ship — we all saw that. Memories of painting it fluttered through my mind, scattered scar thoughts of Bear building it, claiming the ship sky worthy, that the bounds of this sub earth could not hold The Goodbye Girl in the clutches of its gravity.

“Bear!” I screamed, “Bear!”  I hit him as we pulled out pieces of shrapnel and scattered metal pieces. He didn’t hit me back, he just pushed me and kept on searching through the wreckage. Sunshine bot on his back shot me a dirty look, said something to me in its clicking baby tongue that I’m sure was an insult, its illuminated eyes glaring through tin skull.

“BEAR!” I screamed, and howled, and punched my fists into the ground, dirt and rock breaking the skin of my knuckles.

I loved Mary Mary May. We all did, but I loved her moreso, loved her fingers against stomach, loved her lips on shoulders, loved her teeth running against my back. Loved her thrust and howl, loved her whole and shaking, coming and burning. I still felt her, like a ghost against me. Rocking.

Jazz called me out — yelled at me to come and help. He found her leg — the rest of her buried beneath some plastic chair that was torn to shreds with loose puffs of stuffing come loose and floating like clouds. I ran over and helped, whispering prayers to gods I thought long since dead and buried, hoping that she was alive underneath all of that junk.

We pulled her out, her body slid against the ground, pulling the hunks of metal and plastic off. She breathed — beautiful chest rising up and down, orange skirt frayed and torn but still there, the beads around her neck broken and scattered along the chair like tiny, colorful stars.

I held her in my arms. She was bruised, but in one piece. Nothing pierced through, nothing shattered. “She’ll be all right, yeah?”

Jazz grunted. “Won’t know, man. Not out here. Need to plug the equipment in.”

I nodded and ignored Bear, whose long lean body was sorting through the wreckage, scratching at his beard and making thinking noises as he did it. He sucked on his tooth as me and Jazz carried her off, towards the house to get some juice for Jazz’s equipment.

I was going to say something rude and thought against it. Better Bear stay out here, amongst the scraps of this tin can that he strapped a rocket to. Safe my ass. He sent her up to die.

“Hey guys,” he called back, not turning his head, “She was shot down.”

And we said nothing. I knew he was right. He followed behind as we head up to that old mansion. We felt something igniting in the air — a feeling of being watched. The molts watched us. In the trees, in the sky. Somehow, the molts watched us, using their damned molt technology.

That was a spooky old place, definitely one that had gone up and given the ghost. Nobody had stayed in that pad in ages — the wallpapers were all from the early century, the clocks and furniture were covered in dust and cobwebs. We heard the noisy feet of spiders scurrying in the shadows, and tried to pay it no mind when the ancient clock chimed out the angry hours.

“Damn,” Jazz said as we laid her body flat against the floorboards, “I’ll be lucky if there’s any juice left in this old place.”

He pulled open his backpack and rummaged around inside. The sound of gears cranking and mechanical whirring tasted the air as his nimble fingers moved about, searching for the device.  He pulled out it with no great flair, all of us on edge. I held her body, close, that soft velvet skin of Mary Mary May, hoping she would be fine, good, cuddle close and still breathing.

Bear said nothing. He only peeked with cautious eyes out of the windows, microwave rifle in hand, joint in mouth with smoke pluming around his head. “They watching, I think.” He said in his big bear voice, “They shot her down right here, and they’ll be here to get her. That’s why they stopped chasing us, man. We’re in for a big bang of a brawl.”

Sunshine bot clung to Bear’s shoulders, mechanical arms and legs wrapped around tight and making low whirring noises, like a small broken wristwatch. Bear petted Sunshine bot and the thing cooed and mewed in pleasure, tin head arcing up beneath the stroking fingers.

Jazz pushed aside an old table and chair, shoving a tiffany lamp to the floor and followed its mouse eaten cord back to the wall. “Ancient, ancient. This is ancient. But it should have enough juice. Enough sparkly sparkle for what we need it to do.”

He plugged the machine in. Hummmm.

Glitter glow of tiny tesla coils, arching strange light, snickering, snickering. Then the soft illumination of the vacuum tubes, and the tiny green screen in front of him, with glowing radioactive letters. “Give me a sec, boys. I need to calibrate it to her life waves. Focus in, get her signs. See if her chi’s in alignment.”

It sounded like a radio tuning in some ghost frequency — voices from dead stars, dead cities echoing about in the old mansion room. This device always gave me a bad feeling, like something inside of me had gone sour and spoiled my bones.

“Kay, kay, kay. Got it, man. Got it. She seems fine, doing okay. But what’s this? She’s pregnant.”

I tried to speak, but all I got was muttered half words. Was it mine? Was it theirs? It was hers, I knew that, but whose was it? And was it okay after an impact like that?

More tuning, weak sounds like banging, ancient music. Bear pulled red curtain back, pushed his body flat against the boards, fingering the tip of his rifle. “Something’s outside. Like, something walking the beach. Ain’t ever seen anything like it. Fuck me, we are in trouble, boys. We are in trouble.”

“Ok. She’s got a minor imbalance here. Just need to change the flow of the chi, correct the balance with a few things. Baby is fine, kicking a little even. I doubt she knows she even has it.”

He turned some knobs, right, left. I sat by, watching, holding my breath. I want to go and look at the window, to see what Bear sees. But she needs me here, by her side. That’s my baby in there. That’s my girl, half dead from a blast from space, knocking her bird down to earth.

Her arms moved as she shook violently, her eyes flipping open, spasming. Jazz turned the knobs another direction, muttering something beneath his breath, tried to focus harder, his knuckles white, his eyebrow twitching. She sat up, gasping for air, holding her stomach and close to screaming, tears rolling down her face as butterflies flew out of her mouth. They flapped in the air for a moment, and then dissipated like colored smoke.

I grabbed her and hugged her, pushing her close to my body. I didn’t ever want her to go again, don’t ever want her to leave again. Even if the molts come directly for us, their dogs growling and bone hungry. I had wanted to set her free, to let her escape, to let her live in peace. I realized now that was just as selfish as keeping her near.

She shook, finally gained composure to talk. “Where am I? Oh, Captain Heart, you’re still here. Hold me for a moment. I fell from the sky, like a falling star. I can feel it — something shot me down. A bird with an arrow in its breast. How did I survive? My whole body feels twisted and wind-smashed.”

Jazz waved at her and smiled. “Got it done with a little help from my friend here. Just made sure the life forces were flowing properly. And — congratulations.”

I held her tight, knowing this might be the first moment she hears the news — our news. “Congratulations?” she whispers in an out of tune voice.

“Yeah, you’re pregnant.”

She shoved me away, I fall back and hit the floor skidding across. Not the response I expected, not the response I wanted. I’m hesitant, unsure, and must admit a little scared.

“Oh no,” she said, “Oh fuck no. I can’t raise a baby here — not in this world! Not in this — this hell. Those damn molts will eat the poor kid up, turn her into a machine…no, no I can’t do this.”

I reached out to hold her, reached out to comfort her. We heard a noise coming from outside, on the beach. It sounded like metal eating metal, machine devouring machine. “Mary Mary May — we can raise her underground — out of the way of the eating world. We can keep our baby safe from the molts — safe!”

She shook her head as Bear pulled out his rifle and aimed it outside, aimed it at something on the dark beach. “It hasn’t seen us yet,” Bear muttered, “And it’s not going to get a chance to, either.”

“Our baby? Our baby? What? You fuck me a few times and think you own this flesh? This is my baby, idiot, and I’m not raising her in a warzone while you and your buddies play revolution.”

I was hurt, I was broken. Bear fired out the window, the loud shots from the microwave rifle making our ears ring, the smell of ozone once again tinting our senses. “This is my baby too, right? It’s partly mine, right?”

Mary Mary May said nothing, she just ran, ran with her beautiful legs out the door and outside, into that forest where the molts wandered, laser cannons ready to hunt us down and take us out.

Jazz shrugged and unplugged his tool and then popped it back into his backpack. He then unslung his microwave rifle and started the charge, getting it ready to blast some metal to welded scrap. “No thanks, eh? Well, I don’t expect you to thank me for her, man. That’s just how it goes.”

I nodded at him. “Thanks man,” and gave him a quick hug. Our arms beat our backs and we parted for a moment. His beard was ragged, twice as long as mine and covered in tiny beads and braids. “I’ve got to go after her,” and I took out my own rifle, testing the scope, making sure the old battered-down beast of a gun still worked.

“Is cool. Don’t worry, you know? Go after her. I have a feeling this pad might be a good hangout for some time.”

Bear turned around, his face was twisted, his eyes mad with the feeling of a fight. Sunshine bot bounced up and down his shoulders, happily making baby bot noises in joy. “It’s getting closer, closer, closer. You best get her back here, before that damn thing gets to us.”

I took a look outside of the window, saw the beach beyond. Patches of the sand had been blasted into glass, the waves rushing about and crashing beneath the newborn sun. Birds darted over the lake, outlining the lone monster of a gigantic bipedal bot that stood about the size of a house. It was covered in molt designs — complex patterns made of intricate mathematical functions. It was rusty and old, and coughed smoke and smog out of giant tubes lining the head.

It had a tail that oozed out toxic sludge, probably some byproduct of its weaponry. Two arms on either side were lined with large cannons, firing a silent plasmatic bolt in the air, aiming for the cliff, not knowing we were in the house on the hill. It shook the ground, creating small landslides of sand and dirt and tree.

In the center of the biped was a molt. Clean shaven head, clean shaven face, thick black military glasses perched on the nose. Out of its mouth dangled a pipe coughing tar colored smoke in shadows around his head. A grey sweater vest accented his chest, a tie around his neck neatly tied and black pleated pants unwrinkled even in combat. He grinned with each shot, sussing out exactly where the weathermen were hiding.

Bear leaned back out, fired off two bolts just to the left of the machine. The molt swung his head around, trying to follow the trajectory with his eyes, tracing it back and discover the origin of the blast.

Jazz got his rifle ready, scope pointed out. “You missed him,” Jazz scolded.

“Naw,” Bear said, “I’m toying with him.”

Jazz looked back at me and shoved me with the palm of his hand. “Whatta ya doing here, gawking? Like, get out there and grab the girl. Make sure she’s safe, even though she’s fucking nuts.”

I found her sobbing in the wreckage, pushing around the broken parts of the space ship around, her skirt torn and almost a thin thread, her makeup running down her face as she sobbed.

“It’s OK,” I say as I walk up to her, “It will be all right. Everything’s cool.”

She sifted smashed wires between her fingers, looking at the glinting fibers in the palm of her hand. I walked up cautiously, listening to the sounds of the woods around me, rifle at the ready, knowing that with one molt here the rest should be coming round soon, sniffing out of code and swallowing us whole.

“I almost was out there — you know? Almost out to the Heaven’s Fire. My brother went there a few years ago, been sending me vtcards through the post. He can’t say much, but he’s so happy, you know? And they don’t have any of this there. None of it. They all live together, grow food together, take care of each other’s kids. It’s so beautiful. Why can’t we have that? Why can’t I have that?”

I got down at the balls of my feet. Ignoring my instincts to run and fight and kill. I put a hand on her shoulder, and her tear stained eyes look up at me, pleading. “We can have that. I — I don’t want to give up the cause, you know? Like, this fight is important. Because once the molts are done fighting on the foreign worlds and the alien nations, they’re going to target the communes next. And we’ve got to stop them before they start, cool?”

“I don’t care! I want to raise my girl in a place that’s safe. I want to be happy! Why can’t I be happy?”

And I leaned in and I held her close, and I knew, at that moment, that I was going to give it all up. Give up the war, the fight, the Weathermen, give it all up for what she wanted.

“It’s ok,” I said, “We’ve got enough martyrs here. If you want, I’ll help you. I’ll come with you. We’ll make it to Heaven’s Fire. If you’ll let me.”

She didn’t say anything. She just sobbed on my shoulder. We sat there, still in the wreckage for a moment, and then heard explosions and running feet. I moved to stand up, but she pulled me down, pulled me close, shielding her.

