We’re partnering with The Mary Sue! Each month, The Mary Sue will be running one of our new stories on their site, getting the work of our fantastic authors out there even further into the wilds of the internet.

This month’s featured selection is “Ilse, Who Saw Clearly” by E. Lily Yu.

We are absolutely thrilled to work with The Mary Sue to share the awesome that is the work of Apex Magazine contributors.

Lynne M. Thomas

Editor-in-Chief, Apex Magazine

How do you summarize the forty–year career of a man who’s done everything? Joe R. Lansdale is not merely a writer; he’s one of the most preeminent storytellers of our time. He has written dozens of novels and a hoard of short stories spanning the horror, mystery, and science fiction genres, among many others, for which he’s garnered eight Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Edgar Award, and his novels Mucho Mojo (of the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series) andThe Bottoms were each selected as the New York TimesNotable Book of the Year. In 2007, he was given the Grand Master Award by the World Horror Convention, and in 2011, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association. He has also penned scripts for animated film, comic books, and graphic novels for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Dark Horse Comics. Outside of writing, he established and runs a martial arts studio specializing in Shen Chuan martial arts.

For this issue of Apex Magazine, we are delighted to present to you Joe R. Lansdale’s short story, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” and in the hands of a professional like Mr. Lansdale, you will not be disappointed. Although he is incredibly busy, Mr. Lansdale was kind enough to lend us some of his time for an interview, in which we discussed his lengthy career, killer plants, Batman, and his proclivity for novellas.

About “Tight, Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back”

APEX MAGAZINE: Everything about this landscape is unique and fascinating, from the charred ocean floors with the slithering sharks and whales, to the abandoned lighthouse, and the fresh take on botanically zombified corpses. What originally sparked this story for you?

JOE LANSDALE: I always loved all those old science fiction movies where the world changed and was full of mutations the day after the bomb. Not very scientific, but the idea of it, the imagery was very appealing. I also loved the novel The Day of the Triffids, and of course Night of the Living Dead, and I wanted to nod to all of that, but approach it from a kind of literary story; a variation on Two People in Connecticut Are Having Trouble With Their Marriage. This is that, but they’re not from Connecticut, and other marriages just think they have problems.

AM: At its core, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” is a zombie story, complete with animated corpses and grisly brain–eating. However, although there are shotguns present, not a single weapon is fired in defense against the hoard. What made you decide to focus on the quieter, more desperate angle of two lone individuals trapped and unwilling to fight instead of the gun–slinging that so often dominates zombie stories?

JL: I’ve approached zombie stories all manner of ways. Sometimes traditional, and sometimes not. I generally always have some kind of spin on the things I write, and that’s not by plan or choice. It’s just how I see things. But in this I saw two characters that were defeated by the world and didn’t have the energy to live in it.

AM: Although it only speaks near the end of the story, the tattoo itself is a major player in this tale, serving first and foremost as a substitute for the physical intimacy between the narrator and Mary, and then secondarily as a constant reminder and punishment for the narrator’s guilt over the part he played in the loss of his daughter. This split between intimacy and guilt seems mirrored in the split of his own memories about his daughter, the first of seeing her naked in the bathroom and realizing she’s become a grown woman, and the second, of remembering her riding his back as a six–year–old. Was this parallel something you originally intended to come through in the story, or was it something that the story brought forth on its own during the writing?

JL: The tattoo is all you said it was. It is the obvious symbol for all their woes, concerns, and disappointments, not to mention the main character sees it as a well–deserved punishment, and the wife sees it as part of the punishment he deserves. I found the whole thing unsettling when I was writing it, and thought I was writing a real loser. When I reread it I still felt that way, but, it’s all I had. I started to withdraw it, and then I got this response back that was pretty amazing. The editor liked it, and so did the readers, and in time I grew to love it. It was so dark and I had been in such a dark place writing it I had to have some space before I could appreciate it.

