Genre Society
October 2026
Issue 10
The
The Genre Society
Issue 10 October 2026 Published by Whitney Mcclelland Cover art "Dark Hallway" by charlesdeluvio
Letter From the Editor.............................................................................................................................. 4 Poetry The Rage of the Onryō ............................................................................................................................... 6 Daniel Appleby Rot............................................................................................................................................................... 8 Cithara Patra A Zombie's Internal Monologue ................................................................................................................ 9 Paul Burgess Breakfast Made by a Dog .........................................................................................................................10 Romolo Wilkinson Fiction Response Time ..........................................................................................................................................14 Patrick McEvoy and Rodolfo Buscaglia Sins Have Feet............................................................................................................................................18 Christian De Matteo Scion of Sobek ......................................................................................................................................... 22 Brydon Caldwell Shine a Light for the Lost ......................................................................................................................... 27 Morgan Roth Zookeeper Twelve ..................................................................................................................................... 34 Winthrop Jordan A Swarm of Monsters ............................................................................................................................... 46 Arthur Davis Stake and Shake ....................................................................................................................................... 51 Chase Strawser The Horde ................................................................................................................................................ 54 Payton Smith Nothing Remains in the Discard .............................................................................................................. 57 Henry Sinclair Fluffle ....................................................................................................................................................... 64 Sascha Goluboff
Table of Contents
Hello, Genre Lovers, This is the tenth edition of The Genre Society and frankly I hope someone somewhere is reading this letter. After ten of them, are you sick of me yet? Have I ever introduced myself? Hi, I'm Whitney. The one woman show behind the technological curtain that is my iMac. If you didn't know, I decided to start creating this magazine for fun. Because I could. All it would do is cost a little money. And time. But I really wanted to show people what I was capable of, I suppose. I'm a teacher, but I wish I was an editor. I'm a writer, but I need to write more. This year is coming to a close already. My goals for the end of the year include finishing my novel. That's pretty much it. I'd really like to finish this thing. It's turning into a beast. But I can feel the end nearing and in revision I can fix it. Right now, I'm in a race to the finish. But anyway, enough about me. Are you out there? I would love to hear from those of you reading what you like or dislike about this magazine. Feedback, per se. You can actually do that by clicking here: Feedback Form! Thank you in advance if you decide to fill it out. Mostly, I'd just like to hear from you. Like your own letter to the editor. Anyhow, I hope your fall and winter get on nicely and you have/had a very spooky, scary Halloween. I won't speak to you again until after Christmas and the New Year. Another time for setting goals. New ones, like get published now that the novel is (should be) done... Thank you again for reading and enjoy this collection of stories, Genre Lovers. -Whitney McClelland Editor and Publisher
Greetings Genre Lovers!
Letter from the Editor
poetry
A dislocation, a mouth begging for lost salvation, soon to be consumed once again, a statue, a painful misunderstanding, an awkward mother, an isolated child, a green-eyed cat, diary of isolated futures, torn to silence. The stairs are where you cry and they to inevitably die. Your lids fracture; you never blink. You’ll scream inexorably in vengeful despair, leaving a splintered verse in their wake: The white flower cranes its neck and head backwards, abyssal hair covers her mournful feral spite, her nails splinter the domestic paper walls. Once at the front door, the missing posters outside litter the drive, her phantom limb clutches your ankle and traps you inside, never to be heard again, to join in the melancholic void of misery.
The Rage of the Onryo by Daniel Appleby
after Takako Fuji Death is the claustrophobic triangle. Ash is the skin of your delectable dark. Still, you usually are, hidden underneath those black garbage bags, waiting to strike. Eyes quiet and bright with a poisonous fury that seizes innocent nights. It takes only one to be awoken from unforgivable slumber. Haunted, they become, by the rattle of your decay. Forward, left, forward, left, stare, then right. One: between your silver lips, blood waterfalls down your chin. Two: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please help me.
Daniel Appleby is an autistic writer and poet currently residing in Cornwall. He has been published in Flare Journal, Chaos & Grace: A Chapter House Anthology, Fantasy/Animation, and others. Find him on Instagram at @danie_lappleby.
A Zombie's Internal Monologue by Paul Burgess
Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has recently contributed work to Blue Unicorn, The Road Not Taken, Light, Apricity, Star*Line, The Orchards, Snakeskin, Pulsebeat, and several other publications.
Born in North Carolina, Cithara Patra has spent time in Puerto Rico, Ohio, Nebraska, and Texas before settling back in NC. Besides writing, Cithara loves things from the ocean, dachshunds, and cooking. In their spare time, they travel with their family around the city and check out brand new restaurants.
Rot by Cithara Patra
Elitist vampires laugh because they know that “brains” is not announcing hunted foods. What hunter startles prey with shouts of “deer”? The condescending leeches know it means, “Despite the rot, I still possess my brains.” Well, not the bits for finer motor skills or more sophisticated sound control. My clumsy limbs, of course, can’t write or draw. Employing body language, which I can’t, would be as useless since the world assumes I’ve got no thoughts and can’t communicate. I’m seen as cursed or plagued and get attacked, and lacking other means of self-defense besides a set of teeth and flailing hands, I bite and tear to keep from getting killed then eat the only meat I ever get although disgusted every time I feed. With each approach, I hope for different ends but never get the recognition sought of rotting flesh but shared humanity. Yet, speaking sorts among the risen dead delight in having more respect from prey they stalk before devouring with intent.
Waste away under dirt Brittle bones to dust Flesh fading as worms feast on your corpse ripe for eating Centipedes crawl over your legs Beetles scattered across your chest Maggots devoured what’s left your brain as you lay six feet under ground May you rest there and rot May every part of you disappear All your joints fall apart and your flesh torn to pieces as your memory vanishes from the minds of those who you knew you Rot and become food for the creatures who will be the only company down there the same company that swallows every piece of you till there’s nothing but rotten bits that used to be your putrid soul Rot in pieces
Romolo Wilkinson is an American writer and radiologic technologist based in Alameda, California. He holds a BFA in Acting from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and is a two-time winner of the San Francisco Young Playwrights Festival. His poetry has appeared in the Ultramarine Literary Review, Double Dutch Magazine, The Genre Society, and 100subtexts. Today, he balances his creative work with a healthcare career specializing in orthopedic and pediatric x-ray.
GOOD MORNING! Good morning, BEST FRIEND! I've brought a tray so you can have BREAKFAST IN BED! Since you're my favorite person on this God-given Earth I want YOU to have the finest muddiest wettest clumps of cloddy dirt! Topped with eggshells and coffee beans Potato skins and dandelion greens The yummiest open can of sardines I could find And a soggy old tomato that will REALLY blow your mind! Oh! This cup had some smears of strawberry ice cream (I couldn't really help myself and so I licked it clean…) I'm so so very sorry, I know it wasn't right But if you put your nose up to it you can SMELL what it was like… Heck! It's still good paper! Go on and TAKE A BITE! And eat up all these fuzzy things I found down on the rug… A banana peel, some crumbs of bread, the carcass of a bug! The lettuce from a burger someone threw out on the street Drizzled with the sock sweat from your little tired feet A wrapper from a candy bar A chargrilled patty (mostly char)
by Romolo Wilkinson
Breakfast Made by a Dog
A pickled pigeon's beak A tub of melted yogurt– it had to have been Greek– And it's getting more DELECTABLE each and every week! What's that you say? You're OK? Oh! Oh…well…you're always right… But I'd hate for this to go to waste without having a single taste… Do you mind if I have a bite?
FICTION
Maurice hadn’t slept in three days. He was seeing things. Lights suddenly flashing in the corners of his eyes, floaters with faces ghosting past his pupils and once an ex-girlfriend from college in the employee bathroom. Demitra? Debra? Dolores? Sleep would have to happen very soon or his usefulness to the group would collapse. So where the hell was Emilio? Scratching the side of his head with the barrel of his shotgun, Maurice tried to remember the last time he’d seen any of the crew. He was pretty sure he hadn’t volunteered for a 72-hour shift. Not the ideal assignment for a pudgy 43-year-old dude. The deal had been midnight to 5 AM. Right? Emilio would relieve him and he could sleep. When the security monitors all went static, he figured at least some of the crew would come in to check out what had happened or update him on the situation. His brain was having a harder and harder time dealing with the static now, his eyes making up shapes in it, like spotting a figure in a blizzard or a pair of breasts on the porno channel your parents didn’t get. The sound of the static wasn't doing anything good for him either. He was starting to hear words in it and none of them were signs of psychological well-being. “Shut the freezer and shoot yourself” had become the most common refrain. He had no idea why he should shut the freezer. He was almost out of Twinkies, another factor of terror. Maurice was sure the only thing gluing him together was sugar and preservatives. He squinted again through the openings in the dropped metal store gate. How many horror movies had he seen where the future victims ended up hunkering down in an abandoned mall? Granted, the cliché seemed well-earned– that is where all the supplies would be– but still Maurice hated being cliché. Unless it meant him becoming the final girl. He’d want a blue dress and maybe to have his hair done up in a beehive. What the hell was he thinking about? A beehive? And he hated blue. And he had terrible legs for a dress. He was worried about his legs? Maurice needed to sleep. 73 hours was imminent, and he’d processed all the sugar and water he could. If Emilio or Tara or Becca or Nolan or Sponge Bob or Bugs Bunny or Gossamer didn’t show up soon, he was gonna pass out on the sliced bread display. No better beds than food displays in shopping mall mini-marts. Plus, he could read the paper with the news from last Wednesday. Hell, he realized, maybe he’d gotten the whole story wrong and nothing bad was going on. Maybe the headlines “High levels of deadly chemical detected in low fog” really said, “High school deans cleaning dentures in loud frogs,” or something innocuous like that. Sponge Bob? What the shit? Time to sleep. After checking the front doors of the mall one more time through the metal store gate– the glass doors showed fog so thick it looked like smoke from a house fire– Maurice headed to the employee bathroom to take a leak. After all that had happened, he wasn’t gonna also piss himself in comatose sleep. And he was pretty sure he was going to be comatose. Entering the storeroom, he put the shotgun they’d taken from Bob’s Sportsman’s Surplus! down on one of the many shelves full of candy, toilet paper and all other manner of mini-mart goodness. He had tried desperately to find the pornographic magazines, but it didn’t seem they even made those anymore. Short-sighted, he thought, what with the internet going down worldwide. His appreciation for physical goods was getting higher by the day. I mean what the hell would this brave new world be without easily accessible porn? These were the wrong rambling thoughts for a middle-aged man attempting to urinate, his wang confused as to what activity it was supposed to be rallying for. “Come on, buddy, just go so we can sleep,” he said to it. “You got me all worked up about porn and now I can’t,” it responded. “I don’t know, think about baseball or something. I’ve drank about a hundred energy drinks and my bladder’s gonna explode.” “Couple of strokes and we could release all kinds of stuff,” his wang suggested. “Dude, I don’t want to do that now. Just piss and let’s go sleep on the cloud beds in the flower garden.” “Are you talking to your dong about cloud beds in a flower garden?” said a voice neither his nor his wang’s. “Was I talking to my wang?” he asked. “You sure were,” replied the face in the mirror. Still holding his swiftly retreating member, Maurice studied the face, slowly gleaning onto the fact it was that of someone behind him. “Denise?” he said hesitantly. “Jessica, you dumb fuck,” Jessica replied with a mean smile. “You never dated a girl with a D-name.” Still holding himself, Maurice turned slowly around. “Jessica, that’s right. My ex from college. I thought I saw you before.” No one was there. He was going loopy. “The girlfriend you cheated on in college. With her roommate, Maurice. While she slept in the other bed. After you’d slept with her.” Maurice pivoted back around to the mirror. Jessica was there, in the glass again. “Sins have feet, Maurice. Eventually they walk on back.” Dong hanging limply along his open fly, Maurice raised his hands, as though in surrender. Then he turned and booked it out of bathroom. A bit of piss had begun to finally flow from him, adding to the horror and embarrassment of the situation. “I was just thinking about Sponge Bob and Gossamer. I’m hallucinating. Three days no sleep ain’t doing nothing good for me. Just gotta get outta here, find a comfy spot and sing ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ with a reindeer. Shit, my mind is melting.” Had he really done all that to Jessica? And in front of her? College was almost as much of a blur as this moment now, at the edge of the end of the world, a fog covering the earth full of deadly, mind-fucking chemicals and walking demons. “Sins, Maurice, the fog is full of sins, everyone’s sins, mistakes, misjudgments that caused hurt to others. And I’m your first, Maurice. Only your first.” She was in the doorway of the storeroom. He could see all of her now. She was wearing the outfit he’d taken her home from the bar in that night. The night he’d banged her roommate. Deana? “I told you, you never dated a girl with a D-name!” His pants warm with wet, he threw himself at his shotgun on the shelf. Jessica waved and 20 boxes of candy bars collapsed in front of it, half burying him. “I just need to go to sleep. My mind is doing this to me. None of this is real.” She was closing in on him. He held tight, ignoring his now freezing cold wang, swiftly cooling, wet pants and the blood starting to stream from a cut on his scalp apparently made by one of the falling candy boxes. “Emilio…” “Oh, he had his own misspent youth to deal with. So did Tara and Becca. Surprisingly, Nolan will be just fine. Really a sweetheart of a guy.” She kneeled in front of him in the sexy, girlish way women knelt when they wore a skirt above knee height. She reached out a hand and stroked his face. Razor sharp, lava-hot needles sliced through his cheek, instantly cauterizing the wounds as it made them. The heat began to spread, building from the cuts, radiating out and into his head, super-heating his brain. Maurice held his head and shrieked. The pain wouldn’t stop building, a volcano ready to blow. A flamethrower blast of pressure blew out his ears and he slammed his hands down on the ground. His right hand found the shotgun. “Sinners have feet too, Maurice. Use them.” Maurice threw himself to his feet, back slamming into the shelves, knocking more boxes and items down into messy, clattering piles on the floor. He raised the shotgun and fired at Jessica. He watched her raised right hand disintegrate as the recoil launched him five feet back along the shelves, toppling the last and sending him ass over tea kettle in front of the open walk-in freezer door. Looking up, he saw Jessica, waving a bloody wrist with fresh fingers pushing out of the stump. They rose like fast growing mushrooms, blood spattering her face and chest. Soon the webbing between her fingers became visible– translucent and veiny like stretched placenta– before birthing the beginnings of a palm. “What are you?” “I’m the shape of your transgressions, Maurice. We’re all here. We’re all back. For everyone. No one ever said Judgement Day would be fun. But it will be fickle.” Maurice scrambled to his knees and launched himself into the freezer, turned around and slammed the door shut. “Good, Maurice,” the ghost of Jessica’s betrayal said, “now shoot yourself.”