From out of the house I saw pillars of smoke, pillars of fire rising up and engulfing the sun. And running towards us, guns out and ready are Jazz and Bear. “I guess it’s not such a sturdy building after all,” Bear called out, Sunshine bot bopping on his back, “One blast from that molt and it was toast. Whoohee! Come on boys and girls, it’s time to run and keep running.”

They stopped in front of us, Jazz panting, holding out his hand. “Come on,” he said, “I don’t care where we go. We just can’t stay here.”

And I reached out, and he grabbed my wrist, and he pulled me up, and I pull Mary Mary May up with me. And she looked at me, and we heard the sound of explosions, and then saw the giant biped come up over the cliff, right towards us. “I’m scared,” she said, holding her stomach.

Bear laughed. “Join the crowd. Come on kids, let’s get moving.”

And then we run. We run through trees and woods, the molts chasing after us, we fire back, fire true, and over our heads we hear their mechanical birds flying, dropping down flames and fire and burning holes in the ground. And we go and keep going, running, running. Because the revolution is made to run. We are made to run. To fly. To keep on fighting.

<END>

© Copyright 2009 Paul Jessup & Senses Five Press

Sybil’s Garage No. 6
“Sybil’s Garage is one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…” - Escape Pod, Stephen Eley, Editor
	$7.95	More info »

by Jason Erik Lundberg
to the sound of “A Heap of Trouble” by Steve Sullivan…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 5

T

There have been stories and rumors from other towns, other counties, other states, but it doesn’t feel quite real until your own town is visited, snuck into, invaded. For the flyers are merely the first wave, the warning of things to come: the arrival of the Walkers. All that day, the day before, the cold air runs tense through the town, oozing through the leafless winter branches, sliding down shirt collars. The skies turn grey, as if responding to the news, rendering a flatness to the light and an ominous foreboding to the streets. You may laugh it off; it’s just a fraternity prank, or an activist stunt, or a harmless cult, but you hurry home nonetheless, that prickly feeling at the base of your skull urging you to safety, convincing you that there they are, right behind you, conjuring phantoms from the reptilian section of your brain.

The mayor goes on the local station that night, cheeks pinked by the cold, uncomfortable in his new toupee, suit more rumpled than usual, and he reassures you, all of you, that this is nothing to be afraid of, that we can’t let these strangers come into our fair town and terrorize us, though you see a note of fear in his shivering hazel eyes, in the way that beads of sweat drip down the sides of his face. He does not speak long, wanting to be home himself, and it is with some relief when the station returns to prime time sitcom reruns, or reality-based competition programs, or game shows encased in dazzling lights and ecstatic audiences, your regular nighttime showcase of entertaining falseness, full of all the beautiful people.

Your dreams are filled with images in monochrome: a concrete house in disrepair, spotted and stained with gray splotches, surrounded by maple and elm, shed of leaves, extending their skeletal fingers into a sky populated by the skrawks and caws of crows, circling lazily a ghostly form clothed in the robes of an ascetic and surrounded by the crackling blackness of unholy energy, and then the figure stands along the darkened path to the house, more substantial — you can perceive even the rough weave of his garments — and his hands reach up to pull back his hood and reveal his face, to tell you his true name: J. Something Something, but your dream-self recoils, and you scratch and claw your way through an infinite number of oneiric layers until you awaken, breathless, damp, in your own bed. It is an almost involuntary reflex to laugh, to banish the strange dream, to take away its gripping power.

The next morning, the skies still ashen, the colors bleached out of everything by the harsh light that suffuses the streets, you make your way slowly to your office, looking behind you every ten steps or so, passing store after store displaying Closed signs, and only a handful of brave souls wander the sidewalks, chatting and humming to banish the fear and anticipation, as if walking through a cemetery. You unlock the door to your travel agency and slip inside, letting out a breath now that a layer of glass and wood separates you from the outside, from whatever is coming. The work keeps your mind occupied through the morning, arranging flights over the phone, booking package deals with airlines and hotels as far away as Indonesia, filing receipts and reports since your assistant has decided to call in sick, and so the sound creeps up on you, background noise at first, but soon clear and distinct, emerging from the west side of town, and it is the unmistakable sound of more than a dozen men singing.

Naked, we are strong!

You want to march along!

Manly men, come join your kin

And listen to our song!

It is intoxicating, this simple chant, growing closer and louder, progressing ever more near as it approaches eastward, sailing the main street through the town, toward you. The words infect your ears, your bones, your skin, and abruptly your office has become too warm, too stifling, and your clothes too rough and confining. You long to be rid of them, to strip down to your essence, and that is exactly what you do. Off come the tie, jacket, shirt, pants, underwear, hurriedly shedding your second skin, the chant pulsing in your chest as you find the words emerging from your own mouth, and you run outside to join your brethren just now passing by, men of middle age: bankers, office managers, computer scientists, engineers, salesmen, high school sports coaches, now accompanied by others, your townsfolk: an accountant, a dealership owner, a bicycle repairman, an ice cream salesman, a pharmacist, a university professor, a gas station attendant, and yes, a travel agent, all marching and chanting and reveling in your maleness, in the communal bond with your fellow men, untouched by the cold winter wind.

You know that it all looks preposterous, absurd, twenty or so men all parading down Main Street in nothing but their shoes and socks, paunched and hairy and out of shape, far from the manufactured airbrushed magazine advert image of what a man should look like — glossy, coifed, tanned, muscular — as you step in joyful cadence down the lined asphalt, and although you spy horrified looks from behind the window curtains of the people you interact with every day, your voice grows louder, and stronger, and you truly don’t care how it all appears, because for this one all-too-brief moment you experience a near-nirvanic sensation of communion with something higher, of interconnectedness, of being in the world and of the world, tears in your eyes, loving every single man and woman on the planet, vowing to do all you can to deliver this feeling to others, this sense of being liberated, unconstrained, free.

<End>

© Copyright 2008 Jason Erik Lundberg & Senses Five Press

Sybil’s Garage No. 5
A spectrum of stories and poems from the past, present and elsewhen
	$4.95	More info »

by Alex Dally MacFarlane
to the sound of “The Stars” by Patrick Wolf…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 5

The night is a blackbird and it lives on Gemma’s arm. When it is still, its tail feathers brush her elbow and its beak sits below the curve of her shoulder, pointing behind her. When it moves, which is most of the time, it can be anywhere within the confines of her left arm.

Stars string its wings, shining brightly amid the black. They wink when the sun turns its back and whisper rude taunts. Gemma sits in the park, surrounded by the branch-walls and leaf-ceiling of her house, and listens to them. Sometimes she giggles — stars are no different to men, she thinks, with their obsession about size — but sometimes she wants to block them out, their bickering that reminds her too much of other arguments, and she sits in the dirt with her fingers in her ears.

The floor lumpy underfoot, the receptionist’s smile, the buzz from around back — she smiles, breathes in and sighs out, and walks to the desk.

“I was thinking, maybe I could have New Year’s Day on my right ankle.”

Leah, who wields ink and needles with the same ease as the stars wield insults, smiles and says, “Sure you can. And what kind of bird is New Year’s Day?”

“Once a year it burns so bright,” says Gemma, “and all the people can’t do a thing but stop and stare at it. And then the days pass and the people look elsewhere and it fades and fades, until in the quick turning of seasons it’s turned to nothing but ash in the wind. But the seasons keep turning in their circles and it returns, reformed, burning so bright again.”

Still smiling in her guarded, unsure way, Leah readies the ink and needles for the tattoo of the day.

Gemma watches the artist’s long sleeves, waiting to find out if she imagined it last time. But no, there it is when she reaches for the pot of gold ink: a stray feather of day on the soft underside of Leah’s arm, yellow and blue, hiding an old scar.

I have an appointment and What time is it? and Five o’clock and Okay, Gemma, just take a seat, Leah will be with you soon.

In the morning Gemma wipes sleep and twigs from her eyes, carefully packs her clothes and blanket into her tattered bag, and leaves the park.

She wanders into the town, whistling bird-songs to the big toe that pokes through her left shoe. Standing in the centre of the shopping square is the fountain — a pair of nymphs tangled narrow-limbed around each other, spilling water from their upturned mouths — and Gemma goes there to wash her birds. The blackbird has a streak of dirt along its neck; it holds very still while Gemma wipes it away. When she is done, it ruffles its feathers and begins cawing to the pigeons sitting on the nearby stone. They coo back, comparing lifestyles and trading secrets. The stars are quiet.

Later in the morning, when Gemma has finished washing her birds and the town centre is full of people, Leah and her husband sit at a café on the other side of the square. They are too far away for Gemma to hear their words, but she sees the gist of it written on their bodies and faces.

Back and forth, bicker bicker, stars against the sun, husband and wife.

Gemma whispers, “You need a bird with two heads that change with the winds.”

The blackbird is still cawing to the pigeons, boasting that I am night whereas you are just a lump of flesh. The robin on her right wrist joins the conversation a few times, but mostly it stays quiet. It wears a calendar around its neck and as the hands turn their circles the robin flickers, changing. The differences are slight — its beak becomes fractionally shorter, its feet change their shade of yellowy-orange to orangey-yellow — but Gemma catalogues them, storing the memories carefully.

Ink — stillborn birds — on her fingertips, fair hair wispy around her face, shirt long-sleeved despite the warmth: Leah.

“Christmas changes, you see,” says Gemma while the needles work at her wrist. “No one really watches it when it’s not winter. It’s not like New Year’s Day, fading into ash. It stays in people’s minds but because they’re not really looking, it changes. And over a long, long time, it becomes something completely different.”

“Like how it changed from a pagan festival to the anniversary of a god?”

“Exactly!” Gemma grins. “I’m going to watch it change.”

When Leah pauses in her work to bat a curl of fair hair from her face, her sleeve slides back far enough to reveal the feather of day again — with two more, clustered like three-for-a-wedding on Leah’s forearm, bright yellow and blue, a scrap of day quickly covered once more by sleeve.

“Where do you live?” asks Leah.

Only a moment of hesitation hovers over Gemma’s tongue. “With leaves and branches and soil.”

“Is it very cold?”

“The stars argue too loudly for me to notice the cold.”

“Mmm.”

One day: black outline, framing the bird in neat lines and careful swirls.

Another day, or maybe the same day — Gemma finds it difficult to keep track of the days that aren’t on her skin — Leah’s husband comes to the tattoo parlour. At first they talk quietly in the store-room, laughing once or twice, but then the wind changes or the sun goes behind a cloud or something equally insignificant occurs and they are arguing again.

Angry voices shout accusations and Gemma sits on the table, silent, remembering too clearly the last time she overheard those words hurled between husband and wife.

He leaves after a while, promising that We will discuss this when I return from Moscow. Leah returns to the table, shaking only a little. A feather of the day covers her cheek like an elegant fan, hand-sized. “So, Gemma,” she says, shaking out her stress in a forced smile and false enthusiasm, “what would you like today?”

“Draw whatever you want.” In a touch more timid voice, she adds, “Whatever will make you smile.”

A nod and, faintly, a hint of a real smile, and Leah spends several minutes in thought. “A bird of paradise,” she decides. “A bird like the plant named after it: bright orange and purple feathers, long and thin.”

Gemma lifts her jumper and t-shirt over her head, revealing the near-flat canvas of her chest.

Buzzing fills the room — birdsong to Gemma’s ears. She lies still, un-flinching as the needles etch their pattern into her pale skin.

When she is finished, Leah puts away her tools and, running her fingers over the black outline unfurled across Gemma’s chest, says, “Will you come home with me tonight, after I’ve finished work?”

One day: colour, filling the spaces like in a child’s colouring book.

The day is a canary and it lives on Leah’s back.

Leah unbuttons her shirt and lets it slide down, revealing the day’s avian dance upon her skin. Its playground is a vast backscape of shed feathers from neck to coccyx, dazzling at first glance — yellow like the sun, bleeding white into blue-tinged ends. Gemma caresses it, feeling feather and skin and bruise under her hands.

Turning, Leah takes Gemma’s hands in hers and brushes her lips feather-soft over Gemma’s knuckles. The stars are struck into silence at the sun’s proximity, prompting a small smile from Gemma at their childish behaviour.