About Writing in General:

AM: I’m going to try to get the fangirling out of the way here, and just say that I remember watching “Perchance to Dream” onBatman: The Animated Series when I was growing up, and it’s still one of my favorite episodes. How did you get involved in writing the several episodes you did for the Batman animated series? Did writing for an animated episode prove more challenging than the writing work you did for comics or graphic novels? Or was it relatively similar?

JL: I loved writing for that series. I was asked by Warner, and I think it was due to my having written a couple of Batman short stories, a novel and a children’s book that dealt with Batman. Also, a friend I knew worked at DC Comics, and I’m sure he put a bug in their ear. They called me one day, asked if I wanted to give it a whirl, and I did. I wrote three for the series, and one for the Batman and Robin series that came later. One forSuperman: The Animated Series. I’ve worked in animation other times as well. I didn’t find it that difficult. I liked it. I like all kinds of writing. Now and again something isn’t quite to someone’s liking, but on the whole, I found it like a cross between film scripts, which I had written and sold, and comics, which I had also written.

AM: Beyond your many novels and dozens upon dozens of short stories, you’ve also written quite a few novellas, and been nominated for and won Bram Stoker awards for them. (I’m thinking specifically Bubba Ho–tep, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks, among others, and your upcoming collection of shorter fiction, Bleeding Shadows, is said to contain some novellas as well!) There’s something special about works of that length, perhaps because they so perfectly blend the immediacy of a short story with nearly the breathing–room of a novel. Are novellas a form you set out to write deliberately, or did the stories themselves select the form?

JL: The novella is probably my favorite length. That or what used to be called a novelette, a term you don’t see much anymore. But it was usually measured at about 10,000 words. In fact, my first fiction was for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and it was given that label. It gives me room to spread and tell a good story without having to write something that would be too long, too much information for a tale that’s better told at novella length. It’s a very natural length for me and I don’t pad anyway, so it’s good when I have a story I can tell and tell to its fullest, but yet, can finish it up with less time invested for a novel. I love reading novellas, and I love writing them.

AM: For the past forty–odd years, you’ve been involved in publishing not only from the writer’s side, but also through editing numerous anthologies. You’ve witnessed much of the ups and downs, from the emergence of splatterpunk in the ’80s to the current trends in zombie and vampire fiction. How do you feel the business of being a writer has changed over the years since you began your career? Do you feel that it’s easier or harder (or the same?) today for an author beginning their career to make a decent living?

JL: The business is always the hardest business in the world anytime you start. For a while, I thought this was the worst time, but actually, a lot of new markets are opening up all the time. The problem is it’s harder to make a real living as a writer, though to tell the truth, a lot of people making a living as a writer didn’t really start until the 1980s. I think we’re having to some extent a self–correction. It was never meant to have this vast readership for all authors, and the money that was there in the eighties, and somewhat in the 90s, just isn’t there anymore, at least not for as many authors as it once was. I think I’ve survived because I always wrote and loved to write a variety of types of fiction, non–fiction, screenplays, short stories, essays, comics, etc. When one thing faltered I had another place to go to, and it was always a place I wanted to go. I also edited anthologies from time to time, and taught at the University here, but believe me, that was more for the joy of it than the money. I’ve always written for me and then hoped someone would love it. Somehow, the money has always shown up and I’m still writing and feel I’m better now than ever. But, I got my foot in the door in the seventies, so maybe it was easier, but I remember people saying, well, it’s too hard now, back in the old days they had all those pulp magazines, and then in the fifties and sixties it was easier because of all those digest magazines and all the book publishers. All true, but it always changes, and there are more markets than people think. What amazes me is how poorly people who claim they want to write often investigate the markets. They have the internet, which actually makes it easier to find markets than in the old days. I wrote for very cheap markets when I started, even some for copies. And that’s another thing, no one wants to start at the bottom anymore. They don’t have the patience to deal with editors, chasing agents, so they just self–publish. I think that’s valid, but it seems to be what so many writers think of as the quickie way out. It’s better to be vetted by the market if that’s possible. You have a book you love, can’t get it published, sure go the self–publish route, but there’s a good chance that will only be marginally better than the “traditional” route. You still have to sell the books. Ebooks, it’s the same. I think they have opened up a whole new world for writers, but they are not a magic answer. Nothing is other than hard work.