Christian De Matteo is a writer, editor, and college professor whose fiction has appeared in The Bleeding Margin and Grim Omen Magazine, with work forthcoming from Tales to Terrify, Close to the Bone, Crimeucopia, Thriller Magazine, and other publications. He is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of independent comics publisher Fugitive Poems and founder of Tellworthy Creative Writing Services. His fiction wanders through the back alleys of crime, horror, noir, and the strange places in between, usually looking for a fight. Check out his comics at FugitivePoems.com.
Sins Have Feet by Christian De Matteo
Drip. Drip. Drip. She woke to the sound of dripping from several different parts of the room. She was groggy and confused; not quite sure where she was or how she got there. She opened her eyes to find herself in an enclosed space with dirt walls and a concrete floor, probably a cellar, with a full length cabinet and a large work desk at the far end of the room. One fluorescent light blazed from the middle of the ceiling, casting shadows into the corners. The next thing that hit her was the humidity. It hung heavy in the air, pushing against what was now her cold, clammy skin. A musty smell pushed against her nostrils. She looked down to realize that she had been stripped down to her bra and panties, leaving her skin to chill from all of the moisture in the air. Shaking her head, she tried to remember what she had been doing last, but couldn’t fight through the fog in her mind. Looking around the room some more, she realized she was in something of a cage, with bars in front of her and just enough height that she could sit up. When she tried to move, she felt the harsh pull of metal handcuffs against her ankle. They were braced tight against her flesh and then to an eye bolt buried in the cement floor. Afraid of what she was going to find, she slid her hand down over her abdomen. No scars, no blood, no bandages. Gulping, she moved her fingers further down under her panties. No moisture, no crust, no aching or pain. She exhaled; presumably she had not been physically abused yet. Drip. Drip. Drip. She tried to focus on her breathing and keep calm in what was feeling more and more like an unimaginable situation. Slowly, details began coming back to her, even as the dripping water beat against her fragile concentration. Her name was Lacy, she was 32 years old, and she worked as a VP at the bank. Single, no family, one pet, a cat named Mitzy. The last day she remembered being at work was Friday. Was that today? Yesterday? What did she do on Friday nights? She’d… been on a date. Or tried to go on a date? She remembered something about sitting in a restaurant alone for far too long before she decided that she had been stood up. After that… nothing. She shook her head. Sitting here woolgathering wasn’t going to accomplish anything. Peering around again, a detailed inspection on her surroundings didn’t reveal any information or opportunities to escape. Even the top of the desk at the far end of the room was empty and clear. Remembering some of the television shows she’d watched, she felt at the bottom of her bra for an underwire in hopes of somehow picking the lock on the handcuffs. Unfortunately, not wanting to send the wrong message on a first date, she’d worn something more sensible. “Hello? Can anyone hear me? Help!” While she doubted that anyone could hear her, she felt she needed to make the attempt anyway. “Please! I’m awake but I don’t know how I got here or where I am!” She continued yelling until her voice began to turn hoarse. Drip. Drip. Drip. She had begun zoning out when she heard the distinct sound of a deadbolt unlocking. She straightened herself and prepared for whoever might be coming into the room. She heard a door creak open and a man stepped through. A normal, nondescript, average man, someone she would have looked through at the supermarket or in line at the bank. If anything, that confused her even more. “Hello?” she tried. “You woke up,” his voice was flat as he looked her over. “What am I doing here? How did I get here? Where are my clothes? Why am I here?” It all came tumbling out in a rush. The man waved his hand with a grimace. “Stop, just stop.” She waited to see if he would say any more, but he just stared at her coldly. “Please, tell me something!” she begged. “Do you know much about crocodiles?” he finally asked. “Crocodiles? I don’t… I don’t understand?” “Surely you know what crocodiles are. Big green reptiles that live in the swamps around us. Big jaws, long tails.” “I know crocodiles. I’ve even seen a few out there. I just don’t know what you’re asking me for,” she pleaded. “Crocodiles are the superior life form. They’re strong and aggressive, yet they’re rarely territorial. They can catch their own prey while having no natural predators.” “Okay?” All she could do was agree. “Mothers guard their nests for months, waiting for their hatchlings to grow, and help them emerge when they’re ready to leave the shell. They raise their young for over a year before they’re ready to go out on their own. Actual maternal instinct in a coldblooded reptile!” “I… I wouldn’t know.” He sneered. “Of course not. Married to your career without any time for mating or motherhood. Your prime fertility has been wasted and you probably haven’t even thought about children yet. A betrayal of your own species!” Her eyes widened in shock but she bit her lip, not sure how to respond. “Did you know that if something happens to the mother crocodile, the father steps in and raises the eggs and hatchlings? Tell that to all the deadbeat dads and absentee fathers in this state.” “Parenthood can be tough,” she tried. He barked a laugh. “Everything is tough. Life is still about procreation and protecting the young, no matter what humanity thinks.” “What does this have to do with me?” He shook his head and went to dig around in his cabinet. “Please?” she asked again. “Crocodiles should be revered, held up for their traits and the example they set for the rest of the animal kingdom. Instead, humans encroach on their homes, kill them for sport, and think nothing of monopolizing their food supply!” “Okay…” “The Egyptians had it right. A Crocodile God to represent the power of the pharaoh and the fertility of the Nile, which they required for survival. Why can’t we be more like them?” His eyes had become wild now. “That’s not…” She didn’t know what was safe to say or even what he wanted her to say. “That’s not how it works. They didn’t know any better. We’re more advanced than that… Advanced enough that we’re wasting our world and wrecking it for the crocodiles and everything else that deserves it more than we do!” Drip. Drip. Drip. Tears had begun leaking out of her eyes without her realizing. “Please, tell me what I can do. What you want from me.” He looked over at her and his eyes seemed to focus again. “Since you’re just a leech on society, I’m going to make sure you serve a better purpose.” “I’ll do anything you want, just tell me and I’ll agree…” She forced herself to push her chest out. He snorted in disgust. “Anything? Like being open to ‘fun and adventure’ on your first date?” “What? You read my dating profile? Wait…” Things began to click in her mind. “You were the one who stood me up?” “All too easy to convince you to meet. Once you were stood up and distracted, all I needed to do was sweep you off your feet, if you will. Now, here we are.” “Sweep me off…” She gulped. “You drugged me?” “Not much more than chloroform, nice and simple. I wouldn’t want anything to affect your body chemistry. Wouldn’t want you to leave an aftertaste.” Her mind reeled with the information. Abducted on a first date like some bimbo in a cheesy movie. She looked up at him again with a sudden realization. “You’ve done this before.” “We all do our part to make the world better. This is mine.” “But chemicals? A cage?” He snorted. “The Internet is a wonderful thing, and something that rarely asks questions.” He turned back to the cabinet and pulled out what looked like a green covering. Gathering it around himself, she could see that it was made out of a whole crocodile skin. He gathered it around himself to connect the fasteners but left the hood down for now. When he was finished, he seemed to exhale with comfort or satisfaction. He looked at her through the bars again and seemed to nod. “After all this, you must be hungry. Would you like an apple?” Food was the last thing on her mind, but she realized that her stomach was cramped with hunger. “Yes. Please” He turned to pull an apple out of the cabinet and then came close so he could fit the apple through the bars of the cage and toss it to her. She caught it and took a large bite. He stayed where he was, watching her intently. She had just taken her third bite when he brought a bottle from behind his back and sprayed the inside of the cage. Swooning, she dropped the apple and fought to remain conscious. She felt even foggier than when she first regained consciousness and couldn’t control her body. She attempted to talk, but could only manage indistinct mumbles. Nodding, he unlocked the cage and leaned in to tie her wrists together with a soft cord. Feeling secure, he unlocked the handcuff attached to the eye bolt and relocked it on her other ankle. He was pulling her limp body out of the cage when she passed out again. Drip. Drip. Drip. Splash. She woke to him slapping her face and encouraging her to wake up. Unwilling to talk, she let out a large moan as her eyes flashed open. “There we are. It’s always better to be awake and attentive.” He shifted and her world started rocking. Glancing around, she realized that they were now on a boat. The dripping was no longer the humidity in the cellar, but water returning to the swamp surrounding them. Moonlight passed through the trees, leaving menacing shadows all around them. After a couple of purposeful swallows, she found her voice. “What’s better?” “Putting you to better use for society, of course. Why let you consume precious resources from the earth when you’re not going to procreate or give back? Better for you to provide nourishment for a superior species.” “Superior…” She froze in horror for a moment. “You’re feeding me to the crocodiles?” “What better use for you?” She just blinked as the idea kept slipping away from her brain. A good life, a good job, and she was going to end up as crocodile food? “The handcuffs on your legs are nonnegotiable, unfortunately, but the cord on your wrists should be easy enough for you to undo with enough effort. Really, the harder you try to escape, the more the crocodiles will enjoy it.” “But my job! My cat! I can’t just…” She started to squirm and struggle, rocking the boat, but accomplishing little else. He flipped up the hood, revealing the head of the crocodile. He stood carefully, grabbed her roughly by the arms, and tossed her over the side. “You made your choices, this is just the consequence.” He grabbed an oar and slapped it against the water several times as she thrashed and churned in the water. When he saw the first set of eyes reflecting the moonlight on the surface, he reversed the boat to a safe distance and enjoyed his handiwork come to fruition.
Brydon Caldwell is a long time teacher and emerging writer from the western edge of the Canadian Shield. He was recently named the winner of the 2026 Icelandic Festival of Manitoba Short Story Contest. His writing can be found in Boudin, The Ekphrastic Review, New Verse News, and the upcoming Fear Dealer, Opolis 2026, and Still From Somewhere anthologies.
Scion of Sobek by Brydon Caldwell
Shine a Light for the Lost by Morgan Roth
Morgan Roth is a genderfluid writer from Western Massachusetts. They enjoy writing stories about the unthinkable, the unexplainable, and people who fall through the cracks.