Then the blackbird chirps, reminding, and Gemma grudgingly says, “Night and day are opposites. One rises when the other passes below.”

“Then we shall meet at sunrise and sunset, and we shall be orange and pink.” Leah’s raised eyebrow invites further doubts. Gemma does not give them.

Wings stretching, feathers splayed, beak open and the bird of paradise sings its fallen song — a song of reaching a place not perfect, but better.

<End>

© Copyright 2008 Alex Dally MacFarlane & Senses Five Press

Sybil’s Garage No. 5
A spectrum of stories and poems from the past, present and elsewhen
	$4.95	More info »

Interview by Devin Poore
to the sound of “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 5

Lauren is a survivor of the film industry, a former Sybil’s Garage editor and contributor, and a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. Her short fiction has appeared in Sybil’s Garage, Interzone and Salon.com. She has recently completed her first novel, Cycler, which will be published by Random House in the fall of 2008. She is currently working on the sequel, Cycler-2, and the screenplay for Cycler.

My “significant other,” choreographer Kristen Mangione, and I had dinner with Lauren and her husband, photographer Andrew Woffinden, and discussed… well, everything. It was a table full of artists, after all. Afterwards Lauren and I collaborated to boil-down the writer-related topics, which I’ve compiled here. —Devin Poore

You fared fairly well with your short stories, though, selling a couple of them to large markets like Salon.com and Interzone. In the end do you believe that helped with getting your novel picked up and securing an agent?

I think my small successes in short fiction were useful in attracting editors to my novels. One editor, in particular, approached me after my story, “The Perfect Man” appeared in Salon. But not a single one of those editors ever acted. By that, I mean they neither rejected nor made an offer. In fact, they don’t even return my emails. So, in sum, I’d have to say that writing short fiction had absolutely no impact on selling my novel. To be honest, I became quite disenchanted with the novel submission process until I met my current agent, Jill Grinberg.

As for the usefulness of short stories to a writer’s career, I think it has to be artistic rather than opportunistic. You should write short stories because you love them. They have their own merit. There are things you can only do in a short story. Sadly, they do not reach the size of audience that a novel can reach, but I think they do impact their readership very strongly. People who love short stories, really love short stories.

From a bystander’s point of view, it seems you went from writing short stories, to having a novel ready, to picking up an agent, to getting a major book deal quickly. Seemingly within a matter of weeks. What was that like?

I quit my movie job in January of 2001 to begin writing fiction. I sold my novel Cycler in February of 2007. In the intervening six years I wrote two other novels and twenty or so short stories only three of which ever sold. So it definitely doesn’t feel like an overnight success to me. It feels like a long overdue break. But then, I’m impatient like that.

You mentioned that during the writing process it’s good to have a community of peers, like your former writers group Altered Fluid, or your new contemporaries in the YA field.

As a member of Altered Fluid it wasn’t merely the critiques, which were extremely helpful, and the writing tempo that really is above and beyond what almost all other writing groups have, but the shared experiences of colleagues that are going through the same things in the industry with submitting, editing, seeking out representation, etc. The community aspect is most valuable.

Talk about the process of writing. Do you enjoy longhand, typing, or other means of getting the words on the page/screen?

I had visions of writing Cycler by walking about Southstreet Seaport and dictating it into a tape recorder. At the end of the day I’d play that tape into a computer which would use voice recognition to put it all in a file, and then I would manually do line edits. The technology simply isn’t there, though.

Long hand writing and edits do indeed slow down the entire process and give your mind time to think of aspects that simply would not occur with the speed of editing on a computer.

Do you outline at all?

Initially I outline, I find that it helps to organize my thoughts, but once I start writing the outline goes to pot. I planned out Cycler-2, but the characters just refuse to follow the outline. After I begin writing, an outline is just a vain attempt to impose an order that just won’t hold.

How has the fact of a paid deadline altered any of your writing processes?

Other than the nagging sense of doom and failure, it’s had almost no impact. I basically try to forget about the deadline and just write. Thankfully, I’m writing faster and faster all the time, averaging about 3500 words a day. My deadlines, so far, have all been quite manageable. I’ve met writers who have to churn out whole novels in three months and that gives me the hives. I don’t think I could ever do that.

You have said that you are all about symmetry; you like to switch your mouse from left to right hand. You don’t like to play softball anymore because you’re limited to throwing with one hand. How does your need for symmetry translate into your writing?

There’s an inherent symmetry between the protagonist and antagonist, or at least there should be. A writer should love their antagonist as much as their protagonist so that both sides are well represented. I don’t believe in good and evil, but in misguided intention. As a writer, I take the main idea, the “good intentions” of the protagonist and develop a fully realized argument for the “bad intentions” of the antagonist. Only when both sides of the story are fully realized does the reader have the ability to make a conscious decision as to their loyalties to the characters.

Cycler deals with opposing ideas in that way, does it not, regarding gender?

Cycler has strong ideas of gender; how it can be a prison where we are all forced by society to choose sides. In context of the fully developed antagonist, I had to have a character that sees gender as only black and white, male and female, right and wrong. I came to really love the character even though I despise what she stands for because by putting my beliefs up against hers the entire argument of gender in the book was better developed. I was then able to explore gender, how it could be both male and female and neither male or female, and figure out a way to exist in a black and white, opposing, world.

Was the duality of your character(s) in Cycler a problem for you at all? There are those who would say that a man can not convincingly write about a woman’s experiences, and conversely a woman can not know what a man goes through enough to write of it. Am I correct in guessing those notions are entirely too simplistic and had no bearing on the writing of the book?

It takes a bit more than male anatomy and psychology to scare me away. I’ve written from the point of view of aliens, of sentient software programs, of religious fanatics, of anthropomorphized cultural entities, all of whom were vastly more different from me than a man. But I’d be lying if I said that writing from a male point of view is identical to writing from a female point of view. Especially in Cycler, which is very much about gender, I am exploring what it feels like to be male and female. And I had so much fun doing that. What I’ve always tried to shy away from is any notion of an essentialized maleness or femaleness. That’s one of the challenges of Cycler, exploring gender without bogging down in boring dualities.

Was the idea initially to write a YA novel due to the popularity of the subject matter, or was it the best way to deal with your subject of gender roles — to set it in the young adult life when we are becoming aware of “how we should act” based on our gender?

I never knew the category of YA existed until I started meeting science fiction writers who were suddenly being shelved in the YA section. I’m not an expert in publishing, but my sense is that it’s a new category. My original idea for Cycler dealt with the main characters at age twenty-five. But as soon as I started writing it I realized all the juicy identity stuff was being shoved into the backstory, so I simply backed up and wrote it from the teenagers’ points of view. In the movie version, I’ve backed it up even further to show the first day that the cycling began.

From what you have said it sounds as if simply telling a story is not enough for you.

Storytelling is the foundation of any good novel and I think it’s actually a very rare talent. Plenty of writers get by on killer premises and witty style. But effective storytelling is all about structure. It’s very mechanical, almost architectural. When you can marry that structure to a framework of ideas, then the novel can transcend pure entertainment. The trick, in my opinion, is to weave these ideas invisibly into the story so that they are discovered, unraveled by the reader. My goal is to seduce my reader into a compelling narrative that whittles away at some preconceived idea and leaves them with an uncomfortable but somehow intriguing gap in their sense of the world. I want them to close the book and have a head full of questions. I’m not interested in merely diverting them for a while or helping them fall asleep. Nor do I want that from the books I read. I want to be unsettled, challenged. I want to close a book and say “I never thought of that before.”

What else do you have planned beyond Cycler and its sequel? More YA books? Will you delve more into gender, or are there other themes you wish to explore?

I always have a backlog of projects itching to be realized. First in the queue is a novel called Steal the Future, which is about teens and surveillance. I’ve written the first draft, but it needs to be put through its paces. Next in line is my long-festering science fiction musical, Upload/Download, for which I’ve written about ten songs but have yet to bang out a script. I’m also toying with the idea of fleshing out my short story, “The Perfect Man,” into a screenplay. And I’ve just begun making notes for a post-apocalyptic teen adventure set in Brooklyn. The thing is, by the time, I’ve moved on to my next project, I’ll have hatched several more potential projects. Most of them never make it out of the larval stage. My hard drive is clogged with larvae.

And finally, what is the one question I did not ask you that I should have, that you thought “Wow, he really missed the point and should have asked this!”? (and of course, what’s your answer?)

I think you asked some great questions. The one question people always ask me that you omitted is: “Why did you quit the film business?” And my answer would be because it’s boring, trite, and nobody makes good movies any more.

For more information about Lauren & Cycler, visit:
http://www.laurenmclaughlin.net/

Other interviews by Devin Poore:
A Conversation With Stephen Segal, Creative Director of Wildside Press

Devin Poore’s website:
http://www.devinjpoore.com/

© Copyright 2008 Senses Five Press

Sybil’s Garage No. 5
A spectrum of stories and poems from the past, present and elsewhen
	$4.95	More info »

Palimpsest

by Catherynne M. Valente

This story appears in:
Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
published by Senses Five Press with permission.

Purchase a copy of the book at Amazon.com or directly from Senses Five Press

16th and Hieratica

A fortune-teller’s shop: palm-fronds cross before the door. Inside are four red chairs with four lustral basins before them, filled with ink, swirling and black. A woman lumbers in, wrapped in ragged fox-fur. Her head amid heaps of scarves is that of a frog, mottled green and bulbous-eyed, and a licking pink tongue keeps its place in her wide mouth. She does not see individual clients. Thus it is that four strangers sit in the red chairs, strip off their socks, plunge their feet into the ink-baths, and hold hands under an amphibian stare. This is the first act of anyone entering Palimpsest: Orlande will take your coats, sit you down, and make you family. She will fold you four together like quartos. She will draw you each a card—look, for you it is the Broken Ship reversed, which signifies perversion, a long journey without enlightenment, gout—and tie your hands together with red yarn. Wherever you go in Palimpsest, you are bound to these strangers who happened onto Orlande’s salon just when you did, and you will go nowhere, eat no capon or dormouse, drink no oversweet port that they do not also taste, and they will visit no whore that you do not also feel beneath you, and until that ink washes from your feet—which, given that Orlande is a creature of the marsh and no stranger to mud, will be some time—you cannot breathe but that they breathe also.

The other side of the street: a factory. Its thin spires are green, and spit long loops of white flame into the night. Casimira owns this place, as did her father and her grandmother and probably her most distant progenitor, curling and uncurling their proboscis-fingers against machines of stick and bone. There has always been a Casimira, except when, occasionally, there is a Casimir. Workers carry their lunches in clamshells. They wear extraordinary uniforms: white and green scales laid one over the other, clinging obscenely to the skin, glittering in the spirelight. They wear nothing else; every wrinkle and curve is visible. They dance into the factory, their serpentine bodies writhing a shift-change, undulating under the punch-clock with its cheerful metronomic chime. Their eyes are piscine, third eyelid half-drawn in drowsy pleasure as they side-step and gambol and spin to the rhythm of the machines.

And what do they make in this factory? Why, the vermin of Palimpest. There is a machine for stamping cockroaches with glistening green carapaces, their maker’s mark hidden cleverly under the left wing. There is a machine for shaping and pounding rats, soft grey fur stiff and shining when they are first released. There is another mold for squirrels, one for chipmunks and one for plain mice. There is a centrifuge for spiders, a lizard-pour, a delicate and ancient machine which turns out flies and mosquitoes by turn, so exquisite, so perfect that they seem to be made of nothing but copper wire, spun sugar, and light. There is a printing press for graffiti which spits out effervescent letters in scarlet, black, angry yellows, and the trademark green of Casimira. They fly from the high windows and flatten themselves against walls, trestles, train cars.

When the shift-horn sounds at the factory, the long antler-trumpet passed down to Casimira by the one uncle in her line who defied tradition and became a humble hunter, setting the whole clan to a vociferous but well-fed consternation, a wave of life wafts from the service exit: moles and beetles and starlings and bats, ants and worms and moths and mantises. Each gleaming with its last coat of sealant, each quivering with near-invisible devices which whisper into their atavistic minds that their mistress loves them, that she thinks of them always, and longs to hold them to her breast.

