

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 60, December 2016  
People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue

FROM THE EDITORS

Preface  
Wendy N. Wagner

People of Colo(u)r Editorial Roundtable  
POC Destroy Fantasy! Editors

ORIGINAL SHORT FICTION  
edited by Daniel José Older

Black, Their Regalia  
Darcie Little Badger  
(illustrated by Emily Osborne)

The Rock in the Water  
Thoraiya Dyer

The Things My Mother Left Me  
P. Djèlí Clark  
(illustrated by Reimena Yee)

Red Dirt Witch  
N.K. Jemisin

REPRINT SHORT FICTION  
selected by Amal El-Mohtar

Eyes of Carven Emerald  
Shweta Narayan

gezhizhwazh  
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson  
(illustrated by Ana Bracic)

Walkdog  
Sofia Samatar

Name Calling  
Celeste Rita Baker

NONFICTION  
edited by Tobias S. Buckell

Learning to Dream in Color  
Justina Ireland

Give Us Back Our Fucking Gods  
Ibi Zoboi

Saving Fantasy  
Karen Lord

We Are More Than Our Skin  
John Chu

Crying Wolf  
Chinelo Onwualu

You Forgot to Invite the Soucouyant  
Brandon O'Brien

Still We Write  
Erin Roberts

Artists' Gallery  
Reimena Yee, Emily Osborne, Ana Bracic

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS  
edited by Arley Sorg

Darcie Little Badger

Thoraiya Dyer

P. Djèlí Clark

N.K. Jemisin

Shweta Narayan

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Sofia Samatar

Celeste Rita Baker

MISCELLANY

Subscriptions & Ebooks

Special Issue Staff

© 2016 _Fantasy Magazine_

Cover by Emily Osborne

Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams

www.fantasy-magazine.com

# FROM THE EDITORS
# Preface

## Wendy N. Wagner | 187 words

Welcome to issue sixty of _Fantasy Magazine!_

As some of you may know, _Fantasy Magazine_ ran from 2005 until December 2011, at which point it merged with her sister magazine, _Lightspeed._ Once a science fiction-only market, since the merger, _Lightspeed_ has been bringing the world four science fiction stories and four fantasy shorts every month.

This is _Fantasy's_ third installment of the Destroy series: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! After the success of our previous Women Destroy and Queers Destroy projects (for more information about the Destroy projects, please visit DestroySF.com), we have now put the focus on POC creators, and have published People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!—an all-SF special issue of _Lightspeed_ —and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! _(Nightmare Magazine's_ contribution to the party). Now it's _Fantasy's_ turn to host the destruction.

This very special issue features four original short stories, selected and edited by Guest Editor Daniel José Older; four reprints, selected by Amal El-Mohtar; seven essays and interviews collected by Tobias S. Buckell; a selection of author spotlights; and, of course, original art by a mix of exciting fantasy illustrators.

It is an honor and a delight to bring _Fantasy Magazine_ to you in this celebration of POC creators writing, editing, and illustrating fantasy short fiction. Thank you for reading!

—Wendy N. Wagner,  
Managing Editor

# People of Colo(u)r Editorial Roundtable

## Daniel José Older, Amal El-Mohtar, Tobias S. Buckell | 1,600 words

Daniel

I wanted to start with the idea of the origin story. Every writer has one, and it's always interesting to hear how writers of color navigated the choppy waters of reading fantasy early on and then deciding to write it. I remember searching for myself, in that languageless sort of way we do when we're young and don't know the larger meaning of our search. And I remember loving fantasy with all my heart even though I wasn't there, and then feeling a kind of betrayal when I became more conscious and realized how devastating that lack was, that erasure; it was a similar feeling to finally studying US history in depth and coming to understand the true horror of it. All those myths they raised us with have their source in such dirty water. So for me, writing fantasy became an act of reclamation. If it could be used to justify our destruction, it could also do the opposite, no? I put fantasy away for a long time and didn't come back 'til I started reading Pullman and Rowling, who both make motions at dealing with power and its complexities even while still playing into very dominant narratives of whiteness. Then I was reminded of Octavia Butler and something like a cannon went off inside me. I read everything she wrote—an English teacher, Mrs. Middleton, had given me _Blood Child_ when I was in the seventh grade, so it was a return home for me—and then I read Díaz and Mosley and I physically HAD to write. It wasn't a choice.

Tobias

I grew up in the Caribbean and there was a very strong tradition around me of oral folk tales, tall tales, and duppy stories (ghost stories). Paul Keens-Douglas on the radio was doing stories in dialect, and he was the first person I realized was a full-time storyteller. Because the Caribbean nations were producing stories and culture centered around their experience, I had stronger models to look to in those spaces. Yet even so, I engaged with science fiction and fantasy with a great deal of naïveté as a child. The far-off places seemed exotic to a poor kid living on a boat in the islands. I didn't twig to the single narrative I was consuming for a long time, particularly as my education in the Virgin Islands at private schools began to emphasize British and American stalwarts that reinforced the western narratives inside the SF/F I was reading. It was actually a piece of science fiction by an American that I read in high school that gave me my scales dropping from the eyes moment. I read an SF novel set in Grenada, and while it wasn't perfect, I read it so voraciously I felt like I'd been dying of thirst in the desert. It suddenly begged the question: why didn't the Caribbean, India, South America, or Asia show up in the books I was reading in a meaningful (non-touristy) way? There was so little work that had this missing element that I realized if I wanted more of it, I needed to work at putting it out there myself.

Daniel

Ah, that hunger is so real, Tobias. That's exactly it. I wonder then about the moment when we go from readers to writers. I had always known writing was in me, stories came very naturally. But I drifted in and out of knowing what that meant long-term/career-wise. I don't think writing seemed like a real thing that someone could do in their life until I read Stephen King's _On Writing_ that same magical year when I read Butler and Díaz. It's such a practical, straight to the point manual—I don't think I'd ever read anyone being so real about the writing life before. Other books get very airy and pretentious about it all. This was flesh and blood. Even just reading his process around word counts and the simple truth that if you keep putting down words, eventually you'll have a finished manuscript, and then you have to figure out how to make it good. I was also blogging out the weird adventures I had as a paramedic on NYC ambulances, and it was so simple: I would just come home and write out what happened the night before, took twenty minutes and came out cool. I thought, look—If I just make something up, throw some ghosts or monsters in there, it'll be fiction. And just like that a huge wall collapsed—the idea that I had to write THE GREAT NOVEL, SOMETHING PROFOUND AND HEARTWRENCHING, which was really holding me back as it turned out, and my motto became, "Just tell the fucking story." Which has very much kept me going over these years of being a writer.

Amal

I trace so much of my origins as a thinking, writing, speaking person to my childhood in Lebanon. Some of my earliest memories are of being out of place: born in Canada, feeling the Arabic I was growing up with ceding place to English and French; moving to Lebanon when I was six, already half-formed in language, my mother being told that I speak Arabic "like a foreigner" and struggling to find a school in which I could speak my whole self; then back to Canada, my French now too posh for Quebec, my signifiers askew, and learning all of a sudden the several ways in which I was Other.

I could look at that history and shape any number of stories from it: say that the self I cobbled together was fragmentary, and that's why I'm drawn to stories told in pieces; say that growing up multilingual made me want to know all the names for all the things, and that poetry, mythography, folk, and fairy tales offered an achievable path to that; say that being colonized by at least two languages with warring, debatable borders made me want to build bridges between them. But origin stories are always myths, and myths are always teaching tools that can be worn down by their purpose until they're smooth, round stones.

For me, I went from being a reader to a writer when I was seven and wrote a poem to the moon full of the Thees and Thous I'd absorbed from a children's digest of _A Midsummer Night's Dream._ My parents told me that my grandfather—a revolutionary who'd spent years imprisoned for his politics—had been a poet, and that I had his footsteps to follow in if that was what I wanted. I did, with all the fierceness of a child utterly convinced she already understands the world completely. Since then, poetry and fantasy have been my languages more than English, French, or Arabic, and small wonder: if (to slightly mangle T.S. Eliot) poetry can force, or dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning, then fantasy does the same for reality: forces, or dislocates if necessary, reality into its truth.

I'm glad to be taking part in a project where we can do the same, in turn, to Fantasy itself—break new truths out of old ground.

Tobias

Oh, this, so very much this. I look white to most people, and I lived among a sort of ex-pat community on boats up and down the Caribbean. But most of my family and friends were often Caribbean on the islands. Where did I belong? My mother was white, my father black. As a toddler I still remember putting a pick in my hair and then crying when it wouldn't stay in my hair like my dad, it would just sadly slide out and fall to the floor. I was so frustrated. I bounced from group to group but always felt other.

When I moved to the US, I felt even more at a loss.

Daniel

It's wild to read these, because so much of the grounding for my imaginary work also comes from that sense of neither here-nor-thereness, being mixed, at home in many worlds and somehow none, an inbetweener. For a while, of course, I thought I was all alone in that, then, as Baldwin says, I picked up a book. But the emotional experience of otherness and inbetweenness isn't so well dealt with in fantasy lit; at least it wasn't when I was coming up, so while books provided a certain solace on one hand, it really took meeting and talking to other folks to find out that all these things I was feeling weren't my burden to bear alone. So writing became a way of filling that void, answering that persistent call, the endless questions—both in myself and in fantasy.

My favorite thing to hear about my own work from folks is that it feels like home. I think that's the deepest of honors, to be able to reach that place in someone else that's true and indescribably safe, even if it's amidst scary stories about monsters and haints. That deeper safety, the kind that means we are recognized, seen.

What we're witnessing now is a kind of literary renaissance of the imagination. All these glorious counternarratives keep rising up from the rusted exoskeletons of failed hierarchies. And they are responses, yes, but also something brand new. New languages, new rhythms, new structures.

What a time to be alive; what a time to be a writer.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Daniel José Older, Guest Editor-in-Chief and Original Fiction Editor

Daniel José Older is the _New York Times_ bestselling author of _Salsa Nocturna_ and the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series from Penguin's Roc Books. He is also the author of the young adult novel _Shadowshaper_ (Scholastic, 2015), a _New York Times_ Notable Book of 2015, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers' Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of _Esquire's_ 80 Books Every Person Should Read. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music at danieljoseolder.net, on YouTube and @djolder on Twitter.

Amal El-Mohtar, Reprints Editor

Amal El-Mohtar is an author, editor, and critic: her short fiction has received the Locus Award, and she has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, while her poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times. She is the author of _The Honey Month,_ a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey,and a contributor to NPR Books and the LA Times. Her fiction has appeared most recently in _Lightspeed,_ _Uncanny Magazine,_ and Ann VanderMeer's _Bestiary_ anthology, and as well as _The Starlit Wood,_ an anthology of original fairy tales edited by Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien. She divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

Tobias Buckell, Nonfiction Editor

Tobias S. Buckell is a _New York Times_ bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into eighteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com.

# ORIGINAL SHORT FICTION  
edited by Daniel José Older

# Black, Their Regalia

## Darcie Little Badger | 4,100 words

Outside, the quarantine train was unblemished white. Where its tracks skirted populated regions, barbed wire and warning signs—DANGER! ¡PELIGRO! INFECTIOUS MATERIALS! ¡SUSTANCIAS INFECCIOSAS!—discouraged trespassers from marking the cars with spray paint.

The interior was another story. In her cabin, a narrow sleeper with four beds (one for Screaming Moraine, one for Fiddler Kristi, one for Drummer Tulli, and one for their carry-on luggage, several densely packed grocery bags, and an electric violin), Tulli found graffiti scrawled near her upper bunk.

**Amber Smythe was here**

**I LOVE JON HUYNH**

**Kallie + Brett + Austin Klark August 17-18**

**FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL THE CDC**

**god help us**

Tulli fished a leather-piercing needle from her sewing kit. With marks like spider silk, she etched: **The Apparently Siblings rode the White Train**

Tulli, Moraine, and Kristi were only siblings in the spiritual way; their band name was a response to all the strangers who asked, "Are you triplets?"

When she felt thorny—so almost always—Kristi responded, "Because Natives look alike? No. Well. We might have the same great-uncle. He gotta _reputation."_

"Hey! Tulli! Are you defacing the train?" Moraine shouted, as if she couldn't hear him across three feet of recirculated air. "Don't write our names! I'd rather not pay a fine."

"Uh oh. I wrote our band name already."

"Don't worry," Kristi said. "There's no chance anybody will recognize it."

So the Apparently Sibs weren't remotely famous, but they'd been off to a promising start before the plague spread. On average, they played four paid shows a month and had sixty followers on Twitter (sixty-three, if you counted their mothers). With enough time, they could have serenaded the right person, signed a contract, and toured the world. Or, at the very least, toured states outside Texas.

Now, their on-stage corpse paint seemed like a premonition. What little humankind knew about the Big Plague pointed to a grim, albeit sluggish, prognosis. The poor souls who carried the strain had a year, more or less. Could be enough time to find a cure. Maybe even enough time to mobilize the largest treatment plan in human history. Unfortunately, some people crashed fast, their nervous systems torn apart.

A rap on the door announced breakfast: oatmeal and tea. The twenty-something, freckled nurse, Jon—is he the Jon of wall graffiti fame, Tulli wondered—prepared the food with automaton efficiency and took their temperatures. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, one hundred and one point nine. Kristi was running a vigorous fever already.

"Can we do anything to slow her symptoms?" Tulli asked. Like all White Train nurses, Jon was a carrier, immune to the virus but contagious. Lucky: a hazmat suit would obscure the sympathetic crinkles around his eyes.

"Possibly," he said. "The doctors at Mariposa Compound will do everything they can." Jon dropped the disposable thermometer tips down a biohazard chute near the door. He hesitated in the exit, gazing beyond Tulli's head, as if distracted by a memory. "Goodbye, then," he said. "Call if you need anything."

During breakfast, Tulli and Moraine hovered over Kristi, prepared to steady trembling hands as she drank lukewarm black tea. Full-body shakes were a late-stage plague symptom, but they begin with subtle tremors, and Kristi shivered when she choked down the dregs in her cup.

"It's just chilly," Moraine said, wrapping a black Pendleton blanket around Kristi's shoulders. "We need sunlight. Open the curtains."

"Good idea." Tulli obliged, revealing the yellow desert. There were mountains in the distance and barrel cacti in the foreground. Nearby, a bird's tattered, desiccated corpse hung from a coil of barbed wire. "You should both have a nap," she suggested. "Terrible scenery."

• • • •

The Apparently Siblings first met during the Maria de Soto University Pow Wow and Cake Walk for Charity. As poor college freshmen, they were enticed by the one hundred dollar "best student intertribal dancer" prize, not community togetherness or actual dancing, pinkie swear. Tulli had to scour the boxes in her dorm room to find her neglected dancing regalia: turkey feather fan, knee-high doeskin boots, and thirty-pound jingle dress. It had been years since her last pow wow, and the dress clutched her hips and arms, uncomfortably tight. _Do it for money,_ she thought. _And maybe you'll win a free cake, too. German chocolate would taste so good right now._

That year, the MdSUPWCWC, normally held on the soccer field, was moved to the indoor gymnasium in defiance of sparking, mountainous clouds overhead. The drum group sat in the center circle of the basketball court. They were surrounded by the dancing ring and crowded benches for participants.

Tulli noticed Moraine on the bench next to hers. Under the vibrant red fringe and sunset-colored beadwork that covered his grass dancer regalia, he resembled somebody in her music composition class, the kid who always answered Dr. Brumford's rhetorical questions.

"Are you a music student at de Soto?" she asked.

"Yeah!" He lowered his Navajo taco to shake her hand. "I'm Moraine, like the glacial deposit. That's a well-crafted jingle dress."

"Thanks. My mom made it."

"Blue suits you."

"Maybe, but I wanted black and orange. Halloween colors. Mom hates the holiday."

"Mine does, too! She thinks focusing on death and gloomy junk attracts evil."

"My mom says I have ghost sickness."

"What?"

"A mental shroud, a preoccupation with death, a fearful obsession that manifests as physical illness and psychic anguish. So basically I'm haunted because my favorite movie is _Ringu."_

Moraine laughed.

"What if it's real, though?" Tulli asked.

"You believe in the supernatural?"

Tulli shrugged. "I'm skeptical, but Moms have been right before."

"Let's test it. My throat hurts, and you're wearing a jingle dress."

"Okay?"

"Jingle dancing is supposed to heal people, right?"

"Maybe. It healed at least one person. Like a hundred and fifty years ago. Reputedly. An Ojibwe girl, I think? Dunno, man." Jingle dresses, draped with hollow silver cones, clang with every leap. Tulli loved their rhythm, that's all. She knew zilch about the origin of the dance, its significance. Not like they taught that in public school.

"Try to heal me," Moraine insisted. "I want to believe."

A young woman—fancy shawl dancer, her regalia cluttered with shades of yellow and pink—stepped between Tulli and Moraine. "First," she said, "ghosts are real. They look like shadows, and your jingle dress test doesn't prove anything. Actually, it's borderline offensive, so don't let respectable people hear you. Second: I think you're both in my music composition class. Hey. I'm—"

"Kristi," Moraine said. "Yeah, I know! Great to officially meet you!"

They spent the pow wow arguing about ghosts—Moraine insisted that the shadowy figures Kristi saw at night were symptoms of sleep paralysis, Kristi thought he was just scared of the unfathomable truth, and Tulli remained noncommittal. However, they didn't annoy each other too much, so friendship inevitably blossomed.

None of them won the competition. That prize went to a hoop dancer math major.

Five years later, Tulli truly loved her buddies. She couldn't envision better people to live with. To die with.

Hopefully, the death part would take its sweet time.

• • • •

The White Train's mechanical heartbeat, a low whir that sounded nothing like the _chug, chug, chug_ in movies, was punctuated by Tulli's fingers drumming on the windowsill and her steel-toed boots tapping the vinyl floor. They were nearing the Mojave Desert, where several compounds, including Mariposa, treated high-threat contagious citizens away from the lucky uninfected.

Kristi's reflection appeared in the glass, her wide eyes transposed over the cloudless sky. The Pendleton fell in a heap at her feet.

"Sorry, Hon," Tulli said, turning. "Did my drumming disturb you?"

"My dream . . ." Kristi pointed to a silhouette that cut the white-blue sky with long, sharp wings. "She was in my dream."

"That's just a turkey vulture. Strange. I didn't know they lived here. Don't quote me on that before I Google it, though. Go back to—"

"She sent them. They're her children, vultures. Eating . . . eating sick, old meat. To help make the world clean."

"What? Whose children?"

"The Plague Eater." With a sleepwalker's drowsy gait, Kristi stumbled back to bed, pulling the cotton sheet up to her chin and murmuring something about dancing. Tulli tucked the Pendleton over her friend.

"What?" Moraine asked, waking. "Did Kristi have a nightmare? Must be exciting. I'd love to experience her brain for just one REM cycle."

"Nightmares aren't pleasant, last I checked."

"Better than the tedious junk I experience. This time, I dreamed of notes in the major key."

"You're a true musician, Moraine."

"Guess I'll try again." He pulled the sheets up to his chin. "Hey."

"Yeah?"

"Keep an eye on her, okay?"

"I promise."

Once her friends drifted off to sleep, Tulli sat on the end of Kristi's bunk and held her hand. The muscles in her long fingers—a violinist's fingers, spidery and dexterous—tensed, relaxed, and tensed. Her livelihood, if not her life, was rapidly expiring.

Where were the powers their mothers swore by? The great forces that heal faithful children and make bodies strong? "I'll do anything," Tulli whispered. "You just need to ask."

In the silence that followed, she chuckled. The Apparently Siblings reveled in gallows humor. It was much nicer than weeping.

Later, as the train chugged through Mariposa Compound, it passed rows of white barracks with slatted pitch roofs. Laundry lines, sun-bleached plastic toys, and potted plants cluttered the residential grounds. The train stopped between sprawling, nearly identical facilities. To the right: a hospital. To the left: a community center. Beyond them were convenience shops, the kindergarten to twelfth-grade school, a computer lab, a library, and a cafeteria. Tulli had memorized her compound map during the trip, knew where every facility was located. Where she and her siblings would live. Where they would be treated. Where they could eat, rehearse, and hang out. Where they would be memorialized, if the plague consumed them.

Nurse Jon helped load their bags on a trolley. "I have to ask something," he said. "Are you three related?"

"Because we look alike?" Kristi asked.

"Excuse me, Miss. I don't meet many goths."

"You're my new favorite person, Jon," Tulli said. "Our style is closer to neoclassical alt-metal fusion than goth."

"Here's why I asked," Jon said. "They house men and women separately in Mariposa Compound unless you're family or dating."

Moraine shook his head. "I see," he said. "We have the same great-uncle. Will that do? I can't convincingly pretend to date a woman."

"Hopefully. Good luck, you three." Jon escorted them outside, stealing a breath of fresh air before ducking back into the White Train.

Thanks to their apocryphal great-uncle, the Apparently Siblings shared a bedroom that was originally designed for one patient. Imperceptibly tinier than their efficiency apartment in McAllen, the close quarters did not bother Tulli. At least they had a window. Granted, it overlooked a blank white wall, one of the neighboring barracks.

"The internet broke again," Kristi said, prodding her laptop. She'd been bedridden for three days, shivering under her covers and racing to finish her memoirs before the illness made typing impossible. "I'm supposed to call my parents in twenty minutes."

"There's a landline in the common area," Moraine said.

"I want to see them."

Tulli peered out the window, her back to the other siblings. During sunset, the blank wall resembled a cool flame: vivid orange, blushing darker, slipping into shadow. "How's your family doing?" she asked.

"Still healthy, but worry will kill 'em before any virus, at this rate," Kristi said.

Orange became rust, red, black. Tulli rapped a shrill toy drum she borrowed from the K to 12 music room. Pacing, Moraine hummed the tune he dreamed on the White Train. Kristi finished her memoirs with a discontented sigh. At nightfall, they all climbed into bed. Breakfast ended at nine sharp, and the meal lines got longer every day. "What's the opposite of a vampire?" Moraine asked. "'Cause I feel like one. It's unnatural, this early-to-bed schedule."

Tulli pretended to be asleep. If she responded, Moraine would chatter well into late-night-early-morning. The last time that happened, they overslept and missed both breakfast and lunch. She could hear Kristi shifting, shuddering, contorting under the Pendleton blanket with whispering _shif, shif, shifs._ Plague-triggered muscle spasms: most people called them slow death throes. It was like a dance, a terrible dance.

In the hypnagogic realm between awake and asleep, where dreams poisoned reality, a shadow stood proudly against the wall. It possessed eyes: unblinking, round, yellow eyes with pupils that swallowed Tulli's soul, two points of space-time singularity from which nothing could escape.

Drumbeats rang— _rap, RAP, rap_ —and the shadow began to spin. It revolved clockwise around the walls, and when the circle was completed, a final, thunderous _rap_ rang out, punctuated by the sound of breaking glass.

Tulli leapt to her feet; the window near her bed had cracked. Cautiously, she peeked outside. "Whoa!" A wake of turkey vultures stumbled drunkenly below the window, stunned by their impacts against the glass. One by one, they alighted, until all that remained were three tail feathers piled in the dust.

"Hyuh!" Moraine said, patting his pillow-ruffled punk pompadour. "I just had the worst case of sleep paralysis."

Kristi, wrapped in black wool, said, "It was a dancing ghost. Unless you believe in shared hallucinations?"

"What about shared visions?" Tulli asked. "Guys. This may be our jingle dance moment. I think we've been chosen."

"By whom?" Moraine said.

"No idea. Hold your imperious retort while I grab those feathers."

As Tulli entered the alley, she heard a radio muttering through a neighbor's cracked window. The static-thickened voice said, "I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death." Tulli was not religious, but, as a fan of horror movies and the novel _Good Omens_ by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, she knew all about the four horsepeople of the Apocalypse, color- and noun-themed riders who emerged during the End Times.

The moon was full and high, its light spilling into the alley between barracks. When the radio preacher concluded, ". . . to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth," Tulli pressed the turkey vulture feathers over her eyes, blocking the obnoxious white globe. They were so dark, Tulli wondered if their vanes devoured more light than the blackest material on Earth, a forest of carbon nanotubes constructed by Japanese scientists, her personal STEM heroes.

"Not today, Apocalypse," she said.

Inside, Moraine and Kristi were fussing. Nostalgia washed over Tulli; she thought about the day they met. How little things changed, even when everything changed.

"The virus causes hallucinations when it damages the temporal lobe," Moraine said. "Shadows are common."

"We all saw a woman spinning around our bedroom as turkey vultures smacked rhythmically into the window."

"Okay. Sure. What makes you believe she was teaching us a special dance?"

"Powerful dances come from visions. That's what my mother taught me. That's what her mother taught her. That's how I know what I know."

"Don't take this the wrong way: if your ancestors knew powerful dances, why aren't we ruling the world right now?"

"We're holding our own," Tulli interrupted.

"And dying," he said.

"The whole world is dying. Seems like the perfect time for higher powers to reawake. You're a singer. I'm a drummer. Kristi is a dancer . . . until her hands work again. We're going to respect the vision that danced across our wall tonight. What's the worst that could happen?"

"Nothing," he said.

_"Nothing_ would be the very worst," Kristi agreed.

"Right. Nothing. Moraine, I'm scared of nothing right now."

He bit his lip, contemplative. "All right. Let's get started, Ladies. Kristi needs regalia. What was the vision dancer wearing?"

"A dress?" Kristi said. "And a shawl? It's hard to tell. The whole thing was a shadow."

"A shadow . . ."

They needed black fabric. Lots of it.

The first flier the Apparently Siblings pinned to the community message board was short and informative:

BLACK FABRIC NEEDED FOR A DANCE CEREMONY!

**Hόόyíí! Please consider donating used clothes, thread, buttons, etc. A collection box is outside our door (Barrack 19, Room 3). FYI: you won't need mourning suits once we destroy the virus with sick (but not actually sick) rhythm and motion. :D Cheers! Tulli+Moraine+Kristi of Apparently Siblings fame**

The flier only attracted one donation, a pair of black wool socks. Somebody also offered to DJ their "plague prom." Undeterred, they tried again:

BLACK FABRIC NEEDED

**Hόόyíí! We are Apache/Navajo. Ceremonial dances have social and religious power in our communities. For example, we dance to honor veterans, win cakes, and appeal to grand forces. It's a fact! Please help us perform a dance for community wellness. Leave used black clothing outside Barrack 19, Room 3. Thank you, bless you, and thank you again! Tulli+Moraine+Kristi**

In came donations of lace-trimmed dresses, conservative blouses, and skirts: outfits made from silk, cotton, polyester, and rayon blends that were dyed every conceivable shade of black.

First, Tulli and Moraine crafted the dress with cotton and synthetic scraps, stitching a patchwork skin over Kristi's body, its voluminous skirt trimmed by lace and tulle from mourning veils.

Next, they made her ankle-high moccasins by taping faux leather from a wannabe motorcycle jacket around her flip-flops. "I know we're amateurs, but I'd look better wearing garbage bags on my feet," Kristi said.

"They have charm," Moraine promised.

"What will we do about the shawl?" she asked. "The ghost was definitely wearing one."

"Voilà!" Tulli draped the black Pendleton blanket around Kristi's shoulders. "All it needs is fringe. I'll start shredding socks."

As the pièce de résistance, Tulli fashioned three hair clips from the tail feathers. She thanked the turkey vultures; from rachis to barbed vane, their gifts held the plague eater's blessing. Plus, those vultures had kicked her off the fence straddling belief and denial. _Cathartes_ species didn't live in the Mojave Desert; Tulli absolutely knew their territory because she Googled "where do turkey vultures live" after Kristi noticed one outside the White Train. Indeed, those birds were scientific proof of the supernatural; they had to be sent by powers greater than nature: spirits, ghosts, gods. All of the above?

"Are you ready?" she asked, pinning the blue-black feather to Kristi and the brown-black feather to Moraine.

"Shouldn't we practice?" he asked. "I've only heard this song in my head. What if I can't hit the high notes?"

"No time. The virus ruins lives every hour. Plus, Kristi's boots are falling apart, and we won't find another free motorcycle jacket. Do you want to scrap your leather pants, Buddy? It's now or never."

As the Apparently Siblings marched outside, turkey vulture groupies landed on the barrack rooftops. Neighbors peered out windows and gathered in dirt streets to marvel at the birds. Some people leaned against canes or shivered atop wheelchairs, their faces tilted skyward. "They think we're carrion!" a man said, laughing at his own gallows joke. Nobody else would.

"Follow us!" Moraine shouted. "To the memorial courtyard!"

The vultures—two, three, four dozen—swooped from their perches and hopped-waddled-hobbled after the Apparently Siblings, their wings spread for balance. Draped from head to toe in black, Kristi led the procession, supported by her two friends. With the setting sun at their backs, their shadows stretched ahead of them and parted the light that fell against the glittering white stones in the circular courtyard. A pillar—white marble, nine feet high—jutted from the belly of the courtyard. Its bronze plaque read: **IN MEMORIAM**. Already, several names had been etched into the base of the pillar, but there remained room for thousands on its blank faces: one canvas that Tulli hoped would remain empty. She crouched against the eastward-facing side and beheld the night encroaching.

"What's with the birds? Everybody go inside! Back to your rooms, please!"

Was that security speaking? A doctor or administrator? Though the voice was magnified by a bullhorn, Tulli could not see its source beyond the wall of spectators and turkey vultures that surrounded her.

"On my count," she said, drumstick raised. "Káye, dáki, táłi!"

"What?" Moraine asked.

"Sorry. That was Lipan. Um, what's the Diné word for three?"

"Just use English," he said.

"Three, two, one!"

Moraine sang in clear, deep vocables; it had been ages since Tulli heard his voice without a hint of guttural death growl. Stunned, she nearly missed her entrance. The first beat on her toy drum cracked like a whip.

_Rap!_

Even with a bullhorn, the security-doctor-administrator could not overwhelm Moraine.

_Rap, RAP, rap!_

Tulli's drum spoke of healing and hunger.

_Rap!_

Kristi spread her arms and began to spin as she orbited around the memorial pillar, clockwise. By the second loop, she staggered more than she spun; every successive loop was smaller, closer to the pillar, as if it drew her in. On the fifth, she fell and crawled.

"Almost done!" Tulli shouted.

_RAP!_

The ground crumbled, and darkness enveloped their world, a darkness so absolute, even phosphenes vanished. As if drawn together by organic magnetism, Tulli, Moraine, and Kristi found each other and linked arms as they fell. "Are we dead?" Moraine hollered.

"I feel great," said Kristi, "so probably."

"Do you see that?" Tulli asked. "Below us!"

Two arms lit by their own radiance—glowstick-bright bones illuminating muscle, veins, and flesh with cool red light—sprouted from the abyss; their skin was rough with pox scars, their nails curled like talons. The Apparently Siblings landed on one pillowy, massive palm.

"Children," a hoarse, tooth-rattling voice said, "I enjoyed the performance." It came from everywhere, as if the void spoke.

"Thank you!" Tulli rolled into a sitting position; she'd landed gracelessly. They all had. "Are you its composer? Are you the one who gave us visions?"

"I am."

"It's an honor. May I ask, um . . ."

"Why?" Kristi interrupted. "There are lots of decent people on Earth, so why choose us instead?"

"Because," the void said, "I am your _biggest_ fan. Apparently Siblings, when you scream in dim places, I listen, and I relish what I hear."

So they _did_ serenade the right person. Tulli knew it would happen eventually, though she'd expected a human talent scout. "Will . . . you help?" she asked. "Help make us and everybody else healthy again?"

The temperature dove from chilly to Alaska winter cold. Even Kristi, with her wool shawl and patchwork dress, shivered. "From the world Above," boomed everywhere Below, "I take the Big Plague, drink its coils, and sate my hunger. The virus is now just a troubled memory. Make no mistake: you'll all die eventually. Heheh. Mortals _always_ perish. Maybe by illness. Maybe by accident. Maybe by something stranger. It's not my place to know. When the time comes, I hope you will find me and perform for all the dead, the never-born, and the monstrous who live in my deep country."

"Woah. _Metal._ What . . . what are you?" Tulli asked, leaning against her friends for warmth. "A spirit?"

"A ghost?" Kristi asked.

"A god?" Moraine asked. "Or could you be part of a complex delusion? Maybe I'm asleep, and all this has been a nightmare."

"Just call me Plague Eater. The rest is mystery." The fingers curled around them. "But I'm definitely not that last guess."

• • • •

"I have to admit," Tulli said, "that the White Train is much nicer this time. I even saw Nurse Jon sipping a martini in the dining car. I asked if he wanted an autograph, and he said, 'No, you left one on the wall.' What a funny guy. I may really love him."

Kristi snorted. "Get his number, but don't invite him home. Our apartment must be rank. We left chili in the sink."

"Let's hire a maid after the tour finishes," said Moraine.

"Maybe even rent a bigger apartment?" Tulli asked.

It had taken a few weeks to check, double-check, and triple-check their blood samples; not a hint of Big Plague remained. In fact, nobody carried the virus anymore, regardless of the bodily fluid or tissue that was screened. Big Plague even vanished from test vials in laboratories and secure government facilities.

Maybe that's why so many people believed that the Apparently Siblings apparently saved the world. YouTube videos of their performance helped, too: turkey vultures bobbing their naked heads, the dance, song, and drum, a flurry of feathers, an empty courtyard, cheers when the crowd spotted Tulli, Kristi, and Moraine on the medical center rooftop.

In every video, their bodies were perfect silhouettes against the red western sky.

© 2016 by Darcie Little Badger.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache scientist, writer, and friendly goth. After studying gene expression in toxin-producing phytoplankton, she received a PhD from Texas A&M University. Her short fiction has appeared in several publications, including _Strange Horizons_ and _Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time,_ an anthology of speculative fiction by indigenous writers. Darcie tweets as @ShiningComic. For her complete bibliography, visit darcielittlebadger.wordpress.com/my-short-stories.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# The Rock In the Water

## Thoraiya Dyer | 5,500 words

_Throw them in the water where nobody will see,_ the head cook told Yveline right before sunrise, but there're already so many people washing their clothes in the river that Yveline holds the string bag of stinking, empty shells behind a banana tree and cries in dismay without making a sound.

She's seven years old. Too big to be crying like a baby. Yveline scrubs at the tears with the back of her lambi-smelling hand and strains to see a place without people. Too many fishing boats with tyres hung over the sides. Too many men pulling their nets up onto the silver silt. Too many trucks in the pebbly shallows, filling containers with dirty river water while children who still have parents swim and laugh.

Yveline wants to shriek at them not to drink the water. Not to swim in it. Don't they know anything? Her parents drank the dirty water and died. Now Yveline belongs to Msye Maurice.

She works in his big house, sleeps on the floor, and answers to a new name. The head cook is supposed to send her to school but instead sends her to hide the lambi shells.

Msye Maurice ships things to Miami. Bad powder to make people crazy. Trays labelled frozen fish that are really frozen lambi. He swaps them for things from Miami that nobody else in Port-de-Paix can get. Radios and bicycles. Parts for cars. They're stolen, but Msye Maurice says he's like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich.

_They don't even notice what's missing,_ he laughs. _The rock in the water doesn't know the pain of the rock in the sun._

Everyone doesn't agree with him. Especially not the soldiers, whose boats and sea planes also take things to Miami. If anyone sees Yveline with the shells, Msye Maurice will be in trouble. Yveline will be beaten, again.

The string bag's almost as tall as she is. Hugging it, she drags it through the long grass, retreating from the river mouth, away from the golden dawn. There's still time to take the shells to the other side of the point. To dump them into the sea.

Sunlight doesn't yet touch the tiny cove which faces northwest, its small, sandy curve smiling at the Atlantic. Along the beach, bent palm trees whisper like rag-clad witches. Yveline creeps by them. She avoids crumbling colonial fortifications covered in vines, squatters' tents, and blue tarpaulins.

Too many people, everywhere.