From the moment you’re born, you’re living in a territory, mapped out by those who came before you. The human urge to draw borders, to divide the world into “safe” and “unsafe,” is universal. That said, I think you feel it more out in the country. Any place where human civilization brushes up against the wilderness, the lines are stark, and not just between man and nature. This is where you get your sundown towns and “Trespassers Will Be Shot” signs, the borders carved into people’s skin, deep enough to cleave some folks in two. It’s so strong, such a part of the landscape, that you’d be tempted to think it’s a uniquely country thing, but I’ve lived in big cities, too, and the borders are always there. Not just the ink-and-paper ones, witched into existence by a cabal of city planners, but the real ones, the ones you can actually see in the ways people move. Don’t walk alone in this neighborhood. Don’t take the train past such-and-such station after dark. It’s the same habit, no matter how many people try to cram themselves into one patch of exhausted land. The town I grew up in had borders going back to when it was Indian Territory. Probably longer than that, from before anyone showed up calling the folks who lived there Indians. Thinking back on it, there surely must have been some people around who I could have asked, but the school I went to taught me that all the Indians were gone, and I believed what I was told. Like a lot of places, my town’s original border was a natural one, a stretch of forest that curved around the settled areas like the fingers of a cupped hand. There was hardly anywhere you could walk where the trees weren’t at least in your peripheral vision, verdant in that way that makes it seem like it’s always night beneath them. The town had “green” in the name, so you know the founders recognized the trees’ significance, but the real border marker was never laid down in any official documents. That’s how you know it was the one that mattered. You’d start to see them around dusk. The space beneath the trees would turn black, and from that blackness would come the lights. Softly glowing orbs that drifted above the ground, stirred by mysterious currents that had nothing to do with the breeze the rustled the treetops. Sometimes they were the mellow orange of candlelight, sometimes the blue-white of a lightning bolt. There were kids, the bolder ones, who swore you could throw a rock at them and watch them change color, or swarm in a frenzy like wasps kicked up from their nest. Only children could see the lights, but there were enough adults who had grown up and stuck around that everyone knew about them. And everyone knew to warn their children not to follow the lights beyond the tree line, and not to listen to the voices that the lights would use to call out to them. The first time the lights called to me was the year that I had a crush on Stacy Wallace. My first crush, me young enough that I felt it more in my heart than anywhere else, and one night I was walking home from softball practice and heard Stacy’s voice from the trees. “Georgie… c’mere a second… you want to hear a secret?” I looked over my shoulder and saw the lights, floating in the dark like dandelion seeds, and I remembered what I’d been told and looked away. I walked, didn’t run, the rest of the way home, and I shut my bedroom door and drew the curtains, even though it was a pleasant enough summer evening. A few nights later I walked down to Stacy Wallace’s house, stood outside and watched the whole family sit down at the supper table, and still the lights called to me in Stacy’s voice. That’s how I knew they were trying to trick me. I’d been told by the adults that they would, but I had to learn it for myself to really believe it. It was that way for all the kids, I think, an unspoken rite of passage. My older brother, Kenny, was one of the kids who kept seeing the lights well into his teens. You never knew exactly when you’d stop seeing them, but it tended to coincide with the crossing of some threshold from child to adult– your first summer job, the death of a family member, getting your V-card punched. Kenny was a precocious type, the kind of kid who seems like an adult who’d been sidelined by their own childhood, but even when he got old enough to shave, you’d see his eyes travel to the tree line when the sun went down. I remember wondering if maybe all adults could still see the lights, and at a certain age they all just agreed that they would pretend they couldn’t. It seemed like the sort of thing adults would do. The other thing about Kenny was that he was scared of the lights, more so than what was normal even for really little kids. We’d all been taught not to chase the lights, or to call back to them, but we also knew that if you stuck to these rules, the lights would leave you alone. Kenny, though, seemed to view the lights as a much more active threat, would cross the street to avoid them and cram his hands over his ears. The year before he disappeared, he walked pretty much everywhere with headphones on, grinding heavy metal music leaking out from his earbuds all over the quiet streets. He was no death-rocker type, Kenny– he wore khakis and button-down shirts and read computer manuals for fun. I think he just picked the loudest music he could find, anything to drown out whatever it was he heard coming from the dark of the woods. The summer I turned thirteen, Kenny started to think about college. He poured over websites for schools in Boston, New York, even Berlin. His grades were excellent, his conduct record spotless, and so it was a shock to me and my parents when the cops brought him home in the middle of the night. He’d been caught in the sheriff’s pickup, with the sheriff’s football-player son. I’d never seen them so much as speak to each other at school, not once. Word spread like the chicken pox, from the children on upwards, and in two days the whole town knew. The sheriff’s son disappeared. Military school, was the official reasoning, but no one could seem to pin down which military school, exactly. We saw the family in church every week, but their son never came to visit, and his mother rarely made it through a service without crying. Kenny stopped leaving the house. In some ways it made sense, seeing as he couldn’t even walk down to the 7-11 without a car pulling up alongside him, the passengers leaning out to make obscene slurping noises, then spit at his feet. But pretty soon, he wouldn’t even go into the backyard. Our parents lured him out with a cookout once, barbecued ribs and strawberry shortcake, and Kenny hadn’t finished filling up his plate before his eyes shot to the copse of trees beyond our picket fence, and his face turned white as a sheet. He ran inside, locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out, even when our dad threatened to take the door off its hinges. We could hear him crying in there, and Dad called him a sissy and worse than that, but I don’t think that Kenny heard any of it, because he would have had his headphones on. I don’t know what the lights said to my brother, and I don’t know what made him decide to stop fighting their call. All I know is one cool August morning, we woke up to find all the doors and windows in the house open, and Kenny was gone. A search party was formed, but you could tell that no one’s heart was really in it. Kenny was the first kid to disappear this way in a long time, but every family had at least one story of a sibling or a cousin lost to the lights somewhere in their history. The families who raised children in this town were the ones who knew the risks, and accepted them. My family was no different. My mom became the one crying in church, and the kids who’d spent the summer calling my brother names and avoiding me made a big sympathy card for me, for the first day of school. I didn’t see the lights for years after that. I thought they were done with me, that losing my big brother had brought me across that invisible threshold and I was no longer of their concern. I was starting to think about college, too, even some of the places Kenny had considered. I didn’t have Kenny’s grades, but his college fund had gone unspent, and I had options. I was scared to leave my hometown, but also excited, because I understood by that point that there were things I wanted that this place could never give me. I volunteered at the library in the evenings, trying to get some extracurriculars to put on my college applications, and I was walking home one night when I saw the blue-white orb out of the corner of my eye. Dancing, capricious, right where the twilight melted into true dark beneath the trees. “Georgie,” the light called, in my brother’s voice. “Georgie, c’mere.” I’d always been good. I turned my back on the light and kept walking. I didn’t want to put my parents through another child vanishing. I wanted to leave this town, but on my terms. “Hey, Georgina!” I froze. It wasn’t that the light had used my full name. It was that it had pronounced it wrong, with a long i,so that it rhymed with a girl’s you-know-what. It was something Kenny did when we were young and he was trying to rile me up, and the second I heard it, I was nine years old again and stinging with humiliation. “Don’t call me that!” I yelled back, my voice cracking against the evening hush. Then I slapped my hand over my mouth, horrified that I had broken the age-old rule. The lone blue light turned into several, some as small as fireflies, the largest as big as a soccer ball. They billowed and pulsed as the sound of my voice reached them. If there had been adult or even another kid around, they would have known to pull me away. Everyone knew about the lights, everyone knew the way they tried to reel you in. I’d have been safe with company, but I was alone, the street deserted in the late autumn gloom. The wind was blowing strong enough to whisk my voice away from my mouth and fling it into the darkening sky, but the lights bobbed to their own gentle rhythm. The wind couldn’t touch them, and it couldn’t protect me. “I’m sorry, Sis,” the lights pleaded. I could see the gap between Kenny’s front teeth in my mind’s eye. “I didn’t mean it. Just come here, please. I need to tell you something. Something I never got a chance to say.” I hid it well, for my parents’ sake, but I missed my dorky big brother. Kenny teased me sometimes, but he also let me hang out in his room and thumb through his comics, answered my questions about the internet, showed me how to download songs for free and store them on the chunky pink mp3 player he got me for my twelfth birthday. When I learned an alarming new fact about the world, and wanted to know for sure if it was true, I went to Kenny. Unlike our parents, Kenny never withheld information that he thought would scare or upset me. Kenny always told me the truth as he saw it, confident that I would be able to handle it, and more often than not his confidence was what convinced me that I could. During those teenage years without him, I felt lost, unable to brace myself for whatever life was going to throw at me next. I turned to face the lights. They stilled, as if they could sense my gaze upon them. There were things I wish I had told my brother, before he disappeared. Sometimes I think that if I’d been brave enough to tell him, he might have stayed. “Georgie… please listen…” I was young. I hadn’t heard my brother’s voice in so long. Slowly, I walked to the edge of the trees. The lights stayed in place, flies suspended in amber, but as I drew closer they pulsed in time with my pounding heart, growing brighter with each step. When I reached the tree line, the whole canopy was etched in electric white, the shadow of each leaf sharp enough to cut a finger on. Yet all that detail only made the woods beyond seem denser, more mysterious. I dug my heels into the grass, waiting for an invisible force to try and pull me into the dark. “Kenny?” I whispered. A silence, like a thousand held breaths. And then the lights suddenly dimmed and shrank to the size of pinpricks. It looked like they were fleeing into the trees, and without thinking I stumbled forward to chase them. I tripped over a root and sprawled fully into the dark, skinning my hands and knees. The pinprick lights were dancing all around me, not fleeing but swarming, clouds of them that swooped in front of my eyes and made the outlines of the trees flicker in and out of existence. When I climbed to my feet, all I could see in any direction was the lights. I was only a few feet into the woods, but I couldn’t remember which way was out. “Wait.” I took a step back, and collided with a tree. I lunged away, and the lights pulsed ecstatically. All around me I could hear Kenny’s voice, calling my name, calling me Sis, telling me he was sorry. “Wait!” I screamed, desperate for the frantic motion to stop. “I’m sorry, too, Kenny, I swear, but don’t do this. Don’t take me away. I don’t want to disappear, please.” The lights ignored my plea. They had never been my brother, and they had nothing to tell me that I didn’t already know. Kenny’s voice got louder, distorted by the hiss of the branches in the wind, and I began to hear other voices in the din. I heard Stacy Wallace, who moved away in tenth grade. I heard the sheriff’s boy. I heard kids I didn’t recognize, and adults, too, begging me to listen to them. I clutched at my ears, trying to block the sound, and the lights came together in a singular point and grew, big and bright as the sun, searing my retinas through my eyelids, and inside my head I could still hear my brother’s voice. He wasn’t speaking anymore. He was screaming. I ran. I turned away from that terrible light and bolted into the dark. Trees slammed into my shoulders and hips as I raced past, my equilibrium reeling. All I knew was that I had to keep the blue-white light behind me, to do whatever I could to keep moving away. A branch slashed across the lower half of my face, and I tasted blood. I was certain that I was going to die, that any second now I would slam face-first into a tree and fall to the ground, dazed and broken, and the light would catch me and swallow me into wherever those screams were coming from. Instead, I crashed into a bramble patch. I howled as the thorns bit me through my clothes, thrashed and writhed to get free in an animal panic, and when I made it out the other side, I found myself standing on the edge of a manicured lawn. I looked around. There was no sign of the light. Before me, the lawn sloped down to the back of someone’s house. I could see a butter-colored kitchen through a window, a figure standing over a stove. I half-ran, half-limped across the lawn, out to the street. The streetlights washed everything in shades of orange and pink. I was only a couple of blocks away from home. The wind had died down, and the trees that loomed behind the houses were silent. I walked home as fast as my trembling legs could carry me. I snuck past my parents and shut myself in the bathroom. I pulled the leaves out of my hair and washed the dried blood off my lower lip. Then I showered, told my parents I was going to bed early, and locked myself in my room. When Kenny disappeared, my parents let me have his computer. I spent time on the internet, finding kids like myself who grew up in small towns like mine, towns that demanded sacrifices they weren’t willing to pledge. I messaged one of them, a girl a year older than me who’d recently left home and was attending college in the city closest to my town. I convinced her to come pick me up, and I packed a bag, and I stayed up by the window until dawn and the twin beams of her headlights appeared in the driveway. I didn’t disappear like my brother did. I left a note for my parents, telling them where I was going and why I wasn’t coming back. A week later, I called home, and they agreed that my decision was for the best, and asked me to provide an address where they could mail the rest of my things. They donated most of my and Kenny’s college funds to the church. I got a job and took some community college courses, and then later, moved in with a girlfriend who paid my tuition. She was older than me, owned a regional chain of coffeehouses, and provided me with a safe place to burn out my youthful, foolish notions of love. When things soured between us, I moved out, and for many years after I lived alone. Even when I had roommates, I was alone. Sometimes our borders shrink to the size of our own bodies, and the only safe places are the inside of our own heads, the only safe words those that remain tucked beneath the tongue. Now I live with a different girlfriend, closer to my own age. We travel back to my hometown on occasion, and drink iced tea in my parents’ backyard, and as soon as the sun begins to dip toward the horizon we say we ought to hit the road and beat the traffic going back into the city. The next time we go, we’ll have rings on our fingers, and my parents will pretend not to see them. The church will need a new coat of paint. I’ll drive us out of town, never more than five miles above the speed limit, because children play on these streets. I’ll keep my eyes on the road as the shadows grow long. I’ll ignore the flickers of light I see from the tree line, telling myself it’s the reflection of the car’s headlights, or a glimpse of the setting sun. I’ll keep the windows rolled up, and the music turned up loud. My fiancée is on an alt-country kick. It’s not my favorite, but I can tolerate it, because I love the sound of her voice when she sings along. Maybe we’ll drive past a young girl or boy, standing at the edge of the woods, head cocked like they’ve heard someone call out to them. If I still lived in town, I’d pull over, tell them to walk away, to ignore whatever those voices they hear are promising. I’d give them a ride home, maybe, tell them that I remember being their age, seeing the lights and hearing their call. I’d promise that eventually, you grow up, and the lights let you go. Maybe if I still lived here, that wouldn’t be a lie. But I’m a stranger in this town, now, and after sundown my borders lie at the doors and windows of my car. So I’ll leave the kid to their secrets, whatever they may be, squeeze my fiancée’s knee, and keep on driving.