In her office, Casimira closes her eyes and listens to the teeming masses as they whisper back to their mother. At the end of each day they tell her all they have learned of living.

It is necessary work. No family has been so often formally thanked by the city as hers.

The first time I saw it was in the pit of a woman’s elbow. The orange and violet lights of the raucous dancefloor played over her skin, made her look like a decadent leopardess at my table. I asked her about it; she pulled her sleeve over her arm self-consciously, like a clam pulling its stomach in.

“It’s not cancer,” she said loudly, over the droning, repetitive music, “I had it checked out. It was just there one day, popping up out of me like fucking track marks. I have to wear long sleeves to work all the time now, even in summer. But it’s nothing—well, not nothing, but if it’s something it’s benign, just some kind of late-arriving birthmark.”

I took her home. Not because of it, but because her hair was very red, in that obviously dyed way— and I like that way. Some shades of red genetics will never produce, but she sat in the blinking green and blue lights haloed in defiant scarlet.

She tasted like new bread and lemon-water.

As she drifted to sleep, one arm thrown over her eyes, the other lying open and soft on my sheets, I stroked her elbow gently, the mark there like a tattoo: a spidery network of blue-black lines, intersecting each other, intersecting her pores, turning at sharp angles, rounding out into clear and unbroken skin just outside the hollow of her joint. It looked like her veins had darkened and hardened, organized themselves into something more than veins, and determined to escape the borders of their mistress’s flesh. She murmured my name in her sleep: Lucia.

“It looks like a streetmap,” I whispered sleepily, brushing her hair from a flushed ear.

I dreamed against her breast of the four black pools in Orlande’s house. I stared straight ahead into her pink and grey-speckled mouth, and the red thread swept tight against my wrist. On my leather-skirted lap the Flayed Horse was lain, signifying sacrifice in vain, loveless pursuit, an empty larder. A man sat beside me with an old-fashioned felt hat askance on his bald head, his lips deeply rosy and full, as though he had been kissing someone a moment before. We laced our hands together as she lashed us—he had an extra finger, and I tried not to recoil. Before me were two women: one with a green scarf wrapping thin golden hair, a silver mantis-pendant dangling between her breasts, and another, Turkish, or Armenian, perhaps, her eyes heavily made-up, streaked in black like an Egyptian icon.

The frog-woman showed me a small card, red words printed neatly on yellowed paper:

You have been quartered.

The knots slackened. I walked out, across the frond-threshold, into the night which smelled of sassafras and rum, and onto Hieratica Street. The others scattered, like ashes. The road stretched before and beyond, lit by streetlamps like swollen pumpkins, and the gutters ran with rain.

212th, Vituperation, Seraphim, and Alphabet

In the center of the roundabout: the Cast-Iron Memorial. It is tall and thin, a baroque spire sheltering a single black figure—a gagged child with the corded, elastic legs of an ostrich, fashioned from linked hoops of iron—through the gaps in her knees you can see the weeds with their flame-tipped flowers. She is seated in the grass, her arms thrown out in supplication. Bronze and titanium chariots click by in endless circles, drawn on runners in the street, ticking as they pass like shining clocks. Between her knock-knees is a plaque of white stone:

Once, though the tourists could not know of it, on this spot a thousand died without a gasp. Legions were volunteered to have their limbs replaced with better articles, fleeter and wiser and stronger and newer. These soldiers also had their larynxes cut out, so they could not give away their positions with an unfortunate cry, or tell tales of what they had done in the desert, by the sea, in the city which then was new and toddling. Whole armies altered thus wrangled without screams, without sound. In the center of the roundabout, the ostrich-girl died unweeping while her giraffe-father had his long, spotted neck slashed with an ivory bayonet.

Down the mahogany alleys of Seraphim Street, clothes shops line the spotless, polished road. In the window of one is a dress in the latest style: startlingly blue, sweeping up to the shoulders of a golden mannequin. It cuts away to reveal a glittering belly; the belt is fastened with tiny cerulean eyes which blink lazily, in succession. The whites are diamonds, the pupils ebony. The skirt winds down in deep, hard creases which tumble out of the window in a carefully arranged train, hemmed in crow feathers. The shopkeeper, Aloysius, keeps a pale green Casimira grasshopper on a beaded leash. It rubs its legs together while he works in a heap of black quills, sewing an identical trio of gowns like the one in the window for triplet girls who demanded them in violet, not blue.

At night, he ties the leash to his bedpost and the little thing lies next to his broad, lined face, clicking a binary lullaby into the old man’s beard. He dreams of endless bodies, unclothed and beautiful.

I can be forgiven, I think, for not noticing it for days afterward. I caught a glimpse in my mirror as I turned to catch a loose thread in my skirt—behind my knee, a dark network of lines and angles, and, I thought I could see, tiny words scrawled above them, names and numbers, snaking over the grid.

After that, I began to look for them.

I found the second in a sushi restaurant with black tablecloths—he was sitting two tables over, but when he gripped his chopsticks, I could see the map pulsing on his palm. I joined him—he did not object. We ate eels and cucumbers thinner than vellum and drank enough clear, steaming sake that I did not have to lean over to kiss him in the taxi. He smashed his lips against mine and I dug my nails into his neck—when we parted I seized his hand and licked the web of avenues that criss-crossed so: heart and fate lines.

In his lonely apartment I kissed his stomach. In his lonely apartment, on a bed without a frame which lay wretched between milk crates and cinder blocks, the moon shone through broken blinds and slashed my back into a tiger’s long stripes.

In his lonely apartment, on a pillow pounded thin by dozens of night-fists, I dreamed. Perhaps he dreamed, too. I thought I saw him wandering down a street filled with balloons and leering gazelles—but I did not follow. I stood on a boulevard paved with prim orange poppies, and suddenly I tasted brandy rolling down my throat, and pale smoke filling up my lungs. My green-scarved quarter was savoring her snifter and her opium somewhere far from me. I saw the ostrich-child that night. I smelled the Seraphim sidewalks, rich and red, and traded, with only some hesitation, my long brown hair for the dress. Aloysius cut it with crystal scissors, and I walked over wood, under sulfurous stars, trailing dark feathers behind me. The wind was warm on my bare neck. My fingers were warm, too—my bald quarter was stroking a woman with skin like a snake’s.

There were others. A man with a silver tooth—a depth-chart crawled over his toes. With him I dreamed I walked the tenements, raised on stilts over a blue river, and ate goulash with a veteran whose head was a snarling lion, tearing his meat with fangs savage and yellow. He had a kind of sign language, but I could only guess correctly the gestures for mother, southeast, and sleep.

There was a woman with two children and a mole on her left thigh—between her shoulder blades severe turns and old closes poked on an arrondissement-wheel. With her I dreamed I worked a night’s shift in a restaurant that served but one dish: broiled elephant liver, soaked in lavender honey and jeweled with pomegranate seeds. The staff wore tunics sewn from peacock feathers, and were not allowed to look the patrons in the eye. When I set a shimmering plate before a man with long, grey fingers, I felt my black-eyed quarter pick up her golden fork and bite into a snail dipped in rum.

There was a sweet boy with a thin little beard—his thumb was nearly black with gridlock and unplanned alleys, as though he had been fingerprinted in an unnamable jail. He fell asleep in my arms, and we dreamed together, like mating dragonflies flying in unison. With him, I saw the foundries throwing fire into the sky. With him I danced in pearlescent scales, and pressed into being exactly fifty-seven wild hares, each one marked on its left ear with Casimira’s green seal.

Lucia! They all cry out when they lie over me. Lucia! Where will I find you?

Yet in those shadow-stitched streets I am always alone.

I sought out the dream-city on all those skins. What were plain, yellow-lined streets next to Seraphim? What was my time-clock stamping out its inane days next to the jeweled factory of Casimira? How could any touch equal the seizures of feeling in my dreams, in which each gesture was a quartet? I would touch no one who didn’t carry the map. Only once that year, after the snow, did I make an exception, for a young woman with cedar-colored breasts and a nose ring like a bull’s, or a minotaur’s. She wore bindi on her face like a splatter of blood. Her body was without blemish or mark, so alien and strange to me by then, so blank and empty. But she was beautiful, and her voice was a glass-cutting soprano, and I am weak. I begged her to sing to me after we made love, and when we dreamed, I found her dancing with a jackal-tailed man in the lantern-light of a bar that served butterfly-liquor in a hundred colors. I separated them; he wilted and slunk away, and I took her to the sea, its foam shattering into glass on the beach, and we walked along a strand of shards, glittering and wet.

When I woke, the grid brachiated out from her navel, its angles dark and bright. I smiled. Before she stirred, I kissed the striated lines, and left her house without coffee or farewells.

Quiescent and Rapine

There are two churches in Palimpsest, and they are identical in every way. They stand together, wrapping the street-corner like a hinge. Seven white columns each, wound around with black characters which are not Cyrillic, but to the idle glance might seem so. Two peaked roofs of red lacquer and two stone horses with the heads of fork-tongued lizards stand guard on either side of each door. They were made with stones from the same quarry, on the far southern border of the city, pale green and dusty, each round and perfect as a ball. There is more mortar in the edifices than stones, mortar crushed from Casimira dragonflies donated by the vat, tufa dust, and mackerel tails. The pews are scrubbed and polished with lime-oil, and each Thursday, parishioners share a communion of slivers of whale meat and cinnamon wine. The only difference between the two is in the basement—two great mausoleums with alabaster coffins lining the walls, calligraphied with infinite care and delicacy in the blood of the departed beloved contained within. In the far north corner is a raised platform covered in offerings of cornskin, chocolate, tobacco. In one church, the coffin contains a blind man. In the other, it contains a deaf woman. Both have narwhal’s horns extending from their foreheads; both died young. The faithful visit these basement-saints and leave what they can at the feet of the one they love best. Giustizia has been a devotee of the Unhearing since she was a girl—her yellow veil and turquoise-ringed thumbs are familiar to all in the Left-Hand Church, and it is she who brings the cornskins, regular as sunrise. When she dies, they will bury her here, in a coffin of her own.

She will plug your ears with wax when you enter, and demand silence. You may notice the long rattlesnake tail peeking from under her skirt and clattering on the mosaic floor, but it is not polite to mention it–when she says silence, you listen. It is the worst word she knows.

The suburbs of Palimpsest spread out from the edges of the city proper like ladies’ fans. First the houses, uniformly red, in even lines like veins, branching off into lanes and courts and cul-de-sacs. There are parks full of grass that smells like oranges and little creeks filled with floating roses, blue and black. Children scratch pictures of antelope-footed girls and sparrow-winged boys on the pavement, hop from one to the other. Their laughter spills from their mouths and turns to orange leaves, drifting lazily onto wide lawns. Eventually the houses fade into fields: amaranth, spinach, strawberries. Shaggy cows graze; black-faced sheep bleat. Palimpsest is ever-hungry.

But these too fade as they extend out, fade into the empty land not yet colonized by the city, not yet peopled, not yet known. The empty meadows stretch to the horizon, pale and dark, rich and soft.

A wind picks up, blowing hot and dusty and salt-scented, and gooseflesh rises over miles and miles of barren skin.

I saw her in November. It was raining—her scarf was soaked and plastered against her head. She passed by me and I knew her smell, I knew the shape of her wrist. In the holiday crowds, she disappeared quickly, and I ran after her, without a name to call out.

“Wait!” I cried.

She stopped and turned towards me, her square jaw and huge brown eyes familiar as a pillow. We stood together in the rainy street, beside a makeshift watch-stand.

“It’s you,” I whispered.

And I showed my knee. She pursed her lips for a moment, her green scarf blown against her neck like a wet leaf. Then she extended her tongue, and I saw it there, splashed with raindrops, the map of Palimpsest, blazing blue-bright. She closed her mouth, and I put my arm around her waist.

“I felt you, the pipe of bone, the white smoke,” I said.

“I felt the dress on your shoulders,” she answered, and her voice was thick and low, grating, like a gate opening.

“Come to my house. There is brandy there, if you want it.”

She cocked her head, thin golden hair snaking sodden over her coat. “What would happen, do you think?”