AM: You’ve got a wonderful list of writing — I hesitate to call it advice, as advice implies that everyone should follow them (something you yourself would prefer not to imply) — comments on your website. One of the things you mention is that you like to keep a lot of other interests in your life, because if all you had was writing, it would consume you. At least one of those things is Shen Chuan martial arts. How did you become involved in martial arts, and what prompted you to start your own self defense school?

JL: I started studying boxing and wrestling when I was a kid. My father taught me, and that led to me becoming more and more interested. By the time I was thirteen I was beginning to really get serious, and pretty soon I was taking Judo and other martial arts at the Tyler YMCA, and that hooked me. I’ve practiced martial arts and self–defense for nearly fifty years. I love it. And it’s the mindset that’s been important to me. It’s helped me roll with the punches. Also, being a poor kid and a hard worker, and someone who did mostly blue collar jobs until I was 29, I appreciated the chance to make my living a as a writer, and I’ve made the most of it, and martial arts helped me maintain the focus that was necessary.

AM: You’ve said in other interviews that you gravitate so much toward the first–person POV because it reads more like a storyteller’s voice. It’s a first–hand account rather than once or twice removed from the events at hand. You’ve mentioned also that your family always shared stories about the past, such as their experiences during the Great Depression, which served at least in part for the inspiration behind Edge of Dark Water. I’ve been lucky to have a grandfather who is a fabulous storyteller, and I’ll never forget the way he describes the rolling clouds of dust moving toward his farm during the Dust Bowl. Could you tell us a little about how your family’s history of storytelling energized and impacted on your own writing? Do you have a particular favorite story your parents related to you that made a particularly vivid impression on you, more so than others?

JL: Well, a lot of my family’s history, at least pieces of it here and there, as well as tall–tells and stories that are mixtures of truth and myth, have found their way into my fiction in some form or another. My grandmother saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. My dad knew Bonnie Parker. He rode the rails. He boxed and wrestled in fairs during the Great Depression. My mother was a talented woman who could create a job out of thin air, something my daughter inherited, so they were my inspirations, and their stories, and the stories of other family members were legion. I stole from them. And yes, I do prefer the first person as a writer and reader. It doesn’t fit all stories, but it’s been the one I’ve written in the most as a novelist.

AM: How has your writing process changed since you first started writing novels? Has it changed? Or is it still relatively the same as it always was?

JL: I used to write from 10:30 until midnight, or two or three pages, whichever came first. I did that and then later I tried a variety of other methods, more hours. I finally settled on three hours in the morning, three to five pages a day, though I didn’t resist writing more pages, or even working at other times of the day if I felt driven. But my plan was three hours a day or three to five pages. Originally I did that five days a week, and then I went to six or seven if I felt the urge. That works for me. I can feel like a hero every day. I revise as I go, and then do a polish when I finish. Sometimes I miss the boat and have to revise more, but that’s the more common process. Of course, sometimes an editor has a suggestion, or a proof reader, but that’s later.

AM: How do you approach editing one of your novels? Is there anything specific you tend to find needs changing on a second run–through, a common challenge? Do you tend to edit a project immediately after finishing it, or do you let it sit for a while? If the latter, do you work on other writing while you let the to–be–edited draft rest?

JL: I edit as I go, and I edit what I call the polish, which is mostly rereading, cutting, revising when necessary. If it takes more than that, I do it. I generally start the polish pretty quick after finishing. I’m less interested in it and do a poorer job if I wait too long. I might be better at catching spelling and typing errors if I wait, but I’m not as good at maintaining the energy. When I do that I tend to polish it well, but I also tend to suck the life out of it. So mostly, I work when a project is still hot. Sometimes I start the final edit the very next day after finishing, but more often than not, I take a day or two off, and in rare cases longer if I have to travel, but I prefer the former.