Yveline's arms are covered in cuts from the sharp pink mouth-edges and knobby grey outsides of the shells. When she reaches the beach and sees a tall, skinny woman constructing something on the sand, a small lumpy shape against the big green lumpy shape of Ile de la Tortue across the water, she starts to cry again. The woman will see her if she leaves the shadows.

She'll have to bury the string bag in the sand. The wind might un-bury it, but by then she'll be gone. Her fingers make tiny, busy scoops, but no matter how she digs and digs, the hole doesn't get big enough to hold the bag. She needs a grown-up to help her, and there's nobody besides the tall woman. Maybe the woman isn't a spy for Msye Maurice's enemies. Maybe it could be safe to ask her.

When she looks up from her muddy hole, she sees what the woman was making on the beach. A tent made from black plastic. There are things hung from the poles. Bones and feathers and colourful beads. Yveline can't see the woman anymore. She must be inside.

Yveline wipes her tears away again. Before she can run across the open space to the tent, another moving shape freezes her in her tracks.

A bald man in a purple shirt walks out of the sunrise towards the tent. He lifts the flap. Goes inside.

But for the wind, the beach is still. But for the wind, the beach is quiet. She should throw the shells in the water, right now. Yveline runs across the sand, dragging the lambi bag behind her, but she doesn't go to the edge of the sea. Her skin prickles and she stops beside the tent, instead.

She crouches by a tiny hole in the plastic, presses her eye against the hole.

• • • •

Su'ad can't find the mama cat anywhere.

It's crawled into some warm space to have its kittens, she's sure of it, and last time the bloody placentas splodged all over her neatly folded school uniform, ruining it. She can't afford to be late, today. Su'ad is the third speaker in the debate against Ein Tarma in the Girls' Preparatory School Final. The topic is Should Women Be Allowed To Sing In Public, or some inanity, when it should be something serious.

_Su'ad, you are too serious,_ Su'ad's mother always tells her.

The broken window in the kitchen has come open again. Su'ad forces it shut. There are tiny holes in the lace curtains from a sandstorm that engulfed the city in the summer, invaded the house via the broken window, and set Su'ad sweeping up dust for days.

Sweeping and thinking. Each grain of sand is nothing. Together, though, they scour paint from cars, erase political slogans on billboards, and remind dictators in private helicopters that not everything is under their control.

Mewlings come from the pantry cupboard. Su'ad opens the door to find the mama cat kittening on a fifty-kilo bag of rice. Her long, tawny fur is matted at the back end. Su'ad brought her home from the garbage tip by the sea because she looked like a little lion.

"There you are," she whispers.

"There you are!" a man's voice hollers, somewhere in the house. In a house where no men live.

Su'ad hesitates. She could hide in the pantry. She should hide. Her mother has woken her several times in the middle of the night, a shivering moonlit shape, just to tell her that when they come, if they come, Su'ad must not be brave. But Su'ad has never really believed that anyone would come. Her mother is wealthy. Educated. Respected. God is watching, after all.

She leaps to her feet and strolls out into the lounge room.

"What's going on?" she shouts at a man in military uniform who has kicked over the coffee table for no reason. It's Jalaal. She went to school with him. He always had his arms out, pretending to be an airplane; always did enjoy knocking things down.

"We're here to get her," Jalaal brags, jerking his head sideways at Su'ad's mother, who stands in the doorway with one hand in the yoghurt bowl, her astonished mouth still full of chewed flatbread and cucumber. "She's been talking to some Western journalists. Look!"

He holds up a grainy photo of a woman in a white scarf. It's obviously not Su'ad's mother.

"It's not her!"

"It's not me," Su'ad's mother agrees.

"Of course it is her," Jalaal says. "You will come with us now, Umm-Su'ad."

He sneers at the title. Mother-of-Su'ad. Women should be called by the names of their oldest sons, but all of Umm-Su'ad's seven sons miscarried, before she brought a daughter to term. Something was wrong with all of Su'ad's ghostly brothers, so that God did not allow them to be born.

"Leave her alone! It's not her!" Su'ad screams, but two more men come to help Jalaal put Su'ad's mother in the back of an oil-smelling, sand-coloured truck.

"Have a nice day at school," Jalaal says to her shocked, furious face. "Study hard. We'll come back for you. There's no room in the prison right now, but somebody is sure to die soon. Traitors cannot be allowed to go free."

• • • •

Yveline's peeping eye adjusts to the darkness inside the tent.

There's light from a candle in a lambi shell. Interesting things unpacked onto little tables. A wooden pipe, a straw hat, a jewelled hand-mirror. The woman who put up the tent sits on a folding stool, while the man in the purple shirt sits across from her on a plantain crate.

"If the cholera has come beneath your roof," the woman is saying, "would you not rather seek a spirit of healing?"

"Too late for that," the man replies, clutching his bald head, his elbows on his knees. "I wish for revenge! Those blue helmets are the ones who brought it, but none of them have died."

They are talking about the bad water sickness that killed Yveline's parents. The cholera, the woman called it. Yveline shifts her feet in the sand.

The woman clucks her tongue.

"Creole spoken is Creole understood."

"Forgive me, Mambo Asogwe. I meant that only a few of the soldiers have died. Thousands of us have died. Are still dying, every day. Who can give me justice, if not Marinette of the Dry Feet? She freed us from bondage, long ago. She will know how to drive them away."

"She may," the woman agrees reluctantly. "I will summon her so that you can ask her."

Yveline draws back from the hole in the tent, her heart pounding. Now she knows it was a stirring of spirit that drew her irresistibly to the side of the tent. The woman is a priestess preparing to call one of the loa. Marinette will ride the woman like a horse. Answer questions through her lips. Yveline is terrified of the bad things that might follow the loa from the other world to this one. Dead things. Hungry things. She must get away from the tent. It doesn't matter anymore if she is beaten. It doesn't matter what Msye Maurice says or does to her.

Then she sees something that raises her terror to new heights. The local gangs have not been slow to notice the appearance of the black tent.

On the far side of the place where Yveline cringes between the tent and the bag of lambi shells are a handful of gangly boys with guns and machetes. They move like they have taken some of Msye Maurice's bad powder to make them brave.

"Come on out, witch!" one of them shouts. "This is our turf!"

"Pay, if you want to stay!" shouts another one, rattling his weapon in a loose grip.

The bald man comes out of the tent. Yveline can't see him but she hears the swish of the plastic flap and the fury in his deep voice.

"You little fools. Don't you know what these feathers and things mean? You have interrupted—"

The sound of the gun firing, many times in a small number of seconds, makes Yveline shrink down in the smallest ball her shaking body can make. She wishes to be much, much smaller. She wishes to be small enough to crawl inside one of the lambi shells, to hide there until it is safe.

There is silence.

"You interrupted him, all right," one of the boys guffaws, and the others laugh, but they don't sound like they are having a good time. They sound like a rooster sounds right before its neck is wrung.

• • • •

Su'ad doesn't go to school.

She takes the money from the house safe and finds a sand-coloured truck of her own.

"Twenty thousand for United States," the smuggler says matter-of-factly. "Fifteen thousand for number one good European country. Twelve thousand for bad European country."

Su'ad hides her dread. She's heard of women handing over their money and then being sold into slavery or prostitution. Picking up a bootleg handbag that the smuggler is pretending to sell at his market stall, she turns it over in her hands and replaces it without really seeing it.

The risks are unavoidable. Su'ad is a lion. She is a daughter of lions. She imagines the ghosts of her seven brothers standing behind her.

"Where can I go," she demands, "for three thousand?"

The smuggler rolls the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. He gobbles down some spit and smoke. Su'ad stares him in the eye.

"A boat," he says at last. "No papers. A boat from Red Sea port. You will work when you get to Malaysia, to pay for the next part of the journey. To Australia."

"I won't do the work that you are talking about," Su'ad hisses.

"Not that kind of work." The smuggler shrugs. "Cleaning work. Cooking work. Work that will break your back. Work that will make your black hair grey."

"My hair will not turn grey," Su'ad says. She is fourteen years old. Since she was a precocious child watching _Judge Judy_ on pirated satellite TV, she has wanted to sit behind a bench and bang a polished wooden gavel. She will do it. She will bang it down, hard, and Jamaal will go to prison, crying and peeing in his pants.

_You are guilty,_ she will say from her high seat. _You should never have set foot in my house. I am a daughter of lions._

• • • •

On the beach, Yveline stays so tightly curled she doesn't see the tent change.

Instead, she feels it shudder. The smoothness on her bare shoulder turns to hairy, rubbing roughness. Yveline shrinks back from it. Her eyes fly open. The tent is turned to a ring of black pigs pressed up together, with a pyramid of featherless black roosters perched on their bristly backs.

All at once, the red-eyed, red-tusked pigs squeal. All at once, the black roosters open red beaks and crow towards the sunrise. In the deafening confusion, the gun fires again. Bladed weapons swing and boys swear and scream. Yveline screams, too, with all the breath that is inside her.

"Is this how you show respect?" The grating voice is a woman's, but it doesn't match the gentle voice of the Mambo Asogwe who reluctantly agreed to call Marinette of the Dry Feet.

The boys run across the beach. Pigs and roosters pursue them. When all the tent-walls-turned-to-animals are gone, the tall woman stays, standing between empty tent poles. The bald man with the purple shirt lies dead at her feet, along with a few bleeding roosters.

The priestess turns her gaze to Yveline. Takes two steps toward her. Yveline pushes her fists into her mouth to stop from screaming again. Beneath the hem of the woman's dark skirt, she sees two skeleton feet. The bare bones sink a little into the sand.

"You wish to escape this place, child? You wish to be safe? Children have begged for such things before. I covered this land in blood to help those children."

Yveline moves her fists. Mouths something so quiet she isn't sure the loa can hear.

"I just—I just—I just wanted to put the shells in the sea."

"Take them into the sea, then," Marinette commands in her voice like death. "Take them, child, and be safe, until you've had all you can stomach of safety."

Yveline takes hold of the bag with arms like jelly. It's immoveable, at first. Impossible. Seconds later, it lightens. The waves beckon. The squeals of pigs and boys grow distant. She lifts it and dares to turn her back on one of the loa.

Her back. The shells are slung over her back, but she doesn't remember doing that. They're lighter and lighter, the closer she gets to the water. They're part of her. Her clothes turn to sand and fall away. In the mirror of the surface, she sees herself, a naked girl with a giant lambi shell on her back. When she walks into the waves, they are warm. They do not drown her.

She walks and keeps on walking, forgetting her terror in the wonder of it. Her feet stir up the sand on the bottom of the crystal-clear sea. She walks around other dumped debris. Shells and car bodies and crab pots and human bones.

_Msye Maurice can never find me,_ she thinks. _Nobody owns me anymore._

Yveline passes the day walking among wild lambi. She skips like a child, for the first time, in hilarious slow-motion through beautiful sea-grass beds. As the sun begins to set, turning the surface to stained glass church windows, she realises she will never feel hungry or thirsty again. She is free to walk or swim wherever her magical lambi body can take her, and rest, curled inside the pink part of the pearly, perfect shell, whenever she feels like sleeping and dreaming.

_Throw them in the water where nobody will see,_ the head cook told her.

Marinette of the Dry Feet has thrown Yveline into the water. Only the stingrays are here to see her joy at being free.

• • • •

Su'ad scrubs at the grime-encrusted floor of the commercial kitchen.

"Pass me the other cloth," she says to herself. She has nobody else to speak Arabic to, and none of the other cleaners speak French. Her Indonesian is improving, her English, half-forgotten. On callused knees, she crawls to the bucket and wrings out the ineffectual current cloth, a scrap of old, stolen clothing that was soon too worn for her to keep wearing. It's been four years, after all.

Su'ad hasn't grown much. Her mother always was a small woman. Or perhaps it's because she hasn't eaten much. She'd do anything for a bowl of Umm-Su'ad's fuul medammas, smothered in lemon and oil. Sometimes she thinks she made a mistake. That she wasn't really in danger. But it's her mind playing tricks on her.

"Are you still alive?" she asks aloud. As the question leaves her lips she thinks of the butterfly effect she read about, once. Of ripples crossing the whole world. If her question can cross the whole world to find the ears of a middle-aged woman in a prison more terrible than this workplace then maybe, if Su'ad listens hard enough, there will come a reply.

Or the tongueless sound of torture. Silence, maybe. Maybe it's not even her mother she's asking. Maybe it's herself.

Su'ad remembers the kittens in the pantry cupboard that day. Some of them will be dead, now. Some of them will be fine, bold cats that look like little lions. Su'ad uses the other, harsher cloth on a spatter of duck fat and green onions that's turned to black and yellow mould in the week since the army of refugee women last came to clean this kitchen.

_I am one of those bold ones. I will find her again._

• • • •

Yveline swims up to the bottom of the massive oil tanker.

She curls into her shell and sticks to it, snug as a barnacle. The poison paint to keep sea creatures away tastes strange but doesn't harm her. Ships carry her over the deep parts of the ocean. The dark places where she's scared to go. She doesn't get bigger and she doesn't grow older.

Sometimes, though, she leaves her shell and walks, naked, up onto beaches blanketed by the quiet of night. She breathes air, listens to birds, and counts stars.

Sometimes, she watches people. Peeps at them past rocks or from behind bushes. Listens to their conversations, when they are in a language she can understand.

The comparative warmth of the water tells her when she's in shallow seas again. She breaks off the bottom of the tanker and drifts down, poking her feet out of her shell, finding sea grasses a little different to the ones near her old home, but filled with fish of as many colours, and dazzling patterns of light.

• • • •

Su'ad lies on her back in vomit-filled bilge water.

She's wrapped in a heat-conserving space blanket, bought with extra weeks of work, but others squeezed in like sardines beside her, their terror palpable in the dark, have boarded the worm-holed wooden fishing boat unprepared.

"Which way?" a pregnant woman beside her raves. "Which way should I turn, to pray?"

"God is everywhere," Su'ad tells her. Telling north from south from east from west is a madwoman's errand. There is no chance of finding Mecca in the black ship hold. No chance of seeing or knowing anything at all. Only breathing as calmly as they can manage while the air grows sourer.

Hours later, the pregnant woman's hands creep over, trying to steal her blanket.

"I'm cold."

"Let go. It's mine."

"I'm cold!"

Su'ad's head jerks as the woman's hands find her eye sockets and push. She has no choice but to bite the hands until she tastes blood, crying angrily as she does it, the pounding in her ears drowning out whatever the woman is babbling.

The hands withdraw. The pregnant woman is the weaker. Su'ad is the stronger. Hours later, the woman's laboured breathing stops.

"We're all going to die," the Iraqi on the other side of the dead woman whispers.

There is a heart-stopping shudder and the sound of wood tearing. The bilge water, turned to a slurry by shit and corpses, is abruptly fresh and icy. The boat is leaking. Water is coming into the compartment.

Su'ad breathes as calmly as she can manage. If only her mother had thought to keep more money in the house. She could have gone to the number one good European country.

• • • •

Yveline wakes to a tapping on her shell.

When she cautiously pokes her head out, there isn't much to see. It's still dark and her eyes are still human. Then something taps again. She pulls her arms and shoulders out of the shell and sees the glowing, grey shapes of babies. There are seven of them. Their eyes closed, umbilical cords tangled like seaweed, they drum on her shell with their tiny heels.

Yveline pulls back into her shell. Safe inside it, she considers the unnatural creatures that have come to call. She, herself, is an unnatural creature. She knows now that not all spirits are wicked. But what do seven unborn babies want from her?

_My time is up,_ she thinks miserably. _Marinette needs my shell for somebody else. She has sent the babies to fetch me back._

When she uncurls a second time, the babies take her hands in their smaller, softer, paler hands. They pull her along through water too black to see where she is headed, at a terrible, breakneck speed much faster than even the biggest of the boats Yveline has stuck to. She doesn't resist. Only thinks sadly of her beautiful journey coming to an end.

But the babies tug her upwards. Guide her to a black confusion of struggling bodies and broken timber. Put her hands around a shape wrapped in silver like fish skin.

Yveline pulls the shape inside her shell. With both of them inside, squashed together, the shell grows heavy, sinking rapidly to the sea floor. Yveline feels another girl's face with her hands. An older girl. A young lady. Is this the one who will take her shell from her? Has somebody owned this lady? Made her do bad? Are her parents only a shadow of a shadow, like Yveline's parents, or does she miss them?

Will she be happy with stingrays for friends?

The lady's chest spasms. She's trying to breathe. The shell is not being given to her, or else why does she still need to breathe?

Yveline pushes off the bottom as hard as she can, holding the lady's head out of the shell and upwards. They break through the surface. The lady splutters. Retches. As she heaves up the salt water, she makes movements with her legs and arms, but they aren't the movements of someone who knows how to swim. Yveline twists. Pokes and pushes the lady until she's resting between the knobbly spines of the lambi shell.

Then, like a tiny, mobile island, she swims along the surface of the sea, looking for somewhere to set down her unexpected burden.

The babies follow along behind her, no longer kicking, content.

• • • •

Su'ad wakes as they strap her onto a stretcher.

Wind and sea-spray salt the faces of her rescuers. They wear reflective orange and yellow jackets, dark glasses, and grizzled beards, but their hands are white.

Their hands are white.

_I am not dead and their hands are white._

While she lay half-drowned on the rocks, she dreamed of a giant conch-spirit. A liquid-eyed girl slipping, naked, from a great, grey-and-pink shell at sunrise. Dragging Su'ad by the leg onto a rock shelf while limpets lacerated Su'ad's shoulders. The conch-girl tucked the silver space-blanket around her. Asked something in almost-French that Su'ad balanced on the edge of understanding.

White hands insert cannulas and change her hospital sheets. White faces ask brown faces to ask her kindly how she is feeling.

_I am feeling close,_ Su'ad thinks. _I can almost feel that gavel in my hands. Here, I will finish my education. Here, I will hone my mind into a weapon that can open prison doors._ She smiles tentatively.

Other white faces ask, through their own translators, for her papers. Su'ad's smile fades. When she cannot give them what they want, white hands bind her wrists with cable ties. They tell her she cannot stay on the island where the conch-spirit has brought her. Once she recovers her strength and health, white hands push her and a hundred others onto an Australian ship that is in no danger of sinking. The storm-coloured ship is crowded with uniformed women and men, and all of them have the papers Su'ad does not.

Papers to say they can stay.

The powerful vessel cuts smoothly through deep water, with no nightmare rocking of waves, to a different island. It's an offshore kind of prison where, they promise her, nobody is tortured. She is only here to be processed. To wait.

"How long must I wait?" she asks the tired doctor outside the medical tent.

Nobody knows. Nobody is tortured. Nobody is told.

• • • •

Yveline dwells on the young lady she rescued.

_I could do that again,_ she thinks. _I could do it all the time._

Without the babies to help her, she doesn't always find the broken boats in time. Sometimes there are only bodies with no life left inside them. But sometimes she saves somebody.

Sometimes, more than one person.

She doesn't know what happens to them after she leaves them on the shore. Sometimes, she wonders about that lady. The very first one she saved. As seasons pass, seas rise and more and more people need to move. More and more people drown.

Many great cities are no longer fit for the living. And the boats leave, and sometimes they float, and sometimes they break, and sometimes they don't.

• • • •

Ten years pass before Su'ad is allowed to leave the prison.

Mostly it is because the island where the prison sits is being eaten by the sea and is no longer safe, but also because they have finally found her to be a "true" refugee. Not because of Jamaal or Umm-Su'ad or a regime long fallen, but because the coastal city where she lived is now lost, underwater.

Su'ad sits in a grey, featureless classroom on the mainland at a school for refugees, trying to remember her English. She has stared at dirt and listened to rain on tin roofing for so long, she barely knows the sound of her own voice. Her mind feels dull. She knows her brain has lost its childhood elasticity, its ability to absorb like a sponge.

"Apple," the teacher says.

"Apple," repeats the enthusiastic seven-year-old Sudanese girl who sits beside Su'ad. She reminds Su'ad of a dream she had, once, some jumble of _Lord of the Flies,_ _Island of the Blue Dolphins,_ and death in dark waters.

"Apple," the teacher says to Su'ad.

"Apple," Su'ad says. She is twenty-nine years old.

• • • •

Yveline follows a feeling and finds the white-haired woman at last on a rocky shore.

The woman cries softly in a nest of washed-up rubbish and filth. Tyres and trolleys and truck-loads of rubble pile up at the water's edge. Steel skeletons stick out of broken concrete and old shoes lie next to broken dolls and frayed, bloodstained carpets.

Yveline has tested her boundaries and knows she cannot pass beyond the high-tide line. The white-haired woman sits on a toppled telegraph pole, alone at dusk in a dangerous land with the sound of prayers on a smoking horizon.

"Aren't you frightened to be here by yourself?" Yveline ventures in French.

The woman looks up at her. It is the older girl that Yveline rescued, a hundred seasons ago. Her face is wrinkled but her angry eyes are the same. She doesn't react with fear or surprise.

"What is there to be afraid of, now? My mother is dead. She has been dead all this time. Two pieces of paper, I earned with the strength of my love for her. One to say I am a citizen of a country willing to protect me. One to say I know International Law. I wore them like bulletproof armour, front and back, and I flew here to find her. Should I be frightened for myself, now, when I have nothing to lose?"

Yveline wants to understand what the white-haired woman is saying, but she can't. Unless she casts off her shell forever, leaving safety behind, she cannot change. She cannot grow.

"Are you so sad," she asks, trying to grasp the other's sorrow, "that you wish I hadn't saved you?"

The white-haired woman barks a laugh.

"No," she says. "Not so sad as that."

"What will you do now?"

"Help others. Save others, or try to."

"It won't be safe."

"I don't want to be safe. I want to fight!" She tosses her white mane defiantly. Yveline feels in awe of her. "I can still punish people who think their wrongs have gone unnoticed. I can still make them pay."

"My mother died from drinking bad water," Yveline says. "I don't remember her."

She remembers Marinette, though, her fleshless feet below the hem of her dress. If Yveline gives up her shell, she will grow old and die. Her feet, that carry her in lazy leaps from clam to clam in blue topaz water, will turn to fish-bitten bones.

"There is nobody to punish, in that case," the white-haired woman says, but Yveline isn't so sure. When the Creator made the clams and the clear, topaz water, He could have just left out the tiny creatures that cause cholera, couldn't He?

"Will you punish the people who put your mother in prison?"

"They are dead, too. There's nobody left here for me to punish. I could try to punish the people who imprisoned me, I suppose, but why punish people for a failure of imagination? They could not imagine that I was like them. They still do not imagine it."

_The rock in the water,_ Yveline remembers Msye Maurice saying, _doesn't know the pain of the rock in the sun._

"I was so focused on those silly pieces of paper," the white-haired woman goes on, "and they made me wait so long that I lost my chance to have my own family."

"I'll be your family," Yveline says, surprising herself.

"Will you?"

Yveline runs up the hill of garbage and flings herself into the white-haired woman's lap, wanting her for a mother, wanting to learn how to be fierce and brave as a lion.

"Yes."

But the woman pushes her away, trying to hold her at arm's length.

"What can I be thinking? They will never let me bring a little black girl back with me. They will take your youth, as they took mine. They will make you wait. No. Go back into the sea."

"Come with me, Mama Lion. Ride on my shell. I can take you where you want to go."

The white-haired woman shakes her head. She traces Yveline's cheek, like she is tracing the path of tears.

"This old lion has no love for the sea, little one. Stay safe. And you be careful who you bring back from death. Make sure you only save the good ones. Throw the other ones back, won't you?"

Yveline doesn't know what to say to that. Feels the pang of loss for a thing she has never had. She walks back into the water as the last light fades, finding her shell and curling into it.

Then she strides into the underwater city where Mama Lion once lived. Finds the seven ghost babies sleeping in the arms of a skeleton in a prison cell. They beckon to her to come and meet their mother, but she passes them, sharks at her heels, feeling the need to keep moving, moving, moving, through the stingray country without borders, until she finds another ship, broken at sea.

© 2016 by Thoraiya Dyer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning, Sydney-based science fiction writer and lapsed veterinarian. Her work has appeared in _Clarkesworld,_ _Apex,_ _Cosmos,_ _Analog_ and pretty much all the FableCroft anthologies. Four of her original stories are collected in the petite yet beautiful, _Asymmetry,_ available from Twelfth Planet Press. Her first novel, _Crossroads of Canopy,_ a big fat fantasy set in a magical rainforest, is forthcoming from Tor in January 2017. You can listen to a short story set in the same world, "The Chimney-Borer and the Tanner," at Podcastle.org and/or follow her @ThoraiyaDyer on Twitter. Her website is thoraiyadyer.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# The Things My Mother Left Me

## P. Djèlí Clark | 7,400 words

Tausi sat listening to her aunts, who crowded in a circle at the far end of the room. Their dresses were a kaleidoscope of greens, reds, blues, and yellows, each worked with repeating patterns that shifted with the eye. Huddled like that they seemed to her one polychromatic beast with seven heads and fourteen limbs. None of them made an effort to whisper as they planned her life.

"Girl doesn't need such a big house."

"Maybe one of us takes her in?"

"Better to marry her off."

"Who would want her?"

"Oh, she's pretty enough."

"Growing good wide hips. Make plenty children."

"But what kind of wife would she be?"

"No mother to teach her."

"Don't talk about that woman."

"Thief. Criminal. Witch."

"Deserved what she got."

"We'll do what's best for the girl . . . of course."

Tausi shifted the clay pot in her lap. It was hot, even through the fabric of her wrap skirt. Her aunts brought food every day, nine in all since her father's body had been washed and buried—so withered by the shaking sickness that had claimed him. But the mourning period would soon end. And something had to be done with her.

Were she a boy of fifteen they'd probably send her to apprentice with a Guild House, or to study alchemical herbology at an Nganga School. But to her aunts, only strange city girls apprenticed themselves out. And she wasn't wealthy enough to be sent off to learn. No, she'd likely end up a nursemaid to some older cousin. Or perhaps she might fetch a good bride price—anything to get her out of this house, which was the real prize.

Tausi looked down to the stool that curved to fit her frame. It had been carved by her father's hand. He'd put together every bit of this house, adding rooms and extensions. It seemed unnecessary with only the two of them. But he had promised her mother a grand home, and was intent on bequeathing this gift whether she dwelled in this life or the next.

"When her spirit comes to visit," he'd often say, "she will like it very much."

Five years had passed since her mother's death. None of her aunts had approved of her father marrying a woman with no people or family. And then she'd gone and gotten herself killed. He had a duty to remarry, they insisted. But he hadn't. Instead, he'd set about building a house to her memory. How it infuriated them. A smile tugged Tausi's lips at the thought.

"So you still have your good spirits."

She looked up to find that her aunts had sidled up before her. They were infuriatingly good at that. One caressed her cheek. Another patted her thick plaits of hair. A third pinched the side rolls beneath her top. It felt more an appraisal than affection.

"How pretty you are."

"Keeping a nice size."

"So good to take care of your father."

"A fine young woman you'll make."

"Don't worry."

"Won't leave you alone in this big house."

"You'll be in our care."

"Seven new mothers."

This time Tausi forced a smile, if only to hold back the bile.

When they finally left, she sat back wearily. They'd come again tomorrow. And the day after that. Then one day she'd be told to pack her things. Off she'd go to whatever fate they'd decided. Seven crocodiles they were, all with their mouths wide, ready to eat her up. But like the clever birds that fed between those sharp teeth, she was determined to outwit them.

Moving to sit on a reed mat, she opened the clay pot to find roasted cassava, boiled figs, and chicken in a spicy palm nut sauce. She spooned some into a bowl. Then set empty plates for her father and mother—for even spirits needed nourishment. As she ate, she began to plot her escape. She was still plotting long after the Wounded Moon ascended to bathe the town of Epoulu in her broken light.

• • • •

By morning, Tausi had fashioned a plan. She didn't have much money—100 ingots of red-gold, and some blue-silvers. But it was enough perhaps to book passage out of Epoulu. She'd leave this backwater town behind and head to a city—perhaps even one of the great cities. Once her aunts had the house, she doubted they'd expend much time hunting her. The Ten Chiefdoms was a big place, after all.

She arrived at the river market by midday. From stalls, hawkers cried out their goods—earthenware, wild-meat, printed cloth, brass fittings, metal boilers, and other items bartered along the trade routes of the Chiefdoms. Her first stop was with the boatmen that idled about the Luaba River, whose murky waters churned between banks of green. She stopped short at sight of a gutted fang fish, hanging by its tail from a rack. The monster was easily taller than she was, with teeth like knives.

"Caught her out on the Luaba," a grizzled boatman boasted. "The Efé strike me down if I'm lying! Took a piece of me with her, too." He held up a bandaged hand missing two fingers.

Tausi looked over his boat: a small steam paddler. If fish that size roamed this river, she preferred something bigger. She moved on to the other boatmen, inquiring prices to the nearest city—perhaps Kasi or M'basa. Most shook their heads, explaining they only ferried between the towns lining the Luaba. A few laughed off her request, shooing away the mischievous "runaway girl." She stalked from them, fuming at this upset in her plans.

"Take care, daughter!" someone called.

Tausi looked down to find a woman seated on an expanse of cloth. Her arms extended out over a set of small gourds, fearing they might be trampled.

"I'm sorry, Mama!" Tausi cried.

The woman shook a head of braided white ringlets. "The young are always in a hurry, as if they have somewhere to go!" she scolded, then brightened. "Perhaps, however, I have something that pleases you?"

Embarrassed at her negligence, Tausi squatted to inspect the woman's gourds. Each had been polished until they shined and then painted with animals. She opened one decorated with a green gecko to find a sweet-smelling cream. When she rubbed a bit on her arm, her skin glistened like polished night-stone.

"So beautiful," the woman admired. She held up wrinkled hands the hue of tilled soil. "I once had such skin. Passed on from my mother. I can see your mother has done the same. You look very much like her, in fact."

Tausi looked up at that. She had her father's curving eyes, but was growing into her mother daily—the same round cheeks, plump body, and strong legs. Most around Epoulu considered it rude to mention that in public, save for whispered glances. Not so this woman, it appeared.

"I mourn your father," she offered. "As I mourned your mother. Some of us still carry her ways. We have not forgotten." The woman bent to blow a gentle breath over her gourds. There was a familiar prickling in the air, and all along their surfaces the painted animals began to dance.

Tausi almost dropped the gourd where the gecko now flicked a fat tail. "Mama, no! Stop!" Her voice was a whisper. But the urgency must have carried, for the paintings went still. She released a breath. "Mama. You mustn't do that. Someone could see!" Even now, her eyes scanned about for witnesses. Of all crimes in the Ten Chiefdoms, none was as terrible as magic.

The woman looked disappointed. "I had thought . . ." she began, then stiffened. "Must we hide what our mothers pass on to us?"

Tausi stared at the woman. Was she mad? "If you don't hide, Mama, someone will report you." She lowered her voice further. "Witch Hunters are never far!"

The woman snorted, as if one could dismiss such a thing. "The hounds of these Efé priests who now govern us? It was such men who twisted magic for their wars, and broke the world. But it is we who suffer. Let them unleash their dogs! We can only show the courage of your mother. Some of us still revere her—our Bandit Queen!"

Tausi flinched at hearing the name spoken aloud. "Take care, Mama," she warned, "of insulting the crocodile while so close to the river."

The woman laughed sadly. "Daughter, to the crocodiles, we are all food."

A horn blared across the market, and Tausi seized the chance to break away from the reckless woman. She hastily offered a blue-silver for the gourd and left towards the source of the tumult. A crowd had gathered, and she maneuvered her way through before she could see what drew them.

It was a caravan. Only it didn't look like any caravan she'd ever seen. It was made up of what appeared to be small rounded houses on wheels. But where Epoulu's homes were adorned with repeating geometric patterns, these were painted in vibrant pastels. Feathered bush lizards pulled the carriages, their iridescent scales shimmering beneath the sun. The caravan arrayed into a circle, and on one of the houses a yellow door swung open.

The tall man that stepped out was by far the most striking figure Tausi had ever seen. A mud-colored fabric wrapped his shoulders and torso, while a long kilt hung from his waist, made up of strips of leather dyed every conceivable hue. Affixed to these were tassels and bells—so that he rattled as he walked. One hand clutched a cord tied to a small collared baboon with crimson wings. The creature perched on his shoulder and chittered noisily from a blue muzzle. The man strode forward, opening his arms as wide as his bearded smile. When he spoke, his voice boomed in the drawling accents of the western provinces.

"People of Epoulu! I am Master Abata, and you behold now my Great and Wondrous Circus! We have traveled far, collecting all manner of fantastic beasts and curious personages! And we have stopped for a few days before continuing on to Kasi. Tonight, as your guests, we will put on a show the likes of which has never been seen along the Luaba River. I invite you to come out, to be amazed and astounded!"

At his words, a stream emerged from the other carriages: men leading muzzled red-striped hyenas; women on the backs of giant sloths; children who somersaulted or walked on their hands. The crowd watched in wonder. And in Tausi's mind, possibilities sprouted.

• • • •

She set out for the circus that night, following the crowds along paths lit by glowing aether lamps. None could remember the last time a circus came to Epoulu, and it was not to be missed. Women donned fine liputa skirts for the occasion: and men, colorful short-knee pants and airy cotton shirts in imitation of city dandies. Tausi wore a turquoise and red top with a matching wrap and sandals. The circus was a welcome reprieve from her aunts' daily visits. More important, Master Abata claimed his caravan was heading next to Kasi. This could well be the escape she sought.

She found the Great and Wondrous Circus sprawled along a clearing near the market. It was made up of billowing white canopies bearing the Chiefdoms' seal of sanction: two moons, one great and one small.

It had been over three centuries since a night with more than one moon. Not since the Long War, when the Efé unleashed magic hurtling sister into smaller brother, shattering him and leaving a jagged scar across her surface. The world had bore the brunt of this lunar fratricide, as continents cracked and the Sea Gods returned to reclaim ceded land. The Wounded Moon was now forever circled by the broken remnants of her brother, whose bones she held close. The Efé disappeared soon after, but their legacy remained written in the heavens.

And on the world they left us to rebuild, Tausi thought.

She joined one of the many lines snaking into the circus, where money-handlers snapped up currency like hungry fish. When a scrawny boy barked the price of admission—five red-golds—she balked. But there was no other way to find the circus master. She handed the ingots over, sucking her teeth to show her indignation.

The many sights of the circus soon made her forget the expense. Moko Men in colorful straw danced on towering stilts. Masked figures spit fire and walked barefoot on heated stones. Acrobats dangled from ropes and soared through the air to the gasps of spectators. One woman twisted her body into a brass trunk half her size. Another stood on her hands, arched her back, and lit a smoking pipe with her feet!

Between the dazzling spectacles, Tausi asked after Master Abata. But the man moved constantly about and was ever surrounded by enthralled audiences. She would have to find a way to talk to him alone. She was eating a mango doused in fiery pili pili sauce and trying to reason that problem out, when she came upon a canopy in the far back of the circus. It was curiously quiet given the clamor coming from the others. She slipped inside to see what it held—and gaped.

A giant cat lounged in one corner. It was almost as big as a forest elephant, with thick, emerald fur broken by slashes of ivory. It sat upright, displaying two back legs, two in its middle, and yet another pair at its front—six in all! At her approach, it swung a pair of yellow eyes to regard her while twitching a white-tufted ear. She stared back, wondering at how such a magnificent beast could be.

It took a moment to notice the others.

In another corner there sat a Jab Man. She'd always believed such men were the stuff of stories and questioned for a moment if he was simply costumed. But the bone-white horns jutting from his forehead looked decidedly real. And the black skin covering his slender body rippled even as he remained still. He wore only a long white kilt at his waist, and sat silent with legs drawn up beneath him, eyes closed as if sleeping.

The third figure was as strange as her companions. From head to torso, she was a woman with creased sepia-toned skin and flattened breasts that spoke her age. But beneath that, she was an Okapi, with a russet body similar to an antelope and four long legs covered in white bands. She bowed her head, staring at something between unkempt graying locks that framed her face.

Tausi followed the Okapi woman's gaze to a black chain encircling one of her forelegs. She looked to the Jab Man to see similar chains wrapping his chest, near unnoticeable against his skin. One of the giant cat's legs held the same, longer but no larger than the rest.