I smiled. “Maybe our feet would come clean.”

She stroked my cheek, put her long fingers into my hair. We kissed, and the watches gleamed beside us, gold and silver.

125th and Peregrine

On the south corner: the lit globes, covered with thick wrought- iron serpents which break the light, of a subway entrance. The trains barrel along at the bottom of the stairs every fifteen minutes. On the glass platform stands Adalgiso, playing his viola with six fingers on each hand. He is bald, with a felt hat that does not sit quite right on his head. Beside him is Assia, singing tenor, her smoke-throated voice pressing against his strings like kisses. Her eyes are heavily made-up, like a pharaoh’s portrait, her hair long and coarse and black. His playing is so quick and lovely that the trains stop to listen, inclining on the rails and opening their doors to catch the glissandos spilling from him. His instrument case lies open at his feet, and each passenger who takes the Marginalia Line brings his fee—single pearls, dropped one by one into the leather case until it overflows like a pitcher of milk. In the corners of the station, cockroaches with fiber optic wings scrape the tiles with their feet, and their scraping keeps the beat for the player and his singer.

On the north corner: a cartographer’s studio. There are pots of ink in every crevice, parchment spread out over dozens of tables. A Casimira pigeon perches in a baleen cage and trills out the hours faithfully. Its droppings are pure squid-ink, and they are collected in a little tin trough. Lucia and Paola have run this place for as long as anyone can remember—Lucia with her silver compass draws the maps, her exactitude radiant and unerring, while Paola illuminates them with exquisite miniatures, dancing in the spaces between streets. They each wear dozens of watches on their forearms. This is the second stop, after the amphibian-salon, of Palimpsest’s visitors, and especially of her immigrants, for whom the two women are especial patrons. Everyone needs a map, and Lucia supplies them: subway maps and street-maps and historical maps and topographical maps, false maps and correct-to-the-minute maps and maps of cities far and far from this one. Look—for you she has made a folding pamphlet that shows the famous sights: the factory, the churches, the salon, the memorial. Follow it, and you will be safe.

Each morning, Lucia places her latest map on the windowsill like a fresh pie. Slowly, as it cools, it opens along its own creases, its corners like wings, and takes halting flight, flapping over the city with susurring strokes. It folds itself, origami-exact, in mid-air: it has papery eyes, inky feathers, vellum claws.

It stares down the long avenues, searching for mice.
<End>

This story appears in: Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy.

Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
Winner of the 2009 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology
	$9.95	More info »

– Sybil’s Garage reading at ReaderCon 18 (35:22, 32 MB).

by Devin Poore
to the sound of “Greet Death” by Explosions in the Sky…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 4

Stephen Segal serves as creative director for the Wildside Press magazine group, including Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror. I first met him at ReaderCon in 2005 where he was pitching a new magazine concept titled Earthling. After that, we continued to run into each other at conventions, conferences and readings. Our conversations always revolved around speculative fiction and media, how to get it out to a wider audience, why we would even want to try.

From our first meeting, I realized that someone should be writing down what Stephen had to say. Last year, prior to one of the fall KGB Fantastic Fiction readings in Manhattan, Stephen and I sat down to put this to paper. Incidentally, at the same time, Crispin Glover was being interviewed on a door stoop across the street. Stephen and I have yet to decide if that was a good or bad omen.

To start off on a less than serious note, an employee under the Wildside banner wanted me to ask you why you decided to give up the motion picture martial arts career. Along those lines, do you have many OFFICE SPACE, Michael Bolton-type moments with your name, even though you do pronounce your last name differently?

It’s funny — the bad jokes had finally tapered off a few years ago, and then, inexplicably, they came back worse than ever, despite the fact that Steven (spelled differently) Seagal (spelled differently) hasn’t actually been making any new movies. Yes, it’s a rare week when some bank teller, checkout clerk, or peruser of my business card isn’t moved to laughter by my name. I’ve long since grown past being irritated by it, though — hey, if something as simple as that can brighten someone’s day, far be it from me to rain on their parade.

I should point out that there’s also a Steven T. Seagle who writes some terrific comic books, and I’m occasionally asked more seriously if that’s me. Nope! I am Stephen Harry Segal, the Atlantic City kid turned Pittsburgh journalist turned speculative-arts creative director.

First real question: you started out as an Arts and Entertainment editor in Pittsburgh, which is a far cry from working at Wildside Press as manager and creative director. Or is it? While in Pittsburgh, how much of your job dealt with entertainment of a speculative nature? And if the job itself did not deal with it, were you able to turn it in that direction at all? And how much of that experience with the “regular” entertainment scene can you bring into play with your new position at Wildside?

I’ve thought about this a lot, because I’ve noticed how many of the most interesting sf authors today are current or former journalists: Gaiman, Doctorow, Scalzi, Sterling…

On the broadest level, basic reporting experience can be a great education. Your job is to meet lots of interesting people of all kinds and talk to themabout their lives. How cool is that? Is there any quicker way to come to appreciate, first-hand, such an incredibly broad cross-section of society? In seven years writing and editing for Pittsburgh’s alternative newsweekly and city magazine, I got to know artificial-heart scientists and 80-year-old blues musicians, millionaires and shit-poor kids itching for a better life, sleazy artists and open-minded ministers and honest politicians. And it’s hard to immerse yourself in getting to know real people without being forced to throw away lots of preconceptions about “these” people and “those” people. You come to understand that it’s a lot more helpful to approach the world with questions than with assertions — and that, to me, is the heart of all speculative fiction: the question, the “What if?”

To answer a different part of the question: As a lifelong science fiction and fantasy reader, I always felt that the field got short shrift in the mainstream media. So when I became part of the media, I tried to do my part to cover our unique art form just as seriously as I would cover music or theatre or filmmaking. I had the most fun doing it at the alternative newsweekly, because obviously s.f. has been an “alternative arts-based culture” every bit as important as, say, punk rock or hip-hop — and yet I found it was rarely talked about in that way. So that’s what I’d do. The week Samuel Delany was coming to town to give a university lecture, for instance, we ran a cover story about the close thematic links between science fiction and surrealist art. More importantly, I’d try to make sure that as frequently as possible, every issue included some casual, passing reference to a touchstone of s.f., just as another pop-cultural reference carrying the unstated implication that hey reader, you maybe oughtta know what we’re talking about.

Today at Wildside? The main area of overlap is that I’m working with our editors and contributors to introduce more nonfiction into magazines that identify themselves as fiction magazines first. It’s a simple matter of audience awareness — people today are far more accustomed to reading nonfiction magazines than fiction magazines, and giving potential new readers a whiff of comfortable familiarity makes it a lot easier to lure them in to be captured by the far-out weirdness of our fantastic universe.

The other aspect is that, as art director, I’m willing and eager to look waaaaaay outside the narrowly defined field of “fantasy art” for artists of all kinds who are doing awesome, mind-bending work that’s as unexpected, unsettling, and exciting in their own way today as Kelly Freas or Margaret Brundage were 50 or 60 years ago.

I’m often surprised by the unwillingness of people to deal with speculative entertainment because of what I can only broadly label as the “geek culture” associated with it. I was speaking with a neighbor last weekend about Cormac McCarthy’s fantastic book THE ROAD and when I told her the premise she said “I don’t read sci-fi” with the same speed and distaste as someone might say “I don’t watch porn”.

Yeah, it seems to me that that sort of vehement, visceral reaction usually comes from one of two places:

(1) As you say, some people are turned off by the fanaticism of geek culture — usually because they think of themselves as smart people but desperately fear being associated with the classic nerd stereotype, a key component of which is being laughed at by other people. See Exhibit A, “Urkel.”

(2) They pride themselves on being realists, and so they sneer at the “silliness” they perceive on the surface of any kind of fairy story, whether the fairies in question are elves or aliens (or angels, depending on whether they’re semi-honest atheists or hypocritically religious “realists”).

The former person is simply tragically insecure, too worried about being mocked to stand up and enjoy what they ought on their own terms. The latter person is missing the point — failing to understand that mythic narrative and imagery can be wielded with equal force in the service of either escapism or societal engagement.

(Or both. I’ve been saying ever since September 11 to anyone who’ll listen: I wish Berkley would release a new anniversary edition of DUNE onto the general fiction shelves, with a grand, full-scale marketing push but not one word about “science fiction classic” anywhere on the package. Instead, the cover would read something like: “The most important novel of our time — DUNE — a prescient tale of desert warfare, religious terrorism, and ecological catastrophe.”)

But now we are seeing the success of SPIDER-MAN and other superhero movies, acclaim for shows such as HEROES, LOST and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, with more and more speculative books showing up on the “What’s New” shelf at Barnes and Noble. Is this a sign of the genre making itself more general and middle-of-the-road, palatable, or is the audience at large now simply more willing to accept what has always been there?

A bit of both — with the note that it’s not because the genre is making itself more “middle-of-the-road” or “palatable” in terms of content, but in terms of presentation. As far as the book world goes, I suspect a lot of credit is due to the success of the approach taken with Gregory Maguire’s books. WICKED wasn’t aimed at the fantasy market, despite the fact that it’s not only pure genre fantasy through and through, it’s Fanfic, for Pete’s sake. But Harper Collins recognized that it was a wonderfully written story with the potential to push the primal mythic button in the brains of a huge audience — and they gave it the sort of crossover marketing support it deserved. As a result, fairytales won back some of the adult cache they’d lost over the past century.

Similar story with SPIDER-MAN. The movie was, for all intents and purposes, utterly faithful to the comic-book source material — which was hugely popular to a general audience in 1965 but considered a primitive, juvenile medium by the average adult American in 1995. Our culture just had to wait for visual-effects technology to catch up with the fantastical requirements of the story, so that the appealing tale could once again stand up to the suspension of disbelief.

Speaking of visual updates, we have noticed some changes in design and presentation of some of the Wildside magazine titles, specifically WEIRD TALES, since your arrival. Is there more of that to come, and what are the specific reasons for those changes and updates?

It’s the first rule of magazine publishing: Have an identity. There are way, way too many magazines of all kinds out there on the bookstore shelves for a publisher to be able to get away for long with producing a magazine that isn’t uniquely appealing. So we sat down and looked at the Wildside magazines after I arrived, and we decided that their looks weren’t quite evoking their distinct editorial missions — and we needed to address that.

FANTASY MAGAZINE was the easiest, because its mission is very straightforward: It’s the magazine incarnation of our Prime Books imprint, dedicated to highly literary, intellectual, myth-driven fantasy, and propelled by the great talents of emerging next-generation writers who may not be familiar names yet — but will be soon. Our editor, Sean Wallace, had a very clean, modern, elegant look in mind when he first launched the magazine, and we’ve simply tried to streamline and develop that, making it a bit more typographically sophisticated so the visual style matches the literary style. The look works well for FANTASY, I think — it’s much more visual than the digest-sized F&SF, and much more fiction-centric than the glossy REALMS OF FANTASY.

With HP LOVECRAFT’S MAGAZINE OF HORROR, we decided that the original logo was coming across as too psychedelic — and even though that was one valid interpretation of the Lovecraft aesthetic, we thought the horror motif would resonate better with readers if we found a look that was simultaneously grittier and classier. So we went with the blown-up metal-type look for the logo and the headlines — and then we redesigned the interior pages around the concept of vertical lines and centered symmetry, which gives a very understated, subliminal sort of ancient-stone-tablet vibe that I think is even more appropriate to Lovecraft. The final result, hopefully, is a magazine that exudes moody, Lovecraftian darkness while standing out as very different from all the movie-horror mags that clutter up the newsstand.

WEIRD TALES has been the big, exciting challenge, because the original incarnation from the 1920s through the 1950s was so incredibly influential, launching not only Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard but Ray Bradbury and even, for Pete’s sake, Tennessee Williams. And the current incarnation, which is now almost 20 years old itself — while it’s published hundreds of outstanding stories by great writers like Ligotti, Campbell, and Lee, as well as oodles of terrific artwork by the likes of Barr, Fabian, and Rowena — has suffered over the years from the difficult realities of small-press publishing, changing ownership several times and never quite getting a handle on the modern demands of circulation and marketing. So we wanted to put together not just a new look, but a whole new vision for WEIRD TALES that incorporates all the best aspects of the recent run that our subscribers enjoy, while more consciously evoking the groundbreaking, subversive, counter-cultural mission of the original 1920s magazine, and simultaneously reaching out from the newsstand to fresh, young, new readers in the 21st century who may not yet self-identify as “fantasy readers” or “sf fans” per se. Goth kids, punk kids — they would love WEIRD TALES just as much as the devotees do if they noticed it and picked it up, but until now they haven’t. We want to fix that.