AM: Another piece of suggested advice you mention on your website is that it is absolutely vital for a writer to read. You compare reading to fuel, and that the more you read, the more fuel you’ve got to write your own fiction. What are you currently reading?

JL: I’m reading a book by an oil field worker. It’s not a literary novel, it’s a memoir, and I’m finding it very interesting. I just finished a while back Susan Hill’s new ghost story book, and I’m starting on John Sayle’s new short story collection. I’ve read a couple of the stories before, elsewhere, but I look forward to it. I love Sayles. Great film maker as well.

AM: You read a lot––somewhere you mentioned nearly three to four books (and/or an equal amount of short fiction) a week––and have also edited numerous anthologies in horror, fantasy, and western genres of fiction. Across all genres, is there any specific thing––be it character, or style, or idea, or etc.––that you especially notice while reading that indicates that a story is going to be special, or at least, special to you?

JL: I set out thinking I’m looking for anything, but style is a lot of it. It doesn’t have to be highly noticeable, just easy to read but with some kind of weight or poetry to it. Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury come to mind. I love Hemingway’s style as well, and find it to be a kind of muscular poetry. Fitzgerald is another example. So many. But that’s important. I prefer a story that rolls easy but has some echo beyond the reading. Style and character are probably the most important, but there’s no set rule.

AM: What can we look forward to seeing from you in the coming year?

JL: The Thicket comes out in September, my new novel fromMulholland, and in November, will be a new short story collection, Bleeding Shadows.

Thank you so much, Mr. Lansdale, for sharing “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” with us here at Apex, and for sharing your time with us for this interview!

Maggie Slater writes in Maine, where she lives with her husband and two old, cranky cats. She has seen her work published in a variety of venues, such as The Storyteller Magazine, Fantastical Visions IV and the anthology Dark Futures: Tales of Dystopian SF, from Dark Quest Books. She currently moonlights as an assistant editor for Apex Publications. For more information about her and her current writing projects, visit her blog at http://maggiedot.wordpress.com.

I find strength, agency, endurance and anger in the most unlikely works of fiction. I would not dream of telling someone that they are wrong to value a story.  A work of art is empowering when the audience finds power in it.

Amid the current barrage of science fiction, superhero, fantasy, and horror films there is a quiet, steady stream of movies that star women. Tough women. Women of action. Women who are the star of the film or franchise, without whom the story would not exist. This is good.

However, the women are largely young, thin, white, conventionally very attractive, and dressed in a manner that presents their bodies in a constant sexual display. This is what we call problematic bullshit.

There is a moment in Resident Evil 3: Extinction in which our protagonist, Alice, finds a trench filled with bodies of her clones. Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, is horrified. The camera cuts quickly to her dead clones, all identically clad in the same red dress. They are interchangeable. They are disposable. The clones are, as is stated in the film, failures. They are not worth burying.

This moment exemplifies one of the strongest in–world messages of the movie: Alice is property to be used and thrown aside. But we watch Alice recognize her dead clone sisters. We see her eyes narrow, her jaw clench, and fifteen minutes later, we see her launch a vendetta that will burn the world in order to save it. Alice’s courage and determination, her autonomy, make her a strong female action hero.

Do we need to see the scantily–clad dead bodies of disposable women in order for the film to make this point? We support Alice in her rage, we support her as she shoots zombies and takes down the evil Umbrella Corporation. Do we support her choice to wear hot pants and a halter top?

At this point I need to mention false consciousness. I won’t take too long, promise.

False consciousness is the idea that the oppressed (you, me, women, queers, people of color, most of the planet) cannot recognize the tools of our oppression. That the downtrodden participate in oppressing ourselves while falsely thinking we are making free choices. The lack of diversity in female action heroes means that we are forced into upholding unrealistic standards of appearance, youth, and gender. False consciousness is the idea that we don’t know this — that we can’t see the problem. False consciousness tells me that I can’t admire female action heroes without buying all the rest of the crap. This is, frankly, bullshit.