"The chains are of oremantic design," a voice spoke.

Tausi whirled about to find none other than Master Abata. The bells and tassels of his peculiar kilt rattled as he walked, his winged baboon scampering behind. He pointed to the chain binding the Okapi woman's foreleg.

"Wrought by Oboui metallurgists. They drain magic. I was able to procure some for my collection. It gentles such creatures, you see."

Tausi fumbled for a response, thrown by his unexpected appearance. He talked through her silence, gesturing to the great cat. "I captured that one on the western savannah when he was little more than a cub, right from his mother's lair. He is a Jangu cat—bred for battle by sorcerer lords during the Long War. They were said to be fierce fighters, but loyal to their masters. A rare beast indeed."

He returned to the Okapi woman.

"Her I found wandering the edges of the Ituuri. They say whole bands of them live in that cursed forest. I bound her while she slept. Do you know that she has never spoken a word to me? Not one. No matter my many persuasions."

Tausi said nothing, looking on the Okapi woman and the Jangu cat with new eyes. These were not performers in Master Abata's show. They were his captives.

"Then there is this one." The circus master turned to the Jab Man. "A devious creature. Bound to their bargains and contracts. He tried to trick me. But I got you in the end, didn't I?" The Jab Man didn't reply. He never moved or once opened his eyes.

Master Abata sniggered, looking over his menagerie the way a moneylender gloated over his hoard. Reaching to his waist, he drew out a smoking pipe and an iron tinderbox carved like a bird. Sparks flew as he struck the flint and touched the heated stick to the bowl. In moments, the stink of burning dagga leaf rode the air.

"I was told that a local town girl has been searching for me this night. Yet I find her and only hear my own talk. Perhaps her tongue needs loosening?" He extended the pipe in offering.

Tausi hesitated, and then reached out to accept. She'd once snuck a pull from her father's pipe to see what the fuss was about, and nearly choked to death coughing. This time was little different.

Master Abata's laughter accompanied her hacking, and she thrust his awful pipe back to him, doubled over in a fit. When she regained herself, she found him grinning.

"This southern dagga leaf is of fine quality, yes?"

Tausi had no idea how to account the worth of dagga leaf. But she could feel the building euphoria that left her lightheaded. She found her tongue quite loosed, and words spilled out easily. The circus master sat silent when she'd finished, his dark face wreathed in wisps of white smoke. The small baboon flew up to rest on his shoulder, regarding Tausi from behind a crimson wing pulled across its face like a veil.

"You make quite a curious request," he spoke at last.

"It won't be for long," she said. "At least until Kasi."

"And what is it you will do, in Kasi?"

"I thought to join a Guild House. Or hire on with a sky ship—"

The circus master chortled. "What does a backwater town girl know of sky ships?"

Tausi's face heated. "I just need to get there."

"And how would you pay passage, were I to grant this?"

"I can give you fifty red-golds."

"Eh! You would eat three times that alone from here to Kasi!"

Tausi faltered. So much? She'd hoped to hold onto most of her money. It would do no good to arrive in Kasi a beggar.

"I could work for you," she offered.

The circus master's eyebrows rose. "You are a performer? A juggler? What is it you think you can do for my circus?" Tausi once again had no answer. He read her silence and clucked his tongue.

"When I heard some local girl was asking after me, I inquired of her with the people of this town. They are very good at whispering. Isn't that so, daughter of the Bandit Queen?"

Tausi drew back at the question. As always, her mother cast a long shadow.

"And if I am?" she asked, voice tight.

"That would make you interesting," the circus master replied. "Tell me, does the daughter bear any of her mother's . . . talents?" Tausi took in the look on his face. It was the same he set upon his menagerie: those creatures he bound in chains.

"If I did," she answered evenly, "the Witch Hunters would have taken me."

He considered this, then said: "In Kasi, people might pay well to view the daughter of the Bandit Queen. But she would need more to convince others she is who she claims to be. Tell me, does she still hold her mother's great spear?"

Tausi was unable to hide her confusion. "A spear?"

"A _great_ spear," the circus master corrected. "The stories of the Bandit Queen traveled the Chiefdoms: the woman who spoke blasphemy against the Efé priests, dared to use forbidden magic, and showered the poor with stolen wealth. They say she came and went without being seen, wearing a red cloak and carrying a spear with a long blade of gray steel, etched with strange lettering. It was never recovered."

Tausi was at a loss. "I don't know anything about that."

Master Abata pursed his dark lips, his face growing disenchanted. "A shame. For if the Bandit Queen's daughter ever found such a spear, it would do much to convince me to grant her passage." With that, he turned abruptly and walked from the canopy, leaving a trail of dagga smoke that hung in the air with Tausi's hopes.

• • • •

For three days, she hunted the spear.

If her mother had such a weapon, Tausi had never seen it. But her memories were of a woman who sang songs that lulled her to sleep. A woman who swayed when she walked, and wore dashing colors, who smiled and laughed and told stories of clever birds and crocodiles. The Bandit Queen, the woman who forsook her family to wage war against the Ten Chiefdoms, was a stranger: a legend shrouded in secrets. She'd asked her father once how he could have let her take such risks. He'd laughed. No one ever let her mother do anything, he'd said. She'd told him she had to. Otherwise the crocodiles would eat away at her, bit by bit.

As she hunted, Tausi fended off her aunts, who now spoke boldly of families who might offer a decent bride price. Her only refuge came at night, at the circus. She spent most of her time in the canopy, marveling at the Jangu cat. When she looked upon the chains that kept it bound, she was saddened. And in its feline eyes she sometimes thought she saw reflected her own yearnings to be free.

Master Abata visited each night, both to look over his menagerie and to ask after her success. She had tried in vain to make another trade. But the circus master was skilled at bartering and had made his price plain. It was on the third night, after he had come and gone, leaving her despairing, that the Jab Man first spoke.

"He not going to keep his word."

Tausi jumped. The canopy was usually empty. People fast grew disinterested with its odd occupants that performed little. Save for Master Abata's visits, she had become used to the solitude. But when she turned to the Jab Man, she found him staring. It was the first time she saw those eyes open. She'd imagined they would be that same liquid black as his skin. But she hadn't expected the pupils: pinpricks of light like fine stars. It took a moment to find her voice.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"The circus master not going to keep his word," the Jab Man repeated. His smooth voice had an almost singsong accent she couldn't place. "The spear is what he want. He will take it. If you lucky, he cut yuh throat on the road. If you not lucky, he sell you to a brothel merchant." He cocked a horned head and grinned his pearl-white teeth at the dread spreading on her face. "Or did you think the great cities was just fancy Guild Houses, sky ships, and bacchanal?"

"Why do you say such things?" she stammered.

The Jab Man brought his hands up to grip at his chains. "Because I know the worth of the circus master's bargains." He nodded to the Okapi woman. "And I see the wickedness he do she. One day, one day, congo tay," he sang, "time gon catch up with he."

Tausi looked to the Okapi woman, only now understanding something was broken in her bowed form. She'd never fully trusted the circus master. He had too much of the crocodile in him. Perhaps, however, she hadn't fully grasped the sharpness of those teeth. "But why would he—?" she began.

"You not asking the right question!" the Jab Man snapped. "You see me? I ah real maco. I does watch people. I watch you. Even with me eyes closed. You is a smart one. Doh play dotish now."

Tausi had no idea what dotish meant, but she didn't like it. The right question, however, became clear. "Why does he want my mother's spear?"

The Jab Man smiled. When he spoke, Master Abata's voice flowed from his lips. "A spear with a long blade of gray steel, etched with strange lettering." He returned to his own voice. "The spear is magic, girl. An old weapon, from allyuh Long War, when allyuh went mad and almost destroy yuh blasted selves"

Tausi listened, bemused. A magic spear? Where would her mother come across such a thing? She thought carefully before asking her next question. "What does the spear do?"

"Many things," he replied. "Gray steel come from the Ituuri, where the Efé once call home."

Tausi started. "The Efé lived in the Ituuri? But the priests say they were gods, who came down from the heavens to punish us."

The Jab Man rolled his eyes. "Nancy stories. The Efé was people, just like you, only small, small so. Then allyuh bring yuh Long War to they forest. The Efé doh have big man weapons. Or obeah what can summon demon armies. So they call on the Ituuri to save them. And the Ituuri old, with deep, strong magic. Strong enough to break the world! The spear yuh mother have, it make from that same Ituuri magic. Old and deep."

Tausi had never heard such things. She'd been taught that it was the Efé who gifted the priests the power to found the Ten Chiefdoms, to assure a lasting peace after the Long War, and to create the edicts on magic.

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.

"Because the circus master fooling you with he talk," the Jab Man said. "All skin, teeth, eh laugh! He not going to take you from this place. I will."

That took her by surprise. "You? I don't mean offense, but you can't even free yourself."

"But you can. With the spear." He gestured to his chains. "That magic can break this oremancy. Free me, and I will take you with me. Kasi. M'basa. Any city of the Ten Chiefdoms. Any city in the world. I can take us there in an instant."

Tausi thought back to the stories she'd heard of Jab Men: that they could traverse vast distances, appearing wherever they wished. Perhaps he _could_ be her escape. Only there was one problem.

"I don't know where the spear is," she admitted.

"Of course not," the Jab Man remarked. "You searching for it with yuh eyes."

She frowned. What was that supposed to mean?

He sighed, as if explaining a thing to a child. "Yuh mother not going to let she enemy take she spear. Before they catch she, she would have sent it away."

"Away? Where?"

"Beyond the world maybe, or the spaces between. Who can say?"

She shook her head. Now he wasn't making sense at all.

"I know this," he continued, "a magic spear can only be found again by magic."

Tausi's insides seized. "I don't know any magic," she said flatly.

The Jab Man leaned forward in his chains, straining taut muscles beneath his ebon skin. "That basket doh hold water!" he hissed. "Lie to the circus master! Lie even to yuh self. But not to me. I can feel the magic you hiding. The magic yuh mother teach you. It sweet in you, sweet too bad!"

Tausi's heart pounded, her soul laid bare in that gaze.

"Doh fix up yuh face so," the Jab Man chided, settling back and easing his shoulders. "I doh care about yuh priests, and their schupid laws. Find that spear. Set me free, and I do the same for you." With that he turned, and, closing his eyes, spoke no more.

• • • •

Tausi left the circus, carrying with her a knotted bundle of thoughts. Master Abata. The Jab Man. The Efé. A magic spear. And of course, there was her mother.

• • • •

She still remembered the day the Witch Hunters had come to their house: two men in black robes, with inked faces and silver-capped teeth. The guardsman that accompanied them had stepped down from the leather stirrups of his armored pangolin to deliver the body atop the wheeled bier the creature dragged behind. The writ of execution he carried bore the two-moon stamp of the Chiefdoms. Tausi hadn't wanted to look at the corpse wrapped in white. Instead, she kept her eyes on the pangolin, counting its overlapping golden scales and trying to gauge the length of its claws—even after her father had begun to wail.

• • • •

When she reached home, she gathered what she would need and walked to her mother's room. Her father had built around that space, and it felt as if she stood in the house's heart. She seldom came here. But tonight she let the Wounded Moon's broken light pour in. She put on one of her mother's dresses—a green fabric patterned with leaves—marveling that it now fit her. The soil she held she sprinkled across the floor, and poured water and bush wine in libation. Then she sat down in front of her small offering and called on the magic.

It had been a long time since she dared allow herself this. Magic frightened her. Not for the reasons it frightened others, who condemned what they didn't understand, what they had forgotten, blaming it for what men did to the world. Magic frightened Tausi because of the fear it created in others. The fear that allowed for Witch Hunters. The fear that allowed laws that demanded her mother's life. That fear lived inside her: a crocodile that gnawed and devoured from within. But tonight she would face that fear. She had to, if she was ever to escape this place. After such a long time denying the magic, she wondered if it would even come. Or if, like an unused appendage, it withered and atrophied.

A prickling on her skin was the first hint at an answer. The torrent that followed was staggering. Magic flooded into her, racing through her limbs until it tingled at her fingertips and bled through her pores: a dammed river set free and now eager to spill its banks. The crocodile inside her fought and drowned in its depths. And she trembled with exhilaration. The Jab Man had been right. The magic was sweet, so, so sweet!

Pushing her hands into the offering of earth, water, and spirit, she blended them together. This had been one of the first bits of magic she'd been taught. Her aunts thought her mother had no people or family. But that wasn't true. Her mother had come from a long line of women who worked magic. And their spirits were always there when called. Tausi had neglected them, frightened to awaken even a sliver of that power. But if the Jab Man was right, she needed their aid. She hoped they would hear her now as she sang:

_Come mothers, come see your daughters,_

_Come mothers, whose daughters are calling,_

_Come mothers, whose daughters are waiting,_

_Come mothers, come see your daughters._

Her lips chanted the familiar words—a mother's lullaby sung to her in the dark of night—as her hands worked. And she soon found she was not chanting alone. Other voices sang with her. They came first in their ones and twos, and then in scores. Women of her blood. Women tied to her by a thread of magic that extended through the ages—before the Efé priests and Witch Hunters and the breaking of the world. Their hands settled over her own, moving to her rhythm as they sang together. One voice rose above them in her ears, a voice with arms that held her close again, with fingers that wiped her tears and lips that gently kissed her dampened cheeks.

Then, as one, the voices fled.

Tausi opened her eyes, not remembering when she had closed them. There on the ground in front of her sat a lengthy rod of dark wood, banded along its shaft. One end held a triangular blade, longer than her arm. It shone in the Wounded Moon's light, revealing etched markings upon a surface of slate-gray steel.

Her heart leapt, wondering if this was an apparition—some trick of the mind. But when she gripped the wooden shaft with a muddied hand, it was solid and real enough. And it had not come alone. Beside the spear sat a bundle of crimson. Wiping her fingers clean, she lifted it to find it was a cloak, stitched with small mirrors that reflected blackness and drank in moonlight.

She clutched the cloak close. Her mother had sent back more than her spear this night. She'd gifted Tausi a piece of herself, something to help evade the crocodiles that hunted in the river.

• • • •

Tausi returned to Master Abata's Great and Wondrous Circus, swathed in shadows. Her mother's cloak rendered her unseen in the night, and any eye still awake slipped over her without notice. The crowds had gone, and she made her way through the sleeping grounds. When she slipped inside the canopy, only the Jangu cat stirred. His yellow eyes flickered awake, and he lifted his head to search out the unseen presence.

Tausi didn't lower the mirrored cloak until she knelt before the Jab Man. His eyes flew open. Before he could speak, she revealed the spear, then wavered.

"You promise to take me," she said.

"Yes!" His bright pupils were eager. "That the bargain we make!"

She looked to the Jangu cat, having already decided she would not abandon him. "And we take him too."

The Jab Man nodded. "Whatsoever!"

She pointed then to the Okapi woman. "We shouldn't leave her chained either."

"I wouldn't think of it," the Jab Man agreed. "Come, now! Release me!"

Satisfied with their arrangement, Tausi brought the spear point to tap the black chain. She didn't know what to expect as the etchings on the blade began to writhe. When the chains crumbled to black dust, she gasped.

The Jab Man scrambled to his feet. Howling with glee, he did a little dance: winding his hips lewdly and rolling his sinewy torso. Leaving him to his celebration, Tausi turned to the Okapi woman, who might have been sleeping for all her silence.

"Mama!" she called. "I'm going to free you now. Do you understand?" The Okapi woman never raised her bowed head. Sighing, Tausi touched the blade to the chains and watched them collapse.

The Okapi woman stirred then: a statue returned to life. She lifted a foreleg, as if testing her freedom. Raising her head, she revealed a weathered face with eyes swathed in black—eyes so haunted Tausi thought her heart might break. They darted about, searching her surroundings. Unexpectedly, she began to speak in an unfamiliar tongue—her voice frantic, then angry.

"I don't understand, Mama," Tausi apologized.

But the words only grew in pitch. And those swathed eyes were no longer haunted; they seethed. The Okapi woman lifted her arms and the air in the room prickled—hundreds of needles biting the skin, a feeling Tausi knew all too well. There was a shout from the Okapi woman, followed by fire. It erupted from her hands in fluid white streams, tearing holes through the canopy and lighting up the dark. It raced across the circus, putting all it touched to flames, and the screams of animals and people soon rose up into the night.

Tausi fell onto the ground, crawling backwards to avoid the dripping fire. The Okapi woman radiated magic. Tausi had never seen so much: a bright, turbulent sea that churned in waves and eddies. The woman swept that power up with her arms and hurled it out into the night. She bellowed with rage as someone else laughed. The Jab Man. He danced amidst the flames unharmed, reveling in the destruction. Tausi shouted to him; the air that entered her throat was searing.

"What's happening? Why is she doing this?"

The Jab Man turned a gaze to her that competed with the fire. He seemed somehow larger: his curving horns sharper and his skin like melted pitch. When he spoke, his voice was guttural. "Allyuh think to chain up a child of the Ituuri? You think to chain me? A slave gone burn down she master house! Watch she!"

Tausi stared in horror. He had wanted this. The grin he cast at her realization split his face wide. "Hear this. Doh ever cross ah Jab Man."

A roar shook the canopy, and she looked to see the Jangu cat, rearing back from the flames. The black chain kept him bound. And he would burn if he remained. Pushing to her feet, she ran towards him, through smoke and fire. When she came close, he bared his teeth and six pairs of jade claws, an animal's fear in his eyes. She slowed her approach. He didn't strike, but watched her movement. Reaching out with the tip of the spear, she touched the black chain. When it crumbled, the great cat wasted no time. She threw herself back as he bounded past, fleeing the burning canopy and running out into the night.

"Eh! Look trouble now!" the Jab Man cried.

Tausi turned to see a man newly arrived, silhouetted against the flames. Master Abata. His eyes surveyed the chaotic scene of his menagerie, then stopped in bewilderment upon her. She never got a chance to shout a warning, for the Okapi woman saw him first. Streams of magic lashed out to envelop the circus master. At first nothing appeared amiss. But when his skin blackened and liquid fire gushed from his screaming throat, Tausi realized he was burning from within. His body folded, collapsing into a pyre that blazed with white flames. The small baboon that was the man's constant companion chewed frenziedly through its leash. Breaking free, it shrieked as it winged into the night, its feathers trailing smoke and embers.

"Moon does run until daylight catch up with he," the Jab Man sneered. He pulled his satisfied gaze from the dead man and extended a hand. "Lewee go."

Tausi looked to the offered hand and then back to the flames that devoured the circus master like a living thing. "She'll burn the whole town!" she coughed amid the smoke. "We have to stop her!"

"Not our bargain," the Jab Man retorted.

"People will die!"

He shrugged. "How you care so for this place now?"

Tausi winced. There was little love in her for Epoulu. True enough, she was eager to leave it behind. But she couldn't just let it burn. Not all those people, even with their whispers. Not even her scheming aunts. She had to put an end to this.

"Stop her!" she said, this time a demand.

"Not our bar—"

"In exchange for our bargain!" she cut in.

The Jab Man's eyes narrowed to brilliant slits. "If this some trick . . ."

"No trick," she assured. Master Abata's charring remains were enough to dissuade such idiocy. "That's my price for freeing you!"

The Jab Man cocked his head. "You give up yuh bargain, for all ah them?"

Tausi nodded firmly. She would, if it meant no one else would die.

He grinned a crocodile smile. "Accepted." There was a pause. "But I can't stop she." He met Tausi's livid glower. "Cut eye doh kill you know. I can't stop she, but I can tell you how." A black finger pointed to the spear.

Tausi eyed the weapon uncertainly. "I don't want to kill her."

"Then don't kill her," the Jab Man taunted.

Tausi stifled her irritation. The creature was insufferable! Rising, she faced the Okapi woman with one last appeal. "The man who hurt you is gone!" she cried out. "You can stop!"

The Okapi woman turned to stare at this interloper to her retribution—and hurled magic in thick streams.

Tausi had time only to lift her spear against the deluge. She expected to be burned away. But as the magic struck, the gray slate blade cleaved through the currents, sending them dissipating about her. Emboldened, she walked forward. The Okapi woman screamed and hurled magic anew in violent cascades. Pushing against it was like facing a wind that pushed back in turn. But Tausi bowed her head and planted her legs firm—those strong legs passed on by her mother—and pressed through the maelstrom. When she reached the Okapi woman she lifted the spear.

"Stop!" she pleaded. "Please!"

Her answer was a thrust of magic that almost swept her back. But she swung the spear, striking the Okapi woman across a shoulder with the flat of the blade. The etchings on its surface came alive as it met skin, and something powerful rushed into the gray slate steel. The force of it almost sent Tausi to her knees, and her hands shook as she fought to hold the spear's shaft. Then abruptly it was done. And there was silence. The tempest that had roiled about the Okapi woman was gone.

"You take her magic," the Jab Man explained. He walked up to point at the spear that now hissed with smoke—not heat, but a deep cold that covered the gray metal in a light frost. Everywhere, the fire looked to be dying, leaving behind smoldering ruin. "My bargain done," he declared. "I leave now—without you."

"Wait. One more thing." Tausi looked to the Okapi woman, shrunken now without her magic. She stood staring at her hands as if trying to recall what they'd held. "You have to take her, back to the Ituuri."

"When cock have teet,'" the Jab Man scoffed. "Not our bargain."

She turned to face him. "If she stays here, she'll be killed."

"By the people you saved," he jeered.

"Yes. But I'm not making a bargain for me. I'm making one for her." She gestured to the Okapi woman. The rage was gone from those eyes, which were haunted once more. "You knew she would do this. You used her hurt for your revenge. And gave her nothing in return. That's the way of your kind, isn't it? Bargains and contracts? Well, you're in her debt. And you'll pay it, by taking her home."

The Jab Man glared, and anger rippled across his features, his skin seeming to boil. She met that bright gaze unflinching—as her mother would have done. A clever little bird that survived by outwitting the crocodiles that would eat her up.

"Girl smart like she mother," he rasped through bared teeth. "Goat doh make sheep in truth." He snatched up the Okapi woman's hand, startling her. "We play this game again. Ent?"

"I doubt it," Tausi said tersely.

He flashed a grin. And the two of them vanished.

Tausi sighed deep, thinking on what she had just given up. But it felt right. Her mother had passed on more than she knew, it seemed. She hoisted the spear to her shoulder, wondering at her next course when a rumbling growl came from the night.

She turned to find the Jangu cat emerging from the smoke and darkness. He had returned. He crept forward on six legs with the sleekness of a hunter, his gaze fixed on her. She tensed as those yellow eyes drank her in. He reared up before her, but she didn't run. She'd seen too much this night to run. She held her ground and, instead, reached up a hand to stroke the thick fur of his neck. It felt as beautiful as she had imagined. When he didn't pull away, she smiled.

The people of Epoulu say that on that night a strange fire burned down the circus that had come to market. Water pumped from the river could not quench the flames, and there was fear it would sweep into Epoulu itself. Inexplicably, the fire died away—like the hand of a god had snuffed it out. What had saved the town none knew. But many claimed to see a woman emerging from the smoke. She rode upon a monstrous cat, holding aloft a spear while a red cape flapped in her wake. As the two sped away from Epoulu beneath the Wounded Moon, shouts rose up along the Luaba River.

"The Bandit Queen!" the people cried. "She lives!"

© 2016 by P. Djèlí Clark.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phenderson Djèlí Clark's short stories have appeared in _Daily Science Fiction,_ _Every Day Fiction,_ _Heroic Fantasy Quarterly,_ Tor.com and several print anthologies including _Griots_ I & II, _Steamfunk,_ _Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly,_ _Myriad Lands_ and the forthcoming _Hidden Youth._ You can read his ramblings on SFF, politics, history, diversity and more at his blog pdjeliclark.com where he goes by the moniker the Disgruntled Haradrim. He also spends far too much time as @pdjeliclark on Twitter.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# Red Dirt Witch

## N.K. Jemisin | 7,400 words

The way to tell the difference between dreams that were prophecy and dreams that were just wasted sleep was to wait and see if they came three times. Emmaline had her third dream about the White Lady on the coldest night ever recorded in Alabama history. This was actually _very_ cold—ten degrees below zero, on a long, dark January Sabbath when even the moon hid behind a veil of shadow.

Emmaline survived the cold the way poor people everywhere have done since the dawn of time: with a warm, energetic friend. Three patchwork quilts helped too. The friend was Frank Heath, who was pretty damn spry for a man of fifty-five, though he claimed to be forty-five, so maybe that helped. The quilts were Em's, and it also helped that one of them had dried flowers (Jack-in-the-pulpits) and a few nuggets of charcoal tucked under each patch of leftover cloth. That made for a standing invitation to warmth and the summertime, who were of course welcome to pay a visit and stay the night anytime they liked. Those _had_ come a-calling to the childrens' beds, at least, for which Emmaline was grateful; the children slept soundly, snug and comfortable. That left Em and Frank free to conduct their own warmthmaking with an easy conscience.

After that was done, Emmaline closed her eyes and found herself in the Commissary Market down on Dugan. Dusty Southern daylight, bright and fierce even in winter, shone slanting onto the street alongside the market, unimpeded by cars or carts—or people. Pratt City wasn't much of a city, being really just the Negro neighborhood of Birmingham, but it was a whole place, thriving and bustling in its way. Here, though, Emmaline had never seen the place so empty in her life. As if to spite the cold, the market's bins tumbled over with summer produce: watermelons and green tomatoes and peaches and more, along with a few early collards. That meant that whatever this dream meant to warn her of, it would come with the heat of the mid-months.

Out of habit, Em glanced at the sign above these last. Overpriced again; greedy bastards.

"Why, greed's a sin," said a soft, whispery voice all around her. "Be proper of you to punish 'em for it, wouldn't it?"

This was one of the spirits that she'd tamed over the years. They liked to test her, though, so it was always wise to be careful with 'em. "Supposin' I could," she said in reply. "But only the store manager, since the company too big to go after. And I can't say's I truly blame the manager, either, since he got children to feed same as me."

"Sin's sin, woman."

"And let she who is without sin cast the first stone," Em countered easily. _"As you well know."_ Then she checked herself; no sense getting testy. Ill-wishing opened doors for ill winds to blow through—which was probably why the voice was trying to get her to do it.

The voice sighed a little in exasperation. It was colorless, genderless, barely a voice at all; that sigh whispered like wind through the stand of pines across the street. "Just tellin' you somebody comin', cranky old biddy."

"Who, Jesus Christ? 'Bout time, His slow ass."

Whispery laughter. "Fine, then—there a White Lady a-comin', a _fine_ one, and she got something special in mind for you and yours. You ready?"

Em frowned to herself. The other two dreams had been more airy-fairy than this—just collections of symbols and hints of a threat, omens, and portents. It seemed fate had finally gotten impatient enough to just say plain what she needed to hear.

"No, I ain't ready," Em said, with a sigh. "But ain't like that ever made no mind to some folk. Thank you for the warning."

More laughter, rising to become a gale, picking Emmaline up and spinning her about. The Market blurred into a whirlwind—but through it all, there were little ribbons that she could see edging into the tornado from elsewhere, whipping about in shining, silken red. Truth was always there for the taking, if you only reached out to grasp it. Thing was, Em didn't _feel_ like grasping it; she was tired, Lord have mercy. The world didn't change. If she just relaxed, the dream would let her back into sleep, like she wanted.

But . . . well. Best to be prepared, she supposed.

So Em stretched out a hand and laid hold of one of the ribbons. And suddenly the street that ran through the market was full of people. _Angry_ people, most of 'em white and lining the road, and marching people, most of 'em black and in the middle of the road. The black ones' jaws were set, their chins high in a way that always meant trouble when white folks were around, because Lord didn't they hate seeing pride. "Trouble, trouble," sang-song the voice—and before the marchers appeared a line of policemen with billy clubs in their hands and barking dogs at their sides. Emmaline's guts clenched for the blood that would almost surely be spilled. Pride! Was it worth all that blood?

Yet when she opened her mouth to shout at the marchers for their foolishness, the whispery voice laughed again, and she spun again, the laughter chasing her out of dreams and up to reality.

Well, this was what she'd wanted, but she didn't much like it because reality was dark and painfully cold on her mouth and chin, which she'd stuck outside the covers to breathe. Her teeth were chattering. She reached back.

"Ain't time to get up," muttered Frank at her stirring, half-dreaming himself.

"You got Sunday to rest," said Emmaline. "You want to live 'til then, you get to work."

His low, rich laugh warmed her more than his body ever could. "Yes, ma'am," he said, and did as he was bid.

And because they had set to, Emmaline missed that her only girlchild Pauline got up and walked the hall for awhile, disturbed by bad dreams of her own.

• • • •

Since the spirits had given her a full season's warning, Em spent the time preparing for the White Lady's arrival. This meant she finished up as much business as possible in the days right after the dream. The cold passed quickly, as cold was wont to do in Alabama. And as soon as the weather was comfortable again, Emmaline set Pauline to grinding all the herbs she'd laid in since November, then had her boy Sample put her shingle out by the mailpost, where it read HERBS AND PRAYERS, FOR ALL AND SUNDRY. This brought an immediate and eager stream of customers.

First there was Mr. Jake, who'd gotten into a spat with his cousin over Christmas dinner and had wished death on him, and now was regretting it because the cousin had come down with a wet cough. Emmaline told him to take the man some chitlins made with sardine oil and extra garlic. Then she handed him a long braid of garlic heads, ten in all, from her own garden.

_"That_ much garlic?" Jake had given her a look of pure affront; like most men of Pratt City, he was proud of his cooking. "I look Eye-talian to you?"

"All right, let him die, then." This elicited a giggle from Pauline, who sat in on most of Em's appointments these days.

So, grumbling, Jake had bought the garlic from Emmaline and gone off to make his amends. People talked about Jake's stanky, awful chitlins 'til the day he died—but his cousin ate some of the peace offering, and he got better.

And there was Em's cousin, Renee, who came by just to chat, and conveniently told Emmaline all the goings-on in and around Pratt City. There was trouble brewing, Renee said, _political_ trouble; whispers in the church pews, meetings at the school gym, plans for a boycott or two or ten. Way up in Virginia, folks were suing the government about segregation in the schools. Em figured it wouldn't come to nothing, but all the white folks was up like angry bees over the notion of their precious children sitting next to Negro children, competing next to Negro children, befriending Negro children. It was going to get ugly. Many evils came riding in on the tails of strife, though—so here, Emmaline suspected, would be their battleground.

Then there was Nadine Yates, a widow who like Emmaline had done what she had to do to keep herself and her children alive through the cold and not-so-cold days. Nadine was afraid she might be pregnant again. "I know it's a sin," she said in her quiet, dignified voice while Emmaline fixed her some tea. For this one, she'd sent Pauline off to the market with her brothers; Pauline was still just a girl, and some things were for grown women's ears only. "Still, if you could help me out, I'd be grateful."

"Sin's makin' a world where women got to choose between two children eatin' and three children starvin'," Emmaline said, "and you sure as hell didn't do that. You made sure he wasn't some fool who'll spread it all over, didn't you?"

"He got a wife and a good job, and he ain't stupid. Gave my boys new coats just last week."

A man who knew how to keep a woman-on-the-side properly. But then wouldn't it be simple enough for him to just take care of the new child too? Emmaline frowned as a suspicion entered her mind. "He white?"

Nadine's nearer jaw flexed a little, and then she lifted her chin in fragile defensiveness. "He is."

Emmaline sighed, but then nodded toward the tea cooling in Nadine's hand. "Drink up, now. And it sound like he can afford a guinea-hen, to me."

So a few days later, after the tea had done its work, Nadine dropped by and handed Emmaline a nice fat guineafowl. It was a rooster, but Em didn't mind. She pot-roasted it with dried celery and a lot of rosemary from her garden, and the rind of an orange that Pauline had found on the road behind a market truck. Emmaline had smacked the girl for that, because even though "finding" wasn't "stealing," white folks didn't care much for making distinctions when it came to little colored girls. But Pauline—who was smart as a whip and Em's pride—had glared at her mother after the blow. "Momma, I followed the truck to a stop sign and offered to give it back. I knew that white man wouldn't want it 'cause I touched it, and he didn't! So there!"

Smart as a whip, but still just a child, and innocent yet of the world's worst ugliness. Emmaline could only sigh and thank God the truck driver hadn't been the kind who'd have noticed how pretty Pauline was becoming. As an apology for the smack, she'd let Pauline have half the orange while the boys got only a quarter each. Then she'd sat the girl down for a long talk about how the world worked.

And so it was, as the brief winter warmed toward briefer spring and began the long slow march into Southern summer. By the time the tomato plants flowered, Em was as ready as she could be.

• • • •

"Oh, Miss Emmaline!" called a voice from outside. An instant later Jim and Sample, Emmaline's boys, ran into the kitchen.

"It's a red lady outside," Sample gushed.

"Well, go figure," Emmaline said. "Ain't like you ain't a quarter red yourself." Her papa had been Black Creek, his hair uncut 'til death.

"Not _that_ kinda red," said Sample, rolling his eyes enough to get a hard look from Emmaline. "She askin' for you."

"Is she, now?" Emma turned from the pantry and handed Sample a jar of peach preserves. "Open that for me and you can have some." Delighted to be treated like a man, Sample promptly sat down and began wrestling with the tight lid.

"I don't like this one," said Jim, and since Jim was her artist—none of the dreaming in him, but he saw things others didn't—Emmaline knew the time had come. She wiped her hands on a cloth and went out onto the porch to meet the White Lady.

She smelled the lady before she saw her: a thick waft of magnolia perfume, too cloying to be quite natural. Outside, the perfume wasn't as bad, diminished and blended in among the scents of Em's garden and the faint sulfurous miasma that was omnipresent in Pratt City on still days like this—that from the Village Creek, polluted as it was with nearly a century's worth of iron and steel manufacturing waste. The woman to whom the perfume belonged stood on the grassy patch in front of Em's house, fastidiously away from the red dirt path that most people walked to reach her front porch. Why, this lady was just as pretty as a flower in a full-skirted dress of cotton print, yellow covered in white-and-green lilies. No crinoline, but nearly as old-fashioned, with layers separated by bunched taffeta and edged in lace. Around the heart-shaped bodice, her skin was white as pearl—so white that Em figured she'd have burned up in a minute if not for the enormous parasol positioned over her head. And here was why Sample had called her red: the confection of her hair, spun into an elegant chignon behind her head and topped with a crown of white flowers, was nearly as burgundy as good wine.

It was all Em could do not to feel inadequate, given that she wore only an old faded housedress, with her own hair done up in plaits and hidden away beneath a wrap. But she drew herself up anyway, and reminded herself that she needed no parasol to keep her skin fine; the sun did that itself, and black didn't crack beneath its blessing. Those were just surface things, anyway. The White Lady was nearly _all_ surface; that was the nature of her kind. That was how this meeting would go, then: an appearance of grace and gentility, covering the substance of battle.

"Why, I've come to see 'bout you, Miss Emmaline," the White Lady said, as if they were in the middle of a conversation and not the beginning. Her voice was light and sweet, as honeyed as her yellow eyes. "You know me?"

"Yes, ma'am," Em said, because she knew the children were watching and it wouldn't do for them, 'specially the boys, to think they could smart off to white ladies. Even if this one wasn't really a white lady. "Heard here and there you was coming."

"Did you, now!" She simpered, dimples flashing, and flicked at her skirts. As she did this, Em caught a glimpse of a figure behind her: a little black girl, couldn't have been more than seven, crouched and holding the pole of the great big parasol over the woman's head. The little girl's feet were bare beneath the simple white shift she wore, and her eyes were still and empty.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you heard," the White Lady said, unfolding a little lace fan and fluttering it at herself. "Figured you'd have your ways. Could I trouble you for some tea or lemonade, though, Miss Emmaline? It's always almighty hot in this land. Not that that bothers your kind like it does mine."

"Mighty hot indeed," Emmaline agreed evenly. She nodded to Pauline, who stood beside her trembling a little. Even a half-trained girlchild knew power when she saw it. Pauline jumped, but went inside. "This land made its natural people brown for a reason, though, ma'am, long before either your'n or most of mine came along. Seems to me you could make yourself fit the land better—if you wanted, of course."