How to do that? Well, obviously, the fiction is still the heart and soul of the magazine. We’re bringing in Ann Kennedy VanderMeer as our new fiction editor, starting with the October 2007 issue. Ann is not only an incredibly cool person and a terrific editor, but she straddles both the traditional and the avant-garde sides of the genre. The surrealist-fiction magazine she founded and ran in the ‘90s, THE SILVER WEB, published several of the same authors and artists that WEIRD TALES was featuring — and at the same time, also reached far outside the sf establishment to find creative people who were producing works of speculative literature and art from very different perspectives. We don’t want to replicate THE SILVER WEB, but we do want Ann to mix up fresh and unexpected brews of strangeness, building upon the context of the Weird Tales tradition.

We’re restructuring the nonfiction content, too, in a way that I think old and new readers alike are really going to enjoy. First off, we’ve taken senior contributing editor Darrell Schweitzer out of his old duck blind hiding behind the editorial “we” so we can spotlight his insightful musings about fantasy in a first-person-singular bylined column, dubbed “The Cryptic.” The actual editorial, “The Eyrie,” will now run much shorter — just a page or so — so we can add a new, rotating guest essay titled “Weirdism,” devoted to the weirdness of real life. The debut installment is a piece by Caitlin R. Kiernan, marking her first WEIRD TALES appearance. We’ll be refocusing anew on conducting interviews with fantastic creators of all kinds, we’ll be including nifty historical notes on a page titled “Old Weird, New Weird,” and we’ll be launching a couple of art-centric series that I won’t spoil just yet, except to say that I don’t mean writings about art.

How much of your work towards luring new readers to the medium is focused at the existing adult demographic, and now much is focused towards grabbing the attention of young readers, where it seems that the affinity with the speculative is most likely to take hold? You once told me “You build new audiences NOT by initiating them into the existing arcane rituals and clubs, but by simply entertaining them and winning them over”. Isn’t that most prevalent when looking towards young readers?

It sure is. Just think about your own journey into sfdom for a minute, and you’ll realize that the organized structure of Fandom-with-a-capital-F is almost certainly the last thing you discovered, and thus the least important. Taking me as an example — and forgive me, these are approximations — I fell in love with DOCTOR WHO and STAR WARS and SUPERMAN when I was 5, D’AULAIRE’S BOOK OF GREEK MYTHS when I was 7, Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis and STAR BLAZERS when I was 9, Asimov and Tolkien and Marvel Comics and giant Japanese robots when I was 11. At that point, I leapt into my father’s bookshelf full of Heinlein, Clarke, Norton, Varley, Doc Smith, spent junior high devouring them all — and I was confirmed as a lifelong lover of the fantastic. It wasn’t until high school that I discovered STAR TREK conventions, and not until after college that I entered the world of organized literary fandom.

So what does that suggest? To me, it suggests a couple things. First, that us grown-up literary sf fans damn well better embrace the onscreen “sci-fi,” of all flavors, that first grabs the attention of children with its glorious imagery. Whether that’s FLASH GORDON or STAR WARS or TRANSFORMERS or AVATAR, it’s a starting point from which the connections to increasingly mature works can be nurtured, and we shouldn’t mock it just because we’re perversely embarrassed that we used to have kid tastes when we were kids.

From a publisher’s perspective, it reminds us that, as an industry, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that every generation has their own material to enjoy as they grow through those stages. On the one hand, that means making sure the truly timeless classics don’t appear stale (e.g., in the 1950s Asimov’s robots may have been illustrated somewhat fancifully by Freas’ generation, in the 1980s they were illustrated photo-realistically by artists like Michael Whelan, and in the 2010s they probably ought to show a lot more anime influence). On the other hand, it means that we’ve got to remember not to only publish sf for ourselves. For me, that’s been one of the most exciting challenges with repositioning our Wildside magazine titles, particularly WEIRD TALES: working to ensure that it’s not just appealing to people who already know the cultural history of WEIRD TALES, but to an entirely new generation who ought to be able to discover the magazine for the first time and fall in love with it fresh, just like so many teenagers did in the 1930s.

You mentioned that DUNE is relevant to the state of the world today. In the past many have argued that the Cold War and the uncertainty it bred was responsible for the rise of Science Fiction and Horror in ‘50s and ‘60s. How much of the current social, real-world climate do you look to highlight in your book and magazine content. Do you seek it out, or does it just naturally bubble up out of the community?

Well… I think the best social commentary in art is the stuff that puts itself there through the artistic requirements of the work, rather than overt political propagandizing. But these days, I’m just a creative director, not an editor. Come back and ask me that question again after I launch EARTHLING, and I’ll have a much, much longer and more interesting answer.

You come across as one of those people who is never satisfied with “good enough”. Let’s say it is the year 2012: where do you see the Wildside magazines?

Hmmm — prognostication is dangerous. But I can tell you where I think the Wildside magazines ought to be in five years with a bit of luck. WEIRD TALES should have at least doubled its current circulation, by reaching out to new and younger audiences through new distribution channels — and that doesn’t just mean more retail stores, but also a truly awesome Web presence that takes online sf into currently-undreamed-of places. FANTASY MAGAZINE should be a well-established market where writers working in serious, sophisticated fantasy can know that they’ll find an enthusiastic audience. And H.P. LOVECRAFT’S MAGAZINE OF HORROR should not only be wowing horror fans as the niftiest literary-horror magazine in print, but also as the online starting point for anyone who’s making any sort of foray into the Lovecraft Mythos.

For the field in general, where do you see speculative fiction, and entertainment in general, in the year 2012? Will advances in technology, especially the web, allow the medium to reach those that have no inkling of what exactly is available?

By the year 2012, I expect that narrative storytelling will undergo a convergence of all media, and will hitherto be composed by intelligence-enhanced cyborg monkeys and transmitted through touchpad sensors in our socks. At least, I hope so.

© Copyright 2007 Senses Five Press

Website of Devin Poore.
Website of Stephen H. Segal.

Sybil’s Garage No. 4
Digging deep into the substratum of the weird.
	$1.95	More info »

by Livia Llewellyn
to the sound of “The Last Secret” and “Land of Lyss” by John Serrie…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 4

Jetsam

I‘m writing this down because I’m starting to forget. I may need to remember someday. The chemical air is already kissing my mind, biting my memory away. Something terrible happened at work today. Beyond imagining….

Jay stops reading the worn fragment of paper, and looks up. “I don’t remember writing this. Where did you find this, again?” She speaks to the young man behind the counter, who’s examining the creases of a jacket flap. His glasses slide down his nose as he stops to pull a book out of the thick stack on the counter.

“It was stuck in this one.” The man holds up a worn copy of a short story anthology. It is one of about 20 books Jay has lugged into the used bookstore to sell.

“Oh. I though I searched all of them.” Jay takes the book from him. It is old, as thick as a tombstone. Her hand trembles from the weight. “Wait. This book doesn’t look familiar—are you sure it’s mine?”

“It was in the box with the others. The paper was stuck behind the jacket flap. That’s why I like to go through everything before you leave the store. Thought you might want it back.”

“Thanks,” says Jay, and walks away from the counter. She sits down on a worn upholstered chair and turns the paper over in her fingers. One side is crammed with writing, and the other is affixed with a single nametag, a sticker with a smeared red mark on it. She recognizes her writing. But she doesn’t recall writing the words.

It was so still after all the previous commotion, as if the traffic and people had bled off the edges of the city. Emptiness, everywhere. Only the smoke plumes in the sky, coiling like worms.

What day was this? What date? Nothing on the paper gives it away. Annoyed, Jay lets it drop to her lap. At the top of the torn edge, the name of the old publishing company she worked for stands out in crisp block letters. It’s surely the thought of her former job that sends little shivers of distress sparking up her spine, and nothing else. That’s what she tells herself.

“A lot of books from the same company,” the man calls out. He is still methodically examining her offerings. “You’re in publishing, right? I can usually tell.”

“Not anymore,” Jay says. “I work in finance now. Better pay.”

Jay runs her finger along the jagged edge of the paper. She’s really only told part of the truth. She didn’t leave the company. The company left her.

“Didn’t like the job, eh?”

“Didn’t have a choice. They left the city,” she replies. “The attacks. Some people jumped ship. You know.”

The man is respectfully silent.

Everyone was in their offices, all cramming things into boxes, or staring numbly out the windows into space. Like I was.

The company did more than jump ship. It vanished. Jay and a few employees—the ones who hadn’t been warned—traveled into the city one morning to find the building as empty of life as the smoldering ruins on the tip of the island. Whispers on the street said they’d fled to another country, leaving behind the detritus of their long history: piles of old books, unread manuscripts, and discarded employees. Just as devastating, in its own way.

“I have your total.” The man holds another slip of paper, the credit for the books. “This is how much we’ll give you in books, or you can take half that amount in cash. You can use it now or later—just don’t lose it.”

Jay takes the cash. Not much, as always, but it doesn’t matter. Relief is the only payment she needs—relief that there is a little less crowding around her, a little less intrusion on her life. She needs to know that at home, at night, she has some space to think and breathe.

“Thanks. I’ll come back next Saturday with the last load.” Jay grabs her metal shopping cart and heads for the door. As she picks her way through dusty stacks, she shoves the receipt into her pocket. She stares at the fragment one more time, then slides it in as well.

From my office, I watched the apartment building across the street. Some windows were lit up in the rainy gloom like soft yellow candles, others were dark and tomb-like. Most had pale curtains drawn across the glass.

As she walks back home, Jay sees herself reflected over and over again in dark storefront windows. In one tall pane of glass, a ghostly woman walks beside her whose face still flirts with middle age while her body has fully embraced it. In another she is thin and chic, a woman of the City, proudly urban in her clothing and demeanor. In a third pane, she’s little more than a wraith. But her face remains the same in all those reflections: there’s a furrow nestling between her eyes, a deep line of fear bisecting her brow. The sight of it shocks Jay. She hasn’t seen that look on her face for almost five years.

That’s how long ago her old life ended, how long she’s kept herself from dwelling on her past. No reason to remember, Jay tells herself. It’s over. But even now, part of her still wonders why the company left without a trace, while another part secretly rejoices that she escaped something worse than what had been intended for her. What had been intended…?

As she rounds the corner, her apartment building slides into view. It is thick and solid, comfortably utilitarian. From across the street her living room window is just one of many black rectangles, indistinguishable from the others. It doesn’t have a view of the city skyline—she blocked it off years ago. She has no desire to see where she’s been.

To the left of the building a massive clock tower rose like a cream-colored phallus, laced with delicate scaffolding from base to tip.

The clock, the time—it was the last day she’d gone to work in the City, that was it. She’d been late. Only a week since the attack, and smoke still billowed in toxic sheets over the lower part of the island. Chemicals and flesh—the dead settled in their mouths and lungs. Jay hadn’t wanted to step outside. But bills had to be paid. So she’d reluctantly crept down into the subway, taking her place within the throng of silent commuters. And when she emerged from the underground, when she saw the company’s triangular building, saw the dun of the sky—

No. She does not want to remember. To her right sits a battered trashcan. Through the iron mesh, magazine covers press against thick seeping paper bags, sodden bricks of newspapers, strange dribblings of food. The fragment is a tight ball in her hand. It’s only trash. But her fingers can’t release it. She stares at the crumpled paper as it unfolds, an image blossoming in her mind…

Broken things pressing against each other, faces and bricks all jumbled into one terrible mass… And a word—no. A single letter. Everywhere she had turned that morning long ago, she had seen that strange mark.