Jero resealed the lid of the terrarium, checked the humidity, and adjusted the electric light to mimic daylight outside. Already, his trio of dreadfrogs had assumed the colors and texture of whatever surface he’d placed them on– all but their ears, rippling bright crimson and yellow with alarm. He brought his face close to the glass. Their eyes, staring back, were the only part of them that never changed. It was how he’d captured them in the jungles of Continent 2. “You guys win the prize. You’re safer here.” Behind him, a speaker crackled. "Zookeeper Twelve?” came a man’s disembodied voice. “Jero, are you there?” Crossing to the bank of dials and monitors, Jero found and pressed a blinking button. “Here, Chief.” “How do you like the Vault?” Jero scanned the chamber, just thirty feet in diameter. Cot, pantry, and toilet. The lone table supported the terrarium. Glowing camera monitors extended to the door. A central ladder led to an emergency hatch. “Cozy.” “Status? Drawbridge?” Jero found the black-and-white monitor showing the causeway to the mainland where, just offshore, the drawbridge deck stood perpendicular. “Secured. Only way out is swim or fly.” “Twelve?” came a woman’s voice. Jero swallowed hard. It was Henel. He pictured her rumpled, concentrated face. "Yes, Zookeeper Five?” he said. “How’s the Hall?” It took him a moment to find the right monitor. “Normal. Can’t see the urangs. In the corner, maybe.” “I’m worried about them,” she said. “They’ve never been alone more than a night.” “I’ll look in on them,” Jero said, straightening up, deepening his voice. “Check the whole exhibit,” the Chief said. “Continent 17’s a moneymaker these days– keeps us afloat.” “Okay.” “Seen the latest weather report?” “Looking now.” Jero studied the main monitor. “No more ‘storm of the decade.’ Now, it’s ‘storm of the century.’” Jero’s chest tingled; he rubbed his breastbone. “The Vault’s designed to take about anything,” the Chief continued. “The other structures, if–” “Brunt of the storm won’t hit for at least ninety minutes,” said Jero, finger on the display. “I still have time to make rounds.” “Good. Appreciate your volunteering to stay, Twelve. We’ll check in each hour on this frequency.” “Make your personal calls now,” came Henel’s voice, “in case communications go out.” Jero drummed his fingers. There was no one to call. “I’ll do that.” “Good luck, Twelve–” Her voice cut off; the button light dimmed. Jero stretched back in the chair and sighed, rubbing his eyes. She’d said his name—that was a first. Henel, the zoo’s rising star, dogged explorer of Continent 17. They’d rarely spoken since she’d joined the year before. He found it difficult to start a conversation. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, because she wasn’t. Still, something about her, the way she connected with animals, and her directness with people, were qualities he’d admired from the beginning. From afar. Jero looked at his prized dreadfrogs. Now, entering a relaxed state, they appeared pale yellow, like three lumps of soft butter. Every day was spent with them; he knew them intimately, plus all the other amphibians in his care. But, these days, the public didn’t seem to care much about them, what with so many new, exotic creatures on display from farther-flung continents. “You guys stay put.” He waved theatrically to their ever-impassive faces. Though he’d cataloged their remarkable reaction colorings, even he never knew what they were thinking. Perhaps they simply dreamed. Outside, the wind tugged at his sleeves. He strode the walkway that provided a view of the city, bay, and ocean beyond. The causeway, across which he commuted nearly every day, connected to the city where, in the distance, he could place his eighth-floor apartment window, battened down with the rest. The bay rolled, choppy, air warm despite the declining sun, while across the ocean a monstrous cloud squatted on the horizon. Jero stretched his arms. Normally, no fewer than a dozen zookeepers overnighted on the man-made island. Strange to be here alone. He cut through the open-air cages of Continent 4, the familiar path passing the jellymarsh, the zoo’s decades-old, land-based jellyfish. The jellymarsh imitated a sodden pond, complete with algae and grasses growing on top, disguising its gelatinous, stinging mass. Normally it drew a crowd of visitors, especially avid young boys needing to be constantly warned off the surrounding fence. Now, all was silence. Jero entered the zone of Continent 9 with its penned arenas of dry, beaten earth. He passed the tall, horned wakpeks, sprinters of the fabled King Plains, together with their winged parasitic familiars, the wakduks. They stood clustered together, staring off at the brooding storm. Next, he came to the pen of their famous icon: Tiny, the zoo’s trinocerous. The ground shuddered as the seven-ton animal trotted forward, skin thick and yellowed, three paddled horns sprouting from its huge head. Jero jumped instinctively as the beast thumped against the steel fence, one vivid eye glaring through the slats. “Easy, Tiny.” The trinocerous bellowed like a struck gong, and Jero backed away, arms down, heart pounding, feeling for a moment like one of those children who, familiar only with the gift shop’s stuffed trinocerous, cried within sight of the real one. Jero moved along slowly until he’d rounded the corner. Continent 17 was the newest exhibit zone, crowned by the Hall of Cognitive Creatures. The building was well secured, since with greater intelligence came increased risk of escape. Jero had rarely been inside, as access was restricted to specific keepers– Zookeeper Five, Henel, among them– but, for the next 24 hours, Jero held the master key to every lock on the island. Bypassing the keepers’ doors, he made his way to the main visitors’ entrance. The large viewing area echoed with his footsteps. He stopped at a placard that read Ladderbugs. A large window looked into a sealed, white room, leaves and sticks scattered on the floor. In the corner stood a brown pyramid, four crisp edges and flat, triangular sides, appearing solid– a ‘stack’ of ladderbugs. He waited. On some unseen cue, the brown pyramid dissolved into ten thousand individual insects, flowing like spilled beads along the floor until they began to reassemble into a column, flowing upward in a gush, forming within less than a minute a perfectly cylindrical column that touched the ceiling. Jero bent to study the new display showing ladderbug anatomy, how their stiff feet locked into notches on one another’s hard carapace, allowing them to ‘ladder’ into complex, geometric structures. The display was tightly sealed, since escape would clearly be a disaster– ladderbugs ran rampant in their home continent, able to find their way into anything, anywhere, for food or nesting. Passing through a soundproof door into a second room, Jero flinched at the clamor of the songpuppets. Caged on both sides of the visitor walkway, hopping perch to perch, two groups of brightly colored birds emitted piercing notes, some using their stubby talons to manipulate articles of wood, reed, or shell to augment the sound. Music surged in waves from either side, like two orchestras playing different compositions while vying for dominance. Jero covered his ears. This was the songpuppets ‘at war,’ as often happened in the wild, competing through coordinated bombardments of music. How they constellated, who ‘composed’ their song, was a mystery. He’d heard Henel’s research lecture on how one band made another their ‘puppet,’ enforcing allegiance through rigid, high-decibel exercise of the winner’s song. Shutting the far doors behind him, cacophony became near silence. This, the third room, provided a view into the chamber of the urangs, pride of the institution. Jero paused to read the newly installed placards. THE URANG– This display contains the only urang family in captivity. Adult female Onyo and her twin juvenile males, Pao, and Pio, were procured by collectors of the National Zoo. Urangs possess unique intelligence and communication abilities. HABITAT– Urangs are native to the temperate and subtropical highland forests of northeastern Continent 17. In the cool environment they build lean-to structures using native woods. Dense hair covering their entire bodies keeps them dry and warm in most climatic conditions. DIET– Fruit, nuts, flowers, insects, and amphibians comprise much of their diet. Urangs are also skilled hunters of small to medium-sized prey. They have strong limbs, nimble fingers, and a blade-like keratin point at the base of the wrist used for hunting and self-defense. FAMILY– Urangs live in multigenerational family groups. Males have black hair with red undercoat; females have black hair with blue undercoat. Our Onyo is a dedicated mother to her twin sons, who’ve both reached their adult height of 2.1 meters. TELEPATHY– Urangs are most celebrated for their ability to communicate telepathically. Since urangs have no voice box, it’s theorized that telepathy was an evolutionary survival step. They use their abilities not only to communicate with each other, but also to confuse prey, conveying emotions and sensations that stimulate other species’ consciousness. Remarkably, this also affects people—early field explorers found the telepathy of the urangs quite challenging. Our display is ring-magnetized to keep visitors safe from telepathic intrusion. Jero checked for the flashing magnetic indicator on the high wall. Through the humming, wire-embedded window, he gazed into a large chamber. Broad-leafed plants, logs, a child’s pool filled with water, some dangling ropes. He sighed, shook his head. Such confinement compared to the vast forests they once roamed. And not just the physical boundary, but the mental boundary as well, given what they could do. But they were too valuable, plus too much of an escape risk, for an open-air exhibit. He spotted a form, dark red, almost black, curled into a mock cave. Beside it, a slate and chalk; he’d heard that Henel was attempting to teach them symbols. She went in there every day, head encased in a special magnetized helmet. She’d surely been exposed to their thoughts– if not here, then on the Continent 17 expedition. What did they communicate? Did they hear her? How would it feel to have another species’ thoughts appear in your mind? Exiting the Hall, he squinted into the wind now pushing in from the ocean. The sun had dropped into the vast, looming cloud. Dark came early. Wind and water pelted the zoo, waves foamed on its eastern shore. Inside the Vault, Jero watched the monitors as sheets of rain dashed along the walkways. He microwaved some noodles. The Chief called in for his report. Another hour passed. When the speaker crackled again, Jero was grateful for the distraction. “Hello, Zookeeper Twelve. Five here.” Jero sat up and put his food aside, smoothed his clothes. “Confirmed, Zookeeper Five.” Fingers on his chin, he asked, “Can I call you Henel?” “If you like. How’re things looking?” “Nothing to report,” he said, brightening. “All hunkered down, as far as I can see. Except for Tiny. I’ve never seen him so agitated.” “He’s spooked. He’s used to mild weather. Continent 9 doesn’t get storms like this.” “We don’t get storms like this,” Jero said. “Haven’t you’ve collected on Con-9?” “Spent a year.” “Is it true everything’s bigger there?” "Seems like it. Dry place, though. Bad for frogs.” He smiled– she knew his specialty. “I’ve got my dreadfrogs here with me. Dal, Del, and Dil.” When she didn’t answer, he flushed and said quickly, “I named the species.” “I know. Feather in your cap.” “I’ve cataloged 44 emotional patterns. I don’t know what they’re thinking, but I know when they’re feeling." “I know certain people who don’t have anywhere near 44 emotional patterns.” “That’s a good joke,” Jero said, nodding at the console. He didn’t hear her laugh. “What about Con-17?” “Two years fieldwork,” came her voice. “Hard to describe. Beautiful place. Magical. Like stepping back in time.” “And you helped collect the urangs there, right?” While his eyes watched the rain on the monitors, his mind pictured her face, her figure standing on that legendary continent. “How’d you find them?” The lights flickered and the speaker crackled. “We might lose power,” said Henel’s voice. “There’s boats lying on the coast road already.” “I’ve got the generator,” he said. “Did you–?” “I didn’t find them,” she said, and cleared her throat. “They found me.” He waited for more. The speaker crackled. “I checked the Hall. Everything’s fine, but...” He scratched his forehead. “It’s hard to see them when they’re resting in the back. And no telepathy, either. I mean, that’s the fascination for visitors, right? It’s a shame we can’t let people experience what you have.” “I think the shame is having such an intelligent creature in our care at all.” He sat up, staring at the speaker grill as if she were miniaturized inside. “But Chief says that’s the draw, right? The kinds of intelligence. Nest building, species collaboration, migration routes– the new continents are so amazing.” He turned to the darkened terrarium on the table. “Even these guys. Hard to know with dreadfrogs if it’s camouflage, or communication–” “Urangs communicate directly, in our language,” she said. “To be accurate, we absorb feelings which the human mind manifests in words. But can we communicate back? I don’t believe so. Who’s more advanced? That’s what bothers me most– it calls into question our right to do all that we do here.” Head down, Jero rubbed a thumb into his palm. "Do you wear a helmet when you work with them? The magnetized kind?” “I’ll buzz you in an hour. Or the Chief will. Stay dry.” “I’m fine.” He sighed. “Zookeeper Twelve, signing off. Thanks, Henel.” He leaned back in his chair, bathed in the harsh glow of the monitors. They flickered again. A metallic crash jolted him from his cot. Muscles tensed, peering into blackness, Jero heard only the high-pitched storm outside. He fumbled for his flashlight, flicked it on and gained his feet. Shadows lurched as he checked up and down the console; every instrument was dead. Pulling on rain gear, he cracked the door and the wind nearly tore it from his fingers. Rain hammering sideways, hands gripping the exterior wall, he struggled toward the rear of the Vault. A tangled shape appeared in the darkness. The zoo’s signal tower, ripped from the next-door roof, had speared the main power transformer, now a crush of twisted metal. Navigating around the pile, wary of any downed live wires, he arrived at a small door. Within, he kicked on the generator, dipping his head in relief as it came alive. Back inside, bathed in red emergency lighting, Jero changed into dry clothes. He checked the critical systems, which were working, mostly, except for the remote sensor panel which appeared to have been fried by a power surge. Now there was no way to tell if the chilling units for Continent 13’s ice creatures were online, or if the heaters for his low-desert frogs had restarted, or if the ring magnets at the Hall had powered back on. He considered going outside to investigate, but the wind seemed too dangerous. The Vault still had light and heat; that would be enough until morning. But there was no way to track the storm with the signal tower down. No more chats with Henel or anyone else. He looked at his dreadfrogs, oddly luminous in the red light, and felt a tremor on his lips. “We’re on our own, guys.” He woke sometime later, sensing the storm had passed. But no daylight shone through the thick, high window. He dressed and stuck his head out the door. High above, moonlight illuminated the top of a massive wall. A vertical cloud. The storm’s eye. How an amphibian might feel at the bottom of a well, he thought. Outside, the air felt oddly thin, windless. The walkway was flooded, and over his plashing steps he heard lowing coming from pens nearby. The towering wall was moving, churning like a grindstone; it would be on him in minutes. He ducked inside again, locked the door, curled up under his blanket and tried to sleep. Blam! Bolting awake, Jero squinted at the monitors. On one screen, blurred with hammering rain and flying debris, something big was moving. Bang!! Bash!! Heart pounding, he rolled to his feet, fumbled for clothes, scrambled for the console. BLAM!!! The Vault’s steel door shuddered under direct impact. Jero backed to the wall, hands clapped over his head. The ringing of two more blows hit close by, followed by a distant third. Then, only rain and wind. Shaking, Jero leveled the cold beam of his flashlight. The door’s thick metal was bent inward, rainwater trickling in through cracks at the hinges. He stumbled toward it, ears alert. He traced the dent running the length of the door. Pulling on the latch, it wouldn’t budge. “Damn,” he whispered. He swung his flashlight to the central ladder. Climbing to the ceiling, he wrapped legs around the rungs and gripped both hands to the hatch’s wheel. It turned, loosening the seal– but immediately rainwater started streaming in, spattering his face. He clung there a moment; below him, a fall of twenty feet, but outside, in this gale, he’d be swept off the roof. He turned the hatch closed, then slowly descended the ladder. Jero collapsed into the console chair. The camera monitors, every lens rain-soaked, peered into darkness. He stared at the door, water pooling at its base, and pressed a palm to his forehead. “What could do that?” The dreadfrogs watched from their terrarium, rippling fear colors, working the same question. It was noon the next day before he cracked the hatch. He sat on the roof of the Vault, gazing in every direction. Clouds and rain churned past the city skyline, the distant buildings silent and stripped. A few vehicles crawled the road behind the beach, now piled high with detritus: boats, buoys, trees, cars, fencing, and tangled piles that could’ve been anything, once. In the gap of the causeway leading to the island, bay waters roiled; the raised drawbridge had been stripped away. Closer in, the zoo’s sole launch area had been decimated, its float shaken loose from its pilings. Jero dropped his chin into his hands. Then, below him, a striped wakpek trotted past, turning its snout this way and that. There was work to do. He clambered down the exterior ladder and inspected the damaged Vault door. Soon he found other doors that had been struck, some smashed to bits. He ran past the marshjelly where one of the wakduks had wandered in, already limp and being consumed. In Continent 9’s zone, at the great pen, wrapped within a pile of twisted metal, lay a large, shorn-off paddle horn, still bloody at its stump. Battered door after battered door, Jero followed the trinocerous’ trail of panicked rampage until it ended at the bay. Beyond broken concrete, on the collapsed observation deck where zoo visitors came to watch the sunset, a body more like submerged boulders lay on its side, washed by the waves, dead. “Damn, Tiny,” Jero whispered, looking around, “what made you so afraid?” Holding his forehead, he tried to calm himself, tried to think. His frogs should be okay. Where next? Find the broken cages, seal them up. If it’s winged, it’s already gone– but the rest, there was a good chance. He looked toward the city. No copters, no boats on the bay. Help wasn’t coming soon. Then he remembered the Hall. Trotting up the wide, seaweed-strewn walkway, Jero blew out a gust of air– the main entrance appeared intact. But Tiny’s footprints, the size of tree stumps, led around to the building’s rear, revealing the havoc wreaked by the seven-ton trinocerous. The first service door still stood, though badly damaged. Through a crack in the upper seal, something like a long stick extended toward a distant tree. The ‘stick’ was alive. Tramping the slender bridge of their interlocked brethren, a stream of ladderbugs filed upward into the tree where a shape was growing, an upside-down pyramid resting on a thick limb. At the second, savagely dented door, a songpuppet called shrill tones of command. Jero saw dozens of brightly colored bird crowns knocking against the crack in the door, striving to get outside. He clapped hands over his ears as the songpuppets burst out in a piercing, rising note, as if testing for a vibration to expand the gap and escape. He approached the third door. Stove in, the inch-thick solid steel dangled by one hinge. Daylight extended only a few feet inside. Taking a deep breath, Jero entered, listening, the wet floor announcing his footsteps. The room was littered with broken tools and splintered furniture. The walls, battered. On a high shelf stood a row of helmets; black flaring around the power source showed a surge of power– all were fried. He edged further around the corner. More devastation. How had Tiny wedged himself in this far? And why? An odor of peat, of sour rot, confronted his nose. Shattered buckets lay on the floor by an old tire. And, at the rear of the urangs’ cage, the iron bars were bent wide. This was bad– very bad. Holding his breath, swallowing, Jero retraced his shaking steps as quietly as he could. Emerging into sunlight, its rays soft and familiar, his eyes stood wide, darting around. Nothing. Silence. He’d started toward the zone’s exit gate when, without warning, a voice emanated within his head: ‘Hungry.’ He froze, scared to breathe. ‘Sad.’ ‘Hungry.’ A large arm enfolded him, its bristles like the embrace of a stiff broom. Limp, trembling, Jero looked up into the red and black snub-nosed face of the urang, its powerful jaw, its long teeth. A choking sour odor, like the underside of a damp log, sank into Jero’s lungs. He became sad, wincing, body turning cold. And he felt hungry, a sudden aching in his belly. A second urang gripped his opposite side. Between them, they marched him down the walkway, away from the Hall. Jero tried to keep up, throat gurgling, jelly legged. Cries and calls erupted from creatures in their cages, hungry for food. The path gradually rose until the distant city came into view, and the urangs turned their heads every direction to look– birds flying, clouds rolling, waves tumbling. Changes came over Jero even as words manifested in his head. ‘Wonder.’ ‘Amaze.’ He saw it too. The wonder of a world discovered! The amazing, broad rebirth of his home, the bay after a terrible storm! ‘Hungry.’ Jero’s belly growled. He pulled on the two great, bristly arms. “Come with me.” Their long bodies barely fit through the hatch opening. Below, Jero watched them descend the ladder with swinging, lithe movements. The part of his mind still independent and aware knew that these were the adolescent twins: Pao with the white mark on his ear, and the slightly thicker Pio. But most of Jero’s mind felt consumed with feeling. Present, more immediately present than he could ever remember. Right now, he felt hungry. He emptied out the contents of the refrigerator and larder: cold noodles, vegetable squares, chip bread, berry juice. The urangs crushed the cans and swigged the juice, but only poked their fingers at the packaged dry food. Jero scarfed the cold noodles and, chewing, looked up to find Pao reaching inside the terrarium. The first dreadfrog appeared, rippling ochre lines in Pao’s hands– colors not of fear, but of hunger. Jero looked on complacently. Using the keratin spike at his wrist, the urang slit open the dreadfrog’s belly, then poured its insides into his tipped-back mouth. His brother promptly dispatched a second one. Taking up the third and last, together they held it out. Jero received the dreadfrog into his hands, stomach growling. He lifted his hands and opened his mouth, ready to bite. To bite... Dil. His stomach flipped, revulsed, awareness fully returned– he was eating prized dreadfrogs with two escaped urangs. “This is my god!” he blurted out, willing the thought ‘Shame’ as hard as he could. In his hands, the dreadfrog exploded in scarlet-yellow fear colors. The urangs shrunk slightly, elbows in, long fingers to their lips, heads tilting back and forth, in a posture of contrition. ‘Hungry. Sorry.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Sad.’ Pio reached out and stroked the dreadfrog in Jero’s hands, causing it to kaleidoscope with colors of panic, reassurance, fear, relief. ‘Worship.’ ‘Death.’ Jero, slipping back, felt a stab in his chest. A sudden sense of loss, a cracking open of buried sorrow. He sank into his chair and could only watch as the urangs began to scour the room for objects: pens, foil, knobs from the console, anything shiny. These they collected into their arms, pinning materials into their thick fur. Climbing the ladder out the hatch, Jero heard them call into his mind. ‘Worship.’ ‘Death.’ ‘Come.’ Jero followed across the wet floor and through the bent bars, clutching Dil to his chest. In the center of the chamber, twisted unnaturally, lay the blue-black body of the mother urang, Onyo. Her neck was broken. Jero’s breast heaved, water sprang to his eyes. Pain, loss, the sorrow of finality, the unknown ahead... He wiped tears away. Who would mother them? Only brothers now. He positioned Dil by Onyo’s head. The dreadfrog rolled green, purple, then black, color combinations Jero had never seen, but which he somehow knew were patterns of mourning. Around their mother’s body, Pao and Pio placed the shiny objects in a ritual circle, glinting like candles. Together they kneeled, palms across their eyes, inclining toward the dreadfrog which rolled colors, over and over. ‘Love.’ “Love,” Jero sang. At the unfamiliar sound, they turned in wonder. ‘Sorrow.’ “Sorrow,” he sang. As one, they lifted their hands. ‘Stay.’ I will stay, thought Jero. Soul gone, her body should not be left alone. Hours passed, folded only into a moment. The sound of her voice brought him around. “Onyo, I’m here.” Henel stepped through the broken bars, a lighted helmet on her head, followed by the Chief. “Zookeeper Twelve, what–?” Jero struggled to his feet, legs tingling. “I...” “Oh, no,” said Henel, kneeling by the body. Exhausted, Jero drew a hand down his face as sorrow bubbled up from great depth. The sadness broke surface, crumbling, vanishing even as he tried to contain it. “Her soul is gone, but...” “Forget her soul– where are the other two?” demanded the Chief. “Easy,” Henel said, removing her helmet. “It’s going to take him a few minutes.” “We don’t have minutes. Twelve, what happened?” Jero shambled along the edges of the room. Reaching into a corner, he brought Dil into his arms. The dreadfrog changed to match his skin. “Chief, it’s clear,” said Henel. “I’m listening.” “The magnets went down. Onyo realized her chance. She mind-casted until she found Tiny, made him wild enough to bust out and batter every metal door until he reached this one. She got him to break the bars,” she said, hand to her cheek, turning around the room, “but then he wouldn’t stop. So, she panicked, got between him and her boys.” “Why would she have risked all that?” “To be free,” said Henel. “She’d do anything to set them free.” Jero walked past them both without a word, through the broken room and out into the sunshine. He passed the door with the now screeching songpuppets, strode beneath the tree limb creaking with an anvil of ladderbugs, and headed toward the shore. Reaching a copse, he spilled Dil onto the grass. The dreadfrog hopped twice then seemed to disappear, adopting the grass’s pattern and hue. “You’re not my god, and I’m not yours,” Jero murmured. Footsteps stopped on the gravel behind him. He turned to find Henel, her face puffy and thoughtful, doubt and fear revealed like those distant, storm-stripped buildings. “Now you know,” she said, “just how permeable we really are.” “There’s no freedom in this place.” “Freedom’s not a zookeeper’s job.” She stepped closer, near enough for him to see the blue flecks in her green irises. “I like you, Henel.” He took her hand. “I like you. There. I said it.” Her lips parted in surprise and her face flushed pink. She turned away. “You sound like some teenage boy.” “I’ve got hope,” he said. “We’re finally free.” Her complexion changed again, draining color, realization dawning. “Jero, you’re still with them, aren’t you?” She studied him. “Where are they headed? Where are you headed?” Jero smiled. No fear. He had brothers. He’d not be alone. “Going home.” “Going home,” she repeated, and drew her gaze away to scan the horizon. Taking a sharp breath, she detached her hand from his. “Oh, shit.” Out on the bay, two figures dug into the rolling waves in a little boat, bobbing among blinding, sunlit diamonds. “Where are they going!?” she cried. “Home.” “That’s the far side of the world!” Smacking knuckles into her palm, she said, “We need to find a working boat.” “Yes, but...” Jero drew a toe in the gravel. “What do you think, then?” Distracted, shading her eyes as she watched the two paddling away, she said, “I like you too.” “Ah,” he said, color coming to his face. “But help me. Where would you go if you couldn’t reach home?” “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t stay here.” Jero knelt on the grass. Leaning over, he appeared to be studying its individual blades. “I can still see you, Dil,” he said. “I can see your eye. Don’t you stay here. You should go.” Inside, he repeated the thought: ‘You should go.’ The dreadfrog flashed a brilliant purple and hopped away, as if a new idea had crossed its mind.
Zookeeper Twelve By Eliot Jordan
Eliot Jordan is a professional tea taster, singer-songwriter, and writer. After a lifetime recording and performing his songs– even composing two musicals– he’s focused on novel-length works and short stories in the fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction spaces. Eliot draws inspiration from world travel, reading, music, and hiking all over Northern California. He lives with his family in his native Berkeley.
Arthur Davis is a retired management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and in Crain’s New York Business, taught at The New School and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He was featured in a single author collection, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 2018 Write Well Award for excellence in short fiction and twice nominated, received Honorable Mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. He has been featured in The Colored Lens, The Literary Hatchet, Allegory e-Zine, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin, Fabula Argentea and The American Literary Review. Additional background at www.TalesofOurTime.com, the Poets & Writers Directory, Goodreads and Amazon Author Central.
Twice a year I go for a full body examination, handing Dr. Jordan Wildwood a short list of my concerns. A suspicious dark spot on my right thigh. A strange bump over my left eyelid. A patch of tiny bumps on the back of my balding head. “You’re all good,” he concluded. “Great examination. One of your best. Keep staying out of the sun.” “And the bumps on the back of my head? Like last year? I can feel them.” A professor of dermatology at one of Texas’s top hospitals, Jordan Wildwood checked again as his resident wrote down every observation and recommendation for treatment and follow-up. “Nothing,” Wildwood confirmed. “Maybe use some moisturizer before bed? Catherine, give Mr. Howard a sample tube of Oronix Labs’ new moisturizing cream. Let’s see if it helps,” he said. We debated whether the Cowboys’ offensive line was better than the Texans’ offensive line this year before he wished me well and left, with Catherine trailing along. All his past residents were female and more than a few were attractive. Polished and respectful, they never watched the examination. I never saw their faces until they nodded on their way out of the examining room. When Catherine left, she didn’t turn to me. Didn’t nod. Her indifference was unsettling. I dressed and checked out with his staff. At home I had been using multiple handheld mirrors to scour the claw prints of the monsters that grazed unrestrained over the far reaches of my half-naked skull. I wasn’t afraid of going bald. Most of my ancestors suffered that genetic humiliation. I started in my late fifties. By then I was more troubled with the unpredictability of my waistline. Linda, my wife since graduate school, had examined me multiple times at my determined insistence. “Clean as a cue ball,” she said with glowing humor since I won multiple nine-ball collegiate state championships in my late teens. Weeks later I got call from my Jordan Wildwood’s admin changing my next six-month appointment by a week, delighting in the fact that the revised date, “landed on Dr. Wildwood’s birthday.” I agreed and hung up. It was Linda’s birthday too. A coincidence of course. I began using Oronix Labs’ moisturizer. It was warm as applied. After a month, the texture of my scalp had changed. It was softer. Nearly rubbery. Linda continued to tease me, now with renewed enthusiasm, about the monsters feeding on my scalp, “Like the dinosaurs grazing on the savannah in the beginning of Jurassic Park?” she laughed during dinner one night. I began scrubbing my head with renewed vigor, giving extra attention to the far reaches of my scalp where they were grazing. After a few intense weeks, the constant itching and pimply bumps eased. Could it be the prescription moisturizer, or had the monsters taken refuge in the still thick landscape of crown hair that circled the back and sides of my head? I was blessed with a smart, beautiful, loving wife, two healthy grown children, and few financial issues. I was used to enjoying life to the fullest and now welcomed a modest reprieve from the only threat to my sanity. “You don’t use Dr. Wildwood,” I mentioned while we were shopping over a recent weekend. Puzzled, my wife shot me a strange look. “I’ve always used Dr. Rogers, my mother’s dermatologist.” “What? She has to be over a hundred by now.” “Very funny. She’s brilliant, and if you remember, the Chairman Emeritus of Dermatology at the hospital.” “A minor distinction,” was all I could muster. “I asked her for a referral for you after Dr. Vincent, your dermatologist for over a decade, retired.” I tried not to overthink the coincidental connection between my wife and Wildwood. Seeing a shrink had crossed my mind. That came with a stigma as tenacious as the beasts themselves. Over the next few months, the moisturizer became less effective. In strange way I had made peace with my condition. It wasn’t cancer or diabetes or leprosy I said, laughing to myself. Then it happened. I had asked Linda to drive. That was unusual. I hadn’t slept well in days and the surprise breakfast she prepared for me felt like an indigestible bowling ball in my stomach. “That itch still bothering you?” Linda said as she pulled out of the driveway, facing an hour trip to her older sister’s sixtieth birthday party. I heard the question. Then played it back in my mind several times over. Linda sounded different. The pitch was off. Something was off. I glanced at her. “What?” “Your itch. The pimply bumps. You don’t seem bothered anymore.” When you’ve been married so long, the slightest change in actions, tone, or temperament can draw suspicion. Then I realized she may be having a problem, something she hadn’t yet shared. Something about her health. The children. Something. An hour passed and I was still working through a depressing list of possibilities when Linda pulled off the highway and turned onto a rural road about five minutes away from her sister’s home. A rabid environmentalist, Laura and her husband Michael wanted little to do with the rest of the world. A decade earlier, they purchased an eight-acre plot of land in the middle of nowhere and built their home in a sheltered forest of pine and spruce. I loved the place. Linda thought it excessive, like everything else her sister did. The blinding sun that had followed us for the last hour had become fragmented streams of yellow forcing themselves through the thick green canopy overhead. Linda slowed and pulled off the rural dirt road and let the car roll down a narrow, scrub-cluttered path before I chimed in. “Is this a new way to your sister’s?” Another few dozen yards, the rays of yellow disappeared completely as we coasted through an even more obscured untrodden path. Linda’s expression was blank. Distant. There was an unfamiliar coldness about her. And she was wearing her least favorite dress to such an important family event. She flipped on her headlights through the gloom. “So, should I be thinking divorce lawyer?” I joked as several figures appeared in the distance. Linda switched off her headlights. The air in the car grew chill. The lightheaded sensation that crept up on me after breakfast had finally settled into an insistent numbness. My legs and arms felt tired, heavy, and were slowly growing distant. I tried to smile. My lips and cheeks stumbled incoherently over the effort. I wanted to warn Linda. I was working through the possibilities and stopped at stroke, a serious condition that could be mediated if it was treated within an hour. The “golden” hour it was called, beyond which there could be serious and irreversible brain damage. “Crap,” I said silently. A stroke at my age could have terrible consequences. Doctor Wildwood raised his arm and waved with an unrelenting smile. He was flanked by an older, heavyset man I didn’t recognize. His young resident was wrapped stoically in a heavy, dark-blue winter coat that ended just over her ankles. They stood silent. Sentinels, though to what? Linda didn’t turn, as if I was no longer beside her. “Thank God” I mouthed, spotting Dr. Wildwood moving toward us. He would know what to do and get me to the nearest hospital. My door window was down. I tried to lift my arm to wave back at him, alert him to my condition, when I felt something crawling on the back of my head. “Linda,” I screamed, shocked to hear the terror of my own frail words. “My head. There’s something on my head.” She turned off the engine without responding. “I know it. I can feel them,” I insisted in a chocking, panicked whisper. I tried to unlock my side door. Arms, legs, and everything from my toes to my head was frozen senseless. I mouthed, “I know it. I can feel them,” again but my lips and tongue were unforgivingly unresponsive. The only thing I felt was a swarm of creatures moving, grabbing, biting, tearing into the world of softened fleshy swamp my scalp had become. Wildwood hurried toward the car as Linda popped open her door and ran into his outstretched arms. No, that’s not possible was my first reaction. Their embrace was short-lived as Linda took his hand as they moved quickly back to the car. The two of them, shoulder to shoulder, looked through the open window at my side, their stare riveted on my head. Wildwood reached in, pressed his fingers into my scalp, then pulled away. Linda took out her keys and unlocked my door. I had never seen my wife so excited. “Jesus, it’s almost decomposed,” he said, sounding surprised. A small black creature with legs slashed out at the air sat between Wildwood’s fingers. He tossed it aside and reached back, this time scooping away a fistful of nasty black creatures and tossing them into the underbrush. He grinned. “Perfect timing. You’re great,” he said and turned to Linda to place a kiss on her welcoming cheek. Linda grabbed my jacket and pulled me out as though I were a weightless child’s toy. I had to get to Laura’s home. Her husband was a scientist. He would know what to do. I was rolling helplessly like a rag doll into the mud and moist underbrush. They both moved over me. Wildwood spoke first. I couldn’t hear, but there seemed to be some kind of agreement. He slipped on a pair of surgical gloves and handed another pair to Linda. She was aglow with anticipation. “You first,” he said. Surprised, “You’re the genius here. You first.” “Oh fuck it, I’m so hungry I don’t care,” he said and fell to his knees, his fingers clawing away at the top of my head before Linda joined him. Up close and hovering over me, her eyes were coal black, not the light brown with faint threads of blue I had fallen in love with. I felt pressure from all sides of my head, followed by a gush of red that flowed over my right cheek and splashed over my wife’s summer dress. My wife and her doctor were moving about. Fingers grabbing, probing, clawing away in a frantic, almost frenzied blur of desperation. I could make out a few words but nothing that made sense. I was awake and aware, unable to move or feel pain. It wasn’t a stroke. That was a good sign, I thought before I passed out, no longer concerned with the monsters that had been plaguing me for years.