So, back to Alice and her halter top and nudity. Could I wish that not every female action hero be scantily clad? I could. I do. But I refuse to agree that the clothes a woman wears — even a character in a film, dressed by corporate filmmakers — somehow makes her less of a fucking badass.

Go on. Try telling Alice that you are judging her based on her clothes. Let me get some popcorn first.

We consume fiction and take from it those things we need to live, grow, and thrive, even when the fictions available are imperfect, misogynist, complicated, or contradictory. And,believe me, the fictions available aren’t that great. If I restricted myself to watching critically–acclaimed films, it would be a total sausage–fest. Critically–acclaimed cinema is miles of films by dudes, featuring dudes, about dude–related problems which aresupposed to be universal. Life is short. Time is finite. I am not going to spend my precious movie–watching time on The Anguish of Being a Dude.

When I want to watch a woman who is tired of dude–related bullshit, I watch marginal, low–budget genre films. When I want to see a woman take matters into her own hands, kick ass, blow shit up, and save the world, I watch imperfect, complicated, sometimes contradictory genre fiction. The movie Jennifer’s Body is one such brilliantly complicated and imperfect genre film.

Jennifer’s Body is a horror–comedy. One interpretation of the movie is that this is the story of a hot, sexy, slightly stupid teenage girl who makes bad decisions and is killed for them. Her hot, sexy body is then taken over by a sexy demon who uses sex powers to lure–and–then–eat sex–crazed and slightly stupid teenage boys. In this version of the film the homely–but–smart best friend, Needy, is given the role of trying to save or avenge the now–dead Jennifer. In the final moments of the film she succeeds, having taken on some of the demon’s sexy magic.

In this version, Jennifer’s power as a mortal comes from her hot body and willingness to have sex. Her power as undead comes from her hot body and willingness to have sex withanyone.

However. Jennifer’s Body is also about the strength of female friendship. Needy and Jennifer have been friends since kindergarten. Needy is smarter than Jennifer, works harder than Jennifer, and has a loving and supportive boyfriend in Chip. Jennifer clearly believes that her strength — that all the strength a woman can have — comes from sex. Needy just as clearly knows that Jennifer is wrong. Yet these two love each other anyway. Jennifer loves Needy even though she worries that Needy might actually secretly be better than her in some way. Needy loves Jennifer even though Jennifer is slightly mean and demanding because she can see the insecurity and wants to protect her friend. Against all the social slings and arrows that junior high and high school can produce, these two refuse to let anyone or anything come between them. As Needy says in the film, “Sandbox love never dies.”

When Jennifer is kidnapped for human sacrifice by the band Low Shoulder, Needy fights for her. When Jennifer returns as something akin to a succubus, Needy keeps her secret, defends her friend, and searches for ways to save Jennifer. And Jennifer… doesn’t eat or kill Needy. It’s an extension of their entire relationship — Needy makes life easier for Jennifer while not challenging her, and Jennifer doesn’t ever abandon Needy for cooler, sexier friends. They know they love each other. They know what they each give to and get from the other. And not even death will end that.

Ultimately, of course, it does end. This isn’t Jennifer anymore, it’s a demon wearing her body. In their final conflict, the demon is winning until Needy breaks the BFF necklace. Jennifer, betrayed, loses her concentration. Needy kills her. It’s the last gift she can give to the girl she loves.

Strength. Power. Agency. While overtly associated with the body of Jennifer, Needy is the bedrock of the friendship. And Jennifer knows this, relies on it, and will not betray or abandon Needy until she is past dead and her body is host to a nightmare.