Jay crosses the street in quick steps. She pushes the shopping cart into the building courtyard, past the molding statue and stunted trees, toward her entrance. She stops to take out her keys, and the ball in her hand flattens out suddenly as her fingers work the paper open. It’s a compulsion she cannot control.

Between the buildings two inky smears of clouds slowly passed. They lingered briefly in the space before drifting toward the open square, as if surveying and cataloging the sodden masses below. If only I’d known—

She saw something that day. Not clouds, not smoke, not the ashes of her friends. Something moved….

Jay stands at the edge of the entrance, her body rigid. Her eyes slide up to the tops of the building and beyond, looking for the edges of the City, reassuring herself that she cannot see it. That it cannot see her. She runs her tongue around her mouth. It tastes as if something foul has just moved through her. There is more than the memory of ash in her mouth. She tastes marked.

The door swings out behind her.

“Could you—” says the janitor, and Jay grabs the door as he wheels his cart out. He gestures to the gaping mouth of plastic.

“Trash?”

Jay looks down at the fragment. “No. Thanks.” She shoves it into her pocket.

“No books today? That’s a first.” The man smiles pleasantly at her. Jay sidles past him into the empty hallway.

“Not today. I’ve read enough already.” She drags her cart up to the seventh floor.

Giant bins of trash surrounded the building—the last remnants of the publishing company. Just twenty minutes ago, men were walking from bin to bin, red paintbrushes in their hands, marking them for removal.

Jay presses her back against the bolted door. The solid slab of painted metal makes her feel safe. Before her a cool and empty living room sits in silence. The lack of furniture and decoration comforts her profoundly. Owning nothing means nothing can be taken or thrown away, nothing can be forgotten.

She examines the sticker more closely. “*MY NAME IS*” borders the top in thick letters. The white space below is stained red, smeared and slightly cracked. Jay cocks her head slightly as she tries to interpret it. The original mark is lost to her. All that’s left is on the paper.

Dropping her coat to the floor, Jay walks to a large, empty bookcase and pulls it aside with a groan. Behind the case, a grimy window looks out on the quiet street, the buildings, the sky. Breathing hard, Jay presses a finger to the glass, then, as if writing a secret language, slowly traces the tops of the buildings as they sprawl across the horizon.

The creeping skyline of this city both fascinates and repels her. No matter where she looks, the sky seems to stop at the rooftops—and there is a space, a thin crack where reality does not quite knit together. She imagines something pulsating at the edge, watching and waiting. Waiting for a sign, a mark.

Workers clustered in small groups, whispering fearful gossip back and forth. During the night a thousand companies fled. We had been abandoned.

“If I get rid of this, there won’t be anything left of that day. Not even my memories. But you can’t take things I don’t have,” Jay whispers. Her hand curls around the paper, crushing it neatly. “You can’t take nothing.”

A woman with a clipboard was shouting. “Proceed to your floor and pack your belongings—”

Her hand uncurls. It’s no use. She still has the fragment. And now: trickles of memory, staining her soul like drops of blood in water. Still marked, she tells her reflection in the glass.

“—nothing will be left behind!“

The sky looms overhead like a bowl of metal riveted to the edges of the earth.

Jay stands in the middle of an empty street, before her old employer’s building. Beyond it, the island stretches out in one festering sweep of land. In five years, the corruption of the attack has spread outward and up the blocks. Now only smoldering piles of metal dot the landscape. Nothing whole remains, except the strangely triangulated building before her—a stone ship caught in a scoria sea.

A low boom catches her attention: in the distance a colossal wall, one hundred stories high, slices the island in half like a surgical scar. Rooftops of still-healthy buildings are visible over the top, while, at the base, tiny figures scurry back and forth in the thunder and wake of ponderous machines. Below, subways gag on hardening concrete. Jay had to bribe a man at the borough docks to ferry her across the water to the island. There was no other way in.

“Why not you?” Jay asks her old building. It cannot be coincidence that it alone remains. Rows of windows grin at her like blackened teeth, revealing nothing. Pink stains the worn stone. Some brighter color once ran down its sides, then faded with time. Jay’s fingers grasp the wrinkled paper.

The woman slapped a nametag on my coat while a man shoved an empty cardboard box into my arms. “You have fifteen minutes to get to your floor,” he said. “Put your personal items in this, and wait in your office to be escorted out.” As I made my way through the lobby, my fingers slid over the tag. They came away red.

She picks her way past the rounded tip of the building and tries the lobby door. After a few pulls on the handle, it swings open. The landscape behind her reflects as wavering ribbons in the thick glass and brass. Jay looks back over her shoulder.

Two dark grey clouds float along the eastern shore. They creep over the rubble as if they are snuffling and rooting their way inland. Jay slips into the building and pulls the door firmly shut, then presses her face against the glass. One cloud rises slowly, thinning out as it catches the sluggish wind. The other pulses slightly—the ruins beneath it shift.

Jay backs into the lobby until darkness envelops her. More drops of memory trickle through her. Outside, the grey mass of air spreads itself farther out and up, until it is beyond her vision.

At the far end of the lobby, beyond the elevator banks, there is an open door to a brown stairwell. Jay hesitates, listening for any sound. After a moment of silence, she begins to climb. Her footfalls sound distant, as though her body is walking somewhere she can’t yet see. She knows something terrible happened that day, to everyone who entered the building. Somehow, she escaped so thoroughly that she even escaped the remembering of it. Her bones remember, though.

My floor was a wreck. I picked my way through broken furniture, crushed bookcases. Dust choked the air. And everywhere, papers and books crammed in boxes, all marked with the same red paint. The same letter.

The water fountain is dry. Jay clenches her jaw, and air shoots out of her nostrils in tortured bursts. Fourteen floors—twenty-eight small flights of steps. A quick glance to the glass doors of the old office space: the glass doors are open slightly, one large crack running down the right side. Beyond lies empty office space.

Jay walks through the doors into the reception area. The silence is profound. As she makes her way down the narrow hall, Jay marvels at how stripped and spare it all is. No boxes or books anywhere, no furniture, no light fixtures. She moves through bands of muted light and shadow—even the blinds were removed. As she passes each office, she glances at the sky.

At the thinnest end of the building is her little nook. It’s not really an office, just a space made out of bookcases and file cabinets. Jay stops before the opening. Her desk is gone, but two thick indentations mark the carpet where it once rested. She steps in and runs the toe of her shoe along the groove, then turns to the bookcase, placing her back to the window.

I packed my box in minutes, then sat on the desk and pulled the nametag off. It stuck to my fingers as I held it to the light. What did this red mark mean? As I lowered it, a movement caught my eye. I glanced out the window.

She swivels around and stares at out the window. Five years ago, clouds had reflected off glass buildings, cold and clean.

The sun shifted, and light threw red reflections across the glass. I watched the color intensify in waves—red sunset in midday. And then…

“I saw,” Jay says, although the words mean nothing. She still can’t remember. “I saw.”

That’s when I realized what it was. What I had become.

Jay imagines herself five years ago, suspended in cold air, mouth open and slack, eyes huge with the sleepy pull of the clouds as they drift from left to right. She imagines pulling the layer of past over the present, moving one grey sky onto another, matching the clouds one by one…

I saw
I don’t remember the name
remember remember

But she cannot, and there is nothing more on the paper to help. The last sentence ends in an illegible scrawl of repeated pencil marks, smudged beyond recognition. She squints at the last word, larger than the rest, in the darkening light, then frowns. The letters are barely distinguishable, but still. It looks like her name.

Jay rubs her eyes. She has no idea what happened that last afternoon. But does it really matter? Will it change anything? She came here for an epiphany, for understanding and resolution. There is none. She has a new life now. Everything else is trash. It will only drag her down if she clings to it. She crumples the fragment into a ball and throws it against the window with a papery ping. Her eyes continue up to the top of the frame.

A wet red line oozes down the glass.

Everything fades and falls away, except for the line, suspended between her and the sky. It grows thicker as it descends, as if an invisible hand is marking where she stands. Another line joins it, and a third. The buzz of blood and fear nips at the back of her neck and down her spine, until her body flushes it out in a thin stream of urine. Behind the red line, the horizon grins wide, hiccups, then splits.

“I knew,” Jay says. “I knew.”

Where the sky has stopped short at the edges of the horizon, hundreds of cloud-like creatures blossom and spill forth like sea anemones expanding to catch the currents. One cloud darts forward shockingly fast. The blunt end expands. Ropey spirals of wet flesh unfurl and catch the rotting ruins, suckling them up.

“Were you waiting for me?” The words barely pass her lips. Jay sees giant chunks of buildings work their way through the tubes into churning pockets. Sides bulge outward; bodies expand and adjust. They fan out across the island. The largest stretches leisurely and shoots out toward the building.

“Yes,” Jay says to the floating beast, “I think you were.”

Red explodes across the glass. Jay leaps back into the hall. Moving in slow strides toward her are figures in white biohazard suits. She backs up into the final office, all the way to its very end, to the prow of the building; she’s trapped. The window is painted shut. Below she sees more men in suits move an undulating hose back and forth. Red bursts forth from it like fire, dancing intricately around the coils, forming the mark they once had five years ago.

“Stop! I’m still in here!” She pounds on the window, but they can’t hear. Above, the creature pulses, and tiny veins of lightning run down its sides. Something slides around inside the mass, bending the grey flesh without breaking: the tip of the old clock tower. She punches the glass, ignoring the blood and pain.

“Turn her around!”

Figures grab her from both sides and pin her arms against the walls, while a third holds up a clipboard. An electric voice pours out of a black faceplate.

“Is this you?” He thrusts the clipboard into her face. One thick finger points at a word on the page.

“No.” Her voice is firm over the rising wind, with only a tinge of panic. They will listen to reason, she tells herself—they have to. “That’s not my name, there’s been a mistake. Please get me out of here.”

“I didn’t ask if this was your name. You don’t have one! This is you, right?”

“No! That isn’t me. I told you. I have a name!”

“What are you, then?” The man raises his voice. “Come on! I don’t got all day—tell me what you are! What’s your ‘name’?

Jay’s face hardens.

“My name is—my name—”

I’m writing this down because I’m starting to forget, I may need to remember someday.

Her name. She cannot remember her name.

“My name is Jay?” she asks.

“Hey, wadda ya know? That’s what this says.” Even with the creature growling outside, she hears their laughter float through the room.

“She’s the last of the trash, boys—let’s do it.”

Someone steps forward with a small machine and presses it against her right arm. Shafts of metal tear through the bone and flesh, impaling her to the stone wall. Her head snaps back against the glass, and the window finally breaks. Too late.

Gloved hands rip open her blouse, and another machine appears. Thin lines of light embroider her skin, searing through the flesh. Someone is screaming—is it her?

“Yeah, she won’t escape this time.” More laughter.

The entire building shudders. Everyone falls silent and looks up at the ceiling. From above, there is a crackling, then a thunderous roar of ripping stone and metal.

“It’s started—everyone out!” The figures grab their equipment, jostling with each other to be the first from the room.

“Why?” Her howl bounces off their backs. “Why are you doing this? What’s happening?”

From above a second wave of destruction pounds down through the building. The man with the clipboard looks back at her but doesn’t stop moving for the door.

“Nothing personal, lady. I’m just the garbage man.”

He turns and runs.

Vibrations burrow deep in her bones—they travel up from the stone and through the metal pins. Bits of ceiling break away. With a waterfall of sound, everything around her rises. Something smashes against her side, then rips away. Jay no longer feels her right arm. She no longer feels. She stares up into the sky. There is no sky, only the pulsing grey. Membrane and ridges curl back to reveal a mouth as wide and long as her blood-stained eyes can see.

“This isn’t my name.” She wants to point to the mark but cannot move. “I’m Jay. I’m Jay—” She lets out a small sob, almost a laugh, as the weight of her name drags it downward. It seeps through the skin, nestles into her soul.

Jay is a letter. It is the mark. It is not her name.

The grey sky inhales, and she rises.

Jay is a traveler now, squeezed through tubes and shunted from one contraction to the next. Shapes flood her eyes and graze her skin: bones, granite faces, bits of carved railing and brass fixtures. Trash.