The woman extended one long, thin arm and ran her fingers up the pearly skin, looking almost bemused to find such flesh upon herself. "I _should,_ I suppose, but you know there's more reward than price comes with this skin."

Em did indeed know. "Pauline's gone to fetch some tea for you, ma'am. No lemonade, I'm afraid; lemons cost too dear when you got three children and no husband, see."

"Ah, yes! About those children of yours."

As much as Emmaline thought she had braced herself, she still couldn't help tensing up when the White Lady's yellow eyes shifted to dance over the faces of Jim and Sample. Lord, but she should've guessed! America wasn't the Old Country; these days the White Folk didn't bother with silly tricks or living in mounds, and they didn't stay hidden, for why should they? But the one thing they still did, in spades here in this land of cheap flesh, was steal children. And if they kept to children of a certain hue, why, the police didn't even ask after them. Emmaline set her jaw.

The woman's eyes lingered on Jim long enough to be worrying. Jim, smart one that he was, had gone still and quiet, looking down at his feet, knowing better than to meet any white woman's gaze. Sample was all a-bristle, not liking the way the woman was eyeballing his little brother; ah, damnation, Emmaline never should've picked for Sample's father a man who liked to fight. Boy was gonna get himself in trouble someday.

Em had a feeling, though, that this was a feint. Then Pauline came back onto the porch with a big sweating glass of iced tea . . . and sure enough, the White Lady's gaze landed on the girl with much more than greed for a cool drink.

Pauline stopped there, with her eyes narrowed, because like Emmaline, she knew what was beneath the surface. The woman laughed prettily at the look on the girl's face.

_"Trouble comin' tell,"_ the White Lady sang, still grinning. _"Trouble comin' fine! Nought to pay the price but sweet blood like fine wine."_ She had a beautiful voice—lilting and hymn-reverberant and high as birds flew. Hardly sounded human, in fact, which was fitting enough.

Em raised a hand in praise anyway, because beauty was meant to be acknowledged, and to deny it would just invite her further in. "Trouble always coming, ma'am," she replied to the song. "Some'a us, this world made of trouble. Not that you folk help."

"Aww, Miss Emmaline, don't be like that. Come on here, girl, with that tea. It's powerful hot."

Em glanced at Pauline; Pauline nodded once, tightly. Then she walked down the steps to the bottommost slat—no further—and held forth the glass.

The White Lady sighed, throwing a look at Em. "Ought to raise your children to show some respect, Miss Emmaline."

"Lots of ways to show respect, ma'am."

The White Lady sniffed. Then she turned her head, and the little girl who'd been holding the parasol straightened and came around her. The parasol stayed where it was, holding itself up against the ground. As the child moved forward, Em's skin came all over goosebumps. Wasn't right, seeing a child who should've been lively so empty of life and magic. The little girl twitched a little while she walked, as if with a palsy, or as if jerked on strings. She stopped before Pauline and held her hands up, and Em didn't blame Pauline at all for her grimace as she pushed the glass into the child's hands.

"Whose was she?" Emmaline asked, as the little girl twitched and moved to bring the tea back to her mistress.

"Nobody who matters, Miss Em, don't you mind." The White Lady took the glass of tea, then smoothed a hand over the child's soft cap of hair with an almost fond smile. "Such a lovely girl, though, isn't she? Everybody says you folk can't be beautiful, but that's just not true. Where else would I be able to get this?" She preened, smoothing a hand over one unblemished, shining cheek.

"She had power," Pauline said then. Em started; she was used to Pauline keeping her mouth shut around white folks, like a good sensible girl should. But Pauline was still staring at the little girl in horror. Her expression hardened, though, from shock into disgust. "She had _power,_ and you _took_ it. Like a damn thief."

The White Lady's eyebrows looked to have climbed into her red hair for a moment. Emmaline was right there with her, shocked at Pauline's cheek. She snapped without thinking, "Pauline Elizabeth, shut your mouth before I shut it."

Pauline shut up, though Emmaline could see the resentful flex of muscle along her jaw. But the White Lady let out a soft laugh, chilling them both into silence.

"Well! I can't say I think much of how you're raising your children, Miss Emmaline. Negro children never can sit still and be quiet, I suppose. Of course I took her power, girl; not like _she_ could do anything with it. Now. I think I'm owed an apology, don't you?"

Damnation. Stiffly, Emmaline said, "I'm sorry for my daughter's foolishness, ma'am. I'll see to her when we're done talking."

"Oh, but that isn't enough, Miss Em." The White Lady tilted her head, long red lashes catching the light. "Honestly, how's she going to learn respect if you do all the apologizing for her?"

Pauline spoke tightly, with a darting glance at Emmaline for permission to speak. "I'm sorry too, ma'am."

"Now, see? That wasn't so hard." The White Lady gestured with the tinkling glass of tea at Pauline, beaming. "But don't you think you owe me a bit more, after smarting off like that? Why, I'm _wounded._ You called me a thief! And even if I am, it's the principle of the thing." She stepped forward. "I think you should come with me for a while, and learn respect. Don't you?"

"No, ma'am," Emmaline snapped, before Pauline could dig herself further into trouble. "I don't think she owes you a thing beyond what you've had."

"Oh, now, be reasonable." The White Lady stepped forward once more, almost to the porch steps—but then she paused, her smile fading just a little. When she glanced off to the side, she spied the rosemary bush at last, growing scraggly in the summer heat. Growing, though, still, and by its growth weaving a bit of protection around the house. Beginning to frown, the woman glanced to the other side; there was plenty of sage, too, thriving in the heat unlike the rosemary.

Eyes widening, the woman finally turned about, spying at last the prize of Emmaline's yard: the sycamore fig. It grew in an arc over on the far side of the yard, because many years ago some neighborhood children had played on it and nearly broken its trunk. It had survived, though—through the heat, through the breaking, and through isolation, for it was nearly the only one of its kind in America. By the stories Emmaline's own mother had told of its planting, the seed-fig had been smuggled over from Africa herself, tucked into some poor soul's wound to keep it safe and living through the Middle Passage.

"Supposed to be rowan, thorn, and ash," said the White Lady. All at once she sounded sulky.

Emmaline lifted her chin. "That'd work too," she said, "'cause Lord knows I got some Scots Irish in me from my poor slave foremothers' travails. But this ain't the soil of Eire; red Alabama dirt roots different protectors. And you ain't the same as your'n back in the Old Country neither, not after all these years of drinking Negro blood, so rosemary, sage, and fig will do for _you."_

The White Lady let out a huffy little sound . . . but then she took a dainty step back. She started to raise the glass of tea, then paused, focusing sharply on it; her lip curled. Then she glared at Pauline.

"Just a little bit of acorn flour, ma'am," Pauline said, with such exaggerated innocence in her voice that Emmaline had to stifle a smile in spite of herself. "For flavor?"

"Rosemary, sage, and fig to bind," said the White Lady. It was clear now that she was furious, as she held the glass of tea out from herself and then dropped it. The tea spilled into the grass, and the glass split into three pieces. She drew in a deep breath, visibly mastering temper. "And _oak_ to strike the blow. Well, Miss Emmaline, I'll grant you won this one, but it leaves us in a bit of a fix. You can't keep yours safe everywhere, and I can't be chasing after 'em all damn day and night." She thought a moment. "How 'bout a deal?"

"Ain't enough water in the river Jordan," Emmaline snapped.

"Sure?" The White Lady's grin crept back, like a dog badly banished. "Safety and prosperity for the rest, if you give me but one?"

"I done told you _no,"_ Emmaline said. She was forgetting to pretend polite; well, Sample hadn't gotten it only from his father. "How many more times I got to—"

"What kind of safety?" asked Pauline.

"Lord, have mercy, I'mma have to kill this girl," Emmaline could not help muttering. But Pauline had set her jaw in that tight, stubborn way that meant she didn't care if she got a smack for it. She persisted: "How much prosperity?"

Oh, and if that didn't spread the White Lady's grin nearly from ear to ear. "Why, _lots,_ sugar. Bless your heart!"

"Girl, shut your _mouth,"_ Emmaline snapped. But the White Lady held up a hand, and all at once Emmaline found herself unable to speak. Oh, Mercy! Em knew, then. Stupid, _stupid_ girl.

"Pauline, don't!" blurted Jim, but the White Lady eyed him too, and he was shut up as firmly as Emmaline herself. Sample just stared from one to the other of his siblings and from them to the White Lady, his hands flexing as if he wanted to hit somebody, but wasn't sure where to start.

"Children should be seen and not heard," said the White Lady, gesturing gracefully with her fan. "But _ladies_ with that blood like wine, sweet and high and so fine, get some choices in the matter 'til it's taken from them. What say you, _Miss_ Pauline?"

Pauline, to her credit, glanced at Emmaline again. Her belligerence had faded by now, and her small face was properly anxious and afraid. Then, though, her jaw firmed, and she faced the White Lady squarely. "You said trouble was comin'."

"Oh, indeed." The White Lady let her gaze drip left and right, syruping all over the boys. "So much trouble! Folks getting uppity from here to the Carolinas. De-seg-gregation! Non-discrim-ination! And don't you know them bullnecks will be hitting back fast, beating y'all back into your place." She stopped her gaze on hotheaded Sample; Sample set his jaw. "Hitting back _hard,_ I tell you, on boys who think to be called men."

Pauline caught her breath. Then, though, thank the Lord, she bit her bottom lip. "I want to speak to my mother."

There was a moment's long, pent pause. Then the White Lady flipped her fan back up into a blurring wave, dropping into a mocking curtsy. The servant child moved jerkily back behind her, taking hold of the parasol again. "Seeking counsel is wise, and within the rules besides," the White Lady admitted. "Not too much counsel, though, little miss. Some deals don't last long."

With that, she flounced off with the child in tow—though Emmaline noted that she skirted wide around the sycamore fig before passing behind a pine tree and vanishing.

The instant Emmaline could speak and move she did, hurrying over to Pauline and slapping the tar out of the girl before she could speak. "Didn't I tell you about folks like that?" she demanded, pointing with a shaking hand after the White Lady. "Didn't I _tell_ you they'll put a pretty orange in your hand and snatch it back with the hand attached?"

It had been happening more and more lately that Pauline defied her—but then, this was only proper, was it not? A girl coming into her womanhood, and her adult power, should speak her mind sometimes. "I know, Momma," Pauline said, without a trace of apology. Her voice was so calm and strong and even that Emmaline blinked. "But I had dreams."

"Well, you should've told me! And you should've told me about the blood coming, I know how to make you safe for at least a bit of time, and—"

"You _can't_ make me safe, Momma." Pauline said it so sharp, her gaze so hard, that Emmaline could only flinch back. "That's why you told me what to be scared of, ain't it? So I could make myself safe. And I know, 'cause you taught me, that it's a woman's job to fight for hers."

"That's a man's job," Jim said, scowling—though he too should've been quiet, cowed by the slap. Sample nodded fiercely. Emmaline groaned and put a hand in the air for strength; all of her children had forgotten how to mind, all at once.

"Decent folks' job, then," Pauline said back, with a little heat. "But Momma, I _saw_ it in the dream. People marching! Big ol' redneck bulls, standing up like men, holding dogs and billy clubs. Blood everywhere." Emmaline's skin went all a-prickle with remembered fear. Yet there was no fear in Pauline's face as she went on, her voice rising in excitement. "At the end of it, though, Momma, at the end . . . I saw white children and black children sitting by each other in school. It was yellow and brown and red children there, too! Black people at the front of a bus! Momma . . ." Pauline bit her lip, then leaned forward to whisper, though there was no one to hear but family. "I saw _a black man in a big white house."_

There were always black men in the big white houses of downtown Birmingham. Who else was going to tend their gardens or wash their cars? And yet . . . there was a fervor in Pauline's gaze that warned Emmaline there was something more to her daughter's dreams.

Didn't matter, though. The world didn't change. And somebody had to protect her fool children from themselves.

Seething with pent-up anger and fear, Emmaline herded the children inside. She made them go to bed early, with no supper for smarting off, because they had to _learn_ —Pauline especially. Wasn't no prosperity worth a girlchild's soul and what little innocence life allowed her. Wasn't no safety for black boys beyond what humility bought them, little as that was.

And while they slept, Emmaline burned sage, and she prayed to every ancestor of three continents who might listen, and then she set herself up in a chair before the door with her grandmother's old musket across her knees. She would stay up day and night, if she had to, for her children's sake.

After a few hours had passed in slow and taut silence, and the candles burned low, and the weight of drowsiness pressed on the back of her head like a blanket, Emmaline got up to keep herself awake. She peeked in the boys' room: they were snoring, curled up, though Jim had a half-eaten peach still in his hand, sneaked out from some hiding place or another against just such an occasion of their mother's wrath.

Pauline's room, though, was cold from the open window wafting sharp, bitter wind over the girl's empty bed.

• • • •

There would be only one place the girl could have gone: the Fairgrounds, in the shadow of Red Mountain.

Emmaline ran to Renee's house, since Renee had the only working phone on the street. There she called Frank, who came over, bringing his mule. The mule ran like it knew what was at stake, so fast and hard that Emmaline's bottom was raw long before she reached the place.

The Fairgrounds were only Fairgrounds once a year. The rest of the time it was just a fallow field, occasionally used for harness racing. Long ago, though, it had been the breaking ground of a plantation—the place where new slaves, freshly force-marched up from the port of Mobile, got branded and stripped of name and spirit before being sent into the fields. As Emmaline halted the mule and slid off its back, she felt all that old blood there in the ground, mixed with old tears and the red dirt beneath her feet. White Folk fed on that sort of magic. This would be a place of power for them.

As Em reached the top of the hill, she saw that Pauline stood beneath a pine that was being strangled by a carpet of kudzu. Before her stood the White Lady—shining even more now, her skin catching the moon's gleam in the way of her people, ears gone to points and mouth too wide and full of sharp fangs. They both turned as Emmaline thumped up, out of breath, her legs shaking from holding so tight to the mule's sides. Still, she moved to stand between them, in front of Pauline and facing the White Lady. "I ain't gon' let you!"

"Deal's done, Miss Emmaline," said the White Lady, looking amused. "Too late."

Emmaline turned to Pauline, shaking, horrified. Pauline, though, lifted her chin. "I saw it, Momma," she said. "One life for three. Trouble coming whether we want it or not, but if I go, you and the boys will get through it."

In a wordless fury, Emmaline flung herself at the White Lady. She did this without using her body, and the White Lady met her without hers, taking her _up_ and _out_ and _through_ and _into_ dreaming. Thing was, dreaming wasn't a thing mortal folks did so well when they were awake, so Emmaline tumbled, helpless, lashing out ineffectually. And in the perverse way of her kind—who loved to lie, but liked it best of all when truth became their weapon—the White Lady showed Emmaline the future that Pauline had bought. She saw:

Markets full of melons and greens and peaches, all artificially fresh and reeking of chemicals in the dead of winter. Long elevated strips of road carving up Negro towns and neighborhoods all over the country. Gray, looming schools isolating bright black minds and breaking their spirits and funneling them into jails. Police, everywhere, killing and killing and _killing._ This? Emmaline fought nausea and despair, lest she strengthen her enemy—but it was nearly impossible not to feel something. Oh, Lord, her baby had given up her freedom for _this?_

And yet. All at once Emmaline was not alone in her tumbling. Pauline, new and raw and woman-strong, pushed at Emmaline, helping her straighten up. Then Pauline pointed, snatching more truth from the White Lady's dream than even she wanted shown; the White Lady hissed into their minds like ice on a griddle. Pauline ignored this and said, "Look, Momma!"

And then Em saw the rest.

Marching black people, attacked by dogs. But still marching. Children—Sample!—struck by the blasts of fire hoses, the torrent peeling off clothes and tearing skin. _Still marching._ Joined by dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

Still. Marching.

Before these marches, prayers and church-plate dinners. _Emmaline, sprinkling a little fire into the chicken and dumplings to warm the marchers against the cold hose water to come._ Young women refusing to be ordered out of their bus seats to go sit in the back. _Emmaline braiding a donkey's stubbornness into their hair._ Children holding their heads high through crowds of shouting, jeering white teenagers and adults. _Emmaline trimming a few figs from the sycamore to make jam, sweetening the childrens' mouths with the taste of heritage and survival._

And so much more. Brown faces in space! Emmaline could only stare at the stars, and savor the impossible possibility. Brown men on the Supreme Court! Then she saw the white house that Pauline had mentioned. _The_ White House, nestled amid statues and obelisks and the mirror pools of Washington, DC, a place of power in itself. She saw a man standing on its steps, brown as fig jam. And then a woman, black as molasses, her gaze hard and high and proud. And then another woman, and another brown man, and _so many more,_ their frequency increasing with the spinning of the sun.

Still marching. Never stopping, 'til freedom was won.

Pauline's single sacrifice could set all of it in motion. But—

"No!" Emmaline fought her way back toward wakefulness. "I can't—it can't be me who stays!" She didn't believe! She had taught her children to bow their heads, not lift them up high. "I'm not what they need!"

_You gon' be all they get, sugar,_ said the White Lady into the dream, in a laughing whisper.

No. No, she damn well would _not_ be.

The dream still spun around her. Emmaline set her jaw and plunged her hand into it, grabbing wildly this time, and pulling back . . . the jar of sycamore jam.

"Sin's sin," she snapped. The top of the jar was tight, but she wrestled it off and plucked out a dripping, soft sycamore fig to brandish against the churning dark. "A deal's a deal. But one kind of prey the same as another to you lot, ain't it? You like children's beauty, but a woman's don't hurt you none. You like innocence, but you'll take foolishness. So here mine: _I can't believe the world will ever change._

"I can't hope. It ain't in me. Spent too long making it easier for people to live downtrodden. I know how to survive, but I ain't got the fight for change in me—not like my baby does. So take me, and leave her."

"No!" Pauline shouted, but Emmaline had enough control to drown her out with the sound of chanting, marching crowds.

The shape of the White Lady had blurred into the dream, but she was a sharp-toothed presence amid the swirl. _Take you both, child and fool, all mine._

Emmaline grinned. "Greed's a sin." The dream cracked a little beneath good Christian truth, allowing Em to summon the whiff of burned sage. The White Lady flinched hard enough to slow the whirlwind of the dream, for the smell carried with it lamentations for stolen lands, stolen children, and the stolen lives of Em's Creek forbears. Emmaline set that in place opposite the jar of figs. "Your bargain was one for three, not two for two."

Images of marchers warped and twisted around them, the White House dissolving into the foxy face of the White Lady. "True enough," she said, conjuring up her fan again. "Still, I'd rather the child if you don't mind. Or even if you do."

Here Emmaline faltered. She had not dreamt of rosemary. Frantically she rifled through images, tossing away the fish she'd dreamt of before each of her children, shoving aside the green tomatoes and the collards of the market. Lord! Had she never once dreamt of baking chicken?

She had not. But then, through the tittering laughter of the White Lady and her cronies, Emmaline smelled a dream of pot-roasted guinea-rooster, with orange peel . . . and rosemary. That had been the first time Emmaline accorded her daughter the respect of a fellow woman—oh, and Pauline had been savoring that feeling, all this time! There was a bit of innocence attached to it, too, lost after Emmaline's explanation about white men's oranges; the perfect sweetening to lure in a hungry fey. And indeed, the White Lady paused, lifting her face a little and half-closing her eyes in pleasure at the toothsome aroma. But then she stiffened as she caught the rosemary's perfume.

"Rosemary, sage, and fig," said Pauline, in a tone of satisfaction. "Now let my Momma—"

"Take me," Emmaline said. _Commanded,_ now, because she could. She had bound the White Lady by both the ancient rules of the Old Country and the newer rules of flesh and blood. The deal had been made, one innocent life for three lives protected and prosperous, but Emmaline had control over which life the White Men got to keep, at least.

"Momma!" Pauline, her beautiful, powerful Pauline, abruptly resolved out of the dream's swirl and turned to her. "Momma, you can't."

"Hush." Emmaline went to her, held her close, kissed her cornrowed head. "I done told you a million times that the world doesn't change—but I was wrong, and I'm sorry for that. You got a big fight ahead of you, but you can win it. And you're better suited for that fight than I'll ever be." She hugged the girl tight. "Be strong, baby. Tell your brothers the same. I know y'all are anyway."

Pauline clutched at her. "But Momma, I, you can't, I didn't want—"

The White Lady closed the dream around Emmaline, and whisked her away.

• • • •

In the morning, Pauline woke up on the ground of the Fairgrounds wet with dew and weeping. Her brothers, who had come up to the Fairgrounds to find her, came quietly to her side to hold her tight.

• • • •

Cousin Renee took the children in, of course, for blood was blood. She sent them one by one to Alabama State for their learning, so they were there when the Freedom Rides began. Naturally, all three joined up. Through the dark times that followed, the foretold dogs and hoses and beatings—and the unforeseen lynchings and assassinations and bombings—there were white folk aplenty doing evil . . . but no White Folk. The fey did not go again where they had been bested once, and in any case, their time was waning. The dirt of Alabama was red for many reasons, not the least of which that it was full of iron ore. Took a lot of power to overcome that much iron . . . and the times were changing such that not even black children could be stolen with impunity anymore.

The White Folk kept their promise, at least: Jim got his arm bitten by a dog during a protest, but it did not tear his throat out. Hard-headed Sample dated a white woman and only had to flee town; the men who meant to chain him up behind their truck and drag him to death did not catch him. Pauline got married, dreamt of fish, and made her own daughters to carry on the family legacy. After a few more years, she ran for city council and won, and nobody strung her up. Then she ran for mayor, and won that too. All the while she turned a tidy profit from her sideline barbecue business. The greens had a little extra warmth in them that made everyone feel better towards each other, so she called them Freedom Greens, mostly as a joke.

But one year the black man Pauline had dreamt of in the White House passed through town, and he decided to come all the way to Pratt City to have some of Pauline's Famous Freedom Greens. Folks went wild. Somebody paid her to write a book about her life. Somebody optioned the film rights. Companies called and asked to franchise her recipe—but Pauline said no, instead hiring a small staff of Pratt City dwellers and leasing a commercial kitchen to fill all the thousands of orders for greens herself.

In every can, mind, there was a sprinkle of rosemary, sage, and a tiny dab of sycamore fig. Just to cut the bitterness a bit.

• • • •

And late one cold winter's night, Pauline dreamt again of the White Folk. She saw how lean and poorly they were looking these days, deprived of their easy prey as the hate of the world dwindled and left them hungry. But as she fought the urge to smile at their misfortune—for ill-wishing would only make them stronger—she caught a glimpse of a painfully familiar black face among their foxy whiteness, strong and proud and shining in its own way. A face that was smiling, and satisfied, and full of motherly pride.

So the world changed. And so Pauline woke up and went to hold her oldest granddaughter close, whispering to her of secrets and savory things and dreams yet to come—and of Great Grammy Em, never to be forgotten, who would one day also be free.

© 2016 by N. K. Jemisin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award; shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree; and she has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel as well as the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award. In 2015, she became the first black person to win the Best Novel Hugo for _The Fifth Season._ The sequel, _The Obelisk Gate,_ is now available Her short fiction has been published in markets such as _Clarkesworld,_ _Postscripts,_ _Strange Horizons,_ _Ideomancer,_ and _Abyss & Apex,_ along with podcast markets (mostly Escape Artists) and print anthologies. Samples of her work, and essays on speculative fiction, anti-oppression, and general silliness, can be found at nkjemisin.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# REPRINT SHORT FICTION  
selected by Amal El-Mohtar

# Eyes of Carven Emerald

## Shweta Narayan | 7,400 words

Sunrise glinted bloody on giant tumbles of statue; it edged the palace beyond with blood.

A limestone arm, severed elbow to thumb, came almost up to Alexandros' waist. Fingers thick as logs lay scattered behind it. Sunrise glimmered in the statue's blank, rain-filled eyes, and trickled down the pitted stone cheek. So too would Dareios of Persia have fallen, had the coward not fled.

But the statue had been a symbol of Persia's might; it could serve Alexandros' purpose well enough. "Leave it," he said, turning away. To his general Kleitos' raised eyebrows he added, "They will see our victory in it."

"But . . ." Kleitos shook his head. "Basileu, it had nothing to do with our victory. We simply outnumbered—"

"It trembled in fear of our coming, and fell at the taste of defeat."

"It did?"

"They will see it so." As they saw him, more clearly with every city he took, as unstoppable. With Egypt, with all the length of Persia's royal road, and now even Persepolis in Alexandros' power, Dareios knew he fought a losing war, and his knowing made it so.

Which was as it should be. And yet . . .

"As you say." Kleitos' voice held little understanding and less curiosity; like most of the men, he fought only for land. Alexandros bit back irritation and wished once more that he had Hephaistion at his side. At his side, on the field, in his bed; but his reasons were the same ones that had sent Hephaistion, not Kleitos, back to Babylon to quell an uprising.

He said, "Call it a reminder."

"And of course they will need that reminder, Basileu," said a woman's voice, "Because you and your restless army will move on."

He spun, hand going to his sword; felt Kleitos brush by. A piece of the statue's crown shifted. It spread wings and hopped with a whirr of gears onto the nose. Its feathers were tarnished bronze, blurred with age, and it had human hands instead of claws. Not sharp. Little chance they would be poisoned. Keeping an eye on the beak for darts, Alexandros said, "Of course. Persepolis could not hold me, not with half the world yet to see."

"And conquer."

He lifted a shoulder, not bothering to respond to the obvious. "Do Persian automata generally speak to kings without offering so much as a name?"

"I wouldn't know," said the bird. "Those creaking parodies aren't worth my words."

Alexandros' eyes narrowed with the first glimmerings of interest. What might this mechanism be, if not Persian? Surely not Northern barbarian work; it was too fine, though it wore around its neck a ring of shining gold, as they did. It looked old, but shifted without noise or stiffness. And it spoke Greek like a Persian; badly, but with meaning beneath the words.

And that last mystery implied a challenge worth taking. Alexandros said, "To whom do you belong? A king who is long dead, it would seem, or else one who neglects you."

The bird rustled its feathers. "The last king who tried to own me died of slow poison while his city burned."

"A queen, then."

A rapid, ratcheting click, and the wings rose. Kleitos stepped in front of Alexandros, arm up. Alexandros put his own hand on the arm and said, "Do you mean me harm, bird?"

"Not yet, King of Asia." The wings came slowly down. "But keep trying to weight me down with an owner, and I might. I had heard the Greeks were barely civilized, but I had expected better from a student of Aristoteles."

"And not from a son of Zeus-Amun?" said Alexandros around a surge of anger. To dismiss one the Oracle had named half-divine as a mere student—

The bird laughed, a strangely human sound. Womanly.

Well, and if she wanted Alexandros rash in anger, he would not be. He nudged Kleitos aside and drifted close enough to inspect her, his hand a deliberate three fingers from his sword. At Kleitos' wordless protest he said, "She said she meant me no harm, old friend, and telling a lie in Persepolis is suicide." The sun warmed the back of his neck. If the bird was indeed reckless enough to have lied, it would glare in her eyes.

She met his gaze without fear, though there was not a weapon to be seen on her. Nor was she a bribe, with so sour a tongue, and she had yet to convey a message or say who sent her. A scout, then, albeit an ill-mannered one. "Now where," Alexandros said soft-voiced, "do they say Macedon lacks civilization? I have conquered half the world and never heard of such a people."

Kleitos' breath caught at his tone. Alexandros started to smile.

"Were you to follow the sun," said the bird, "you might find them. But I would not advise you to try."

East. The edge of the known world. And— "East. Where your cur of a king ran, leaving his womenfolk behind."

Though in that, Dareios could hardly have been more useful to Alexandros. His mother Sisygambis had met abandonment with cold fury; her nature was not forgiving. She had allied with Alexandros against her traitor son, and the information she now sent him was timely and precise.

With a click of gears, the bird tilted her head arrogantly up. "No king of _mine,"_ she said.

"A wise choice." She was a pretty thing, even tarnished. On what board might so valuable a piece be placed so deep in enemy territory? How large a game was Alexandros being challenged to—and how far into lands half-imagined did it stretch? He took a breath, tasted for the first time the new-washed air, the honey hint of something more than tedious, played-out endings. "What are you called, bird who belongs to nobody and claims nobody?"

She tilted her head. Sunlight ran liquid down her neck. "I have borne different names," she said, "in different lands and times. Most recently I am called _Vaacha Devi._ The voice."

"What is it you give voice to?"

"Tales, Basileu. I weave stories."

• • • •

Once, long ago, before the time of the first Darayu, before even the time of Kurush, before empire claimed these lands, there lived a prince not so much younger than yourself.

This prince's father had conquered vast territories, and in his endless war he won a city in the hills made of alabaster filigree and blown glass, of gemstones and spinning gears, a city of artisans and merchants and artificers. And the people of this city were made of beaten bronze and copper springs, as I myself am made.

Now the prince's father did not stay in his alabaster city, for he was too busy fighting over new lands to enjoy the ones he had, but the prince lived there with his mother. He befriended the only son of the city's richest jeweller. They were tutored together; they fell together into mischief; and when they were older they travelled together, bronze boy and flesh.

They snuck out one summer day to ride across the land. But they were very young men, and raised with servants; they did not think to check how tightly their horses had been wound. So it was that they ground to a wobbly stop in the middle of an arid plain, forced to wind springs under the glaring sun. The horses stood with legs splayed and heads down, skin pinging with the heat that poured from them. The prince had to wrap his key in saddlecloth not to be burned. And by the time the horses were well again his friend had run down, heartspring nearly undone, and the prince had to wind him up too.

All this left the young prince hotter and thirstier than he ever had been in his life, and when he saw the smoke of a village, he whistled his horse to a gallop and left his friend far behind.

At the village well, he found a mechanical girl of surpassing beauty. She wore a frock of sackcloth and went barefoot, but her legs were shapely, her movement graceful, her body adorned with a winding, green-enamelled snake. Her eyes when she turned to look at him were blown glass clear as the desert air.

"Water," croaked the prince. The girl tossed a bucket into the well and drew it up with ease. Then she looked thoughtfully at him, smiled, and poured water from the bucket into an amphora.

But when the prince reached for the amphora, the girl pulled it away, laughed, and poured the water back into the bucket. Again the prince reached. Again the girl poured water from one vessel into another, and again, making him watch its crystal stream and listen to its cool music. Only when his friend drew near did she hold the amphora up. "Now," she said, "you may have it."

"Why now?" the prince demanded, though it was a whisper through his parched throat. "When I have been thirsty all this time?"

"You were overheated," said the girl, "and the water icy. Such opposites make humans ill."

He drank. It was sweet and fresh and still so cold it sent jolts of stabbing pain into his forehead. And in the girl's beauty and her cleverness, and the rushing joy of water after too great a thirst, he fell in love. "Tell me your name," he begged. "Tell me why you live here, when you would bring grace and beauty even to the city of golden clockwork and alabaster light."

"My name is Anaeet," she said, returning to the well to draw more water. "As for why I am here, I am enslaved to the headman of this village."

The prince slid down from his horse. "I will free you," he said. He took her hands in his, but she would not let go of the bucket's rope. "I will marry you."

She said, "What is your trade?"

For a moment he stood stunned. Then he laughed. "Am I so covered in dust as to seem a tradesman? I am the prince of this land. My father is lord over everything you see, from the greatest house to the lightest feather. Why should I have a trade?"

He laughed again, but she only shook her head. "When your father's men came through these lands, prince," she said, "they kept only the tradesmen and dismantled everybody else. I remember it still. I shall not wed a man without a trade."

• • • •

Persepolis sat quiet, its daily work muted. Behind the fallen statue, palace walls glowed bright as alabaster in the red-gold light. Alexandros cleared his throat. "Hardly a prince worth the name," he said, "if he thought he loved a village automaton."

"Nevertheless," the bird replied, "he did. But if the story is not to your taste, Basileu, I do not need to tell it."

So lightly did she shrink the world to dullness. And no hint yet of who she came from, or why. Alexandros hesitated, glanced back toward his camp. He turned back. "Tell it quickly," he said. "There is work waiting. A true king hasn't time to learn a common trade."

She flitted from the dead king's nose to his sheared-off knee, above their heads. "As the statue fell without you, King of Asia," she said, "so too does a story go at its own pace and not yours. If you haven't the patience to hear it, someone else will."

"Are you _asking_ to be caged?"

She looked down her beak at him, wordless, then took to the air. Kleitos pulled a knife and aimed in one smooth motion; and indeed she was an easy target, bright-edged in the sun. Too easy. Alexandros put out a hand again to stop the throw. "No," he said. "I would not simply destroy a wonder."

"It's an automaton."

"There's a mind there." That itself was a marvel. Whose? "And one behind that, guiding her moves. I made one bad throw, yes; I shall not make another."

"Another?"

"She'll be back." His hand still lay on Kleitos' arm; he turned the gesture into a caress, eyes on the bird as she shrank to a gleam. "I wonder how she works," he said.

He had darker questions that night, when fire broke out in the palace and grew to paint half Persepolis in deadly light. _The last king who tried to own me_  . . . He pushed through men scurrying like ants with buckets and blankets, reached the statue, and climbed onto its arm. Tilting his head up to watch smoke eat the stars, he said, "Your point is made, bird." He fingered the charm at the nape of his neck. "But poison will not touch _me,_ and the stories that spread from this night will not hurt my name."

Scant days later, he marched on.

• • • •

The Phoinikes dare any siege to break the island of Tura, whose walls rise, impregnable, from the ocean itself. No ship can break down those walls, and no men can land. The island's men mock Macedon.

"They say we cannot take them by sea?" asks Alexandros, soft-voiced. "Well enough; I say we have no need to." He gestures around at the smoking ruins of Tura's mainland sister. "We have stone, do we not? Build me a causeway."

Remembering, he smiles. His challenger may seek mystery, may not choose to reveal himself, but he has already revealed arrogance. He will have blind spots, as they all do, and blind spots stand unprotected.

• • • •

He next saw her in the middle of a dusty road, perched over a body in a broken ox cart. She was a point of brightness in the grey day, her tarnished wings replaced with feathers of polished and graven copper.

The body was that of Dareios.

Alexandros said sharply, "Did you kill him?"

"No," said the bird. "Did you want me to?"

"I might have taken his surrender." A meagre victory, this, and ashen. Dareios. Dead. By another's hand. "His mother—" he had another missive from Sisygambis, received just the previous day— "His mother was owed, is owed, an explanation. His daughters will want to know."

Stateira would want to know. He raised a hand to the base of his scalp, to the spell woven of her hair and braided into his, waiting to quench poison and turn away the sword. More a sign of Sisygambis' ambition than of the girl's fondness for Alexandros, surely, but the token reassured. And he could not deny that Dareios' daughter might make a useful wife for Dareios' successor.

If that was all he meant to be.

The bird said, "For his mother, then—his kinsman killed him, and now lays claim to the name of Artaxerxes. Will she mourn, do you think?"

Ha. _The only son I have is Alexandros,_ she had written. _Persia misses him, and I will find joy only when he comes home._ He said merely, "I will tell her."

"And will you turn back now, with Darayu dead and your vengeance fulfilled?"

Alexandros smiled grimly. "This Artaxerxes displeases me. And there are lands yet to claim."

"But how much more will you take, whose empire borders five oceans?"

"A sixth." His smile grew a touch. "To the east and the south, past the river called Indos." It lay as far from Persepolis as Persepolis did from Macedon, but he had come that distance once and could cover it once more. "The land bordering that sea is a rich one; they trade gemstones and silk and cinnamon. Their warriors ride elephants, and their defeat could bring glory even to the king of Asia." Such a land, unknown, unseen, might hold even a city of alabaster and blown glass . . . "I will own it, and I will ride it down to fabled Khaberis itself."

When the bird did not reply, Alexandros said, "I hear the Eastern mountains are home to children of Typhon who live in lakes and bring storms, who fly without wings, whose wisdom challenges the gods."