Yet the film giveth, and the film taketh away. Jennifer’s Bodyuses the first interpretation I offered to tell the story of the second. To undermine the idea that sex is power, Jennifer’s Body shows us that sex is power. While denying the stereotype that girls always fight and compete, we first see Jennifer being mean to Needy, we see Needy’s loyalty, and we see the demon in Jennifer fight and compete with Needy. To subvert the notion that a woman’s power comes from being an object, Jennifer’s Bodymakes the body of Jennifer an object for men to use.

Complicate, imperfect fictions. But I get to choose the parts of the story that give me strength, hope, and determination. You get to make the same choices and I would not dream of speaking ill of them. A film can be objectifying and misogynist and still be a source of power for the audience. Sucker Punch is the perfect example of this contradiction.

In Sucker Punch, we have five women who are presented as abused patients in a mental hospital. These same five women are also, in fantasy sequence, unwilling prostitutes. And in further fantasy sequences the five are warriors, pilots, ninjas, magic–wielding mech–driving badass motherfuckers. Their dark, luxurious, long, false eyelashes are the same in every scene, no matter which world or fantasy the women occupy. No matter their power, position, or lack thereof, their faces look bruised and hollow.

Sucker Punch is not a well–made film. In one interpretation we can conclude that the opening scene’s point of view character, Baby Doll, is committed to the institution because she tried to protect her sister from rape. She is lobotomized at the end of her first week. All other scenes in the film are her fantasy in the moments before the lobotomization.

If this is the narrative you take from the film, women are objects, without power, used sexually, discarded and further violated to protect their abusers. In every scene, the women are presented as sexually available. In this interpretation the viewer is supposed to find a mech pilot, a trapped prostitute, and a sexually abused mental patient equally sexy. Remember the lush, perfect false eyelashes. It feels gross to even think about.

But there is a second narrative in this mess. The narration voice–overs are not by Baby Doll, but by Sweet Pea. It is possible to see the prostitution fantasy not as Baby Doll’s, but as Sweet Pea’s method of coping with life in the institution. The violent action fantasies become part of Sweet Pea’s life when she meets Baby Doll. Baby Doll is the catalyst for an escape plan, enacted both in fantasy and reality, which results in Sweet Pea getting away. She is free.

I wish for movies in which badassery is not only–and–forever paired with a limited notion of fuckability. But, despite the costuming and the makeup and those damn false eyelashes,Sucker Punch is the story that makes me bare my teeth and pump a fuck–yeah fist in the air. This is a story of women who have had absolutely everything taken from them, who steal power back by any means necessary. This is a narrative of women joining forces to carve out safety and freedom. This is women with every damn reason in the world to give up, lie down, and die — who don’t.

They will not give their abusers the fucking satisfaction of surrender.

Are these films and the other action, fantasy, and horror films that star women — such as Underworld, Kill Bill, Salt, Aeon Flux, Domino, Elektra, Ultraviolet, or Haywire — empowering? Yes. Without question. Are many of them exploitative, problematic, and full of male–gaze sexual–pandering bullshit? Yes. Many of them. Without question.

So fucking what.

This is where the female–power party is at. It’s here in the action films made mostly by dudes who think women with guns are hot. That’s okay — I believe that you and I are smart enough to find strength while rolling our eyes at bullshit.

Power is present. Agency is here. And nobody but you gets to choose your strong female–hero role models.

Sigrid Ellis is co–editor of Chicks Dig Comics and Queers Dig Time Lords, both from Mad Norwegian Press. She is an air traffic controller, editor, writer, and homeschooling parent. She lives with her partner and their family in St. Paul, MN.

I am —
I am —
Oh, just ignore it, catches sometimes,
just a gear in my throat.
Just needs some polishing,
maybe descaling,
it only hurts
when I’m inhaling,
which mostly I don’t have to do.

I was
designed for precision work
slim, interchangeable
various parts,
just not a heart
I was
state of the art
slick golden shiny
covet me, buy me
sweetly admire me

But I am —
I am —
slightly less shiny now —
okay, I’m rusted,
swear I’m not busted,
just need some repairs.