A Swarm of Monsters by Arthur Davis
The street carnival was in full swing as heavy October light sifted and coated us like caramel. I paid for a stick of deep-fried food and devoured it to the hilt. When I went to throw away the stick, the ones already in the trash were varying shades of reddish-pink like partially licked candy canes from those without self-control to stop themselves soon enough. As it clattered down, it was only a matter of time before it caught red like the rest. Those with chattery teeth that took in flesh and blood like air were not as rare nowadays as one might think. Local Future Feeders of America chapters would tag them and show them before the auction before they were too far gone, and I always wondered what happened to them once in the hands of those who bid enthusiastically, almost rabidly. Looking down at my hand, if someone asked me for a high-five, I would be a couple short. I could still feel them there, though when I wasn’t looking. The one in the center was going numb as if in trepidation of possibly being next. I too had sometimes eaten a little too far down from the fried food stick. (At least I was able to get my wedding ring back though when it cycled back through). At the local diner and the angel-bats were already swarming the sign. They weren’t really bats, they were only called that because of the size. They were moths with halo shaped antennae that craved light (even light that we could not see). Sometimes, when they surrounded a person, we knew it was just a matter of time before they changed. I walked in and sat in a stool that was so familiar with me that it was like another set of legs that scratched in odd owl-like hoots from the floor. Still full from the carnival, I ordered free water and bought a song on the jukebox. The music kids listened to nowadays just sounded like a garbled mess to me but it was better than a whole lot of nothing to go along with my water. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. With the smudge of dusk on the horizon, it looked like my cup was filled with something stronger than water. I was about to take a sip when I noticed something flit at the corner of my eye. My reflection vanished, and I heard the jingle of the door being opened. This sounds like a joke, but I was in a diner and was flabbergasted to see me walking towards me. They sat down, took the water, and splashed it on me. “No, this isn’t a dream. I need your help,” they said. I wiped the water from my face with my shirt and coughed a little because I had breathed some of it in. “This is an odd first date…” I began. They pointed to ears and I could see orange earplugs poking out of them like mushrooms. “Let’s talk in the car… I will blare the radio so no one can hear us.” Their pizza delivery truck had rims sauced with rust. “She tends to stay put, but that’s okay... I come out here on my breaks sometimes, and it is amazing how long the battery has lasted. Just don’t turn on the headlights…” They accidentally bumped the volume button and their hands smashed their ears like flies before one shot out to adjust the knob. “Ahh, you must not have listened to much of the classics,” they said. “This band is popular among those looking for music to torture those in captivity…” “I can’t hear anything. Just you speaking,” I remarked, half-jokingly. “At least it is a familiar voice! No introductions needed… we can just get right to it… You see the diner across the street? It opens when the other one closes and closes when the other one opens, but there is a brief millisecond where they are both simultaneously open and that is how I was able to get to you when you looked over.” “I bet that one has better restrooms, and I have always thought that this one could use a play place...” “Ok, but seriously, have you ever wondered what was happening to your fingers?” I looked down, and there they all were. All members that were left… present and voting. As I watched, the middle one writhed of its own accord like a larvae. “Keep watching,” they said. In the time it took to look back, it had sprouted one wing and then another and was hacking away at its base to detach from my hand. I tried to smash it, but my fanged doppelganger cracked open a window to let it out. “You see, if you become a vampire all at once, they cannot use the superior taste of your meat to feed the rest… the festival would be no more,” they said. “How can I, or we, stop this? “We switch places and sabotage this whole operation.” “How?” “When you hear the song, you will know what to do.” I sat there at the booth. I had never been there before, but it knew my shape. An empty glass was put in front of me. Free of charge. I heard the song. I lifted my arm to the cup and the rest of the diner followed in unison. My other hand reached for the sharpened stick in my pocket. As their cups filled with dusky wine mine followed suit. The cups seemed bottomless. I shook the last of the red residue into my cup. “Congratulations! You are the carnival king!” my voice said to me. The sash clung to me like a broken wing. They began to swarm with their fresh stakes, but I would not let them wrench it from me. A vinyl record skipped; a light flickered. A thousand hearts stopped at once.
Stake and Shake By Chase Strawser
Chase Strawser is a writer from Columbus, Ohio with a BA in English from Muskingum University and an MAEd from Mount Vernon Nazarene University. He’s published in publications As Surely As the Sun, Wandering Lights, Teach. Write., The Penwood Review, and Infocalypse.
The Horde By Payton Smith
Payton L Smith is a speculative fiction writer who likes to explore society and ideas through satire and drama. In their stories you’ll find science, magic, and horrors.
Even with my mask and oxygen tank, the smell leaked through pulling water from my eyes. Rotting food, putrid waste, and body odor prevailed. “Come on, get moving, the cleaners are coming,” I called out as I stepped over those lying on the ground. “Screw the cleaners,” a man yelled from his hunched over stance, “and screw you.” “They don’t care whether you’re a human or another piece of trash,” I pressed the tip of the pointer against the man’s side which gave a little shock. He meandered a few steps, grunting as he arched forward again. The constant hum of the cleaners echoed around the corner. It caused some of the horde to engage. Shuffling feet through the glass and rot. The cleaners rounded the block, their vacuums inhaling and scrapers gliding across the pavement, pulling up any unwanted material upon the hot and sticky concrete. They lumbered far taller than any standing man, yet the whinnying of their hums was far less than the negative grouse each person on the streets whined as I whacked them with the thwacking stick. “Move if you want to keep your limbs,” I said after attempting to move a sleeping man. He groaned but pulled himself enough out of the way before falling back into the dark slumber. Everyday was difficult. I’d always get backlash, people telling me I was scum for selling my soul or had lost my compassion for others. Was it wrong to sell the soul for survival? Would not all conscious life fight for a better life, even at the cost of others? (All other animals would). I always comforted myself with the most plausible explanations which in most cases came down to ‘they’d do it too given the chance’ and felt comfort in my decisions and actions. The job wasn’t great, but I felt some justification for doing it because the cleaning machines would ignore the peoples’ pulse and register them as another heap to be sucked into the disposal. I was saving lives, even if less glorified than one of the doctors from the echelon. I mattered. It was a Thursday, a usual day of sweeping and the machines cleaned as much as any other day, when I was asked to come to the management building. “I’m afraid we have to let you go,” said the man in his suit, whether plastic or fabric I couldn’t tell, but either way it would’ve looked better on a doll than his person. “The company's operation of procedure is taking a different route.” “A different route?” I asked as I could feel my hands trembling, my stress hormones spiking like a wounded zebra running from a lion. “But I need this job, without it my score will drop, I won’t be able to get another job, or keep my home.” “We’re deeply sorry for this loss,” the man said and after I remained frozen before his desk, he flicked his hand at me as his comm device rang. I searched for weeks with little interest in my work history and no skills higher than that of the advanced toaster. My bank ran dry, and with a score less than 500, my landlord told me to pack up. Standing in line for a bag of food and a blanket, I saw it, the new cleaners being deployed on the pavement. Far larger than their predecessors and with more attachments than I could name, let alone conceive of their function. Did it have a thwacking stick? Would I be thwacked now? I shuddered as they handed me a blanket. I stayed away from the sweepers for sometime, the sight of them sparked both rage and sorrow. “Need a place to sleep tonight?” An elderly woman asked, she was lean and covered with years of dust and grunge, but her smile was one I hadn’t witnessed in an even longer time. She patted the ground next to her, cleared of anything that might stab and infect me. “Thank you,” I said after taking the spot. “You must be new to the streets,” she said, causing my eyebrow to curl. “Your clothes.” She said and I realized I was less stain covered than anyone around me. “I worked for Claracorp, but they didn’t need me,” I mumbled, not confident in myself over the situation. “The modern world doesn’t need any of us anymore,” she maintained her smile, though how, I cannot say. “Society has out-evolved humanity. Money has saved some for now, but even that won’t be needed and they’ll be pushed out another day.” The smile finally faded as clicks and clanks came from down the block. The rambunctious sound of the cleaners. “You're not welcome you tin can,” someone shouted from down the lane. “Clear the area!” A metallic voice commanded, but no one moved. Until one of the machine’s metal scrappers drug across the concrete accompanied by a cry of pain. The crowd began running, stampeding over one another, it was like watching a wave as it breaks on the beach and continues over the sand. I lunged to my feet and helped the woman beside me up to her feet. “What’s happening?” She asked as she wasn’t as tall as I and couldn’t see the mangled limbs being vacuumed up alongside the rubbish. I pulled her as we stepped over those who couldn’t get to their feet quick enough. People shouted and screamed as the blood throbbed through my eyes. The wall of moving bodies slowed as it reached parts of the crowd oblivious to what caused the distress. The crowd grew hostile. Fights began to break out even as the cleaners encroached and the screams reached ear-shattering levels. I came to a stop as the old woman tripped behind, her cries of pain far louder than the crunching of bone beneath pressing feet. She clutched to me as I pulled her to a spot we’d be out of the way. “Stay back citizens,” the automated voice called as the mechanical monstrosity approached. Only screams answered as metal met meat. “You go without me,” she said as she adjusted herself to lean against the wall. For a brief moment, I almost did, my animal instincts screaming at me from every corner of my mind to run. But I couldn't be another cattle in the herd. I surged through the crowd, towards the street cleaner. Coated in red, the machine would do great as a steel guard to Hell. It nonetheless cleared the streets of the mess. It was doing its job. The cleaner did have a thwacking stick, a metal appendage thrashing about with a mind of its own. That’s where I struck. After jumping upon the cleaner, I grabbed the thwacker then started twisting, pulling, and jerking until it broke loose at a joint. I got a few good smacks on the machine leaving minor dents before being yanked back and pulled through a tubing made of a bendable metal. I yelped while my arm bent and snapped as a twig does underfoot. Using my working arm and the thwacker, I pushed it around until it stuck into something, then I shocked the shit out of it. I held the button down even as the air began to taste of burning metal and oil-filled smoke. Heat rose and I wormed my way out of the tube. Smoke as dark as night rose from the fire which consumed the cleaner, its circuits popping and various alloys drooping out of shape. The crowd behind me cheered and a horde of hands lifted me to my feet. The cheers, the whistles, and the crackling of the machine covered their joy. The thrilling energy died as more cleaners emerged on the street to clean the area.
Henry Sinclair is a queer public servant who writes fantasy, speculative, and science fiction, and occasionally edits books. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, alongside his partner and oddly silent border collie. This is his first published work of fiction.