Flashes of light ripple across her vision—the grey membranes holding her become translucent as they rise. Below, she sees another creature move in to finish the job. It spreads great sails of skin and strands of flesh as it rides an unseen current. Jay would sigh at the terrible beauty of it if she were able to breathe.

Now they skim in silence over the top of the massive wall. The rest of the City appears, healthy and alive. Jay’s severed right arm lies slightly below her—spires of steel sift between the fingers. She sees the City, a slow-moving river of rooftop gardens and secret alcoves, silver windows and neon smears, resting like the body of a lover, safe in sleep. For now. One calm moment of beauty, worth the price of Jay’s pain.

The creature tilts. Trash rumbles about her as Jay is thrust forward through hooked membranes. Mucus uncoils from her throat. Everything shifts. Jay plummets into darkness like a blood-tipped comet, the remnants of the building her silky-stoned tail.

Nothing is left behind.

My name--

“What are you looking for?”

Jay looks up at the sound of the boy’s voice. She is unaccustomed to being spoken to, unaccustomed to anything other than the sound of her hand sifting, sorting, pushing aside, and breaking. She pulls a cardboard box to her side, and opens her mouth. But the words fail her, as always. If she could just find the fragment, she might remember what to say….

The boy steps back and watches as Jay shoves her hair back from her face and stares into the valley. Jumbles of skyscrapers fill deep pockets in the land, separated only by occasional trickles of rivers and accidental bridges. Up where they are, blind horses cantor down cracked streets with deformed dogs nipping at their sides. Here, potters fields and wooden shanties cling despondently to each other, and the people do the same. Perhaps they are afraid if they let go, they will drift away. From where she stands, she sees no difference between the brown of earth or sky. There is no up or down in the universe’s midden.

Jay and the boy both crouch as a wind rises. Heaps of trash stir and hitch around them, great stinking piles of garbage—old toys and dishes, broken lamps, bits of magazines, clothes. It is their history. It is everything they ever jettisoned in life, before life jettisoned them. Her box is full of paper. She reaches inside with long, dirty fingers. They curl around like dark worms. Papers crumble. If she could only find a fragment, a piece, a certain word… She doesn’t remember. She only remembers the wind and the search, and that sometimes the sky will open up and vomit more broken memories across the land.

“What’s your name?”

My name—

The boy is speaking again. She tries, tries to mold the feelings up out of that festering sore in her chest, to trick it from the darkness in her mind. Her fingers creep, searching for inky triggers. But they find nothing, and the only word that comes out is the only word she knows. It cracks open her mouth and hovers before them, then floats away in the filthy wind, nothing more than what it is—which is everything around it, everything she has ever been.

“Jetsam.”

<End>

© Copyright 2007 Livia Llewellyn & Senses Five Press

Sybil’s Garage No. 4
Digging deep into the substratum of the weird.
	$1.95	More info »

by Ekaterina Sedia
to the sound of Tom Waits’ “The Briar and the Rose” …

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 4

Jillian sits on the windowsill, and looks outside, where the first snowflakes flutter in the pale glow of streetlights. It is cold; her breath leaves a white patina of fog on the black plastic of the phone receiver. She imagines the phone ringing in Rick’s dark apartment. The answering machine does not come on — he never had one — and she counts the rings. Seven. Eight. Anything to keep her mind from wandering. She can spend all night listening to the receiver. Fourteen. She imagines Rick’s bare feet padding across the cold ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor, his hand tugging up the pajama bottoms riding low on his waist. Last she saw him, he looked like he’d lost weight.

“Hello?” His voice breaks through the twenty-first ring, hoarse. “Jill?”

“Yeah. Did I wake you?” It’s a stupid question — it’s 4 am, of course he was sleeping soundly in this dead hour. She feels a small pang of guilt at denying him oblivion.

“Yes.” He never lies, not even in the small reflexive way when he’s woken up. “Are you all right?”

“I guess,” she says. And then she is crying, weeping into the receiver, a part of her mind worrying if it’s possible to cause a short by crying into an electrical appliance.

“I’ll come over.”

“No need to… I’m all right.”

“I’d like to come over. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.”

The phone is silent again, and she sits on the windowsill, trying to keep her mind away from the horribly missing piece of her existence. She thinks of the ways Rick annoys her.

She thinks of their meeting in court. The divorce proceedings were over with, and there was just the question of custody. Jillian bit her lip all the way to the courthouse, and spilled her coffee down the front of her white shirt as soon as she got there. She despised herself for this, especially once she saw Rick in his immaculate suit. Not an expensive one, but the man made any clothes look good. He owned them, while she couldn’t reach a truce with hers. Her clothes betrayed her by getting dirty or twisted, just like her hair tended to get in her face, and her makeup smeared itself at inopportune moments. How she hated Rick then, how she feared him! Any judge in his right mind would take one look at them and decide that she was a pitiful mess, while Rick was together, a fit parent. Able to provide good care to a child. Reliable.

She mopped up the coffee stain the best she could, and stood before the judge brimming with desperation. She stammered out her reasons why Derryl should stay with her – she loved him so much! – and fell quiet, turning an uneasy gaze to Rick. He didn’t look back, the pale clarity of his eyes for the judge only. He didn’t argue that Jillian should have custody, he just wanted visitations and vacation time. She hated him for being more generous than she.

The dead receiver in her hand comes to life. “If you require assistance from the operator…” She puts it back on the cradle, startled, upset that the delicate silence of the night and the snow was spoiled by this mechanical voice. She cringes and thinks of Rick, willfully, like it is some sort of an exercise. Thinking of Rick keeps her together until the doorbell rings.

She hugs him as he comes in, and cringes at how prominent his ribs are, how gaunt his face looks. He didn’t get a chance to shave, but even the scruff looks proper on him. Like he meant it.

“I missed you,” he says, studying her face, searching for clues. Always searching for an indication of how she feels.

“I missed you too,” she says, and forces a smile. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask for sex.”

He breathes relief and adds, “I didn’t say you are.”

“But you thought it.”

He doesn’t deny this.

“Want anything? Coffee, tea?”

“Coffee,” he says. “Please.” He sits at the kitchen table, his large pale hands lying passively palms-down on either side of his empty cup. She hugs her shoulders and waits for the coffee to percolate.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” she says.

“It’s all right.” He looks at his hands. “I’m the one who’s sorry. It was my fault that—”

“No,” she interrupts. “I don’t want to talk about that.” It’s enough to know that he’s feeling what she’s feeling.

He takes the cue. “How’s work?”

“I haven’t been in for a while.” She looks at the snowflakes dancing outside the window. It will get light soon. “Don’t go tomorrow… I mean, today. Stay here. Call in sick.”

“Okay,” he says, always obedient.

When they first met, his obedience shocked her. She found him on the beach ten summers back. It was late, and the beach was deserted; she enjoyed her solitary walks, almost dissolving in the darkness and the relentless pounding of the surf. She screamed when she stepped on something that seemed alive; it turned out to be the hand of a man lying in the sand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She squinted as he sat up. In the pale moonlight, he seemed lost.

“It’s okay,” she said. It was difficult to tell what he looked like in that light. “I must be going.”

He followed her. She should’ve been scared, but she wasn’t. He followed her not like a prowler but like a lost puppy. He spoke quietly, and she strained to hear his words above the surf. “Caspian,” he said.

“Is it your name?” she asked. “Caspian?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes wide and dark.

They reached the boardwalk and strolled along the fronts of rickety wooden shops.

“What’s your first name?” she said, just to say something.

His gaze cast about wildly. “Rick,” he finally said. She followed the direction of his gaze to the sign of the Rick’s Bait and Surfing Supplies. She pretended not to notice.

He sips his coffee, his face turning pink in the hot steam. He whispers under his breath, and she strains to hear. He takes a deep breath. “Aral,” he whispers. “Azov, Black, Red, Arabian, Laccidive, Andaman, Yellow, Dead.”

“Dead,” she repeats, and starts crying again.

“It’s my fault,” he says. “I shouldn’t have told him.”

She cries too hard to answer, to react, and he resumes his litany. A nervous habit he has, naming all the seas in the world.

“Philippine, Sulu, Koro, Java, Halmahera, Mindanao, Savu, Sunda, Arafura, Celebs, Molucca, Bismark, Coral, Solomon, Tasman, Bohol, Visayan, Camotes, Bali, Sibuyan, Flores, Timor, Banda, Ceram.”

It calms her a bit, like it calms him. “It’s not your fault,” she says. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

“I shouldn’t have told him.”

“Told him what?”

He swallows hard. “About me. About him. The way we are.”

She stares at him. She thinks he might be finally cracking, feeling the loss more than he shows. She feels selfish for forcing him to always be reliable, to make her feel better. “You want to tell me?” she says.

“Caribbean, North, Irish, Hebrides, Celtic, Baltic, Bothian, Scotia, Labrador, Sargasso, Balearic, Ligurian, Tyrrhenian, Ionian, Adriatic, Aegean, Marmara, Thracian…” His eyes are distant, glazed over. Dark. “These are my seas. His seas.”

It is always like this. Ice and water, jagged black cracks like stationary lightnings running across the floes. The taste of fish, tightly clenched nostrils, lungs expanded like bellows. The shadows of other seals, floating in a graceful arc, their flippers trailing behind them like twin tales of a comet.

Rick does not know if it’s a dream or a memory; neither does he care. He tells Derryl of the slow falls and rapid ascends, of the green depth of water. Of the migration routes, of the ecstasy he felt as the water turned from icy to balmy, with every mile south. Of the coral reefs where water ran clear as tears, of the fishes as bright as they were poisonous, of the quick darting of dolphins overhead, of their staccato laughter superimposed over the short, sharp barks of the seals.

Derryl listens, wide-eyed, as the two of them walk on the beach. “How did you become a person?” he asks when Rick stops talking.

Rick shrugs. “I just stopped being a seal.” He talks about the Sargasso Sea and its streaming grasses, undulating underwater like mermaid’s hair, and of the fat eels that come to this sea from all over the world. He talks about following the stream of eels from the Black Sea all the way to Sargasso, of the Aegian and Marmara, Ionian and Adriatic, of Greeks and Scythians, the deeds of men forever branded into the ancestral memory of the seals.

Derryl looks at him with his warm brown eyes. “I want to be a seal too,” he says.

Rick is listening to the surf. “Then you’d have to stop being a person,” he says, distracted.

It is light outside when Jillian looks out of the window again. The world is dressed in a shroud, a shroud her son never had. A shroud for a boy who did not want to be a person.

“It was an accident,” she says.

He shakes his head, vehement now that he has found the courage to tell her.

She sighs. “It doesn’t matter, Rick. It doesn’t matter why or how.” She makes more coffee and they drink it, silently, as the snow falls outside.

Jillian thinks of the Arctic seas and the ice — so thick — that opens suddenly wide to reveal black water underneath. She thinks of the smooth seals turning cartwheels in the black depths, oblivious to cold and wind whipping the land half to death.

“Laptev,” Rick whispers, “White, Barents, Beaufort, Chuckchi, Lincoln, Kara.”

Jillian thinks of the black seals perched atop white floes, of their sharp barks that tear the frozen air like tissue paper. She wonders, beyond hope, if Derryl got his wish.

Rick calls work, telling them that he won’t be in. Then he settles by the table again, his hands palms down on the stained surface.

“Tell me about the seals,” Jillian says.

<END>

After a quick introduction we got right into things. There was no time for idle chat as we had a full house of ten guests. Mercurio D. Rivera read his first draft of “The Fifth Daniel” to radio listeners. Afterward, we critiqued his story. One thing I noticed, and Jim pointed this out, was that several of us picked up on subtleties when Mercurio read the story aloud that were not readily apparent when we read it on our own. “Could this be the author’s voice giving life to the words?” Jim speculated. I think so.

At the end of the critique session, we took a few calls. Most people were curious and interested, though we did get one complaint that there weren’t enough trolls in the story. I think I agree.

If you’d like to listen to the show, I’ve made the mp3 available below. Also, here are some pictures from the show. I know Kris Dikeman has more, but she’s on vacation now, sunning & writing on the Outer Banks.

– Altered Fluid – Hour of the Wolf – May 5, 2007 (2 Hrs)