Can’t go on pointe no more
Still I can twirl and plie —
Fully powered, I’ll do it all day —
for now, just an hour
swear I can, swear I can
just a few parts to replace

Don’t go —
I am —
I am —
Terribly useful
Ever so teachable,
I can
sing,
if you fix this thing
lodged in my throat, and
I can
fix your computer
your engine, your implant
Really, I’m versatile,
don’t let my appearance fool you.

No, sir —
I am —
I am —
Not that kind of bot!
There are some things that I just won’t do.

…but maybe for you …

You, sir!
You look like an engineer!
Surely you have no fear
of one battered bot.
I am
not really challenging,
just need some balancing,
tinkering, tempering,
few things replaced.
Nothing too pricey.
Nothing too dicey,
my brain is just fine,
just my body’s debased.
Okay, I need some new parts —
mostly the joints,
worn at the knees,
ankles are gone and my hands, sir
just need some fixing —
you just do one,
I’ll take care of the other
really no bother
I’ll pay for myself in time saved, sir,
just power me up and all day, sir,
I’ll work for you.
So much I can do.
With one hand
from you.

I am —
I am —
having some trouble here,
once I was held so dear —
just look me up!
You’ll see me dancing
or maybe weaving,
or welding,
or programming —
I am —
I am —
ever so useful,
I promise,
and only so slightly
out of date.
Don’t even think it, sir,
I’m not disposable —
yes, there’s a newer model —

… yes, she’s an upgrade.

Please, sir,
new isn’t better,
I’m seasoned, experienced
All customizable,
much more affordable.
No, I can’t walk right now —
I tell you, that’s easy to fix.
Not under warranty.
Sir, are you kidding me?
Sir, please don’t go!

I need
just enough power
to get through the month, and I am —
I am —
I’m almost out.
Running on half right now,
could use a laugh right now —
Sir, I tell jokes.
I am —
I am —
I am —
I don’t need much,
don’t even need touch,
just a day in the shop
and I’ll be
as good as I ever was —
please let me show you —
no, I can’t pay.

I’ve been here all day.

I am —
I am —
I am —
sentient, although
I’m not very confident
that you’d agree.
I am —
I am —
I am —

I
am

Shira Lipkin is a poem masquerading as a person. She hasn’t gotten the height or hair right, but has been passing undetected regardless. She has implanted seeds in Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Clockwork Phoenix 4, and other fertile grounds, and expects to extend her fronds in the near future. You’ll know it when you see it. In her spare time, she fights crime and knits. Visit http://shiralipkin.com if interested!

Most memories were gone.

The name of the ship he had served on. The name of his commanding officer. His daughters’ names, which husband went with which daughter, which grandchildren came from which marriage, which fiancé held hands with which granddaughter. That had mostly melted away. His head felt like an icebox, and someone had opened the door for just a simple moment and let all the cold air out, filled it up with thick stagnant heat. Alzheimer’s was a muggy goddamned country, the airless stomach of a huge beast that took its time digesting old useless machinery.

He could hold Audrey’s hand, like he was doing now, and he could remember her name and he could see the wedding ring he had given her, could run his trembling fingers over it and feel its coldness, its sharpness, the places where it had scratched and speckled and lost its shine. But he couldn’t remember the wedding, not a goddamned thing about it. He reached into that broken old icebox, strained a little further and tried to find the little details: what did her dress look like? How did she wear her hair? Was she smiling? Was she crying? It was gone. Melted. And he panicked because he knew it was there, knew that if he could just reach a little further… And then he looked around and realized he wasn’t at home. He was in a strange, stinking bed in a pastel–colored room, surrounded by mechanical noises meted out in impersonal rhythm, a bubble universe that screamed Waiting–For–You–To–Die. And he looked up at her and tried to say, Audrey, I’m scared, dammit, I’m scared and I want to go home, and some small part of me knows that I never will, that there is nothing to be done to save me, but lie, goddamn you, lie and tell me you’ll make it better, you’ll reverse it, redact it, reduce it and destroy it, please! And all he could ever say was, “Audrey… I don’t know…”