Nothing Remains in The Discard By Henry Sinclair
Nothing remains in The Discard. It only changes. Caution rowed through the labyrinth. His oar, once freshly scavenged and sanded to perfection, was baked with the river sludge that splattered his boat. His white feathers molted, weighed down by globules of muck and carrion. The night beyond the labyrinth drew away with the tide. 3-in-1 had demanded payment by dawn. He need only beat the sunrise. Then Caution could bathe. Better, perhaps, to drown himself first. ‘Specify destination?’ Tumble asked. For the third time. ‘I will not tell you again.’ Navigation was difficult by lantern light, the stench vile, their time short, and all the boy could think to do was– ‘Caution–’ ‘I will not tell you again. Take that lampshade off your head and you will know.’ Caution was glad the boy’s mother had not lived to know the inanity of her offspring. All currents flowed to The Mire, the slum 3-in-1 called home. Tumble knew this. But the boy was unfocused, his mind preoccupied with the spires of refuse. He could follow direction– hold that handle, take the steps slowly, lower the chest into the boat with me now, careful! Once aboard, however, Tumble sat at the front of the boat and contributed only asinine questions to their journey downriver, holding the lantern to his chest as though to keep it warm. No matter. Caution need only beat the– ‘Provide rationale designated destination?’ Tumble’s beak peered out from beneath the lampshade. The boy’s tutors had been letting him read instruction manuals again. Caution had foraged widely, unearthing tarnished but legible copies of Top of The Heap literature, yet Tumble’s speech was as stilted as any scumsucker. The scumsuckers Caution continued to borrow from. He gnawed at his lower beak and peeked down behind his feet; the chest was still there, nestled into the bilge of the boat. His debt would be paid, and he would borrow no further for the fool child’s education. Nor pay to replenish their stock of ice, for that matter. Tumble fidgeted and said, ‘Supply explanation your degree of upset. Rowing fatigue? Flight optional.’ Caution scoffed. The boy continued to labor under the delusion that birds could fly. ‘I am not tired.’ ‘We–’ ‘We cannot fly there.’ ‘What–’ ‘Tumble Dry Only,’ Caution warned, invoking his full name. ‘That is quite enough.’ ‘But–’ Caution brandished the oar above Tumble, raised as though to strike. He needn’t actually hit the boy anymore; Tumble cowered beneath his lampshade, bringing forth his wings to protect his head. When no hit was forthcoming, the boy slowly removed the fitting from his head and turned away, cradling the lantern. Good. Caution rowed onward, coaxed by eddies through misshapen crevices. In the forgotten rivulets of The Discard, Caution was surrounded by barricades of broken furniture, shattered timepieces, chipped cups, cracked dishes, and rusted gears. The world disgusted him, forced as he was to traverse this slush so that he might continue to breathe finer airs. He could hardly stand it. Still, Caution made haste, his grip on the oar straining against the river’s pull. The treasure chest pressed into his legs. Caution shifted his feet to brace it more securely. The current had strengthened, worrying the boat from side to side, and he would not have the contents of the chest bruised against the hull. Ahead, Tumble’s shoulders jerked. He had put on the burgundy lampshade once more and was crying. Caution fixed his gaze on the next opening in the refuse. A cracked wardrobe leaned across the rivulet, its door opening and closing with the water. Beyond it, the dark narrowed to a seam. Caution’s mother had told him that a disciplined mind gave shape to the world; whatever he understood, he could claim as his own. Caution dug the oar into the sludge and forced the prow straight. A small whimper came from beneath the lampshade. The boat struck a half-submerged clock. Its face rolled briefly beneath the water, hands arrested at some useless hour, before disappearing under the bilge. Caution rowed harder. The whimper came again. ‘Take that damn thing off your head.’ Tumble did not comply, but the crying ceased. Better. Caution worked the oar through the dim, counting each stroke against the paling sky. The sun would rise whether or not the boy understood what had been required of them. The sun would not delay. It would not soften. Caution bent to the oar. Caution knew trouble when the thick sludge beneath his oar changed directions. Sweat smeared his brow, his muscles toiling now against the current. Somewhere out of sight, the labyrinth had closed off a path, the waters damming and rerouting. ‘Tumble, you must row.’ No response from within the lampshade. Tumble sat small, head down. They were closer to The Mire– the narrow inlets of The Discard had widened into The Spillway, an expanse that permitted ramshackle barges and trade ships, bridges of junk spanning the chasm. Denizens emerged from their hovels and shambles in the cliffs of trash. Those who resided on half-sunken pontoons on the riverside began to scatter for higher ground. ‘Tumble, now. I will not ask again.’ Tumble turned, shaking. He ought to be afraid. Caution could not miss this payment. In-the-red was not just an expression. ‘I don’t want to,’ Tumble mumbled. The language of his manuals was gone, replaced with a childish petulance. ‘That is not your choice. There is an oar here,’ Caution said, kicking the spare oar at his feet. ‘Hurry up.’ Tumble straightened. ‘I don’t want to see 3-in-1.’ Caution’s hard stare held back his fury. Fine. It was about time the boy understood the danger. ‘If we don’t see 3-in-1, our lives will be over.’ Caution spoke slowly, that the vermin might understand him. ‘We will be killed. You will never see your tutor again.’ ‘3-in-1 hurts people.’ ‘3-in-1 is doing what she needs to do to get by. Now get rowing,’ Caution said. ‘No.’ No? Caution resisted the rising urge to swing his oar again. He would only lose momentum. ‘Why not?’ ‘3-in-1 hurts people. She takes everything. She will take my lampshade.’ Ah. ‘She will not take your lampshade. She does not care for rubbish.’ ‘It’s not rubbish.’ Tumble stroked its frayed rim. ‘It’s a lampshade.’ Caution exhaled heavily. ‘She does not take things without value. There are countless lampshades in this wretched place.’ ‘Discard is not... not...’ His tongue stumbled, before settling on, ‘wretched.’ ‘Tumble. Do you not like the life you have?’ ‘I... I don’t–’ ‘Do you want to maintain it?’ ‘I like Discard. And I don’t like 3-in-1.’ ‘3-in-1 is how we have kept the life we have. Without her, we will become another piece of Discard.’ Caution eyed the rising tide. ‘So I need you to row.’ ‘I love Discard. Everything I see is new.’ ‘Everything you see is broken.’ ‘Maybe. But mother said the more I know of Discard, the more I know of me. Isbn said so, too.’ That wretched tutor. ‘And you just believed them, then? I raised you better than that. Now, Tumble, row.’ ‘No. I read my manuals. And played in the trash. Now I know Discard. And so, I love it,’ Tumble said with matter-of-fact impertinence. Blood pounded in Caution’s ears. ‘Perhaps you are trash, then.’ The groans of the Spillway carried down to the water, voices clamoring. The lampshade shifted, Tumble shaking his head. ‘No. I am not trash. I am not even a lampshade. But I can know the lampshade without making it me. I can love it.’ Tumble’s impertinence was staggering, but he could hardly blame the child. He’d learned it from his mother. Caution recalled Ages’ contrivances, her lackluster attempts to pull him from his path. Caution did not need to borrow money, to fight for their existence, their home; they could simply find happiness in the pits of the underworld so long as they knew who they were. She never understood why he fought so hard. It was no choice, to waste away in the Mire or climb his way to the Top. Caution was beginning to better understand that his mistake was elevating his wife and child with him. That is how you lose in this hellhole. The current swelled, bubbling in pungent swirls. Caution braced a foot against the chest behind him. ‘You know nothing, Tumble. Now row!’ ‘Correct. Understand nothing is optimal.’ The language of his manuals had returned. ‘You refuse me?’ Caution’s words came between ragged breaths. Tumble was silent. Everything Caution had done, everything he had torn apart, everything he had rebuilt... all discarded by a simple boy and his lampshade. ‘This is your last warning. Pick up the oar. Now. Or I will be forced to hurt you, too.’ Tumble turned back to the water. Caution abandoned his battle against the sludge. One strike and he would only have to fend for himself. He raised the oar. Trash rained from the sky, plummeting into the river and launching torrents of sludge into the air. The boat pitched wildly, Caution flaring his useless wings to keep upright. He plunged the oar back into the water, battling to regain control. Tumble cried out. A Blight. He hadn’t noticed the sky’s somber tone against the morning twilight. Caution pulled a hard reverse stroke, the front end of the boat swerving left to avoid a misshapen mass of metal and wheels falling from the sky. Through the smog above, he could make out the rolling cloud of the Blight. ‘Tumble!’ he bellowed, and his son sprang to action and seized the spare oar, the lantern clattering to the floor. Tangles of scrap metal and slapdash structures shifted, shattered, and fell into the Spillway, assaulted by the Blight. Caution shouted instructions to Tumble, words lost amongst the grating landslides. Geysers exploded from the turbulent river, water displaced by the rain of churned steel and fractured stone. Caution paddled, unleashing a primal roar. Shifting a foot onto the edge of the boat, he prevented the boat from capsizing. Tumble rowed ineffectually. A wave, wide and rolling, bore toward them. The rerouted waters. ‘Grab on!’ Caution yelled. He turned his back to the tidal wave, jammed his oar under his wing, pinned the treasure chest in place with his legs, and grabbed the rim of the boat. The tip of the boat rose on the wave, cresting as though in preparation to fly. They soared over its lip. Caution was thrown about forcefully. Tumble screamed. The boat came crashing down, drenched in filth but afloat. The chest had made it. Get ashore. Run for The Mire. Let this damned day be over. Caution gripped his oar, ready to fight to the river’s edge. Tumble was gone. Caution looked about sharply but heard him before he saw him, Tumble’s screams carrying across the toxic sludge that drew him downriver. The child struggled to stay afloat, clinging to the lampshade like a buoy. ‘Daddy! Help me!’ Caution almost turned. He steeled himself against it. The boy brought this on himself. Caution turned his back on Tumble’s cries. The entrance to The Mire loomed in the distance, the twisted archway of debris marking the beginning of the slums. The Blight had not stopped, but Caution was too close to give up now. By the time he had reached the waste grounds, the light had shifted. The Blight still loomed overhead, rubbish falling in a lesser deluge. And a gentle light broke through the smog. No. His time was almost up. ‘Help me,’ Caution called, heaving the heavy chest through the shallow waters of The Mire. ‘Help me!’ But no one emerged from their hovels. He trudged through the muck, talons plastered in grime. Curious eyes peered out at him, watching Caution be battered by Blight trash. The chest was too heavy to carry on his own. Caution could only lift one end. It grated and sloshed with each pull. Those callous scumsuckers! They would condemn a man to the Blight. He risked pausing to gain his bearings. 3-in-1’s home was around the corner. He could rush to her. But then he’d have to leave the chest behind. If it were stolen, he’d lose everything. Tears cut through the grit covering his face. That useless burden of a child. Didn’t even have the sense to keep aboard the boat. Let The Discard take him, drown him alongside his obstinacy. He had doomed them both. Caution struggled on, drawing upon his final reserves of strength. Heave. Heave. Heave. He would not lose. He would not lose. He would not lose. Rounding the corner of the alley, 3-in-1’s hovel came into sight. She sat on her stoop, a cup of steaming tea in hand, watching the rain fall. Watching him fall. Caution’s heart blazed. The Blight was easing. It pelted Caution with petty trinkets. He would not lose. The Blight was easing. He would not lose. The Blight was easing. The Blight had eased, and with it, a steady glow diffused the pollutant smog above The Discard. The sun had risen. The chest thumped to the ground with a splash, broken ripples washing between Caution’s feet. He stood halfway down the alley. He had not reached her home. There was no recourse. No next attempt, no further fight. 3-in-1 would seize his life and cast it from The Top, let his broken body crunch and twist and shatter until it was little more than sludge destined to pool in the mire. The light of day was cold. ‘Caution,’ 3-in-1 called down the alleyway. ‘So good of you to join us.’ By her side sat Tumble. Wrapped in a towel. Tea in hand. ‘My men found him downstream, clinging to a pontoon. Brought him straight to me. An intelligent boy you’ve raised,’ she said, running her hand over his crest. ‘Quite the conversationalist.’ ‘Take him.’ Caution knew how this game was played. ‘Take him, spare me.’ 3-in-1’s muck-brown feathers bristled, as though caught in a chill breeze. Her keen black eyes found him. ‘Come here.’ Caution dragged the chest down the alley, pulling to a stop beneath 3-in-1’s stoop. He slumped with exhaustion before her seat. She slapped him. ‘Hurt this child again and the terms of your debt will be paid in the number of screws we can drive into your body.’ Caution bit down on his beak, if only to hold back his fury. Moving shadows lurked by the windows of 3-in-1’s hovel. ‘Now, the terms of your current debt–’ ‘It is not my fault, the rivers–’ ‘I did not ask,’ 3-in-1 cut in, ‘for your excuses. You have used my funds to propel yourself beyond all this.’ She gestured to the labyrinth. ‘And yet you have forgotten the lessons it has taught you. There are no excuses. Only what you will do in recompense. You knew the terms of your debt. You strove for more and you failed.’ ‘I didn’t strive for more,’ he cried. ‘I only wanted to be away from here. It is not more. Only different.’ ‘You would argue semantics with me now?’ ‘Everything in this world is nothing. I cannot strive for more where there is only trash. I have done unspeakable things to make the most of this desolation. And it was all for nothing.’ 3-in-1 studied him, placing down her cup of tea and standing. ‘Unspeakable things. You have spent the last two years on Top. What do you know of unspeakable things?’ Caution grew still, then unlatched the chest. Ages Three Plus’ body was twisted into itself but had yet to decompose. The supply of ice had kept her. ‘Ah. How mercenary,’ 3-in-1 said appreciatively. ‘You know what... what organs can fetch on the market.’ ‘That is generous. You would have overpaid your debt and then some.’ Tumble stepped around 3-in-1, peering from beneath his lampshade, eyes locking upon his mother’s mangled remains. Caution had not been able to tell him. He did not need to. He need not explain himself to anybody, least of all that parasite. He had not meant to kill her. But he could ill afford to discard her once the deed was done. Tumble did not vomit, as Caution had. He did not pull feathers from her corpse to locate the wound, as Caution had. He did not even cry out or lose himself. He stared blankly, too dim-witted to understand he had lost his mother. Caution wanted to strangle him, beat him into the wet dirt. ‘Tumble, my dear,’ 3-in-1 said. ‘Head inside.’ The Blight had not stopped; light trash rained upon The Mire. Sequestered under the stoop, it did not touch them. ‘Acceptable current conditions. Will remain.’ ‘How?’ Caution whispered. ‘What is so wrong with you?’ 3-in-1’s eyes met Caution’s in warning. Tumble’s fingers tightened around the lampshade and his words caught. ‘Mother... and the lampshade are both things I am not.’ Caution’s disbelief could not be contained. ‘She is not a lampshade. She is dead.’ ‘Yes.’ Tumble’s voice pitched as though to challenge Caution. ‘And I can still love her.’ Caution’s shoulders sank. ‘You love The Discard.’ Tumble nodded resolutely. 3-in-1 watched on in fascination. ‘Well, if there are no objections, I will accept this payment in lieu of your death. But, as consequence of your breaking the terms of your contract, you will owe the same amount again next month,’ she said pointedly at Caution’s broken expression. ‘And I will not be so forgiving next time, no matter which family member you gut next.’ Tumble sidled over, caressing his father’s wing with his own. Caution looked upon the folded corpse. Everything he was not crowded closer– his dead wife, his worthless son, The Discard itself– until he was nothing but a carcass crammed into a chest of his own making. Caution smacked Tumble’s wing away. The boy flinched, reaching for 3-in-1’s wing. So. He would rather seek refuge in the violence of the Mire than with his father. ‘Take him,’ Caution said to 3-in-1. ‘I can’t do it any longer. He is worthless to me.’ 3-in-1 stepped away from him. ‘Children are not merchandise. You should know better than that. Your debt is your own. You cannot pay it with the life of someone who did not incur it.’ ‘Haven’t I already?’ Caution gestured to the body between them. ‘Let’s not pretend you did that for me.’ 3-in-1’s disdain softened as she looked to Tumble. ‘Is that what you wish? To live with me?’ Tumble leaned out from the stoop and looked up at the sky, at the cloud of rolling blackness. ‘No,’ he said. He lowered his lampshade over his face and stepped out into the rain, raising his wings as though to embrace the trash that fell upon him. ‘What’s that old saying?’ 3-in-1 said. ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure?’ ‘We’re standing over the body of my wife, traded to you in debt, and you speak of treasure.’ ‘Yes.’ 3-in-1 handed him Tumble’s cup of tea and sipped at her own. Tumble turned. ‘Nothing would not be better. Nothing does not have lampshades!’ And with a resolute nod, Tumble spread his wings and flapped. He rose slowly into the air. Caution and 3-in-1 stepped forward into the rain, watching him pitch upwards and fly into the smog. ‘I didn’t know we could do that,’ 3-in-1 said. ‘We can’t,’ Caution replied. The light of day was cold and bright, but Tumble had a lampshade. Nothing remains in The Discard. It only changes. And so, Caution remained.