"Oh yes," said the bird. "They are called _Zhug._ But an army would never see one, only the ice storm sweeping down to blot out their final sunset." She raised wings of molten fire, hesitated. "But I had been telling you a story," she added slowly, lowering her wings. "Would you hear the rest?"

"I could listen for a time," said Alexandros, "if you will ride with me."

• • • •

The prince returned home that day thinking so hard that he barely noticed frightened servants scolding over stolen horses. The next morning, when sunlight spilled over the alabaster city and its clocktower cockerels crowed harmonies, he went with but one slave to his friend's father, the jeweller. And he said, "I would learn to cut gems so that stars wake inside them, and set them in beaten gold to dazzle every eye."

He was a diligent student, at his studies by dawn so he might return to his duties by noon. And so he came quietly into a trade. He made rings and armbands and jewel-studded shoes, and discovered a genius for fine detail. He made glittering planets the size of pomegranate seeds, their metal entirely covered in a dusting of stones. He engraved a golden sun no bigger than the tip of his thumb, and he helped his master set them all into a miniature orrery. And he watched, amazed, as it turned with astrological precision.

For his masterwork he made a bracelet set with a tiny clock. A green snake circled the face; its head, marking noon, was a diamond clear as Anaeet's eyes.

Oh, I remember your complaint. She was a mere automaton. But he wanted to impress her, so back he went to the little village across a barren plain. "I have a trade now," he told her proudly.

She took the bracelet from him and turned it over and over. She examined its hinge and clasp, and checked the clock against the sun. Slowly, she wound it up. "Yes," she said to its regular tick. "It seems you have a trade."

He said, "So when next the stars bring fortune, we shall be wed."

The ceremony was grand, for she was his first wife, and a sign moreover of the new peace between human and mechanical. And she was lovely. When she rode into the city over flower-strewn streets on a silver-plated horse, her prince was not the only young man to stare.

Now, Anaeet had been a scholar of law before her slavery, so the prince started giving her documents of taxes and properties and inheritance. He sat nearby while she studied them, sketching, or sorting gems, or twisting wires of gold into filigree, and later she would tell him what he needed to know. Soon she was ruling beside him. The mechanicals adored her, for they now could gain fair trials without bribing the jeweller or his son; and for her reason and forethought the humans came to respect her word. And every night, with loving hands, the prince wound her heartspring tight.

When they had been married a year he added a sun-room to his palace, and set thin slices of mica into the cross-hatched roof. They took to holding court there, hearing their people's quarrels and complaints amidst slanting diamonds of light—and so they could have lived for many years. But the army returned, bearing news. The king had died in a distant land.

The general who brought these tidings was loyal to the old king, but he hated the thought that his men should fall into the hands of an unblooded boy. It mattered little to him that the new king was an able administrator who would bring justice to the land and care for the ragged, exhausted troops; the general's only trade was war, and the young king was no warrior. Worse—he had married one of the conquered, foreign mechanicals.

So when the new king and queen came out from the city to greet the troops, the general drew his sword on them.

And although the king had been raised among mechanicals, travelled with one, learned from one, and taken one to wife, he learned something new about them then. There was a whirr, a clang, a snap. Before the king could so much as flinch, the general was dead at Anaeet's feet. She bent over him, clutching her left arm; it bore a deep groove, seeping oil where the sword had split skin. And shards of glass from her shattered left eye glinted on the road like tiny diamonds.

The general's second fell to his knees. He offered his life for this treason, asking only that the men might be spared; in response, the king set him in command. Then he ordered the people of the city to care for the soldiers, and he took his queen home to mend.

They called in a master smith to hammer the dent from her arm and a master artificer to check her gears and springs and make sure all was still in order. The king made new eyes for her himself, grinding the lenses from two flawless emeralds, perfectly matched to the snake coiled across her skin.

New-burnished, with eyes of polished stone, Anaeet was more beautiful than ever. The court whispered about how lucky she was to be so loved.

But have you ever looked through green lenses at everything, King of Asia? They were fine, surely, but she might have preferred glass; and the king never thought to ask.

• • • •

Alexandros next saw the automaton a year and more later, in a tower in Marakanda. He climbed while the world slept, wrapped against the wind in a chlamys cloak and the warm haze of wine, to find a bird-shaped hole cut into the star-spattered night. She sat on a parapet, and the sliver of moon behind her served only to darken her shadow.

He said, "I thought your cursed story was done."

She clicked her beak. "You of all people," she said, "should know that stories do not end when a prince becomes king."

"They merely go badly."

"So do they go badly for any of us if we choose to kill our friends." A pause. "You're drunk beyond reason."

He put fists to his eyes. "I am drunk." Which made it easier not to think. But harder not to talk. "I am never beyond reason, though I grant the wine loosened my hand."

Silence.

"It was the wine loosed his tongue, too, but—how could he think—he said I plotted to send him to an honourless death, to lead all my Greek soldiers into a trap, to better be Persian myself. Where did he hear such tales? Who did he tell them to in turn? If I wear Persian tunics under my cloak, do I not still speak Greek?" And why, after all, should Alexandros be merely one or the other?

"Hard to say what he thought," said the bird, "since you killed him."

"And not even the son of Zeus-Amun can bring him back to life." The words shredded his throat. Kleitos had been a loyal general till that quarrel, and almost as fine a lover as Hephaistion. If only Alexandros had more wine.

She said, "I am sorry for your—pain—but he is not the last of Greece that you stand to lose. Why will you not go home, Basileu?"

"Because I have not finished, bird." An echo of the words he had written to Sisygambis.

Feathers rattled irritably. "I am called Vaacha Devi."

"Yes, yes. I am so close to claiming that sixth ocean. It has jungles, they say, where you could walk from one tree to the next for ten days without ever catching sight of the ground."

"They say true."

"Then it will be worth it." To have a world larger than the limits of Kleitos' mind.

"But do they also say," the bird continued, "that the jungle goddess' tigers will hunt men who desecrate her land, and her swamp demons swarm up from the fetid water, so that days before you might see ground your army will be shrunk to a sad handful of men puking their stomachs out? For that too is true."

Alexandros turned away. "I prefer your story of the king and his mechanical queen."

Gears whirred. "They ruled for many years," said the bird. "From home." And she would say no more.

He saw her next in a town newly named Alexandria, in pouring rain that churned the streets to mud, perched on a huge statue of the long-eared sage the locals called Gautama. "In your story," he said, "did they kiss the king's hand?"

Her new-made, enamelled tail shivered in distaste; the sound blended with the ping of raindrops off her skin. She said, "Such things humans do. Yes, it has been the tradition in Persia for a very long time."

"My generals don't like it either." Nor the men, whose eyes still reflected Kleitos' death. Alexandros glared over his shoulder at her, chin up. "But why should I not take Persian traditions? I am King of Persia."

"And Persia misses you."

He stilled, eyes narrowing, while rain stuck hair to his face and trickled down his back. That choice of words. Only one other had used them. He said, "And in all of Persia, did I ever find your home?"

"You did not."

"No. I would have known it." He looked into Gautama's calm smile. "Your king with the mechanical—he is not the only one whose own men tried to kill him."

"And it would be a pity if they succeeded," she said. "So take them home."

"Yes," he said slowly. Even the more loyal men looked to him with more appeal than ambition now. They were weary, cold, and ragged. "Yes, Vaacha Devi. Tell Sisygambis that I might."

He smiled a little, bitterly, at her surprise. The challenge had been petty after all; the win was worthless, and the wonders merely tales. And he was held back, yet again, by the limitations of those smaller than him.

• • • •

Everyone knows of the ox cart that stands in Gordion's old palace. Everyone knows that the knot fastening it to its post cannot be undone.

Alexandros proves them wrong.

He has cause to pride himself on seeing what is there, not merely what is wanted. Wishing the world to be vast does not make it so. Wanting men to be brave and mothers to be patient does not make them so.

Perhaps Arabia will have marvels, if the East does not.

• • • •

But a year later, over a smoky campfire, Alexandros had a new wife, a new battle, and a new will to press on. He might lack fond dreams of marvels, but Raja Porus was a foe worth meeting—and Rokhshna, who travelled with him as fearless as any warrior—a bride worth impressing. And every new day told Sisygambis who decided Alexandros' course—and who did not. Her missives were growing satisfyingly plaintive.

"Did you not suggest," Alexandros asked the bird, "that a king might like a clever wife?" He smiled like a petted cat. "You were right. I do. But you, of course, were thinking of Sisygambis' granddaughter when you said it."

The bird stammered in dismay, feathers clattering. She looked at Rokhshna through one eye, then another. And Rokhshna looked back with cool enmity.

• • • •

Now, the young king found himself to be protector of vast lands. Many of them remembered a time before his father, and none welcomed a mechanical queen. In the first few years of his reign he put down rebellion in a land of ice and granite, rooted out banditry in a fever-ridden swamp, and fought a hard, heartbreaking battle with his own mutinous navy. But he married a girl from the land of ice and a girl from the swamps, and after some time and some children the lands quieted. And Anaeet still ruled at his side.

But one crystalline winter's day when the sun peeped pale and hesitant as a new bride over the alabaster roofs, he received word that one of his satraps, the ice girl's father, had gone missing in the mountains. And though his whole city searched, nobody found so much as a footprint.

Being young, with a thirst for adventure still unquenched, the king decided to find his vassal himself. He left Anaeet to rule in his stead and his other wives in her care, and took only his mechanical friend the gemcutter with him. This time they rode horses of flesh and carried feed enough to last them. They disguised themselves as wealthy tradesmen, with tasselled blankets on the horses and fine jewellery in a box of carven sandalwood.

Towards the sun they rode, over the desert and past Anaeet's village, into mountains that rose like black talons scratching at the snow-stuffed sky. And in every village they came to, huddled between rock face and cliff, the friends offered bracelets and jewelled pins for sale. The villagers could not buy such wares, of course, but the king intended only for word of them to spread. He reasoned that no ruler disappeared by accident; greed and lust for power must be behind it. So he called out to greed. And while he called, he listened for tidings of his satrap.

The friends came finally to a town whose people spoke of a noble hunting party, all grand in bronze and bearhide, that had passed through one day and never returned. The king chose to stay and learn more. And while he stayed two nobles approached him and said, "We hear that you and your mechanical are gemcutters."

"We are," the king agreed.

"We have found a cave full of gold and jewels," said one noble, "and have hired a dozen village boys to help us transport them, six human and six mechanical. But we would pay you well to come with us and tell us which pieces are worth the most."

"We shall join you gladly," said the king, though joy was far from his heart.

He followed the nobles quietly, with his friend and a dozen villagers, to a cave set far into the mountains. Its mouth glittered with icicle teeth, and ice rimed the walls. The path was wide, but it sloped steeply downwards, and the ground underfoot was slick and studded with gravel that broke free and rolled, echoing, into the black distance. The king had to walk with his head bowed, as he never had before, to keep it safe from low-hanging rocks.

So he did not see the two nobles step each one to a side into alcoves, and he took a step further. His feet met empty air. He fell, how far he did not know, and the other men tumbled after him. He came quickly to his feet; but the walls were sheer and icy, and the hole too far above.

Some men had been carrying torches, and in their fallen light he could make out huge cauldrons bubbling to each side. He peered into one; in it, gears and rods and mysterious pieces of shaped bronze bubbled in acid that scoured them clean.

He crossed over to the other side, and a wet carrion stench hit him. He gagged, but looked closer.

A hand rose to the bloody, bubbling surface, and seemed to reach for the king before sinking again into a mess of cooking guts. Then, in the slow churning of the cauldron, came the severed, staring head of the king's missing satrap.

• • • •

"Enough," Rokhshna said. "This tale disgusts. Have done." Her face held no fear, but her voice was high and the words too fast.

Alexandros draped the corner of his chlamys over her shoulder. It offered scant warmth, though its embroidered hem glowed in the firelight, but she calmed under it. He said, "You have changed its nature greatly. To upset us? We march on no matter what you say."

"The story goes as it goes," the bird replied. "I merely tell it."

"Oh, surely," said Rokhshna. "And of course I am not meant to be the princess of ice, and the dead man not my father?"

Alexandros said, "If this is Sisygambis' way to lure me back, tell her I find it clumsy."

"I told you once that I serve nobody." The fickle light turned the bird into a gaudy toy, showed her indignation faintly ridiculous. "I will own that she and I share a goal, but—"

"Then in kindness to her I tell you only this: Begone."

"If you will not hear this voice, she is already gone." The bird spread her wings. An eye of new enamel stared at Alexandros from every feather's tip, liquid black against the copper. In each one danced a miniature fire. "But . . ." Her voice spoke regret. "You will not turn back from your folly, Basileu, though you sully the holy river Ganga herself?"

Alexandros' smile was cold as ice and dark as the belly of a cave. "A river," he said, "is only a river."

• • • •

He founded a new town on the Hypasis, another Alexandria. But by the third day of its building he started to hear mutters and see the sidelong looks.

He called Hephaistion to his side. It was Koinos who came. Hephaistion was away again, as he was too often since Alexandros had married. "Tell me," Alexandros said, more abruptly than he meant to. "What is it they say to one another?"

"They say you want them to ford the Ganges next," said Koinos.

"So I do." He glowered at the rising sun. "What of it?"

"They say the Ganges is wider than even the Nile," Koinos said. "They say it runs so deep that a hundred men can drown, one on top of another, and never be found. They say it runs frothy brown at strange times, churned by the hooves of river horses that will strike us down with their hooves."

"Where do they hear such tales?" Alexandros demanded, turning on the older man. "It is a river. No more. And beyond these hills, over that river, the lands are ripe with game and fruit." And, rumour said, mechanical creatures as clever as the bird.

"Perhaps," said Koinos. "But those lands are ruled by the Gangaritai and the Praisioi. And the men have heard that their forces are allied against you, that the far side of the great river is lined with waiting horsemen and catapults and thousands of elephants, an army so large that an eagle in flight could not see both ends of it at once. They say one elephant in ten is an automaton, and that their trunks spew acid. They say there are pneumatic bows that fire a dozen dozen arrows at a time, their strings pulled so tight that they shoot right across the river. They say—"

"Where," Alexandros said again, "do they get these tales?" But even as he spoke, he knew.

Koinos reached out, appealing. "They believe them, Basileu. They are tired, and ill, and that breeds fear. They left so many brothers on the field when we fought Porus, and even Porus fears the Gangaritai. You may order them to march on, but you would be wiser not to, for the Greeks remember Kleitos and they will not go."

Alexandros said, "They will do as I tell them."

They did not. Mutters rose instead to shouts, and shouts to the clash of bronze on bronze. By the day's end, a hundred men lay dead and twice that many dying. With them lay three of the Macedon generals. Only two had fought for Alexandros.

Sisygambis had not played this move. She wanted him back. She did not want his vengeance, and she was not one to lose by winning.

If she was not the player now, had she ever been?

When Koinos came again to beg Alexandros to turn back, he paid more heed.

He walked alone again that night. The muddy streets had iced over. They crunched as he walked, and the stars shone bright as little suns, distant as the far side of the Ganges. Though he shivered, he let his chlamys cloak stream proudly out to show the embroidered tunic underneath. Faint on the wind came the moan of injured men.

At the end of town he called, softly. "Come out, bird. I know that you are here."

Silence. After a time, he added, "Vaacha Devi. My wife is safe abed. Come out."

Her voice came from shadow. "How did you know to find me?"

"Rokhshna is wary. You always appear in the wake of Sisygambis' missives. And your stories sent men of mine to their deaths today."

Silence again. Alexandros sighed and sat on a low wall. He grew tired sometimes, these days. Finally, finally he saw the picture correctly, and he could not even summon rage. "So," he said. "My men will go no further. Which is what you have worked for all along, isn't it."

Why hate her for his mistake? He had misread a player for a piece. Seen a smaller board than was offered after all. And been bested. "Though by the gods," he said bitterly, "I would know why."

Gears played a complex rhythm of quiet clicks. A wingbeat, two, and the bird landed delicately next to him. "No secret now," she said. "Sisygambis wants you back; I merely wanted . . . _want_ you gone. The land beyond the Ganga, which you think of as a jewel to snatch, which you would paint bloody, and trample the rice and silence the smithies and taint the art with your notion of culture, that land is my home. And some of the Magadha mechanicals, your Gangaritai, are my kin."

Ah. Was there even a real army awaiting them? Bile rose at the thought that he would never know. He said, "Why not tell my men your tales earlier?"

"And risk an uprising that killed you?" The bird preened and spread her starlit feathers. "A ruby glittering in the pile of gravel that is humanity? I would not simply destroy a wonder."

"You might have."

"You came too close to my land."

Her land it might be, but her new feathers, the enamel work—their elegance was that of Persia. He said, "Though Sisygambis _was_ your patron, and she wants me alive. Were you trying to marry me to the granddaughter, too? Will you tell me she is cleverer than Rokhshna?"

"Human marriages mean little to my kind," she said, "though tales of them intrigue. They sound messy."

Anger flared. He would have truth, at least, if it could be wrung from a mechanical. He grabbed for the bird's neck.

There was a whirr, a blur, a snap; then she was out of reach, and blood welled between his thumb and fingers, black in the starlight. "A ruby indeed," she said, a tremor in her voice. "I cannot fault you for trying."

Alexandros wrapped his throbbing hand in a corner of his chlamys cloak.

After a moment the bird said, "As to the girl—Rokhshna is the politician of the two, but you know Stateira's cleverness. And I wonder which you trust, when you talk behind the back of one and wear the charm the other made you."

His hurt hand twitched toward the charm. How did she know of that? She saw more clearly than even Hephaistion had. _"Is_ she a wise woman?" he said. "Does it work?" Certainly poison had not touched him yet, and his wounds had never festered.

"Do I look like a magician? If it doesn't, you will doubtless find out."

Wind rustled in a pine tree, brought the scent of coming snow. A smell that was the same the world over. But the drooping, dancing branches of this Eastern pine were like nothing in Macedon, and under them gleamed rows of round puddles: elephants' footprints full of ice. Alexandros said, "Then we have nothing left to speak of." Odd, how that made it a little harder to breathe.

In denying him the rest of the world, she had shown him that it had been worth the attempt.

She looked at him through one eye, then the other, then said softly, "Unless . . . you wish to know what happened to that young king we left trapped inside a cave."

Ice was melting under Alexandros, biting into his fingers and seeping through the chlamys to chill his legs. He needed to plan his return—surely it would not be a retreat—home. And Rokhshna hated waking to find him gone.

Watching the foreign pine, he started to smile. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I would hear that, if you will tell it."

• • • •

The king called up, "What place is this?"

"Your new home," one of the nobles said, "where you will make us jewellery enough to buy this satrapy. If you walk a little way down this tunnel you will find a workshop with a fire pit, and gold and gems enough to start your work."

The king glanced once more at his wife's dead father. "And the cauldrons?"

"You and your mechanical have nothing to fear in them, gemcutter," the other noble said. "They were men without a trade, worth only their parts and the tallow from their fat, which will light your work."

At this some of the villagers drew together and looked fearfully up. But the king said, "You must know a great deal about gemcutting, honoured sirs. Most men of your class would have no idea that my mechanical and I have need of six helpers each."

Now in fact the nobles did not know any such thing, since the king had only just made it up, but they smiled knowingly down into the pit and left all twelve villagers their lives. The king made bracelets and bowls and statuettes; and slowly, invisibly, he began with fine work and flattery to gain the nobles' trust.

And so he spent years far from home, while Anaeet ruled so wisely that most people forgot they had or even needed a king.

One day he told the nobles, "Bring me gems of every type and gold enough to plate my arm, and I shall make a jewelled rhyton cup in the shape of a winged lion. It shall be fine enough for Queen Anaeet herself; she alone has the power to grant you your satrapy. In return I ask only that you set me up as your jeweller, for it pleases me to serve gentlemen of such exquisite taste."

The nobles brought him these things with glee and good wishes, and in time he fashioned a cup as long as his arm. As he had promised, its base was a lion. Its sides were wings set with diamonds and emeralds and rubies, and sapphires yellow and blue, so closely nestled together that no hint of gold showed through their glimmering, mottled pattern. The other prisoners gathered around while he worked, caught between interest and awe; and when the cup was finished the king gave it to his captors with unfeigned pride.

And they took it to the queen.

But the queen, through eyes of ground emerald, saw diamonds and yellow sapphires as green. And to her eyes, rubies and blue sapphires both were black as nighttime blood, and those black stones picked out writing across the green wings. And the words read, "Help me, Anaeet."

• • • •

Finally, finally, Alexandros' face lit in simple gladness. "Ah," he said. "So having a clever wife did help him in the end."

The sky had grown lighter, stars fading into grey, as the tale wound to its close. Now the night silence fractured into the cries and clangs of the waking camp. Vaacha Devi spread her wings to catch the sun's first rays; they lit her like a phoenix, turned enamelled feathertips to blood. "It depends, young Alexandros," she said regretfully, "on what Anaeet did with that knowledge."

And with a musical shiver of wings, she was gone.

© 2010 by Shweta Narayan. Originally published in _Clockwork Phoenix 3,_ edited by Mike Allen. Reprinted by permission of the author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shweta Narayan was born in India, has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California, and feels kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry have appeared in places like _Strange Horizons,_ Tor.com, the 2012 Nebula Showcase anthology, and _We See a Different Frontier._ They've been mostly dead since 2010, but have a few stories and poems in the works again. Seven years is a traditional length for otherworldly imprisonment, so they're hopeful. Shweta received an Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, co-edits the speculative poetry zine _Stone Telling,_ and feels old on tumblr at shwetanarayan.tumblr.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# gezhizhwazh

## Leanne Betasamosake Simpson | 2,400 words

everyone always tells wiindigo stories when they should be telling gezhizhwazh stories. that's what this old one says.

_"why you telling wiindigo stories all the time?"_

_"maybe because they're about greed and evil and imbalance, and we're all living surrounded by that."_

_"well then why you want to be surrounded by more of that?"_

_"i dunno. so we see the wiindigo in ourselves?"_

_"gaa. you young ones forget everything nowadays. wiindigo more about the inside than the outside."_

_"so what should we be telling, then?"_

_"you know."_

_"i don't think i do, know, that is."_

_"tell the ones about that strong young nishnaabekwe who wasn't afraid of those wiindigo. who was smart and strategic. who was patient, so, so patient. waiting until just the right time. waiting, watching. tell those ones, so those young ones will know what to do. teach those ones. make it so they'll want to listen. make it so they'll pay attention."_

_"like a movie?"_

_"gaawin! not like a movie. everything got to be a movie with this generation. everything got to be 'an app.' not a movie, that one. a story. i show you. your job is to listen."_

this one came into the world a fast-moving cloud gliding through the doorway like she was riding the southwind, and by the time i met her, she was tens of thousands of years old. you wouldn't know it to see her, though. she was thin and muscular, but not overly so, not like she spent all her time in the gym. her long black hair was very straight. her skin olive, her eyes a dark, haunting brown. her hair was almost always in a ponytail or a single braid mirroring her spine. she was good at transforming too, that one. one minute she was turning heads she was so sexy, and the next minutes she was walking through the crowd unnoticed.

_"do you really think we should be talking about sexy in the middle of this not-a-wiindigo-story, auntie?"_

_"why not? when'd sexy get so bad to talk about? you wouldn't even be here without sexy. sexy got you here. no, no, no, we're talking about sexy. we all sexy. sexy make the world go round."_

_"auntie. i don't want to hear old people talk about sex."_

_"what you got against old people talking about sex? you think we not got sexy anymore? you think i didn't have my share of husbands and lovers? you think sexy expires?"_

_"um, no, i guess not. i just don't want to hear the details."_

_"hear the details? you lucky if i tell you the details! i'm the old lady storyteller and if i want to put sexy in my story, sexy is in my story. you the listener, and your job is to listen. here we go."_

it wasn't easy for her. a lot of people had been made to forget. when they did remember, they remembered him, not her. the teacher. the one that taught by never learning. the one that had pissed off every aspect of creation at some point. the only reason everyone seemed to remember him and not her was because of his shameless self-promotion. it was brilliant of him, really, as the teacher he was supposed to reflect back the worst of what had happened, and it used to work. people used to get it.

but for her, this version of him made him a self-centered, egotistical pain in the ass. but when they were alone, it was effortless, and she'd come to rely on them more than she should, given that the situation they were now in was utterly unreliable by nature.

_"whoa auntie, i think maybe you going too far with the sexy now. you don't want to piss, you know, those guys off. some of them ones like to keep it clean, on the up and up. i don't know about you making all these stories pornographic  . . ."_

_"howah. when did sex get pornographic? who said anything about pornographic? your thinking is all messed up, boy. not all sexy is pornographic. sexy not suppose to be pornographic. hola. i need to get some money from inac to give your generation sexy lessons."_

_"well why you using all this big words anyway? why you not talking normal? and where is your rez accent? why aren't you talking like an indian?"_

_"howah. i'll show you my rez accent. not everyone like my accent. not everyone listen when i talk in my accent. some people only think that i'm smart when i talk like peter mansbridge. it's about audience. some audiences you got to lose your accent and use big english words. you think i can't use big english words? i'll show you. none of that stuff is important anyway. what is important is who is listening."_

_"i dunno, i think it is more authentic if you speak rez, auntie. it's more decolonized."_

_"what do you know about decolonized? you think sexy is pornographic. you think i can't use five-dollar words. you think i'm only authentic if i'm talking rez. you the one suppose to be listening, anyway. how can you be doing any listening when you're all critical about my authenticity?_

the two of them were both travelers, but they never traveled together. he traveled from place to place, visiting. checking reality. testing reality. shaking hands, being everywhere at once but still nowhere. telling stories, helping. always helping, that guy, even when it made everything much worse. she was also always in motion, but in the background. she solved problems ahead of time, as a negotiator, a strategist, a quiet protector who no one saw. she'd saved his ass more times than she could count.

_"what? you not going to interrupt me and ask about 'ass?'"_

_"no. you told me to sit quietly  . . . but yes, i think you should change 'ass' to 'life.'"_

_"oh you do, do you? look at you, the big shot, editing my story. howah, you're showing signs of zhaganashiiyaadizi. you're a worry, alright. but right now, the show must go on."_

there was a certain amount of loneliness that came with living through the centuries, and the times she hooked up with him helped with that. or at least that's what she told herself. he seemed to be able to see her as only one of her own kind could, but at other times, he switched that off entirely, getting lost in the intensity that he carried with him like his own personal whirlwind.

gezhizhwazh, as she was now called, was well known to only the oldest anishinaabeg, as the one that had rather dramatically defeated the wiindigo. many generations ago, she'd planned and carried out a successful resistance against the wiindigo by sacrificing herself. not just a successful resistance, but _the_ successful resistance. they ate her slowly, as they planned an attack on a small anishinaabeg village. she endured, persisted, sacrificed. she learned their plans. she studied them. she learned to think like them. she gained their respect and trust and led them into the village. it was then that her strength of heart rose to the surface and she betrayed her enemy. she told the anishinaabeg of their plan. taught them how to kill wiindigo, and the wiindigo were defeated. and once she did, those old ones say she cut off their balls. it was the greatest defeat in the history of the world, and for a while at least, everyone had remembered. everyone had celebrated.

_"how come i never heard about no defeat."_

_"i dunno. how come you not heard of a lot of things?"_

but by now, the anishinaabeg had lived without the wiindigo for so long, or so they'd thought, that they'd relegated wiindigo out of real life and into the realm of myth. they'd forgotten entirely that story and reality are one and the same. a critical mistake, because the wiindigo had insidiously reincarnated and come back stronger. instead of an insatiable appetite for the anishinaabeg, this time they had an insatiable appetite for anishinaabeg aki and all of its gifts. of course, to the anishinaabeg this was the same thing.

this seemingly minor adjustment in wiindigo strategy had shored up their superior military power and made death for the anishinaabeg much slower and more painful than before, and any potential interventions were that much more difficult to realize. wiindigo had diffused their political power since the old days, their system of replication had become more complex, and they'd hired public relations experts. hell, they'd invented public relations experts. their system of replication permeated everything. they were brilliant instead of just scary, and they found a way to convince people to buy disconnection, insatiable hunger, and emptiness. the lucky ones worked their whole lives so they could buy more disconnection, hunger, and emptiness. the unlucky ones were destroyed by it, and the unluckier still had parents that were destroyed by it. the more people that ate their own young, the stronger the wiindigo got.

for gezhizhwazh, it had become difficult to know where to intervene. things had become so fucked up. the last years she'd spent being a sex worker to the elite of bay street. before that, she'd been a linesman for hydro, a political aide, a nuclear engineer at the bruce, a bureaucrat. she'd deciphered the system. she could think like them. she mimicked them. she'd diagnosed the problem. but this time, the betrayal was more complicated—a search for meaning in a vast sea of contradictions. she won battle after battle after battle, with virtually no impact on wiindigo power. what was she missing? it seemed so much simpler last time. she called on the other guy.

"i don't get it. i can see them. i know them. i can think like them while still thinking like me, but nothing i do stops them. nothing i do disrupts it."

"then you're not thinking like them," he replied as he ran his big toe slowly up the inside of her leg.

"i _am_ thinking like them, so much so, i sometimes forget i'm me. it's not that," she said.

"then what is it, gezh?" he asked, nudging his nose into the space between her earlobe and her neck.

"it's that this time, their power is all over the place. there is no single target. it's everywhere."

"then start at the beginning, even everywhere starts at the beginning. fix the beginning, gezh, maybe the rest will follow."

gezhizhwazh rolled over facing her other one. that right there was why she loved him. he gently touched her forehead in soft lines, more like breath than touch. he wrapped his body around hers, and then slipped into sleep. she held onto her thoughts.

_"how come you not interrupting me? my story no good? you asleep?"_

_"i thought it was disrespectful to interrupt."_

_"it is. but your not interrupting is making me self-conscious, like my story is no good."_

_"the story's good, auntie. keep going."_

_"okay. pay attention to this next part, it's important."_

when gezhizhwazh needed to heal and renew herself, she had learned to mother. the stability and rhythm of a new life filled her up. the constant physical contact. the love. the birth ceremony was renewal in itself. no wonder men had to work to not become lost. no wonder. but birth was the one ceremony that you still had to be careful with. the one that happens countless times every day in the world. wiindigo kept that one controlled through medical intervention for maternal health and of course the health of the baby. this translated into drugging women so they couldn't be present at their ceremony. planned c-sections. putting a plastic nipple in the baby instead of her own flesh. putting her in a plastic box instead of in the arms of a warm, living, breathing human.

gezhizhwazh knew this was how those wiindigo first planted the hole inside each of these new little people in the first place. the hole that they tried so desperately to fill for the rest of their lives. they filled it up with food, with drink, with stuff. they cut themselves down, flooded themselves, they fevered themselves. they ate, drank, swam, and breathed in the toxic soup they'd inadvertently created, all in an attempt to fill the bottomless hole. they sat in front of screens for most of their waking hours. they became cannibals.

gezhizhwazh figured that part out. she'd figured out the next part too. that if she could bring new life through the doorway without that hole, there would be nothing to feed. without the weight of large gaping holes in their beings, people would no longer be willing to pay for disconnection. with nothing to feed, the entire system would fall apart. so while that other one was out carousing, protesting, or pontificating to anyone who would listen, gezhizhwazh was at work as a bami ondaadiziike, circling around those birthing women to protect that ceremony. foiling those interventions, protecting the circle. for now, her battle with the wiindigo was in its resurgence stage. gezhizhwazh was building an army—a diffuse, scattered group of souls that could see through the wiindigo illusion, because they were whole.

the light of gezhizhwazh's army of dancing eyes would change the world.

just wait.

_"just wait for what?"_

_"you just wait. that's it."_

_"that's it? nothing happened? it's a great set up, but  . . . but i don't know if you should be messing around with gezhizhwazh and wiindigo stories, especially if nothing is going to happen."_

_"nothing happened? howah, you don't even know a story when you hear it. it doesn't all come to you at once. you can't just press a button and get all the answers. press the button, get all the answers, then what you going to do, big shot?"_

_"then what do we do?"_

_"you just wait, i already told you. and while you are waiting, get me some tea, and maybe something to eat. i'm hungry after all that storytelling."_

* * *

_**nishnaabemowin: zhaganashiiyaadizi means to be colonized, live as a white person at the expense of being nishnaabe, gezhizhwazh means to cut**._

* * *

© 2013 by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Originally published in _Islands of Decolonial Love._ Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is the author of three books: _Dancing on Our Turtle's Back,_ _The Gift Is in the Making,_ and _Islands of Decolonial Love,_ and the editor of _Lighting the Eighth Fire,_ _This Is An Honour Song_ (with Kiera Ladner) and _The Winter We Danced: Voice from the Past, the Future and the Idle No More Movement_ (Kino-nda-niimi collective). Leanne holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and has lectured at universities across Canada. She is of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ancestry and a member of Alderville First Nation. Follow her on Twitter @betasamosake.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# Walkdog

## Sofia Samatar | 4,400 words

This paper is in response to the assignment "Know Your Environment". In this paper I will discuss an animal called Walkdog which is native to my local environment which is South Orange, New Jersey. First I will describe the animal ("Brief Description"), then I will write about it's origin and habits ("Research"), then I will conclude with why I chose to write about this animal and why its important ("Conclusion"). Thesis statement: _Even though not much has been written about it, Walkdog is an important part of North American wildlife._

1. Brief Description

What is Walkdog? Well Mrs. Patterson you probably know better than me. However, I am writing this paper and not you, because I need the grade as you know very well, so here is what I know.

Walkdog contrary to it's name is not a dog. It is more like a beaver or large rat. It lives mostly in sewers but also creeks and rivers. It is nocturnel and believed to eat fish and also, excuse me, excrament.1 Walkdog when walking is said to be about 5 feet long, including the tail, but when it stands up it looks taller than a man. Its fur is black and oily. Its a great swimmer and can stay underwater for 3 days without coming up for air.

Other names for Walkdog: Grimdog, Grimwolf, The Dog that Walks Men, The Dog that Walks Hisself, Jumpy Leg, Conjure Dog, Canewolf.

Some people also call it Growldog, but this is stupid because Walkdog doesn't growl. It has no voicebox.2

2. Research

One thing you will notice when you start researching Walkdog is that not much has been written about it at all. It gets mentioned in a sentence here and there but you won't find a book about it or even a Wikipedia page which is weird, don't you think? Its like its hiding from everything with some kind of magic. Probably the person who knows most about Walkdog is your nephew, Andrew Bookman, the most hopeless dork in this school you'll excuse me for saying, because you know its a fact and facts as you say are the Building Blocks of Research.3

From Andy I learned that the origins of Walkdog are, as he put it, "obscure". There are three main theories on the origins of Walkdog:

(a) indigenous animal related to otter

(b) came over from Europe or Asia with immigrants

(c) came over from Africa on slave ship4

In other words, the origins of Walkdog are the origins of just about everybody. This is why I describe it as a native animal. I mean I consider myself a New Jersey native, what else would I be, even though I'm African and German and Spanish and God knows what else.5

Now for the habits of Walkdog. These habits are not what you would call nice. Walkdog steals kids (another name for it is The Child Thief). It does not steal them to eat, as stated above, it eats fish and excrament mainly, but it steals them at night and then _it takes them for walks._

It takes them for walks. It just takes them around with it. I want you to think about what that's like. Imagine your a normal kid asleep in your normal bed. Don't imagine yourself as Andy Bookman, because that kid is not normal _at all,_ but imagine you're somebody regular like me. Me, Yolanda Price. I would say I'm pretty normal. I'm not popular, in fact I generally have to keep my head down, just smile at the right times and keep my mouth shut, because I am almost on the edge of nerd, I only manage to do all right because I can sing. If you have a cool talent like that and are not stupid you'll be okay. I'm not saying that singing could of saved Andrew Bookman. Your nephew I am sorry to say was a grade-A world class nerd and singing probably would of just made things worse for him. Do you know he told everybody that after graduation he was going to go eat strawberries in Denmark? Who _says_ that? Strawberries and new potatoes and the grave of Hans Christian Andersen. People called him The Little Mermaid for weeks. Bubble-Butt, your too ugly to get into another country. Did you notice? Were you afraid that defending him would make things worse? If so you were probably right. It was best to just ignore it. There are places that once you step in, you can't get out.

So, you're me, Yolanda, lying in bed. There's a tap at the window. Tap tap tap. Annoying. You think its a tree branch on the glass. You get up and open the window, even if its winter you would open it to break off the branch and get rid of that awful tapping. So you open the window, lets say its winter like now, February, the worst time of year, with no holidays in sight except Valentines Day a.k.a. National Torture Day, and not being able to sleep is just the last straw, so you open the window and theres a small black shape looking at you from the yard. You stand there, because what is it? Too big for a cat or even a racoon. And then it rears up. It hauls itself up and its tall, its snuffling at the window, and its eyes are small red lights and it says in this voice that comes from no voicebox, this voice in your head, it says Come on girl lets get walking.

Where are we going?

Down to the creek.

I don't want to.

It laughs: Eee, eee, eee.6

I don't want to. But your already putting your knee on the sill. Walkdog reaches its paws up and catches you as you fall out. It smells like drains. It puts you down on the ground and crouches on all fours. Bam, just like that, its small again. It sets off walking over the snow, and you follow. Your sliding down the slope at the end of the yard. Now you're on Varsity Ave. It's all dark out. I don't know if you're crying. Would you cry? Some of the stars are gold, the same color as the streetlights.

Now you are going to walk for a long time.

You might walk as far as the Wolf-Boy, Carlton O'Neill. Just trying to get back home again. I know for a fact you could walk to Indiana easy, like in the song "Indiana Morning" by Blueswoman Maisie Oates.7

Walking and walking. You'd see a lot. Maybe you'd like it since you are such a fan of Research. You could do all the Research you wanted, walking up and down the country. I think you'd be cold though. You'd sleep in ditches and drains. Curled up against Walkdog for warmth. Walkdog's voice in you murmuring, Time to get up.

3. Conclusion

In this conclusion I will write about why I chose Walkdog for this assignment and why its important.

I chose Walkdog because I heard about it from Andy. What happened is two boys who you definitely know so I won't repeat their names slammed into Andy in the hall and sent his papers flying. This happened on a daily basis. _Every day._ You have to ask yourself why Andy was always carrying stuff in his arms when he also wore a backpack. Why not keep everything in the backpack and then when people banged into him he would fall but his stuff would not be all over the hallway. Theres a sign above your desk that says "Nobody is Unteachable", but Mrs. Patterson I beg to disagree. In this matter Andy was 100% Unteachable. So there his papers went as usual and these two boys enjoyed kicking them and leaving footprints on them. One of the papers slid over to me and almost touched my foot. I didn't pick it up, because unlike Andy I am Teachable, but I glanced down at it. There was a drawing of something black and blobby with red eyes and underneath it it said Walkdog.

You could say that that was when I got the idea for this assignment even though you had not given it to us yet. I got curious about Walkdog. It seemed like such a weird thing to draw, even for Andy. I asked my parents about it at dinner and they'd never heard of it. Sounds like an urban legend, my mom said later, when I told her about my Research. Mm-hm, said Dad. Mom did remember when Carlton O'Neill got found in the reservation. That poor man, she said, God bless him. She said that's probably where Walkdog got started, and poor wandering Carlton is the only Walkdog there ever was. I asked how she would explain the song "Indiana Morning" which was recorded back in 1955. Oh that's just a metaphor she said, and I said, a metaphor for what? She looked uncertain. Alcoholism?8

When you gave us this assignment I went to the Union Market and found Andy at his parent's booth and asked him about his picture that said Walkdog, and whether it was something that would be good for a paper on "Know Your Environment", and he said it would be awesome. Andy was always saying things were awesome, and he meant it. He beamed at me from under the leaves of a plant being sold in the stall next to his. He didn't even think that I might of come out there to mess with him or make fun of him even though that was the most likely scenario. Mrs. Patterson, Andy was special. I know you know that. I know you saw him getting picked on every day. When he raised his hand in class all it took was for somebody to shout _Bookman!_ and the whole class would burst out in these awful little giggles. They didn't even have to use his nasty nickname. Imagine how it would feel if just your name made other people laugh. You never batted an eye, you just said Yes, Andy? like it was all normal and like I said before it was probably the right thing to do. And then Andy would say whatever he was going to say, always something smart, while people made fart noises and snickered or whatever. You know Mrs. Patterson, this school is actually hell. I don't know why everyone acted shocked when Andy got beat up the way he did. Special assembly and Principal Reed on the stage with his voice all wobbly. He said we must realize we are becoming men and women. He's right about that. But that doesn't mean we're changing. It just means we're bigger now, big enough to put somebody in the hospital.9

It's true. People act like highschool students are kids and need to be taken care of all the time but we are actually adults. If this was the Middle Ages we'd all be married or in wars and you, Mrs. Patterson, you'd be considered a very old lady. And the truth is, you are a very old lady. The day after Andy got beat you looked so frail. You had that old lady's look of being lost in the world. The truth is, Mrs. Patterson, that a lot of us kids are married and a lot of us are in wars. Andy was both.10

Now when I think about why I chose Walkdog, I think I really chose Andy. I think I chose him even before I knew it. That black, bulky shape on the paper was just an excuse. I wish I could end my paper there and say that getting to know Andy was getting to know my environment. You might give me an A for a paper like that, or you might give me an F, but I wouldn't care because I would be going over to Andy's after school, or I would have invited him over to my house, and on National Torture Day we would have watched dumb horror movies in my basement and laughed. My head on his shoulder oh God Mrs. Patterson where do you think he is? Is he still alive? Is he with Walkdog? Is that it? Is he walking around? Is he going to appear in thirtysome years in the forest like Carlton O'Neill and are people going to start calling him another Wolf-Boy? I went to look for Carlton, you know, after Andy disappeared, but I couldn't find him, he's not at his mother's house anymore. I found his mother and she blew a ton of cigarette smoke in my face and said He gone for a walk and shut the door on me. Is that where Andy is? Just gone for a walk? If I'd known I never would have gone back to his house for the conjure mat like he asked me. Yes, I went back for it. He told me where to find the spare key and I went into his house and got the mat from his room. His stupid action figures staring at me in their creepy way. The mat was on top of the filing cabinet. It felt prickly and weird in my hand. I put it in a plastic bag that used to have my lunch in it and stuck it in my purse and went back to the hospital. Maybe I should of known something was wrong, but I just wanted to make Andy happy for once, and I could tell the flowers I'd brought him weren't doing anything. He just sat in the bed and stared at nothing. White bandages over his nose, white light everywhere. He looked really drained there, drained and small. I didn't know how to touch him, he looked so hurt. I was crying but he didn't seem to notice. He just said in this muffled voice: Get me the conjure mat. Okay, I said, still crying. Andy's parents were outside. Are you a friend? his mom asked, and I said, I'm his girlfriend.

Some girlfriend, right?

I never went anywhere with him. Never went in his front door. Never, ever walked home with him from school.

I should have walked home with him. I should have. _I should have walked him home._

So now you know why I couldn't finish my solo at the service they held in his honor. Praying for news of the missing Andrew Bookman. The choir kept going and I just stopped. I saw you out there in a pew, looking at me, so sad. I couldn't keep going. My voice was just gone, cut off, there was nothing but air, like I was all full of dust, like I didn't have a voicebox.

Mrs. Patterson this is my thesis statement: _Even though not much has been written about it, Walkdog is an important part of North American wildlife._ I hope you can see why Walkdog is important. I hope you can help me. The fact is I think your nephew conjured up Walkdog using the conjure mat. I think he felt so alone, so abandoned by everybody, including you and me, that he did something drastic, he summoned up Walkdog and Walkdog came. I want you to tell me if I'm right. Did you know that conjuring grandmother? What was she like? Did she leave you anything? Did she tell you the counterspell?

I want you to tell me that yes, you know a spell, or you have your own conjure mat. I want you to tell me how to find Andy. I need him. Mrs. Patterson this hound dog is walking me and he's walking me hard. Everywhere I go I hear his footstep and his splash.

If you can't give me a spell then I want you to tell me that Walkdog is not a devil or anything scary but that its a helper and a friend. I want you to tell me that Andy's not scared right now and not alone. He's just walking. He's doing Research, which is another kind of Nerd Heaven. Maybe he's walked to Indiana by now. Maybe he'll get to Denmark. Maybe he'll swim with Walkdog who can stay underwater for three days. I see this boy in the waves, he's holding onto Walkdog's small black ears and heading out to where its strawberry season. I always see him in his hospital gown, the way he was the last time, the way I imagine he got up one night, his conjure mat in his hand, and walked through the hospital in the ghostly light and opened the doors and there was Walkdog waiting, black and low to the ground. Come on lets get walking. I want you to tell me that Andy's not going to come back all skinny and beat-up like Carlton O'Neill. I want you to tell me that he's not cold. Somebody's always with him. He's got protection. No one will ever hurt him again.11

* * *

Footnotes

1. The reason Walkdog is supposed to eat excrament is simply common sense, because what kind of fish is it eating in the sewer? Also we can assume that Walkdog has a seriously powerful gut and high-level immune system because eating random fish out of Jersey creeks will kill you. If Walkdog can eat bugged-out radioactive fish it would probably consider excrament a healthy snack.

2. Marjorie Wilson, "Sounds of the Jersey Night", in Voices of Nature, ed. Steven Wilkins, Rutgers University Press, 1980, p. 115. "Then there is the Walkdog, a creature without a voicebox, known only by its footstep and its splash."

3. Facts about Andrew: fat (nickname: "Bubble-Butt"), glasses, always reading (and his last name is Bookman!), started calling himself "Andy" when he started highschool, which anybody should of known that was a stupid thing to do, he should of just stuck with Andrew, even Drew would be cooler, but no, he had to be Andy. Also, his aunt is a teacher (you) which does not help anybody I am sorry to tell you. The cloud of nerd gas surrounding Andy is so strong it could make your eyes water. People only go near him to mess with him. As a teacher you probably know this unless you are unbelieveably clueless.

4. Source: private conversation with Andrew Bookman. Andy's personal favorite of these theories was #3. Mostly because of the name "Canewolf" which must mean sugarcane which is something we don't have a lot of here in Jersey. Andy's grandmother, who I guess was possibly a relative of yours, died and left him what he says is a mat made of Walkdog hair. His grandma called it her "conjure mat". This mat supposedly came from the Caribbean somewhere which Andy also says supports his theory. He kind of lost me at that point-he talks really fast when he gets going, and his face, which is already oily, starts getting oilier than ever, I mean really impossibly shiny, which is distracting-but it was something about slave routes and stopping points and getting from Angola or somewhere to Charleston. I don't know. Poor Andy. He had on a white button-down shirt. Big sweat stains under the arms. It was like he didn't want to be normal.

5. This note is not exactly related to the above, I just want to clarify the previous note in which I named my source as a private conversation with Andrew Bookman, but I also said earlier that people only go near him to mess with him. I want to be clear that I myself never messed with your nephew in any way, also I did not go near him at school because to be frank I did not want to get contaminated by his nerd gas. I went to Union Market on the weekend because as you must know that is where Andy goes every Saturday to run a coin swap booth with his parents. Andy's parents are also terrible nerds, his dad in combat boots, his mom in a red wig, both of them obsessed with antique coins. Their super nice which just makes it worse. I guess you know that though. You certainly didn't stop by their booth while I was there.

6. This is the sound of the Walkdog laugh as you hear it in your head. Carlton O'Neill who was abducted by Walkdog when he was nine years old and let go again for some reason when he was thirty-six described the sound for the Star Ledger. "It sounded like a kid locked up and crying or a train whistle far away." "'Wolf-Boy' Found in Livingston Reservation", The Star Ledger, August 14 2005, p. 1. Carlton O'Neill was skinny and a mess when he was found. He said he'd been to Canada and the farthest tip of Argentina. All on foot. They gave him a pen to write down who he was and when he remembered how to write his name he fainted.

Andy who was a Walkdog fanatic had this newspaper article tacked to his bulletin board. He also had Carlton O'Neill's signature on an index card. He had actually tracked the guy down and gotten his autograph. Carlton lived with his mother in East Orange at that point. I don't know where he is now.

7. Indiana morning, I'm as low as I can be.  
Indiana morning, I'm as low as I can be.  
Went to walk my hound dog, but now he's walking me.

This song is from the album Indiana Morning by Blueswoman Maisie Oates. I heard it at Andy's house which is also where I read the article about Carlton O'Neill, and also I may as well say since its part of my Research that I saw and touched the "conjure mat" Andy inherited from his grandma. I am wondering if you know anything about this mat? Have you ever seen it? Its gray and hairy and about as big around as those things you put on the table under hot dishes. I said I thought it would be black and Andy said he doesn't know why its gray, he thinks maybe since its cut off the Walkdog its lacking essential oils. That was in his room which is like Nerd Heaven, full of action figures and model planes. You can't touch anything or Andy starts freaking out. Obviously I would not be caught dead going in the front door at Andy's house. I went in the back. He opened a window.

8. This is Mom's explanation for most bad things. It is based on personal experience because my grandfather (her dad) drank himself to death. In my opinion this is the reason she married a security guard (my dad) who works at the same bank where Mom is a teller. Security is her thing. This is my parent's week: Bank, Bank, Bank, Bank, Bank, Groceries, Church. After graduation I am going to Rutgers and my mom assumes I will major in Accounting. Accounting is a good secure choice. I want to major in Music. The only person I have told this to (besides you) is Andy Bookman. It was after we listened to "Indiana Morning". He said I should do Music if I want, maybe I should even go to an arts school instead of Rutgers. I never thought of that, I said. I felt like such an idiot. But Andy didn't laugh. He looked calm and thoughtful. Its hard to get started, he said. Its hard to get going by yourself. He was looking at my boots, which I'd left by the window. Snow melting off them on the floor.

9. They cornered him down by the creek. Behind the fucking police station. I am sorry, I don't care that I'm swearing in my paper. Why did he have to walk that way? Why couldn't he have gone down South Orange Ave. like everyone else? Why didn't I invite him to my house? Do you think Andy Bookman has gotten invited anywhere since seventh grade? They cornered him down by the creek. They yanked off his backpack and threw it in the water. They broke his nose. They broke three of his ribs. They stepped on his wrist and broke that too. They kicked him all over, those same two boys that I won't repeat their names. Nice boys that everybody knows. All they got was suspended because they're sorry. Right behind the police station. Where were the police? Where was fucking Walkdog when Andy needed him? I went to the hospital after and Andy's father was crying in the hall.

10. His bed was so saggy. He'd probably slept there since he was six years old. It seemed too small. He had the best smile, a perfect dimple on either side. Long eyelashes that brushed my cheek. I don't want to ruin anything, I said, and he said what? and I said I don't want to mess up your trip to Denmark. I was already hoping he'd cancel and stay with me because even if I had my own money my parents would never let me to go Europe with a boy, not even a boy like Andy who was so sweet, its not secure, even though there is no place more secure than Andy's arms. He laughed and kissed me. Your not ruining anything. I love you. Model plane wings turning, shadows on the wall. Snow outside and the windows all blue. He hugged me and I just sank. There are places that once you step in, you can't get out.

11. To complete my Research here is the rest of the song "Indiana Morning".

If you got a dollar, why don't you give me half.  
If you got a dollar, come on and give me half.  
The stories I could tell you, they'd make a preacher laugh.

When I had a good man, the sun shone every day.  
When I had that good man, the sun shone every day.  
Now I need this whiskey to take the pain away.

Budworm in the cotton, beetle in the corn.  
Budworm in the cotton, beetle in the corn.  
Feel like I been walking since the day that I was born.

Hear that hound dog. Day that I was born.

* * *

©2014 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in _Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories,_ edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels _A Stranger in Olondria_ (2013) and _The Winged Histories_ (2016). Her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Her short stories have appeared in magazines such as _Lightspeed, Uncanny,_ and _Strange Horizons,_ and _Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy's_ 2015 and 2016 volumes.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# Name Calling

## Celeste Rita Baker | 3,500 words

Ah wake up every mahnin at tirteen minutes before tree. Imagine. Every fore-day mahnin, de same ting. Heart racin, palms sweatin, singin outta name. Any and all kinda name. Jaramogi, Hanako, Melissa, Ansgar, William. Ah write dem down. Ah have several notebooks just fulla de names. Me ain' know dese people, strangers all. Wouldn't none ah dem get ah invite to ah party ah mine. Ain' but bout tree or four people I could call on dis, me home island, good times or bad. Yet Ah calling dese names with force and command, knowing, knowing whatever a go on is for true and for sure.

Dis been goin on two years and ten months. Only two tings Ah could remember when Ah wake up, dat somebody had call me, call fo me, and dat somebody name was Ramona or Franklin or Marshall or whosoever it was dat time, dat night. Ah answer dem with dey own name, and it done. Me ain' ever hear de same name twice. Ah couldn't find nuttin in no dream books, none a de ole folks tell me nuttin. Ah ask de lottery ticket sellers and de obeah women, de one who does only wear black and de one who only wear white. De two a dem cross dey chest and spit on de ground, but dey say dey ain't heard bout dat befo. After dat me ain't talk bout it again, case people start talkin melee bout me. Ah use me manners generously, but Ah don't seem to be de kinda woman who does cling and be clung to. So widout no answer Ahda just write down de names and keep goin. What else Ah gon do?

But someting happenin now. Someting changin. Ah still wakin up. Is always two forty-seven in de mahnin. But me ain't gettin no name. And insteada feelin happy and rested, like Ah usedta feelin ever since Ah realize wasn't nuttin gon come of me gettin all wraut-up, insteada de refreshment Ah accustomed ta, mahnin come and Ah sufferin. Ah feel like Ah ain't turn off de stove when Ah done cook, ain't lock de door when Ah leave de house, ain't collect me pay when Ah finish work. Ah only gettin half a night sleep now, goin on tree months. First month people say, 'hey, Rhonda, you lose weight, you lookin good.' Now dey watch me like Ah have AIDS and nobody don get too close. Me hair brittle and fallin out and me eyes look like Ah packin fo a cruise on one a de big ships wha da come thru heh. Ah draggin thru de days in de hotel makin beds and swishin bathtubs, tips goin down down since Ah forget how ta smile. Emmanual don't come round no more, say Ah too grouchy. De children call from foreign, but Ah rush dem offa de phone. Inside Ah feel like somebody callin me all de time, bawlin out me name, callin fo me. Ah feel Ah always goin ta dem, answerin dem, and Ah just too too busy.

Me best girlfriend, she name Aundie, from when we was small togedda, back when de weather was hot and breezy, not heated and rainy like now, causin tourism ta drop off and halve everyone little piece a money, anyway, she, she take me ta her doctor. Say mine too modern-minded, like is science alone dat rule de world. Is cash money Ah have ta pay ta see she doctor, Dr. Anduze, and he come tellin me it's stress. Of course it's stress, but he ain't tell me what Ah could do bout it more dan eat, exercise, sleep, and pray. Is how else you tink I manage ta stay on de planet fifty-nine years? Ah just suck me teeth and turn off.

Den Aundie say she want us go ta Antler's Bay next week, where it quiet and peaceful. Is a harassment Ah say. Long car ride, short ferry ride on de choppy sea, next long ride inna hot bus full a strangers. Tuesday, me next day off, she wanta go. She had ta take de day off. Ah know she worried bout me. Ah ain't fight she. Ah say okay.

When time come ta board de bus ta da beach Aundie take one look at me face, even doh me ain't complainin, and she hire a taxi. De air conditionin hit me and it feel good. Ah close me eyes and just breathe. Ah feel Aundie take me hand in hers own. Names, old names, names Ah had done already write down swirlin round in me mind. Bolo, Gloria, Misha, Warren.

Taxi stop, we ain't at Antler's Bay, but some cleared patch a land near a beach Ah don't recognize. When de heat a de day hit me Ah feel dizzy and tink me belly callin ta me besides. Aundie lead me inta a wood-board house paint up in red yellow blue and white star shapes. De paint so new it buhnin me eyeballs. Ah glad when we pass up de porch steps and de open counter bar ta reach de insides. It make up like a restaurant, 'cept ain't no customers. A man, scrawny as a mangy dog, come in from behind a old sheet tacked up like a back door. He look at me and Ah look at him, and Ah know de two of we wanta run. If Aundie wasn't holdin me hand again tight tight, me feet woulda been meetin de hot sand inna steady rhythm.

"Oh, Lawd," he say, "Ah ain't seen one a you since me Granny died." He start ta shake like hummingbird wing but he make it over ta de counter bar while Aundie pull me ta sit down at a table by de window what so low it almost a door.

Aundie lea' me dere an go ova give de man a long tight hug and dey whisperin togedda. Den she come back sit by me.

He breathin hard like a horse, but he come and stand over us wid tree shot glasses full of someting dat look like bush tea and a bottle a Cruzan Rum. De tray rattlin so in he hand de noise makin me teeth chatter. Me head hurtin so bad is like Ah hearin thunder, seein fireworks, and feelin earthquake.

"Drink dis," he say, "it gon make it stop." He keep de tray rattlin in he tickskinned hands til he sit down in de frail-lookin stick chair.

Aundie tell me dis she great uncle from she Fahdda's side and he gon help me. Ah dig round in me bag lookin fo aspirin. No words ain't come ta me. No words Ah could say. Only names. Louder and louder. And Ah wonder how dey ain't bust out me eyes like tears.

"Drink dis first," he say, "den if you don' feel better in two minutes you could take you pills."

He pick up a glass and full it to de brim wid rum, then he extend it ta me, de liquid sloshin all over de table til ain't but a couple swallows left. Aundie make a face as she drink hers so Ah know it gon be nasty. By de time Ah rest de glass back on de tray, which coverin most of de small table, de noise in me head lessenin. Ah beginnin ta hear de waves from de beach and a old scratch band chune comin from da radio perch atop de bar. And Ah don't have ta concentrate on keepin me head from explodin.

And den he ask me.

"How long since you get a name?"

He watchin me steady. He two eye dem cover over wid de bluish screen some ole folks does use to filter out what dey ain't want ta see. He not shakin no mo. Bright pink tongue dart out and lick he cracked lips. Fast like lizard catch he dinner he reach out and grab me wrist, but gentle, fingers down on de tender insides like he takin me pulse. Ah too slow ta move now. A blink is like Ah sleepin.

"Uh huh, Ah see," he say, still holdin me.

"What, Unc Roo?" say Aundie, "what you see?" She sound like she gon cry, and Ah only see her cry two times in all dese forty-nine years since we was ten learning bamboula dance together.

"She is a Escort," he say ta Aundie. "She is an Escort and she don't self know it."

He holdin me wrist still, and he odda hand come cover me hand and stroke it like he tryin ta soothe a child. Still he talkin 'bout me like Ah ain't dere.

Pictures scrollin thru me mind like a book a postcards. Brown hands. Woman hands. Pictures, more dan photographs, more like memories, wid names across de bottom like captions. Me own hands, me own ring, what me own husband, Daniel—who living in peace and glory now twelve years already—had give me in high school, what only fit on me pinkie now, de gold flashin in de sun 'gainst a background of a blue knit cap coverin de head dat Ah'm pressin facedown in snow finer and brighter dan sand. Ah look up while Ah waitin fo de strugglin body unda me ta stop squirmin, an Ah watchin a valley a green and anodda snow-covered mountain beyond dat. Gregory. Blue hat name is Gregory. Den is pearly pink polish on me fingernails as Ah grab de ankle a de lady in de wide-leg pants on de marble stairs. Camille. Me hands strugglin ta hold de steerin wheel ta de left as he fight ta spin it ta de right. Adolfo. Me two hand dem splayed wide wide and Ah caan even span de broad back, naked and sweaty in de hot sun. Ah push and he fall right off de bamboo scaffold. Lin. Fatima at home cookin while she Muddah sleepin in de next room only tinkin bout cutting she wrists. Is my hands put de force behind de knife.

Is dreams Ah tell meself. Ain't real. Too many movies. Too much TV. But Ah startin ta shake an shiver from right below me breastbone, right where me soul sit in me body. People been callin me, callin me, callin me. Dey names roll round in me head, in me mouth, like when de boys dem pitchin marbles and dey break de pack. Each one different, dey scatter wid a sound like hard glass crackin, 'cept dey don't break, just careen off one anodda and be gone, while anodda little group start ta join and somebody, somebody wid brown hands and Daniel's ring bowl inta dem and dey fly apart. Ah start ta sweat and everyting inside wanta come out. Ah feel Ah need ta pee and coocoo and vomit. Like Ah could void the whole of meself.

"She is a Escort, Ah tell you."

Aundie watching me and smilin. She proud, Ah see it in de way she purse she lips. Glad she bring me here so we could get some answers. But de tears dem drippin and she squintin she eyes so she could see better when she ask, lookin from me ta Uncle Roo, "So what dat mean?"

He watch me and Ah nod. Lemme hear what is true.

De old man leh go me hand den, and pour anodda drink a rum fo each of we, Aundie eye leakin like a standpipe all de while.

"All right," he say, "hush up, now." So calm and slow is no more dan a whisper.

Aundie reaching fo me, pattin me back. Ah have me arms dem wrap round me center core, holding meself togedda.

"You is one who does shove people across when dey ain't know it's time ta go. You notice dat, right? How is always a surprise? Dey don be sick or nothin' right?"

Me head bow down. Ah so shame.

A wave crash on de beach, and Ah hear it like it ain't past de rustlin of de wild grass growin in de sandy soil, past de empty taxi wid de driver door standin open while de man gon ta wade since Aundie tell him ta wait. De wave wash me eardrums like it ain't past de lonely sea grape tree what bearin fruit not yet ripe. Ah hear de wave. De names recede.

"How long since you get a name?"

"Tree months," I tell him, "since February."

He eyes turn off den. Seem like insteada dey seein de outside a him, is like he just turn dem round and he watchin he own mind. A strong breeze blow thru de window and he turn he face ta it slow slow, like a blind man locatin a songbird. Ah watch as de wind blow a bead a sweat sideways 'cross he cheek til it get catch up in he scraggly beard hair and make a downward turn.

"You strong," he say. "Hold out long time. But it ain't gon go til it finish. Tree years is de most Ah ever hear anybody do. Den it pass, just like it come."

"Oh, Gawd in heaven!" I call out, "in two more months I gon dead, too!"

"Okay, okay, what ahyou mean? What you talking, Uncle Roo? Whatall goin on?"

"She mubbe gettin a name she insides caan lea her do."

"Do? Do? What you mean do? De woman sick, not workin!"

Aundie bolt up and look like she gon bust a clout on Uncle Roo. She neck veins sticking out and jumpin like cold rain on a midday hot roof.

"Hush now, gal. I gon tell you just now."

Uncle Roo rise up and stand tall over Aundie. Aundie is five eleven and does move suitcases off de ramps at de airport all day. She big, but he bigger, a long tall drink a water. Clear skin and boney. Dey watch each other like cock in de ring and Ah start to giggle.

De rum mubbe get me, Ah know. Ah ain't eat nuttin since a piece a dumbread and tea last night. Or maybe is de whole ting. So schupid. So sad. I dere laughing.

Even tho Aundie body still square off with Uncle Roo she eyes rove over ta check fo me. Uncle Roo take dat as surrender and put he hand on she shoulder, pressin she ta sit down. When he touch she she flinch lil bit, but she sink so gracefully ta de low chair dat was like seein a feather float ta de ground. Dat set me off again and even as Ah tinkin on big-leg Aundie as a feather me tears wellin up, causin if Aundie is powerless dan I mubbe gon dead for true true.

Uncle Roo say how Ah working fo de Lawd in mysterious ways by taking people through death's door while Ah sleeping. How is a job some people does get and dey have to do it. How Ah meet up now to a name, a person, me ain't want to acknowledge and I resisting. How Ah have to do it, leave meself do it, or Ah gon end up doing it for real.

"Wha you mean, fo real?" Ah ask, "ain't real? Dese people don't die? Dey is real people anyway?" Me ain't know. Me ain't never look dem up or nothing.

"Dey real, yes. You could probably find dey obituaries in dey hometown newspapers if you had dere last names. You don't doh, do you? Me Granny didn't get last names. But me Grannie's was all from round here. People she know. Dat was real hard on her, she feel guilty all de time, she tell me, til she find someone what know what goin on, like you find me."

Ah nod me head. Is like de line in de ole Lord Pretender song, "somebody suffering more dan you."

"So now you mubbe get a name a somebody you know, and if you ain't do it de way it's 'posed to be done, den you gon do it in you wakin hours and it gon be worse fo everybody."

Aundie mouth catching flies, but Ah know wha he mean. Is like me brain take a breath. I feel relieved. Like when you food ain't digest and it sittin on you heart, den somebody pat you on you back, give you some comfort and it move off.

Uncle Roo rise up and go off inta da back room. He moving tings and making noise like he straining, finally he come back with a green glass bottle wid a cork stopper. He dusting de ting off wid he pant leg, rolling it round on he thighs. I could see de insides swirling round, mixing what probably ain't been touched in twenty years.

"You must drink dis," he say, putting de bottle directly in me bag, "tonight. You must bathe in painkiller bush bath, and clothe youself in something white. Drink dis right at you bedside, right after you get up off you knees. De whole ting. It taste all right. Won't make you sick or nuttin neida. When you wake up, de blockage be gon and you could move on."

Is my eyes leaking now I so grateful for de help. Aundie pullin me up wid one hand and rootin in she purse wid de other. Uncle Roo backin away like is now he seeing ghosts.

"Unh-unh," he say, "don't try to give me nuttin, Aundie, or you neida. Just do wha Ah say and come tell me so next two months when you feeling better."

Is more dan tears now, me chest heavin and me sobs sounding like conch horn. Nobody ain't have ta call back de taxi man, he a come running and we get inta de car and be gone.

• • • •

I never even get ta drink de tonic. It gone ta de bottom of de sea.

• • • •

It happen when we leaving de ferry boat. De boat tie up tight to de pier and we walking down de board plank ta de dock. De white lady ahead a Aundie slip and she scream and flail round trying ta right sheself. Aundie jump when she hear de scream and I jump too, and me pocketbook sway into Aundie backside and dat startle she even more. Ah remember like Ah living it again. Like Ah living it for both a we. She were holding onta de rope guide wid she left hand. One a de boatman, four people in front to de right, all blinding in he white shirt and white pants, one leg on de pier, one leg on de boat, steadying people as dey crossing over. Wasn't nobody close behind Aundie but me. When me pocketbook swing and slap she ass she reach to swat it away, just while she body reacting to de woman scream, just when she release she weight from she left leg for she next step on she right. She right knee buckle and she crumple right down on she hands and knees. She tip right over, sideways, and as she falling, she unfolding, like a paper fan, like de woman in church does—snap—whip dat ting open. Wid a pow Aundie hit de wata, lengthwise, tween de dock and de slimy green a de boat sides. She legs and body sink right under while she head remain aloft. I grab de rope ting wid me two hand and let me body slide down inta de wata feet first. But Ah too late. Ah know it's de waves making de boat and de dock knock togedda, but what happen is de sea take a deep breath and on de inhale Mami Wata contract everyting tight, tight, de boat and de dock, Aundie's ribs and Aundie's lungs and like day and night does meet, is so life and death had meet in me sweet friend Aundie. When Ah reach face to face wid Aundie in de wata, she rum breath expel inta me face and Ah breathe it in for me own. Red spit bubbles come outta she mouth and she staring at me hard wid she eyes wide in question, like de time I give she de plane ticket to Puerto Rico for she Christmas and she watch me like I make mistake. I brace me arms aside she breasts, under she arms, holding she up and tryna keep de knocking of de boat from reaching she. Blow after blow landing on me back as de ferry rocking wid de waves, but Ah know she dying already, right here in me arms. Right here in de sea.

• • • •

De hospital tell me me two legs dem crush like matchsticks and me arms and shoulders all mash up from holding back de ferry. But Aundie's body not broke, 'cept for where she ribs had puncture she lungs in Mami Wata's first embrace.

• • • •

Ah dreaming a name every night again. And me ain't feel like me soul hiccupping. Ah know I have more names to go, but Ah do de hardest one already.

©2014 by Celeste Rita Baker. Originally published in _Abyss and Apex._ Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Celeste Rita Baker is a middle-aged Black Caribbean woman from the Virgin Islands living in Harlem, New York City. She has been writing and not writing, thinking about writing and thinking about not writing for years now, hence her output is very low. She hopes to pick up the pace, since, most probably, she no longer has "time longer dan rope."

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight. 

# NONFICTION  
edited by Tobias S. Buckell

# Learning to Dream in Color

## Justina Ireland | 800 words

I didn't grow up dreaming in color.

I dreamed in white.

Not my literal dreams, the thoughts that flickered within my mind's eye while I dozed. In those dreams I was a frizzy-haired black girl with unkempt hair and an overbite, same as I was in my daily life. Those nightly dreams were cast in shades of brown.

But my fantasies, those daydreams that get us through the dull moments of the day: the bus ride to school, a teacher reciting multiplication tables for the thousandth time, the lecture from your father about the importance of school, those were white. Me, a princess with golden hair long enough to escape a tower.

Me, a warrior woman defending my land against barbarian invaders.

Me, a vicious sorceress feared throughout the land and for good reason.

In my head I was many women.

But I was also always white.

I became convinced after a while that if I were white, magic would happen for me. Obviously it was my skin holding me back from having the adventures I read about in books. I only became more convinced of the fact after reading _The Hero and the Crown,_ a book in which the main character's pale skin and red hair marks her as different from the rest of her darker-skinned family. Of course, Aerin was truly a princess, even though the rest of her family doubts her royal blood. She was white, and everyone knows princesses are white.

And they were. Every fantasy world I read about was inhabited strictly by white people. Beautiful white people. Petty white people. White people with every color of hair imaginable. They were the stars in these fantastical lands. I wanted what they had, the magic, the drama, the intrigue. And most of all, the fair skin.

And so I always dreamed in white.

The funny thing is, I'm not the only one.

• • • •

Whenever people talk about making fantasy more inclusive the focus tends to be on adding realms of discovery, broadening the conversation to include fantastical worlds that exist outside of the European fantasy tradition. Why, exactly, is that?

Rarely do we look at the existing canon and agitate to change that. It seems like such an obvious place to start, but for most of us it isn't. We chafe at adding black people to the settings of European fantasy, relying on arguments of historical accuracy and tradition. What part of history had dragons and complex magic systems? And slavery was also a tradition for a very, very long time. Few would ever consider holding on to that institution.

Still, others sidestep these arguments altogether. Rather than adding and elevating people of color within the existing fantasy story frames, the decision is to add new frames to the conversation for people of color to project their stories upon. Which is admirable, but essentially changes nothing.

And you can see this for yourself: most calls for diverse (a word bandied about so much that it's lost all meaning) or multicultural fantasy specifies non-European-based fantasy, as though fantasy worlds based on other cultures haven't been white-washed just as much as their European-based cousins. It is a flawed idea that to make fantasy inclusive we must force writers, and most especially writers of color, to design new story frames upon which to hang their tales.

This focus on fantasy worlds from cultures other than the ones we know comes from a good place, but it is functionally corrupt. These calls emanate from a desire to both broaden the current storytelling frames and preserve existing, wholly white story frames. After all, it isn't as though no one is publishing European-based fantasy with an all-white cast. Those stories are multitudinous. Rather, by forcing tellers of multicultural/non-white fantasy to create new frames we are still, in our hearts, dreaming in white first and all other colors second. This is what a colonized imagination, an imagination in which white is the first, best answer, and all others are secondary, looks like.

This is why we talk about people of color destroying fantasy. It means breaking down the existing story frames that rely strictly on a white, European default. It means building new frames that are wide and broad enough to include all. It means populating a European-based fantasy with black elves, Latino dwarves, and a hapless Chinese farm boy. It means making Bilbo Baggins Samoan or casting Snow White as Aleutian. It means to make all stories fully inclusive, not just those set off to the side with an eye toward exoticism and white voyeurism.