Sascha Goluboff is a writer, mother, and academic with a PhD in Anthropology and an MFA in Writing. She lives in Virginia. Her most recent fiction pieces have been featured in Sudden Flash, The Dread Literary Magazine, and The Piker Press. You can find more about her at saschagoluboff.com.
Fluffle By Sascha Goluboff
Grady Bradford resented every second he’d been waiting with his son’s Fluffle to see Dr. Prasham, a highly rated and very expensive vet specializing in GECs (genetically enhanced companions) in Los Angeles. The noon-day sun shone through the skylights and illuminated the reception room’s pristine, white-tiled floor and walls. Enormous monitors played ads of sad children made happy through Dr. Prasham’s interventions: “Your Fluffle not eating? Try Dr. P’s Prolaxian supplements.” “Your Fluffle losing its hair? Ask Dr. P for a micrograft– on special this week.” “Your Fluffle in a funk? Sign up for Dr. P’s SymTech certified recalibration package.” Grady checked the time on his mobile phone. The appointment was scheduled for thirty minutes ago. He peered into a plastic carrier on the floor. His son’s Fluffle’s rheumy blue eyes blinked back at him. Grady shivered. He never felt comfortable around GECs, especially those that were so unnaturally spherical. The Fluffle made a high-pitched whine. Annoyed, Grady jostled the carrier with his foot. “They don’t like it when you do that,” said a little girl who’d sat down next to him. He guessed her to be about ten years old. She held a pink Fluffle on her lap and stroked its fur. It gazed up at her with wide dark eyes and cooed. “They don’t have feelings,” he said. “They’re programmed to act cute to appeal to our nurturing instinct. It’s a marketing ploy.” She looked at him funny. A slim and attractive young woman, sitting on the girl’s other side, leaned over and asked her in a foreign accent, “Lily, you want cookie? Maybe piece of gum?” “Gum,” Lily said. The woman gently placed an unwrapped piece in Lily’s outstretched hand. Grady surmised that Lily– with her perfectly perky blond pigtails, pink dress that matched her latest edition Fluffle, and stylish au pair– was the daughter of a CodeX, the elite group of technocrats that his wife Tanya was trying so hard to impress at work. Her boss was Chad Whitmore, the most famous CodeX under forty. Tanya had even gone so far as to buy Grady a suit to accompany her to corporate functions. But he’d made it a point of honor to wear his usual jeans, sneakers, and black t-shirt. “Pepper,” Lily said, pointing to her Fluffle, “thinks you’re weird.” Lily blew a bubble and popped it. “Tell Pepper to keep its opinions to itself,” Grady said. “You mean, her opinions to herself. She’s a girl.” “Sure, if you say so.” “You’re silly.” She blew another bubble. “What’s your Fluffle’s name?” “Josh. It’s my son Ricky’s.” “Josh?” she squinched up her nose. “Why’d he name him that?” “Can’t say,” Grady replied. A series of phlegmy coughs emanated from inside the carrier. Grady remembered when Tanya had brought the Fluffle home three years ago for Ricky. By that time, they’d moved to L.A. for her new job at SymTech where she’d started as a junior level biotechnician. She’d been on the team that developed the first Fluffle from animal DNA. The invention was big news– it was all over the internet, on home monitors and highway billboards. Everybody wanted one. Ricky, who was five at the time, called the burbling ball of blond fuzz “Josh” because he said it reminded him of his younger brother who’d died at ten weeks old. Grady’s phone lit up with a text from Tanya, who was away at a conference: Dr P figure out what’s wrong? Grady typed: Still in waiting room Tanya: Sorry! My presentation went really well. Our reverse genome prototype is way ahead of the competition. Please make sure Ricky studies math tonight. He’s got a test tomorrow. Grady: Sure. Ever since Tanya’d been promoted to senior level biotech, she’d worked late at the lab every night, so why’d she bother to remind him about Ricky? It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do. L.A. had no need for sustainable botanists. To think that he and Tanya had met at an anti-CodeX rally during grad school. They’d shared a passion for keeping nature natural. Her biology thesis was about the negative effects of genetically modified DNA on living tissue. But then she joined SymTech, lured in by their bullshit promise that she’d make more of a difference by keeping their products safe rather than by opposing them. Grady felt that he owed it to his wife to be supportive, especially since the new job helped her climb out of the depression she fell into after Josh’s death. He tried to keep his condemnation of the genetic enhancement industry to himself. Tanya logged off. Josh whimpered. “He doesn’t sound too good,” Lily said. Grady shrugged. “Maybe you should take him out of there,” she said. “We don’t have that kind of relationship.” Grady hadn’t been surprised that Ricky quickly lost interest in Josh. Ricky was more into sports and roughhousing with his friends than caring for a Fluffle. Of course, Grady had to step in. He did the minimum– feeding, changing the lining in its carrier. Sometimes, he found Tanya sitting with it on her lap, talking to it in soft tones. Right before she departed to Europe for her conference, Josh got the sniffles. Tanya said she’d take him to see Dr. P like usual when she returned, but when Grady told her that Josh’s symptoms had worsened, she insisted that Grady take him himself. “I never put Pepper in a carrier,” Lily said. “I hold her wherever I go. If I’m at school or someplace where Fluffles aren’t allowed, then Magda holds him.” Magda smiled and nodded. “Dr. P says healthy Fluffles need monthly checkups,” Lily continued. “I won’t let anyone else but me bring her here– even if I’m supposed to be at school. Mommy and Daddy approve.” “Glad to hear it,” Grady said. A nurse, clad in a starched white uniform, entered the waiting room. “Mr. Bradford? Dr. P will see you now.” Grady picked up the crate at an angle. Josh slid forwards, smooshing his face against the grating. Lily let out a squeal of delight. “I’ve never seen a Fluffle that color. Where’d you get him?” “My wife picked him out,” Grady said over his shoulder as he headed into the examination room. Chrome cabinets lined the examination-room walls, and small motorized machines hummed on the white laminate countertop. Grady placed the carrier down next to a picture of Dr. P with a group of CodeX men. Grady recognized the man on Dr. P’s right as Chad Whitmore, the CEO of SymTek. Dr. P entered the room with a confident stride. His thick black hair was slicked back, and he wore a white lab coat over gray slacks. “Mr. Bradford,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” His hand was smooth and cool. “Tanya’s told me so much about you,” Dr. P said. “Really?” Dr. P chuckled. “The world always needs idealists.” For once, Grady didn’t know how to respond, and it irked him. “Let’s see what we have here.” Dr. P spread a piece of white stiff examination paper on the counter. He pulled on a pair of purple latex gloves, opened the carrier, and brought out Josh. It had been a while since Grady saw Josh in full light. It looked pretty disheveled. Its hair was matted and damp, eyes watery, and lips cracked. Dr. P tsk-tsked. “Someone hasn’t been looked after properly, have they?” Josh sighed. Dr. P grabbed two wires attached to a machine on the counter, and, searching through Josh’s fur, clipped them onto Josh’s tiny ears. The mechanism whirred and dinged. He poked Josh gently on what Grady assumed to be his stomach area, and Josh let out a fizzling sound. Dr. P pulled a tiny tongue suppressor out of a jar and opened Josh’s mouth. He peered inside with a small flashlight. He wiped Josh’s nose and probed the goo on the tissue with his gloved finger. “Well,” Dr. P said, “the good news is that Josh isn’t in serious danger. But the bad news is that he’s highly dehydrated and suffering from Levora flu. It’s harmless to humans, but GECs are susceptible. Josh developed a secondary infection as a result. I'll prescribe a course of antibiotics, and I’ll also recommend ten days of Prolaxian supplements to get his appetite up. A warm bath with my line of lavender soap– available out front– will help him regain his original puff.” “Thanks, Doc.” Putting away the wires, Dr. P said, “You know, Fluffles were developed to be cuddled.” “Yeah, well, that’s not really my thing.” “Sometimes we have to think beyond ourselves to do what’s good for others. But of course, you’re familiar with that, being a dad and husband.” He threw out the suppressor and tissue and began peeling off his gloves. “I remember when Tanya briefed the team on her idea to invent the Fluffle.” Grady recalled that when Tanya brought home the schematics for the Fluffle prototype, she sat at the kitchen table all night reading and taking notes. She told Grady that she’d been put in charge of the project but never mentioned that she’d been the one who’d envisioned it. “From the look on your face,” Dr. P continued, “I’m guessing that you didn’t know how integral she was. I was asked by Chad Whitmore to be a consultant on the project. Her passion really impressed me. Of course, only later did I find out that you’d lost your baby boy not that long before.” Dr. P threw away his gloves and washed his hands. “Did you know that she’d made this Fluffle especially for you and Ricky? Hadn’t you ever noticed that no other Fluffle but yours has blue eyes and blond fur?” No, he hadn’t. Not until Lily pointed it out. The nurse knocked and opened the door. “I’ve got another patient,” Dr. P said. “Nurse Church will send Josh’s prescriptions to your pharmacy. Again, nice seeing you.” “This way, Mr. Bradford,” Nurse Church said, pointing down the hallway, “when you’re ready.” As soon as they left, Grady pulled out his phone and scrolled through his pictures until he found the one that Tanya took of him holding baby Josh at the park. Josh, with his silvery blue eyes and wispy blond hair. Two days later he died in a car crash. Tanya had walked away with minor physical injuries. Grady gazed down at the Fluffle. It blinked up at him. Same silvery blue. Fur the same shade of blond. No, Tanya wouldn’t have. Would she? He thought about how he’d done the minimum for it, avoided touching it longer than he had to. Grady felt woozy. He grabbed the counter for stability. His phone rang. It was Tanya. “What did Dr. P say?” she asked, voice tinged with worry. “Josh’ll be fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Dr. P told me what you did. Is it true?” Tanya was silent for a moment. “Yes.” Why did she do it? Why did she even think it was okay to do it? Why didn’t she tell him? “Why?” is all he could manage to say. “I had the chance to save a part of him, but I had to work fast, and I knew you wouldn’t approve. I just couldn’t let him go. I thought maybe, once you got to know Josh as he is now, then maybe you’d be okay with it. There were so many times I wanted to tell you, but I could never say it. I worried what you’d think of me, of us… of him.” “I’ve got to go.” “Wait. Let’s talk about this.” He hung up. She called back, but he ignored it, placing his phone in his pocket. Grady looked down at the Fluffle. It seemed so small and vulnerable on the crisp examination paper. Grady leaned down so they were eye to eye. “Josh?” he asked. Josh burbled. After they buried Josh, Grady swore to himself that he’d never cry for his son again, but here he was, hot tears rolling down his face and splattering on the paper. Josh sneezed and shivered. Josh. Her Josh. His Josh? Grady grabbed a tissue and wiped Josh’s nose. He ran his fingers across his fur. Josh cooed. Grady gently picked him up. Josh leaned into the crook of Grady’s arm. He was soft against Grady’s skin. This felt… weird. But he could get used to it. “Let’s go,” Grady said. Down the hall, they passed Lily, Pepper, and Magda. “Hey,” Lily called out. “You forgot your carrier.” “We won’t be needing it anymore,” Grady said. He and Josh were headed home.
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