We need fantasy worlds that don't rely on a palette of whiteness. The colors we dream in shouldn't be an accent to an overwhelmingly white construct. Rather, all the colors should be visible in discernible measure. Anyone should be able to find magic.

Fantasy belongs to everybody. So let's all dream in color.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Justina Ireland enjoys dark chocolate, dark humor, and is not too proud to admit that she's still afraid of the dark. She lives with her husband, kid, and dog in Pennsylvania. She is the author of _Vengeance Bound_ and _Promise of Shadows,_ both currently available from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers. Her essay "Me, Some Random Guy, and the Army of Darkness" appears in _The V-Word,_ an anthology of personal essays by women about having sex for the first time, published by Beyond Words (S&S). Her writing has appeared in _Story Magazine, Book Riot,_ and _Fireside Fiction._ And her forthcoming book _Dread Nation_ will be available in 2018 from the HarperCollins imprint Balzer and Bray. You can find Justina on twitter as @justinaireland or visit her website justinaireland.com.

# Give Us Back Our Fucking Gods

## Ibi Zoboi | 1,600 words

Creation myths are the stuff of old, intuitive science. They are the stories that attempt to explain the source of the universe and the very beginnings of life. Creation myths are not synonymous with folktales, animal stories, or playful allegories that instill morals and values. They are, ultimately, our embellished truths—complete with fucking gods, incest, unrequited love, lust, vengeance, and war. These are the fundamental values that birthed humanity, civilizations, and empires. And as a native Haitian, a descendant of Africans who have experienced the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, as well as a great-granddaughter of those who've fought in the Haitian revolution, I know this much is true: we've been stripped of our fucking gods.

In Haitian Vodou mythology, a serpent fucked a rainbow, and thus, the sky and sea, the sun and earth, the Haitian people, and all of humanity were created (in that order). Yes, it's hard to imagine a serpent and a rainbow getting it on. Much like it is hard to visualize one's actual parents, maybe. I suppose this sort of mental quantum leap backwards to the big bang that gave way to our existence creates either psychological trauma or ecstatic revelation, depending on the circumstances of our conception, be it out of love or hate. This inceptive love or hate determines our birth, our life, our worldview and cosmology, and ultimately our cultural death.

The primordial white serpent Dambalah is the sky god for the Dahomey people of Guinea and Benin. He is the beginning of all life, and thus, with his seven-thousand coils, is essentially the twists and turns of DNA strands. Through Dambalah, we know that life begins with the spiral. Science confirms the same—our genetic coding is embedded within spiraling DNA strands. Within the seven-thousand coils of Dambalah are our cultural and ancestral memory—the psyche of our collective history. We revere the flexibility of the serpent, how it can wrap itself around any and everything taking the shape of the great Maker. Flexibility and ease of movement are life itself in Haitian Vodou.

Yet, in other parts of our world, serpents are deemed evil. This connotation of a snake as sinister and conniving dates back to Norse myths, where it was guardian of the underworld symbolizing death and chaos. This is also the case in Judeo-Christian mythology, where the serpent was responsible for "the fall of Man."

During colonialism, when enslaved Africans were brought to the new world by the Portuguese, British, French, and Spanish, they were forced to denounce their traditions and do away with their fucking gods—the same gods that birthed them and guided them through life's twists and turns. For Africans who arrived in Saint-Domingue, what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the old African gods simply merged with the new saints. They didn't quite fuck. There was no love, no hate even. It was simply a recognition and a gentle nod to universal truths. So in order to appease the white slave masters in the new world, Africans in Saint-Domingue hid their gods behind European saints. Thus, Dambalah wore the mask of Saint Patrick, who had banished the snakes out of Ireland, symbolically doing away with paganism and evil. The serpent god Dambalah became associated with the nation without serpents. The rainbow serpent Ayida-Wedo became the Immaculate Conception. No symbolic snakes had entered her womb and penetrated the holy egg that was to become the lord and savior. We Africans were clever in this way, pretending to condemn our traditions by discreetly worshipping their veiled counterparts. If we had a god of love and fertility, surely there was a patron saint for those same values, however warped and twisted. Though in this process of masking our truths, we chipped away at our gods, stripped them of their power in our lives. While they were still the fucking gods who birthed us, we worshipped them from a distance as if we'd been adopted by new mothers and fathers. Our memory of them faded and blurred. Or we outright turned our backs on them to embrace monotheism. Otherwise, we were pagans and heathens, like Saint Patrick's snakes in Ireland, in the eyes of our masters.

Fantasy in literature is the stuff of old and new gods. We pull from our collective memory of fucking gods to create worlds where magic, monsters, and mayhem live. The Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Roman, and Greek pantheon served as foundation for many of Western Literature's epic masterpieces. From Homer to Tolkien and Neil Gaiman to George R. R. Martin, white men and their fucking gods have been at the forefront of fantasy literature. They place themselves at the center of their own stories, and thus, create new mythologies where they are made both hero and god. They create and birth themselves over and over, immortalizing their story and truths within the pages of volumes and tomes. This sort of perpetual homage and constant reverence is ritual drama and ceremony, in the same way that African traditions require libations and songs and prayers to uphold the memory of our fucking gods. This is how culture is preserved. This is how we continually breathe life into the very thing that birthed us, so that we can continue to live.

However, as for people of color all over the globe who've been stripped of their fucking gods through colonization, how can we begin to revere our cosmic mothers and fathers in the form of fantasy literature? How can we uphold our respective mythologies and preserve them within published pages so that we can immortalize our truths for all of eternity? Especially when others, who still have access to their own fucking gods, dig away at ours after we've been collectively told they were evil and perverse.

This brings to mind the story of Yurugu in Dogon mythology. The Dogon of Mali are some of the most scientifically advanced indigenous people ever to be observed by cultural anthropologists. Their understanding of the cosmos and the universe even without the contraptions of technology far surpasses Western science. They have a god of chaos and evil, of course. Amma, the sky goddess, nested her twin children in the great cosmic egg, one of whom was Yurugu. In an act of rebellion, Yurugu prematurely abandoned this egg, the very thing that was supposed to nurture him into birth, and descended into earth. Realizing that he was alone in the universe and without a female counterpart, he returned to the cosmic egg in search of his twin, Yasigi. Amma had placed her under the care of the protective twins called Nommo. Upon encountering his mother, Amma, he procreated with her instead. This vile and incestuous act against the cosmic mother brought about a great disaster in the universe of the Dogon. It is the single source of evil and destruction.

All indigenous mythologies in our world have a god of chaos. Everything was once birthed. Gods fucked, and then good, evil, love, or hate was born. Fantasy literature allows us to pull from this idea, and this is where we can begin to tell our truths if we peel away at what was force-fed to us about other gods whose stories have no place or value in our history—white men with their swords and proclamations of godlike power over the universe. What if in our fantasy literature we take back our fucking gods and dismiss the names of the fathers of evil and chaos? It would be like denouncing our foster and adoptive parents in search of our birth mothers and fathers. If our collective lives have been reduced to existing within margins—poverty, oppression, violence, and disenfranchisement—then we have to look back to those forces that cultivated this reality. Were these circumstances the product of our birth or our upbringing? Do we blame our cosmic parents? Were they fucking out of hate or love? Was it incest or rape? Because if nothing but chaos exists around us, then this cosmic fucking must have been an act of violence if we were to follow the patterns in world mythology. If we don't take back our loving, nurturing gods—the wise and life-affirming serpent and his rainbow wife, for example—then we will collectively live the realities of the energies that we believe to have created us.

In order to write fantasy stories that are epic and dig deep into our mythological truths and history, we have to know the names and faces of our fucking gods, or at the very least, have a seed of a memory of them to know that we were not born out of chaos, that we are not the purveyors of evil across the globe. N.K. Jemisin has done this by subverting European tropes in fantasy literature to cast a light on the overarching themes of oppression and power in our world. Nnedi Okorafor has highlighted the breadth and depth of both godlike magic and human reality in African cosmology and merged it with Western technology to tell a profound truth about our existence: we have our own magic, and we have our own fucking gods.

The dearth of people of color writing fantasy literature is directly related to our collective proximity to what was stolen from us; pried out of our hands, hearts, and minds; or stomped out and beat out of us—our gods. Our beloved fucking gods.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ibi Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and immigrated to the U.S. when she was four years old. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she was a recipient of the Norma Fox Mazer Award. Her award-winning and Pushcart-nominated writing has been published in _Haiti Noir, The Caribbean Writer, The New York Times Book Review, The Horn Book Magazine,_ and _The Rumpus,_ among others. Her debut YA novel _American Street_ (Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins) is due out in Winter 2017. Her debut Middle Grade novel, _My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich_ (Dutton/Penguin), is forthcoming.

# Saving Fantasy

## Karen Lord | 1,100 words

There are standard, academic definitions of fantasy and its subgenres, but I will not be using them in this essay. I am a writer, a worldbuilder, a sociologist, and an occasional critic. My definition of fantasy and my expectations of the genre are a product of all those things.

Fantasy is more than a Tolkien pastiche set in a vaguely pseudo-European, quasi-mediaeval world, and published in a series of very thick books. Fantasy can be a story in a large, complex universe with a high-stakes plot that plays out over several locations and a large cast, told via various media including short stories or graphic novels. Or it can be a small, intimate glimpse into the soul of a protagonist revealed through a blend of real and surreal happenings. It can even be both at the same time.

Fantasy is anthropological and political and may even be linguistically inspired if the author has that skill and interest. Systems of magic (a form of power like money or social standing), government, and religion take centre stage. Physical geography, biology, and physics may have supporting roles. But beyond the influence of social science, language, and history, fantasy remains a genre which is rooted in myth—real-world myth, adapted myth, constructed myth—and myth is a marvellous, variable lens through which to view the human condition.

Myth can function as wish fulfilment, propaganda, cautionary tale, and refuge from reality. I have read authors who do not realise that their work contains a myth, nor are they aware what their chosen myth is revealing about them. A fixed preference for the myths of Middle Earth, the Middle Ages, or Middle America can only take the fantasy genre so far, both critically and commercially. If fantasy needs saving, it must be saved from this—an unexamined attachment to the myths of the Old Empire. Though it be the empire that destroyed your country, obliterated your language, and colonised your aesthetics, and though their temples are in ruins, their language is dead, and their ships have long returned over the sea, some grand, cultural Stockholm-urge still leads the colonised to identify with the myths of the conqueror peoples.

There are good reasons for this. Standards of legitimacy, once established, or enforced, are glacial in their speed of change, and so it is an easier task to adapt to those standards rather than discard them. We declare ourselves heirs of the Old Empire and imagine that a lineage of blood and purpose connects their Golden Age that is past to the Golden Age that we shall create. We claim to descend from those who came from Rome, from Troy, from Jerusalem. We pretend that we are the chosen people and our rule is destined. We graft ourselves to the old myths instead of seeking our own roots.

Centuries later, even if our only motive is entertainment, our writings are never free of the desire to model our heroes on the ancient heroes. Cultural purity is a fruitless aim. Bacchus will dance in an alternate Arcadia; Cupid and Psyche will return with new masks. Yet there is a point in cultural maturity when the dominance of the invader myth must end and the dead language of the Old Empire finally be laid to rest. There is a time when your vernacular must be accepted for the griot's voice _and_ the printed page, when the rhythms, syntax, and idioms of long-silenced peoples push through and transform an imposed foreign speech into a new communication.

The worlds thus created may be mongrel beasts, but they are ours, and we have the authority to name them a new breed and confer validity on their quirks and qualities. Imagine the new narratives that emerge when we give attention to the languages, rituals, and stories that the Empire tried so hard to kill. _There_ is your epic. Choose your own chosen people. Choose your voice, choose your conversations, choose the company you will keep, but also choose the company that is willing to keep you.

If literature is a conversation, the writer must periodically stop and ask, "with whom am I seeking conversation, and are they in conversation with me?" Is your Anansi inspired by the childhood tales you heard from your grandmother, or by a foreigner's once-removed rendition? Which source legitimises your version? How many levels of pastiche can the fantasy genre bear? What is the difference between an influence and an imposition, and which will most benefit your story? These are all choices for the writer to make, and they should be made consciously.

Note how I have placed the words "fantasy genre" and "literature" together in agreement, not opposition. Academics and publishers have their own reasons for the boundaries between genres and subgenres, literary and commercial, but speaking purely as a reader, I feel that literature is what lasts. A work may not be the most popular or bestselling in its own era, but it can have something that speaks to future generations, some truth in its depiction of a people or a world that earns it a place in the canon. In this, as in many other situations, Time is the final arbiter.

Saving fantasy means expanding our ambitions beyond a temporary period of commercial success. Myth-based fantasy is an essential part of any nation's literary canon. If science fiction is about our future state, and realism about our present circumstances, fantasy is about our roots and our promise. It relates how our _once upon a time_ becomes a _happily ever after_ through ordinary human endeavour mixed with a touch of something greater, something beyond our limits. When we save fantasy, we save it for ourselves and our communities. No other reason is needed.

That is why I appreciate all the writers, content-creators, and publishers who take hard risks and acknowledge no boxes, who insist on no criteria but excellence. I salute those whose works are inspired by a deep love and close attention to the wide world, and whose imaginations heed no boundaries, geographical or genre. I embrace all flavours of fantasy, from the mildly supernatural to the full-on fanciful, that come from a place of timelessness and truth.

I want to read the kind of fantasy that discovers and rediscovers the myth that makes me a person, that makes us a people, that makes this our world. The old order may be passing away, but look! We are making everything new. We choose not to patch old ruins, but to build our own edifices. That may look like destruction to some, but I call it renascence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barbadian author, editor, and research consultant Karen Lord is known for her debut novel _Redemption in Indigo,_ which won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2010 Carl Brandon Parallax Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and the 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Best Debut), and was longlisted for the 2011 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her second novel, _The Best of All Possible Worlds,_ won the 2009 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2013 RT Book Reviews Reviewers' Choice Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was a finalist for the 2014 Locus Awards. Its sequel, _The Galaxy Game,_ was published in January 2015. She is the editor of the 2016 anthology _New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean._

# We Are More Than Our Skin

## John Chu | 1,400 words

Gordon Ramsay has a reputation of being incredibly foul and abusive in his reality TV programs. _MasterChef Junior,_ though, is different. I'd never have guessed it, but he is terrific with kids. He's still demanding, but he's neither foul nor abusive. There is a genuine rapport between him and every kid in the competition. So while I don't watch _MasterChef,_ I never miss _MasterChef Junior._

One episode in the most recent season, the kids had to make their "signature dish." That is, the dish that best represented each of them. One of the competitors was Kaitlyn, an eleven-year-old Korean-American girl. She chose to make a black forest cupcake with a vanilla buttercream frosting. It used raspberries, though, rather than the traditional cherries. The cupcake was something she'd perfected over years, so it's not surprising that it's the dish she most identified with.

Whenever the kids were cooking, the show's hosts would go around and talk to them about whatever they were cooking. Gordon talked to Kaitlyn and all but said that what she was doing was too simple. He did say that it would have to be spectacular. In the end, Gordon didn't like the proportion of sugar to butter in the frosting. So, this girl who had won in previous episodes, who had placed near the top in a couple other episodes, who had never been placed in the bottom of any episode, who might have been a contender to win it all, found herself eliminated.

Now I bring this up for two reasons. One, as she brought her cupcake up for judging, the show played an interview of her having second thoughts, wondering whether she should have cooked something Korean instead. Two, as her cupcake was being judged, Gordon asked her what Korean dish she might have cooked instead, then said that was the dish he had wanted to see.

She was already in the top ten, so, if I'm going to be honest about this, the cupcake really was too simple, not technically impressive enough for that stage of a cooking competition. Other contestants were putting up more ambitious signature dishes. So I'm not saying her elimination was unfair. (As an aside, one of the downsides of watching this show is seeing kids aged nine to twelve get eliminated in pairs from competition. It is heartbreaking.) My point is that when the brief was "cook something that defines you," Gordon automatically went to her ethnicity. Now as it turns out, while she had some interest in Korean fusion cooking, one of her favorite cookbooks was of Italian cooking. What might have happened had she made something Italian? Might that not have been just as representative of her? Based on Gordon's comments, though, I suspect that had she made something Korean, she would have also made it to the next episode.

This isn't to indict _MasterChef Junior_ or Gordon Ramsay. This is just to point out another example where people, consciously or not, assume that the proper works from people of color are ones that are borne directly out of their culture. It's like once I heard an interview on NPR with Bill Cheng (who, by the way, was born in Queens) and he got the question about why he was writing about the South rather than about Chinese people. Both Kaitlyn Tomeny and Bill Cheng were born in the USA and are perfectly fluent in American culture. At least when it comes to their work, though, they are still treated as though they are "really" foreigners. The dish that best represents Kaitlyn must be something Korean. Why didn't Bill Cheng write about something more Chinese?

Of course, fiction that works is inevitably going to weave in some aspects of whoever wrote it (although this doesn't generally mean autobiography, regardless of what people may think). It's reductive, though, to think that ethnicity or culture is always the only or most prominent aspect and unfairly confining to expect that ethnicity or culture will always be foregrounded. It's contradictory that we're both expected to write about our culture and told that works about our culture generally won't sell (at least when we write them).

Now, the answer to this is not that we, writers of color, shouldn't represent our culture in our own writing. The "well, if you don't like one extreme, then you must love the other" retort makes me crawl up walls. That a culture be represented by the members of that culture is important. This is one reason why I translate Chinese speculative fiction. My representation of Chinese culture, for example, will always reflect the fact that I immigrated to the United States. It won't be the same as the representation of someone who has grown up and lives in, say, China or Taiwan.

What I am pointing out is that not only do we feel an expectation to represent, but sometimes, an expectation to only represent. Compounding this is the niggling feeling that "if I don't write about these things, who will?" However, we are more than merely our ethnicities, and our work deserves better than to be viewed solely through the lens of autobiography. We should be able to break out of the box that—

You know what? I'm writing this essay and my Twitter list is filled with (among many aggravating things, but the one especially on point for this essay is) a link to an incredibly racist video made by a self-described journalist on a walk around Chinatown in New York City. He used people in Chinatown as props for tired jokes at their expense. In the name of humor, he pandered to cheap stereotypes.

There were lots of ways he could have done a humorous walk-around of Chinatown. Why did he do it in a way that reaffirmed long-standing prejudices against and misconceptions of Chinese people in America? The video was something that, for all the outrage on my Twitter list, plenty of people laughed at. It was something that, even though they knew would get plenty of complaints, the network aired anyway.

None of the jokes in that video were funny. Even if they'd been funny once, they were so old that the funny had long been leached out of them. It's hard to escape the conclusion that reducing those people to mere props for hoary jokes comforted many people. Remember, plenty of people enjoyed that video. As much as the video was intended to be "light humor," making the video or enjoying it is also participating, intentionally or not, in something quite serious: the flattening of an entire group of people into mere stereotype, as opposed to engaging with them as actual thinking, feeling beings. (Just to tie this back to my putative topic, it's this stereotyping that leads to expectations that we should write only about our culture.)

We may be used to this. It may make some people more comfortable. None of that, though, makes it acceptable. When we prioritize our own comfort, we have to understand the cost, especially if that requires other people to bear the cost. In this case, reducing people to stereotypes makes it easier to pretend that whole groups of people are less than human. Lots of horrible things lie down that path.

My acting teacher in college spent a lot of time talking about the "I-Thou" relationship. In order to portray a character realistically, the actor has to reach "at-one-ment" with the character. As readers and writers, that's what we need to do here. It would sound nice and fair to say that we all need to reach "at-one-ment" with everyone. While this is undeniable, it's also true that we've had more practice doing this with some than others. How many movies have there been where it seemed the reason why the lead is a (straight) white cisgender man is to give the audience "someone to identify with"? By now, we've all had much more practice identifying with certain sorts of people, and it's time to redress the imbalance. It's now the 21st century, and the time we regularly identify with women, members of the QUILTBAG, and people of color is long past due.

As I'm finishing this essay, my Twitter list is filling again with news that the upcoming live-action movie remake of _Mulan_ may center on a newly invented White Savior character rather than, oh, Mulan. Oh, for fuck's sake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at _Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld,_ and _Tor.com_ among other venues. His translations have been published in or are forthcoming from _Clarkesworld, The Big Book of Science Fiction_ and elsewhere. His story "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

# Crying Wolf: Predators in the Genre Community

## Chinelo Onwualu | 1,800 words

I don't recall how my harasser came into my life. When I first started working full-time as a freelance editor, I would assess short stories for free. He would regularly seek out my opinion on his work and try to engage me in conversation about topics of mutual concern. The problem is I found his attention deeply unsettling. There was an odd element of competition to our conversations—a strange aggression that would leave me feeling defensive. I felt that I had to downplay my success to prove that I wasn't doing as well as he thought I was. It got to the point where I blocked him from my feed and stopped responding to his messages.

He and I finally met at a literary festival in Nigeria. There, his attentions were so persistent and oddly hostile that some of my friends took note and would regularly intervene to get me out of interactions with him. I began actively avoiding him, cringing when he came near, and passing up on social activities where he might be present. I could never specifically pinpoint which of his actions disturbed me most—it was all so subtle that at the end of each encounter all I would be left with was a feeling of distress and violation that I could never fully articulate. Even his calls would leave me deeply upset.

I never told anyone about it because I was never sure whether his behaviour was the result of differing cultural norms, or if I was just overreacting. However, when I discovered he would be attending a private event that I had previously attended, I was alarmed enough to inform the administrators of his interactions with me. You can imagine my anger when I discovered later that he had not only perpetuated the same behaviour on a fellow attendee, but had ratcheted it up by several degrees, leaving the person deeply traumatised even a year later. Luckily, the organisers of the event addressed the situation immediately and the harasser ceased his behaviour at the time. However, he continued to contact the attendee for months afterwards—only stopping completely when he left the country.

Every woman1 has had this sort of experience of harassment and boundary-crossing. At its mildest, it is an upsetting incident that we have to brush off in order to get on with our day. At its worst, it can be sustained emotional abuse, or physical and sexual assault. We often don't report these behaviours because, very simply, we know we will not be believed.2

At the time it was easier for me to keep quiet about my harasser. To tell myself that I'd experienced worse. I was just starting my business and fighting alienation from sexist and racist micro-aggressions that rendered me either invisible or uncomfortably on display. I was also racked with angst about my ability and the value of my work. Besides, my relatively short exposure to the dynamics of many literary spaces across the world had taught me that talking dragons and time-travelling werewolves may be welcomed, but a woman crying abuse was not ****.

Dirty Laundry and Missing Stairs

We live in societies that expect women to take on the burden of other people's emotions. We are groomed from very early ages to accept that men's dominance and control extends to our bodies but ends at their libidos. Our accusations are often met with a rush to defend the perpetrator, to list his good qualities, and to show how the indignities of his life excuse him from the rules of decent behaviour. We are then blamed for being too sensitive, too rigid, too passive, too . . . much. We become the killjoys, the shrews, the whiners, and we—not the perpetrators—run the risk of losing our social circles.

The stakes are even higher when the victim is a woman of colour. A system of global racism means that black and brown women are simply valued less. In particular, black girls and women are rarely seen as victims, as author Cherise Charleswell notes, because they are stereotypically viewed as seductresses and aggressors. They also face a greater backlash from their communities when they report abuse because they are seen as "airing dirty laundry." Writing in 2014, she explains:

Due to a history of racism, and the desire to protect black men from white supremacy and imprisonment, black women have been conditioned to be their brother's keepers—and have allowed themselves to be perpetual victims by doing so . . . While acting as human shields for black men, we have left our daughters vulnerable.3

And so we women learn to smile off the "accidental" touches, ignore the passing comments, and even laugh at the "jokes." We suppress our discomfort when our harassers stand a little too close, or stare a little too long. Instead, we warn each other. In a 2012 post on his blog, Cliff Pervocracy called this form of private warning about violators "missing stairs." In the first example of the phrase, he wrote about a problematic member of his BDSM community:

I think there were some people in the community who were intentionally protecting him, but there were more who were de facto protecting him by treating him like a missing stair. Like something you're so used to working around, you never stop to ask "what if we actually fixed this?" Eventually you take it for granted that working around this guy is just a fact of life, and if he hurts someone, that's the fault of whoever didn't apply the workarounds correctly.4

The problem is, what happens to the women who don't get the warning? The woman who joined the group after you left? Or the one whom the harasser got to first? Because excusing abusive and predatory behaviour like harassment in our social circles is like allowing a wolf into the farmhouse and hoping that the livestock will somehow be okay. After all, they can't help being a wolf, can they? What about their reputation, and what if their feelings are hurt?

More Than A Buzzword

In literary circles, the harm done by such violations takes on added weight because writing is a fundamental act of communication and revelation. For predators to worm their way into these spaces and leave a trail of victims silenced by shame5 in their wake is, to me, an act of evil. And those who excuse these violators are complicit in this evil. As poet Muriel Leung puts it:

Though we often look to the act of writing as documentation and witness, the writing of violence somehow becomes the burden of those who have endured it, and forgotten by those with the privilege to ignore.6

We in the literary community, particularly the genre community, need to make a commitment that our spaces will be zero-tolerance zones. Creating safe spaces can't just be a buzzword; it has to be a frame of mind. This means that workshops, festivals, and writing groups need straightforward written anti-harassment policies that are easily accessible and frequently discussed. These policies need to make clear what constitutes harassment and violation and what should be done if an incident occurs. When violations happen, organizations then need to address it as quickly and compassionately as possible, making sure the victims are supported and the perpetrators face disapproval and pushback—even if it means barring them from events and social spaces.

If the organisers of the event where my harasser tried to escalate his behaviour hadn't taken my warnings seriously, if they hadn't fostered an environment where the attendee on whom he'd focused his attention didn't feel safe enough to complain, if they hadn't taken immediate steps to stop the behaviour—I suspect we would be having a very different conversation today ****.

The Consequences of Silence

You see, when we excuse predators—turning away from the evidence and assuming it was just a mistake or a confusing situation—there is only one consequence: the predators get away with it. A tragic example of this came in January 2016 when three women stepped forward to accuse7 Nigerian poet Chijioke Amu-Nnadi of making aggressive and unwanted sexual advances toward them. Their accusations led to an investigation8 that uncovered that the poet had actually molested a total of nineteen women—possibly up to thirty-three—over the course of several years. Most had declined to speak up because of the poet's outsized reputation and a well-founded fear that their accusations would be dismissed.

Know this, though: if a woman speaks up about a predator's violation, it is often not an isolated incident. More than likely, the predator has done it before. Studies show that only a small handful of perpetrators are responsible for the bulk of sexual violence and domestic abuse. In his 2009 article, "Meet the Predators," author Thomas MacAulay Millar points out:

The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again . . . and again . . . and again. That just doesn't square with the notion of innocent mistake. Further, since the repeaters are also responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of the intimate partner violence, child beating and child sexual abuse, the notion that these predators are somehow confused good guys does not square with the data.9

By spotting the red flags that predators display, encouraging victims to speak up, and shutting down the social structures that give those who violate a license to operate, Thomas estimates that a _quarter_ of all the violence against women and children would disappear.

This is why I have decided to publicly speak out about my experiences. My harasser deliberately launched a campaign of targeted coercive behaviour that undermined my confidence and left me feeling unsafe—and now I know he did far worse to another. It wasn't a misunderstanding, and it wasn't an accident. This was the behaviour of a predator.

Literary communities need to put the safety of their most vulnerable populations above the reputations of their most powerful members. Those who violate others need the consent of the groups they belong to in order to continue their behaviour. They need our silence. By speaking up, and by taking the words of the victims seriously, perhaps we can signal to potential predators in our midst that "this is not the place for you."

* * *

1. "The Trump Revelations Show How Much Women Are Expected to Ignore" by Eva Wiseman, _The Guardian:_ bit.ly/2eg2XL3

2. "My Friend Group Has a Case of the Creepy Dude. How Do We Clear That Up?" by JenniferP, captainawkward.com: bit.ly/2eV5KYI

3. "Sexual Abuse and the Code of Silence in the Black Community" by Cherise Charleswell, _Role Reboot:_ bit.ly/2f6jlNN

4. "The Missing Stair" by Cliff Pervocracy, _Pervocracy:_ bit.ly/1toOHBk

5. "Things I've Been Ashamed to Share About Being a Writer Until Now" by Annie Finch, Ph.D, anniefinch.com: bit.ly/2elHrD0

6. Quoted from _Apogee Journal:_ bit.ly/2eV895E

7. "Award Winning Nigerian Poet Chijioke Amu-nnadi in Sexual Molestation Scandal" by Jite Efemuaye, _Brittle Paper:_ bit.ly/2eg9nKv

8. "19 Women Accuse Nigerian Poet of Sexual Molestation, Says Investigative Report" by Ainehi Edoro, _Brittle Paper:_ bit.ly/2e6zWhN

9. "Meet the Predators" by Thomas MacAulay Millar, _Yes Means Yes:_ bit.ly/1EhgYNf

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chinelo Onwualu is an editorial consultant living in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. She is editor and co-founder of _Omenana,_ a magazine of African speculative fiction. Her writing has appeared in several places, including _Strange Horizons,_ _The Kalahari Review,_ _Saraba,_ _Brittle Paper,_ _Jungle Jim,_ _Ideomancer,_ and the anthologies _AfroSF: African Science Fiction by African Writers,_ _Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond,_ _Terra Incognita: New Short Speculative Stories from Africa,_ and _Imagine Africa 500._ She has been longlisted for the British Science Fiction Awards and the Short Story Day Africa Award. Follow her on Twitter @chineloonwualu.

# You Forgot to Invite the Soucouyant

## Brandon O'Brien | 1,300 words

They can't empty me with they MTV,

Tell BET they could beat it;

I want to see me on my TV.

—Freetown Collective, "Me On My TV"

Where I from, vampires don't speak no American Standard English, because where I from, we don't call nothing "vampire." So I have to start there—if we can't talk to allyuh the way we does talk to weself, the way the dark creatures of the islands does talk to we, then how you go understand what _they_ have to say?

I write this to ask why nobody decide to invite the soucouyant to the party.

In an episode of Season Three of _Sleepy Hollow_ called "This Red Lady from Caribee" (what the jail is that?), they does call something by the same name we does call something. They does call something "soucouyant," even if they can't pronounce it; they does point at it and say it did come from where I come from, Trinidad. But that was not a soucouyant. It did look like a La Diablesse, but it wasn't a La Diablesse either. They did say the body of it was made up of Jack Spaniard wasps, but they go and get that part wrong, too. They get kaiso wrong. They get bird pepper wrong. They even go so far as to say chadon beni—something allyuh know as culantro—is something you have to know a fella to know a fella to buy on the down-low, and a one-ounce bag of the thing suddenly cost five hundred American dollars or some other kind of high price that people have to look over they shoulder before they could call.

And I can't begrudge anybody for telling the story they want to tell, especially since the writer of that episode was a woman of colour, and it important to have more black women telling stories on TV. It's just that, if you going and tell us it was a Trini story, it should be a story that Trinis could recognize, not a thing made up of the limbs of the corpses of Trini stories.

When a people can't see themselves often in the media, they does learn to be hypervigilant of the rare moments. They does become stricter guards of what their culture should sound like. Some, unfortunately, might even lose faith in the creatures of their homeland, because it not on TV, right? So they can't be real, right? Papa Bois don't defend the forest, douens don't come for we children, all we have to fear must be the dragons and ghosts of European lore, ent? But in a world where we could understand that not seeing yourself on TV is a matter of real negative power for young Americans of colour, could you imagine what it must be like to not be American at all, to be a Caribbean boy who can't see himself, can't even see the things that does make up his world?

Where I come from, even the things that sound like things you know are not things you know. Here, charming women with their faces hidden, one foot a perfect cow hoof, does meet lustful men at night, charm them into the darkness of the forest, and leave them lost in the bushes to get trampled by wild hogs. Here, the bodies of children who dead before they baptised does have their legs twist backwards, and travel the night singing sweet songs to lure your children to them. And what of the rest of the islands, of their stories, of Ol' Higue and Rolling Calf and all the other magical guardians and mystical jumbies that does only seem to walk this corner of the earth? Is like suit-and-tie vampires and vengeful pale-faced ghosts does travel everywhere, but Papa Bois can't even get a plane ticket, even the soucouyant can't just fly to the States with she skin in a carry-on bag and audition for a little walk-on role on _Supernatural._

Is not enough that black and brown people does just end up being muscular, tusk-toothed orcs or conniving drow or slaves under the foot of a benevolent dragon-loving queen. They take we tongue from we, too. We don't get to see even the things we in awe of, or afraid of, on TV half as often as the same old grizzled European knight or raider charging into battle against the forces of darkness. We could forget weself under the shadow of it, the world being primed pale by the lack of us. Often, we do—not just creators making the kind of thing they think the world want to see, but audiences asking for the kind of thing that isn't native to their birthplace because they learn it isn't cool, it isn't powerful, it isn't relevant. They learn their local jumbies not real, they want us to invite chalk-white ghosts instead.

And I want to be fair, I not saying we shouldn't have anything to say to them dragons and banshees and what have you. I have real plenty things that I have to tell them, and those stories writing as we speak. I just saying . . . them does get invited everywhere. Leprechauns in too many parties; vampires does get every invite, but is always the fairest vampires of them all, barely anybody does call the soucouyant, not even the Romanian strigoi does get a call asking if they free that night.

The concern is simple: folks (and folklore) from all over still impact the world, including where I come from. They does have things to say, painful struggles with the recent past and ill portents of the far-flung future. How many of those memories and prophecies you go feel comfortable missing out on? Papa Bois does confront us in the forest easy and rough we up when we damage the woods. When we hear the douen whoop for we children, we learn to hold them closer, to brave the dark for them. Those lessons important, and we must never forget them. Everywhere could do to learn them.

Which lessons reveal themselves here, then? One that comes to mind is that not telling we fantasies—among so much of we other stories—could have their own kinds of consequences. Not just for audiences of colour, who learn to imagine that they ain't a part of these worlds. Imagine the losses of those majority communities who don't get to hear those stories, or learn the deeper mysteries of the past, present, or future that people like me learn from small. America get to teach me that vampires and zombies are questions about consumption, about population, and about death. Who go teach America through Papa Bois the value of nature, through the soucouyant the importance of being critical of appearances, and all the other lessons besides?

I want you to call the soucouyant and invite she. Not right away, but soon. Ask she to talk about sheself on she own terms. Call Papa Bois. Check with the other islands, too, ask them who available, earn the trust of the dark so they could teach you. Invite local mortals, too—I have real things I could tell you, too, and I have a list of other Caribbean writers long like me own arm. Check Africa, check Southeast Asia, check all over. Ask who wasn't on the guest list before, and invite them now. Keep them in mind the next time you make something. And if you open a book or turn on a TV show and you notice none of them get invite to the party, ask the host why.

Try to do something about that, real soon, you hear me? The soucouyant does feel left out, you know. And you don't want to make people like she feel left out.

—Excerpt from the song "Me On My TV" by Freetown Collective  
used by permission of Freetown Collective.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brandon O'Brien is a performance poet and writer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in _Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons,_ and _New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean,_ among others. He can be found on Tumblr at therisingtithes.tumblr.com and on Twitter @therisingtithes.

# Still We Write

## Erin Roberts | 1,300 words

For me, writing is not an easy thing. Of course, there are days when everything flows perfectly, when the words dance out of me like they were always meant to exist and all I have to do is let them flow. But those days are far outnumbered by the ones when the blank page mocks my efforts, or when the words I want are trapped in a corner of the back of my heart and I know that unearthing them will bring forgotten baggage tumbling into the light, or when someone with a face like my father is shot dead in the street for no justifiable reason and I have to figure out how to work my pain and anger and helplessness into a story about faraway lands.

Some days are harder than others. Some days are harder _for_ "others." Still, I write.

I write imaginary injustices in undiscovered countries that stand in for those that are all too real. I write the feeling of taking your hands out of your pockets so nobody can accuse you of holding a weapon, of wishing, when you hear of violence in someone else's neighborhood, that neither the victim nor the perpetrator looks anything like you.

I write the boys who didn't see me as the kind of girl you date in junior high and the house I visited in Alabama during college whose chained-up dogs weren't "exactly members of the NAACP" and the time I painted a ceramic unicorn with hair of gold at nine years old because I didn't know magic any other way.

I write fun and escape—conflicted shapeshifters and incompetent fairy godmothers and dragons on the streets of Brooklyn. I write double-dutch on a summer day and my sisters convinced that my prom date was a secret vampire and hearing tall tales at a family barbecue. I write triumph over incredible odds and love in the face of hatred and the lilt in someone's voice that carries their homeland with them wherever they go.

I write all of it, all at once sometimes—a jumble of meaning and belief and fun, of faraway worlds and backyard adventures and magical lands, trying to make it all make sense outside of my head. And once I have collapsed in a heap of sweat and creative exhaustion and one too many semicolons, I remember: this may just be the easiest part. Because now I have to get someone to read it.

On its face, the science-fiction and fantasy publishing world, especially in short fiction, is an egalitarian paradise. Every magazine is seeking a diverse set of viewpoints. Everyone (okay, almost everyone) says the right things on Twitter. Every writer is welcome if they are talented and hard-working and articulate enough; it says so right there in the submission guidelines. And if the faces at all the major conventions are a little monochromatic outside of the umpteenth "Writing The Other" panel; if the same five names come up whenever diversity is mentioned, like silver crosses warding off any accusation of even unconscious bias; if too many writers and editors and readers who can envision magical spells and mystical worlds can't stretch their creativity far enough to allow something besides fantastical Europe into their imaginations? Well, that's just coincidence. Right?

Maybe this sounds harsh. It's not meant to. I love the speculative fiction writing world. I'm a part of this community, if a very new one. I went to Odyssey. I've attended a few conventions. I spend plenty of time on Codex. And more than that, I've gotten love from so many individuals, from the ones who retweeted my very first published story to the ones who give me advice when I'm flailing to the ones I talk to every week about my writing and whose encouragement so often keeps me going. Some of those are brown faces. Many are not. Heck, I'm writing this essay for People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! because people, many of whom look nothing like me, shared words that I wrote. If I play my cards right, maybe I'll be one of those five famous names someday. But that is not the point. Because this is not about me. This is about us.

It seems sometimes that for us, for writers of color, the gulf between writer and traditionally published writer (or even better, well-known award-winning respected writer) requires some sort of magic key to cross—some hidden platform at King's Cross Station or fantastical wardrobe or mystical tornado. It turns out that it is one thing to pour your heart or dreams or imagination onto the page and it is another to have them understood. It turns out that the worlds you imagine may not be the ones that the people doing the buying can wrap their heads around, that you'll be told your language is too confusing, your metaphors don't make sense, the references you grew up with are too obscure. It turns out that when diversity doesn't exist in the masthead of a magazine, too often it doesn't appear in its pages either. It turns out that when you point this out, you may be told that people like you don't write in this genre, and if they do, they probably just don't do it well enough. It turns out that even egalitarian paradises have messy hidden corners.

Still, we write.

Many bridge the gap by publishing on their own, by building their own infrastructure and amplifying their own voices. Some share that shine with other writers, create things like Rosarium Publishing or _Omenana_ or _FIYAH._ Some simply keep writing and submitting and writing and submitting, figuring out whose editorial statement of diversity means something and whose is just words.

The truth is that this fantasy writing world is a wonderful place so many days, but there are days when it is hard. There are days when I fear that I'm doing it wrong—letting down my culture, letting down myself. There are days that I feel like the doors will never open. And on those days, it is you—writer of color, creator and destroyer and dreamer of worlds—who keeps me going.

Because I see you. I see you scribbling away at your computer or notebook or scrap paper, jotting ideas down in your smartphone or on a bar napkin or on the back of a receipt. I see you writing your soul into the page and putting it out into the world however you can. I see you dreaming of your first sale, your first review, your first signing or reading or award acceptance speech. I see you hustling to make those dreams a reality. I see the worlds you're creating and the world that we're all trying to write ourselves into. I see you knocking down barriers and building bridges and shining bright. I see you. I am you.

So let's go out there. Let's share our truths, tell our stories, put our dreams and lives and imaginations on the page. Let's bang on the gates until our knuckles are raw, slide our papers and truths underneath every door, flood the market with so much talent that they can't help to let us in and call them out if they dare to try. Because no matter what anyone says or does, no matter if we're scared or angry or hurt or full of the joy of a perfectly turned phrase, we win if we write. We are strong if we write. If still, always, we write.

—With a hat-tip to the great Maya Angelou.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erin Roberts has always loved to tell stories, but has only recently gotten into the habit of writing them down. Her debut short story appeared in _PodCastle_ earlier this year. She is an MFA student at Stonecoast, a graduate of the 2015 Odyssey Writing Workshop, and a member of Codex. You can find her musings on life, the universe, and all things writing at writingwonder.com and @nirele.

# Artists' Gallery

## Reimena Yee, Emily Osborne, Ana Bracic

# AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS  
edited by Arley Sorg

# Author Spotlight: Darcie Little Badger

## Nicasio Andres Reed

From the title onward, this is a story built in stark, vivid color. The white train, the black feathers, the red western sky. How important was the visual landscape of "Black, Their Regalia" to the inception of your story?

"Black, Their Regalia" was inspired by the colors in my home. One morning, I opened my closet to choose an outfit from its abundant selection of black blouses, black dresses, black skirts, black jackets, black t-shirts, and black sweaters. The monochromatic streak was interrupted by a blue-and-yellow Lipan camp dress, a turquoise shawl with red fringe, and a pink jingle dress. I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny if my regalia matched my everyday clothes? Haha. Yes." That incident eventually led to a story of three musicians who wear black to please a very strange entity from Below.

During the writing process, the colors black and white transformed into prominent symbolic elements. White is linked to sickness and death; thus, it colors the memorial pillar, the quarantine compound, and the notorious train (among other things). Alternatively, black is linked to strength, both natural and supernatural.

If you want to admit that you are or were a goth, this is the time. It's safe here.

As a geneticist, I can assure you that goth is woven through my DNA.

This story ends on a hopeful note, even a triumphant one, despite that the characters start out somewhat resigned to their fate. Could you talk a bit about hope, and the revitalization of hope, as it relates to these characters?

The Apparently Siblings have a complex relationship with hope. As Apache (Tulli and Kristi) and Navajo (Moraine) people, their family lines survived a genocide that killed millions. Adversity is not confined to the past; Tulli, Kristi, and Moraine must contend with the persistent weight of colonization, including dispossession, poisoned water, erasure, assimilation, violence, racism, poverty—the list goes on. They wear resignation as a shield against despair. It is so easy to be heartbroken when you are an optimist in a persistently unjust world.

However, they are also survivors. The fact that they—that any indigenous person in North America—live, create, and make new history is a triumph. Given the chance, Tulli, Kristi, and Moraine fight the Big Plague with everything they got. By embracing their personal strength, they come into hope.

What's next for you?

I'm writing a book, something I haven't done since elementary school. In the vein of "Black, Their Regalia," it combines comedy with dark fantasy. The first draft has been a blast. I hope the next seven are equally fun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicasio Andres Reed is a queer Filipino-American writer and a member of the Queer Asian SF/F/H Illuminati. They write fiction, comics, and poetry, and their work has been represented in _Beyond: A Queer Sci-Fi Comics Anthology,_ _Strange Horizons,_ _Lightspeed's_ Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, _Liminality_ and more. Their next short story is upcoming in _Shimmer._ You can find them on Twitter @NicasioSilang, probably tweeting about _Dragon Age_ again.

# Author Spotlight: Thoraiya Dyer

## JY Yang

I really enjoyed reading "The Rock In The Water," and I was struck by how deftly it touched on current issues around crossing borders, immigration, and illegal detention. Could you tell us a bit more about the creative processes that led to the birth of this story?

Thank you! Lots of bits and pieces went into this story. My visits to Syria, before the war, or should I say before the climate change that led to drought that led to war. Crossing a maritime border on a Bahamas cruise (the Sail to Success Workshop for SFF writers), and how it looked like nothing. Try telling the seagulls and the storm and the conches on the seabed that it's a border. Oh, and try telling the Australian government that we are signatories to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This story was born from anger and helplessness and also Dr. Dolittle's patient/mode of transport, the Great Pink Sea Snail.

The story has an interesting structure, with two narratives that start off at different times and in different places, which end up entwined around each other. Were there challenges that you faced when writing the story in this non-linear format?

Just my own and the world's expectations that a short story have a beginning, middle, and end with one main arc wherein a character is fundamentally changed by the climactic event. How many of those can a person write all in a row, really? (This doesn't mean I don't enjoy them or that I'm not super proud of the ones I've written: See "The House of Half Mirrors" in the September _Clarkesworld.)_

A theme that I've noticed recurring in your work is one of women overcoming adversity, particularly adversity imposed by larger social pressures. Is there something that draws you to this theme in particular?

The same thing that draws me to the entire genre, I guess: Good versus evil. The hero defeating the dark lord. I've kept the hero—heroine—but for too long in fantasy the evil has been a race or a country of innately rotten and largely irredeemable beings, whereas to me, evil is greed, evil is environmental destruction, evil is a failure of empathy, and none of that is specific to one kind of person. Societies, as carriers of inherited information, are just as prone to error as DNA, but should in theory be more easily changed!

Tell us about an upcoming project you're excited about.

I don't think you understand how excited I am to have a story in _Lightspeed._ My first JJA rejection was from _F &SF_ a decade ago, hahaha. So, thanks again to guest editor DJO, and hang in there, authors of stories with non-linear structure! In other exciting news, my debut fantasy novel, _Crossroads of Canopy,_ is coming from Tor on January 31. Instead of waves, salt, and sand, think massive jungle treetops, warring kingdoms, and feet that never touch the ground. It does have a beginning, middle, and end, but hopefully also some surprises along the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JY Yang is a lapsed scientist, a former journalist, and a short story writer. She lives in Singapore, in a bubble populated by her imagination and an indeterminate number of succulent plants named Lars. A graduate of the 2013 class of Clarion West, her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in _Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons,_ and _Apex,_ among others. A list of her publications can be found at misshallelujah.net, and she can be found on Twitter as @halleluyang, grumbling about Scandinavian languages and making displeased noises about the state of the world.

# Author Spotlight: P. Djèlí Clark

## Jeremy Sim

Congratulations on this wonderful story! Could you tell us a little about how it came to be?

Thanks! So, this story is an origin tale of sorts. I actually wrote another story back in 2011 set in this world, with at least two of the same characters. But it was longer than I liked, and with too many moving parts. After repeated attempts, I walked away and worked on some other projects. In 2012, hoping to get some new inspiration, I commissioned artwork to be done for the story by Jason Reeves over at 133Art. The piece was a hit, and was even featured at the 2015-2016 _Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination_ exhibit at the Schomburg in Harlem. When the call for POCDF submissions came out, it seemed the right time to return to this world. I set my original write-up aside, and instead tried to explore the background of the central character, hoping to give her more depth and meaning. The result was this story.

The world of the Ten Chiefdoms is so fascinating. Feathered lizards, winged monkeys, pottery that comes to life; the backdrop seems filled with these tiny elements that really bring it all to life. I have to ask—is there more of this world planned?

Who doesn't like winged monkeys? When it comes to worldbuilding, especially in fantasy, it's those little elements that add texture to the setting: the clothing, the food, the architecture, the color and scents. The world of the Ten Chiefdoms has diverse inspirations: from Central Africa to the Caribbean. So you see bits of history, music, folklore, politics, and even dialect, of these vast regions interwoven throughout. There's also a closeness to nature, which allowed me to include a bestiary of fabulous creatures. Why, for instance, giant feathered lizards? Because in this tropical setting, horses are problematic, not to mention _boring!_ This was also a way to give myself playful elements that I know I'll enjoy returning to—if only to explore them further. So yes, there's definitely more planned for this world. This story is a beginning.

Themes of mothership, of matriarchy and patriarchy, also play a strong role in the story. Was this an intentional choice? What do you think the story has to say about the role of women in the Ten Chiefdoms and, by extension, in our world?

Intentional is always a hard thing to suss out. From my first writings in this world I knew the protagonist's backstory—which tied a mother-daughter relationship to the broader societal politics of the Ten Chiefdoms. The rest grew from there, leading me to explore several gendered themes: women as keepers of sacred knowledge, rituals, beliefs; women who are marginalized or persecuted for holding such knowledge; women finding ways to resist their persecution through secrecy or preservation. There are enough examples of this from our own world that play out across cultures, time, and space—especially in societies facing stress or shock. The Ten Chiefdoms similarly arises after a great upheaval. In the search for stability, edicts are passed that disproportionately impact women, diminishing their status and power. But as we learn, and as we know from our world, resistance will always take root in the midst of persecution.

As a writer of color, how do you think your heritage affects your writing?

It's always there. I grew up reading a lot of fantasy in which I barely saw anyone who looked like me. And nearly everywhere looked and felt like Middle Earth (at least the less swarthy parts). But fantasy can take place anywhere, and the characters can look like anyone. In this story, for instance, I threw in a bit of Carnival folklore from the Eastern Caribbean—a distinct part of my own heritage. I was hesitant at first. Could I do that? Was I breaking some unwritten rule of the fantasy gods? Was J.R.R. Tolkien going to frown down on me? Then I remembered this was fantasy—with talking dragons and whatnot. I'm supposed to break the rules and overthrow gods. So I did what I had to do.

What's next for P. Djèlí Clark? What are you working on now?

A gothic fantasy novella complete with magic swords, sorcerers, and monsters. Did I mention it's set in 1920s Georgia? Of course it is.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremy Sim is a Singaporean-American writer and author of more than a dozen short stories, most notably in _Beneath Ceaseless Skies,_ _Cicada,_ and _Crossed Genres._ He is a graduate of Odyssey and Clarion West Writing Workshops, where he was awarded the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship in 2011. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany, where he moonlights as a freelance video game writer and editor. On a normal day, he can be found making spreadsheets, overanalyzing things, or trying strange new ice cream flavors—sometimes all at the same time. Find him online at jeremysim.com, or on Twitter at @jeremy_sim.

# Author Spotlight: N.K. Jemisin

## Christian A. Coleman

First thing's first: Congratulations on this year's Hugo Award for best novel! Are you still reeling from winning? Were you working on this story while the voting and ceremony took place?

I _am_ still reeling! Doesn't feel quite real, though I'm told by other Hugo winners that this feeling goes away eventually.

During Worldcon I was working on the third book of the Broken Earth trilogy, which had a fast-approaching deadline, as I mentioned in my acceptance speech. I had spent a little time on the short story during the Hugo voting period, but only a few days, since that was all I could spare.

I love how the oral storytelling-style narrative voice grounds us in Emmaline's character. What work went into honing the inflections, rhetorical devices, and tone of the voice?

It's just an Alabama accent, is all. I slip back into it myself when I visit family there for long enough.

In certain aspects, especially her humor and candor, Emmaline reminds me of some of my own relatives. Tell us about the inspiration behind her character. Is she based on anyone in particular?

According to my father's stories, my paternal great grandmother survived in Pratt City by "working magic" the way that Emmaline does—herbalism, midwifery, a little bit of hoodoo. I wanted to write a story about her squaring off against Celtic Elves, with her family's future in the balance, because why not? That's really kinda it.

Toward the end, it's heartbreaking when Emmaline says, "I can't believe the world will ever change." As much as she cares for and protects her children, she realizes she can't (or won't?) usher them into the future of foreseeable yet snail-speed change. This moment reflects a sobering truth about systemic oppression and Black history. Do you see this sort of mindset playing out nowadays? And if so, in what way?

Yes, of course. Change is hard for everyone, and people who learn to survive amid systems of oppression often do so by at least partially internalizing that system—by accepting that the terrible way they're being treated is right and normal. For example, I've mentioned in other interviews that it was hard for me to start writing black characters when I was a younger writer. I'd seen so few black protagonists that, even though this is my own voice, it sounded foreign to me. It felt wrong to put people like me into the role of "hero." Took a long period of intentionally pushing back against that internalized racism (and sexism, and so on) for me to be willing to try something new. To quote Jocelyn Elders, "You can't be what you don't see." Emmaline hasn't seen many black folks standing proud and demanding equality in American society before—and where she has, she's seen those people punished violently. Her children, though, in the form of Pauline and via Pauline's dreams, have seen better.

Could you tell us a little bit about what you're working on now?

I've just finished the rough draft of book three of the Broken Earth trilogy, and I'm starting the first revision now.

Huge congrats again on winning the Hugo!

Thanks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

# Author Spotlight: Shweta Narayan

## LaShawn Wanak

What was the inspiration for this story?

Wow, that's kinda complicated, and I'm reconstructing from six years later, but here's my memory of what happened:

My good friend Michael Ellsworth is a historical linguist and an Ancient Greece nerd, and he had been telling me awesome things about both. One day he sent me a snippet of text, translated from the Tocharian, of a Tocharian Buddhist text featuring a mechanical girl and a Greek man. (In his words: "Greece, from an Indian perspective, from a Tocharian perspective. Since the original was written in India, I believe. Original now lost, preserved only in Tocharian translation, whose language is now lost.")

I'd written one story already about the mechanical bird, so she was in my head, and thanks to Michael, so was Alexandros; Anaeet was lurking in there too, because she comes from an Armenian folktale that I'd loved since I was tiny. When I read the snippet of Tocharian translation, they all came together, though they left it to me to figure out how to interweave (alternate versions of) a real history and a real folktale so that they played well together.

Vaacha Devi's story to Alexandros has a folklore feel to it. Was her story also inspired by history or by folklore? How did you decide to have a clockwork bird be the storyteller?

It's a steampunked version of a real folktale, "Clever Anaeet." The original comes from Armenia, and was in a collection I had of folklore from all over the world. That story carved itself deep into my writer brain, and I only realized as an adult that Anaeet wasn't from India.

I worried about appropriation, of course, and still do. I decided at the time that the bird could easily have been to my world's Armenia before my story starts—especially since it's another place Alexandros never does conquer—and it would be okay to have her retell a story she heard there. I also tried to stay as true to the feel of the original as I could, and the Armenians I've heard back from have liked it. (Which is not to say there couldn't be objections! Just that as far as I know it worked okay. I wouldn't be comfortable having the story reprinted otherwise; the last thing I want to do is further hurt POC who have been subject to genocide.)

The clockwork bird showed up in a story I wrote in 2009 and took over my brain, possibly because nested stories are a big part of my storytelling tradition. So far she's in five published stories—one with a rewrite request I need to follow up on—and a novel outline, and she may get referenced in the two I'm currently working on.

There are many tales that have been told of Alexander the Great. What made you decide to immerse him in a clockwork world? What made you decide to use "Alexandros" instead of "Alexander"?

I started with the world and expanded it to include a version of him, rather than starting with him and adding clockwork. But the Antikythera mechanism does make Ancient Greece plus clockwork a plausible and cool setting that I'd love to see other people's take on!

The Greek forms of names were meant to ground the outer narrative in Alexandros' perspective—it's consistent for every name mentioned from his perspective, not just his own. The bird, by contrast, uses Sanskrit forms of names while challenging that perspective. For example, the king we would now call Darius, he calls Dareios and she calls Darayu. It's not something I expected readers to pick up on consciously; rather, I wanted to get an immersive "feel" of their clashing views and multilingual world.

Pretty much everything I got right on that front is thanks to Michael, who discussed Alexandros' characterization and reactions with me at length, as well as which of his many famous moments to focus on, and used his academic superpowers to figure out what every name should have been from the relevant character's perspective, in some cases even doing original scholarship to derive them!

I did use the modern version of the name Anaeet, instead of the historically accurate Anahita, because I wanted her name to sound different from other names the bird uses. I meant it as a tell that her story's origin is foreign to the bird. It's far too subtle, and if I was writing the story now I would have her say outright that she heard the story on her travels, but it's the decision I made at the time.

I love how you use the power of story to halt Alexandros' advance into India. What is your take on the importance of stories told by people of color?

Thank you!

I wrote this story while processing RaceFail '09. I'd realized I needed to decolonize my own thinking and was poking at the importance of story and of multiple differing voices and perspectives. I didn't deliberately put any of that into the story, but now I see a lot of it there. From Alexandros and the bird fighting for the position of protagonist, to the emerald eyes (which have no analogue in the original folktale, and are absolutely a divergence on my part), to the way the bird uses story to stop him—it's all me realizing how different things can look from a marginalized perspective.

And to answer the actual question, I think stories by POC (and in general by marginalized voices) are life-saving. When we only see stories from a white perspective, we start to think of that perspective as "neutral" or "objective," while ours are less real, less valid; and that makes us doubt and dismiss our own experiences. It's silencing.

I think we need a whole range of stories from different voices to help us unlearn that silence, because perspective goes beyond who gets to be the protagonist and who gets relegated to props and villains, though of course that's an important starting point. Non-white stories also challenge/expand Eurocentric ideas of what a story is, of which forms and aesthetics and points of view "count." (For example: People in the US keep trying to equate nested stories with _One Thousand and One Nights,_ because that's what they know; but to me it's also the Mahabharata, and tales of Vikramaditya, and so many of the stories I could see myself in as a kid that it's the most natural form I could use.)

****Anaeet goes from someone who has very little agency to having power over a king's life. Why did you choose to stop the story before she makes a choice (other than making this reader go, "Ooh, great ending!")?

You might have noticed I can't give a single answer to any question, and this is no exception.

Within the story, the bird is trying to warn Alexandros not to overlook the agency and perspective of women in his life; having accomplished her goal precisely _because_ he underestimated her agency, she can afford to.

Outside the story, I wanted readers to figure out what they think Anaeet would do. Which means rethinking her story from her perspective. It's my biggest divergence from the original folktale; in the original, her husband doesn't do anything that maybe hurts her, and of course she rescues him. In this version, would she? How do things look through those pretty-but-limiting emerald eyes? To me, the answer matters far less than the creative action I'm hoping readers take, of centering her perspective instead of his.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in _Strange Horizons,_ _Daily Science Fiction,_ and _Ideomancer._ She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for _Fantasy Magazine,_ the _Cascadia Subduction Zone,_ and the anthology _Invisible 2._

# Author Spotlight: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

## Coral Moore

This story is told as a conversation between people of different generations. How did that inform the choices you made during the story itself and the storytelling narration?

Storytelling is a practice in my culture that is always a conversation between different generations and different beings—it is a conversation that takes place across time and space. I wanted to reflect that very organically in this piece.

The character Auntie narrates the story of the gezhizhwazh in a different voice than she speaks in. How did the creation of her character differ from characters who only speak in a single voice?

Indigenous peoples speak in a variety of voices as a matter of course. When I am in Nishnaabeg space, I speak in a different manner than when I am addressing a group of non-Indigenous Peoples. Fluidity, layered, multiple meanings, and multiple voices and perspectives are encoded into Nishnaabeg storytelling practices. So the idea that the auntie has different voices is, again, something very organic and normal to me.

Oral storytelling is about the relationship between the storyteller and the audience as much as the story itself. Which came first, the idea for the story, or the idea for the characters? Do you think the story would have been the same if the two people having the conversation had been different?

Both occur at the same time for me because they reflect, embody, and amplify each other. Process and context generate meaning, so no, the story is always different.

What do you have coming out in the future that we should look for?

I have a new record called _f(l)ight_ from RPM Records, and I have a new book of short stories and poetry called _This Accident of Being Lost_ coming from House of Anansi Press in the spring.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Coral Moore has always been the kind of girl who makes up stories. Fortunately, she never grew out of that. She writes character driven fiction, and enjoys conversations about genetics and microbiology as much as those about vampires and werewolves. She has an MFA in Writing from Albertus Magnus College and is an alum of Viable Paradise XVII. She has been published by _Vitality Magazine,_ _Diabolical Plots,_ and _Zombies Need Brains._ She loves aquariums, rides a motorcycle, and thinks there is little better than a good cup of coffee.

# Author Spotlight: Sofia Samatar

## Christian A. Coleman

This story is written as a school research paper with footnotes that dialogue with and comment on the main text. Similarly, your story "Ogres of East Africa" is written as a catalogue with a scribe's notes in the margins. What draws you to this postmodern narrative device? What prompted you to use it for this story?

It's always interesting to me how footnotes and marginalia inspire strong feelings. I love them, and I know people who hate them, who won't read a story with footnotes, almost on principle. It seems to have something to do with our definition of what a story is. Some people like a single, uninterrupted narrative. Personally, I like to have different stories layered on top of each other, contrasting, or woven together. I often think of the connection between the words "text" and "textile"—that's a really rich concept for me.

For "Walkdog" and "Ogres" as well, the idea of the "extra" text works to show how there's a dominant narrative, and the narrators of these stories are under its power to some extent, but it's not their story. In "Walkdog," Yolanda has to write an essay for school, but she really wants to write something else. That was me all the way through school! And her story pushes through, it won't be silenced.

How do you approach a character like Yolanda, who expresses genuine remorse when Andy disappears, as well as latent romantic feelings for him, but, like everyone at her school, is complicit in allowing violent bullying to endanger his life?

I approach her as myself: wanting to speak up, but often too scared of the consequences. Certainly that's how I was in school, although to be honest, when I was at school in South Orange, NJ, where "Walkdog" is set, I was much lower on the social hierarchy than Yolanda, much more like Andy, although I never suffered physically the way he did. So I wasn't in a position to really help anybody else. Now I often am, and it's a struggle. Should I say something? But what if . . . ? Maybe somebody else will say something?

In some ways, this story—like all my stories—is a message to myself.

****The way you subvert our expectations of the monster reminds me of John Ajvide Lindqvist's _Let the Right One In._ Once we discover that Andy's been a target of violent bullying, the Walkdog appears to be his merciful deliverance from a horrible situation rather than a monster. What's the inspiration behind this creature?

Oh, that's a great comparison, thank you! Well, I have thought and read and written a lot about monsters—"Ogres of East Africa" was part of that thinking, as well as several other stories like "The Nazir" and "How I Met the Ghoul," and both the Olondria novels. And I have a book called _Monster Portraits_ that I wrote with my brother, which is coming out in 2018. So it's kind of an obsession. The figure of the monster is so intense—the focus of fear and longing, hatred and compassion. And because these contradictions interest me so much, there are no simple monsters in my work. They're always in some way like the monster in "Walkdog": menacing, seductive, utopian. They threaten us with what we want most.

As far as the actual creature Walkdog, the way it looks: it was really just inspired by northern New Jersey. It's an urban/suburban creature: a little bit dog, a little bit raccoon, a little bit lizard, with a knowledge of dumpsters and drains.

What are some of your favorite beasts and creatures in fantasy?

Selkies! The selkie is probably my favorite creature. (My autocorrect changes selkie to "selfie," which is either appalling or weirdly instructive or both.) I love giant birds, like the roc. I also love all the gross uncouth cave dwellers—ogres and trolls and so on, Grendel, Caliban. I'm really into orcs.

Is the blues song "Indiana Morning" based on an actual song with similar lyrics and tenor? Did you have a specific blues singer in mind, such as Billie Holiday, when you came up with Maisie Oates?

No, it's not based on an actual song, just the genre of the blues, that folk tradition. Billie Holiday fits, but I was thinking more of Bessie Smith.

_The Winged Histories,_ your second novel and sequel to _A Stranger in Olondria,_ came out this year. Do you have other projects in the works you can tell us about?

My first short story collection, _Tender,_ is coming out in 2017! It will include "Walkdog," as well as many of my other stories, including some that have only come out in print, and two never-before-published pieces: a new story and a novella. Then there's _Monster Portraits,_ which I mentioned already, forthcoming in 2018 from Rose Metal Press. Currently I'm working on a hybrid fiction/history/memoir, based on a migration of Mennonites from southern Russia to what's now Uzbekistan in the 1880s, and it's going horribly. Notebooks and index cards everywhere. It's monstrous.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

# Author Spotlight: Celeste Rita Baker

## LaShawn Wanak

What was your inspiration for this story?

I didn't have an inspiration for the story while I was working on it. I write what comes to me, and then I tinker with it until it feels right. With "Name Calling," I only knew that it wasn't finished. Then my sister died, and as we had held our mother when she was dying, I was now holding my sister. I felt like I was walking and talking my loved ones through death's door. The next time I looked at the story, over three years later, I was able to finish it, but I still didn't make the connection. That's how it works best for me. Write, marinate, add, subtract, try to polish. Much later, I learn what the true inspiration was.

What made you decide to use dialect in the story?

I wrote it in dialect because that is how Rhonda would have spoken if she were recounting her experience to a friend. Not every character, or every conversation by a certain character, may be in dialect, but I wanted Rhonda's retelling to feel natural and uncensored. Unconstrained by the strictures of Standard American English.

You could have easily decided to have Rhonda be a younger woman, even a teenager. Why did you make her an older woman?

Teenagers and young people get enough press! I would love to see many more older characters, and not just in books but in all media. We still learn and grow, get in and out of trouble, can create conflict and drama. But in Rhonda's case, now that I think about it, it probably added weight to the story in that she and Aundie had a friendship that lasted decades.

The relationship between Rhonda and Aundie calls to mind the use of strong friendships in Black literature, particularly between Black women. Why did you choose this dynamic instead of a pair of lovers, or a mother/daughter relationship?

I didn't choose it, it was what came to me when I started writing, and it never even occurred to me to change it.

What projects are you working on now?

I'm sick of saying I'm working on a novel about a Black woman in a futuristic New York City who shares her body with a saint, because clearly, to me at least, I can't get that story out yet. In the meantime, I'm working on a short story about the intergenerational conflict between the survivors of the Middle Passage that live in the sea, and another about french fry eating iguanas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in _Strange Horizons,_ _Daily Science Fiction,_ and _Ideomancer._ She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for _Fantasy Magazine,_ the _Cascadia Subduction Zone,_ and the anthology _Invisible 2._

# MISCELLANY
# Subscriptions & Ebooks

## The Editors

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# About the People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! Team

## _The Editors_

Daniel José Older, Guest Editor-in-Chief and Original Fiction Editor

Daniel José Older is the _New York Times_ bestselling author of _Salsa Nocturna_ and the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series from Penguin's Roc Books. He is also the author of the young adult novel _Shadowshaper_ (Scholastic, 2015), a _New York Times_ Notable Book of 2015, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers' Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of _Esquire's_ 80 Books Every Person Should Read. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music at danieljoseolder.net, on YouTube and @djolder on Twitter.

Amal El-Mohtar, Reprints Editor

Amal El-Mohtar is an author, editor, and critic: her short fiction has received the Locus Award, and she has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, while her poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times. She is the author of _The Honey Month,_ a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey,and a contributor to NPR Books and the LA Times. Her fiction has appeared most recently in _Lightspeed,_ _Uncanny Magazine,_ and Ann VanderMeer's _Bestiary_ anthology, and as well as _The Starlit Wood,_ an anthology of original fairy tales edited by Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien. She divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

Tobias Buckell, Nonfiction Editor

Tobias S. Buckell is a _New York Times_ bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into eighteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com.

Arley Sorg, Author Spotlights Editor and Special Issue Coordinator

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He went to Pitzer College and studied Asian Religions. He lives in Oakland, and most often writes in local coffee shops. He has a number of short stories out at various markets and is hammering out a novel. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he works at _Locus Magazine._ He's soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Pablo Defendini, Art Director

Pablo Defendini is a designer for hire. He mostly works on user experience, product design, and strategy for websites and mobile apps, with a little book design and art direction on the side. Occasionally he'll do some illustration and some printmaking for his own amusement. You can see his latest work at defendini.com. He also gets really nerdy and technical exploring new forms for building digital comics out of HTML and CSS at digitalcomics.co. He helped launch tor.com and ran it for its first few years, before moving on to work for companies that sit in the overlap between publishing and technology, like Open Road Media and O'Reilly. Pablo was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, lives in New York City, and works with clients over the world.

Ana Bracic, Illustrator

Ana Bracic was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1988. In 2014 she completed her studies at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, where she obtained Master degree in painting. She currently works as a video game concept artist and illustrator in Belgrade. Learn more at anabracic.tumblr.com.

Emily Osborne, Illustrator and Cover Artist

Emily Osborne is a digital artist and illustrator from the UK who likes to hug dogs and drink wine. Her work is inspired by her love of history and folklore, having grown up in a little village where there wasn't much else to do but run about in the woods and tell spooky stories. Emily likes to draw strange, patterned characters, combining an appreciation of costume design with anthropological and cultural art. She is currently an artist on online webcomic _Catalist_ where she gets to draw a lot of colourful, magical cats.

Reimena Yee, Illustrator

Reimena Yee is a strange and fancy illustrator who enjoys way too many things for her own good. Hailing from the dusty city of Kuala Lumpur, she travels the world (mostly digitally) to take inspiration from its endless offerings and tell some good stories. She has worked with clients like BOOM! and Girls Make Games, and is dedicated to her webcomic, _The World in Deeper Inspection._ Learn more at reimenayee.com and alcottgrimsley.com.

Christian A. Coleman, Author Spotlight Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Coral Moore, Author Spotlight Interviewer

Coral Moore has always been the kind of girl who makes up stories. Fortunately, she never grew out of that. She writes character driven fiction, and enjoys conversations about genetics and microbiology as much as those about vampires and werewolves. She has an MFA in Writing from Albertus Magnus College and is an alum of Viable Paradise XVII. She has been published by _Vitality Magazine,_ _Diabolical Plots,_ and _Zombies Need Brains._ She loves aquariums, rides a motorcycle, and thinks there is little better than a good cup of coffee.

Nicasio Andres Reed, Author Spotlight Interviewer

Nicasio Andres Reed is a queer Filipino-American writer and a member of the Queer Asian SF/F/H Illuminati. They write fiction, comics, and poetry, and their work has been represented in _Beyond: A Queer Sci-Fi Comics Anthology,_ _Strange Horizons,_ _Lightspeed's_ Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, _Liminality_ and more. Their next short story is upcoming in _Shimmer._ You can find them on Twitter @NicasioSilang, probably tweeting about _Dragon Age_ again.

Jeremy Sim, Author Spotlight Interviewer

Jeremy Sim is a Singaporean-American writer and author of more than a dozen short stories, most notably in _Beneath Ceaseless Skies,_ _Cicada,_ and _Crossed Genres._ He is a graduate of Odyssey and Clarion West Writing Workshops, where he was awarded the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship in 2011. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany, where he moonlights as a freelance video game writer and editor. On a normal day, he can be found making spreadsheets, overanalyzing things, or trying strange new ice cream flavors—sometimes all at the same time. Find him online at jeremysim.com, or on Twitter at @jeremy_sim.

LaShawn Wanak, Author Spotlight Interviewer

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in _Strange Horizons,_ _Daily Science Fiction,_ and _Ideomancer._ She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for _Fantasy Magazine,_ the _Cascadia Subduction Zone,_ and the anthology _Invisible 2._

JY Yang, Author Spotlight Interviewer

JY Yang is a lapsed scientist, a former journalist, and a short story writer. She lives in Singapore, in a bubble populated by her imagination and an indeterminate number of succulent plants named Lars. A graduate of the 2013 class of Clarion West, her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in _Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons,_ and _Apex,_ among others. A list of her publications can be found at misshallelujah.net, and she can be found on Twitter as @halleluyang, grumbling about Scandinavian languages and making displeased noises about the state of the world.

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Additional Special Issue Staff

We made every effort to involve POC production staff whenever possible, but, as with the Women and Queers Destroy projects, we involved some allies on the production side of things. (Note: Copy Editing, though it has "Editing" right in the name, is actually a production job. Similarly, Audio Editing is a production task as well.) So the following folks worked on this special issue, but are not necessarily people of color.

Publisher

John Joseph Adams

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Managing Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Audio Editor

Jim Freund

Copy Editor

Julie Steinbacher

Proofreaders

Coral Moore  
Esther Patterson  
Liz Colter  
Mike Glyde

Book Production & Layout

Matthew Bright

Crowdfunding Logo Design

Julia Sevin