And Audrey said, like she always said, “Hush Cotton.” And he could see himself in her eyes, a useless old man, or not even a man but a reminder of the husband she ought to have. And he could see how tired she was, could see the part of her that wished the whole mess would just end. The part that wanted a period on the end of this awkward run–on sentence. It would be a period of a death, too. Not an exclamation point death like he’d always pretended to want in his Navy days, a smile on his face and the devil at his heels, a man’s sort of death. It — no — he would end quietly with a mushy melted head and a single dark period.

§

The hospital room was dark when Cotton woke up again. In the dimness, the white panels on the checkered linoleum floor looked dull blue, and the dark ones like pits.

Eisley was there in his frumpy brown suit, the hound’s–tooth pattern catching the room’s shadows, covering him in tiny honeycomb pools of dark. He sat in a chair next to Cotton’s bed, the same chair Audrey sat in every day, holding Cotton’s hand and looking tired. He tilted his head up and his glasses caught some secret pocket of light from somewhere in the room and held it in their lenses.

In the end, people never changed much.

“Hi, Cotton” he said, and his lips pulled back in a weak grin. “How are we holding up?”

“Fair,” said Cotton and pushed himself up in bed. “You?”

Eisley made a noise like laughter.

Another night, another visit from the eternally middle–aged Greg Eisley. One more evening with the lampreys. Their teeth shining in the lightless corners of the room.

Cotton closed his eyes for a second, and the undertow in his head sucked him away again.

§

Most of what was left came to him second hand; imprints of stories he had told a thousand times about memories he used to have, memorized monologues about a life for which he had no context. Copies of copies. But he still had a few pure memories. These, the last original prints, played over and over again. The cold Professor Eisley and what he turned into. Maybe what he’d been from the beginning.

“Biology,” Eisley said, “is a nasty old bastard of a science. Without it, there is no medicine, and there is no psychology, and there is no neurology, and there is no understanding. You want to trace your way back to the very lynchpin of knowledge? It’s all here,” a gesture toward the blackboard, symbolic for a moment of the entire discipline. “And here,” a hand swept across the textbook, open on the podium. “And here,” a calculated, self–aware tap on his own temple, an act of conceit so unapologetic that it could hardly be objected to. “You know nothing about life if you don’t know about biology. And you know nothing about biology if you can’t accept, emotionally as well as abstractly, one simple, awful fact: that we are all going to die, and that there is nothing we can do about it.

“The terrific thing about modern biology is that most of it is based on the idea of natural selection. Or, in other words,” And here he’d look over his glasses at the lecture hall and the ceiling lights would catch on the lenses making them into a pair of twirling white urchins. “If you, as a species, don’t want to die, you’d better hope something else does.”

Eisley, brushing the errant strands of his thin brown hair back from his forehead, drinking in the apprehension of the class, the silent, weirded–out fascination naked on the faces of the collected class. It made Cotton jealous somehow to see those restless strands of hair fall down over Eisley’s wide white forehead. He brought a hand up to his crew cut, the bristled shortness of it, and he knew it made him look big and stupid. Soldier–boy sitting in class and pretending to take it all in.

“We’ll take a look at the lamprey,” said Eisley and wrote out the word in big capital letters on the black board. “The lamprey is… and I’ll ask you to forgive the hyperbole here… a true bastard bastion of natural selection. Phylum cordata, which if you’ll recall from last class just means he has a spinal cord, and class cephalaspidomorphi.” All of this he scrawled across the black board with that frantic and obvious intelligence, that flaunted and frenetic cunning. Phylum Cordata. Class Cephalaspidomorphi. The letters becoming smaller and messier, curving downward across the board like worms.

The lamprey. A jawless fish most commonly found in fresh water or just off the coast. He drew a wide circle on the board, “In their mouths…” He fleshed out the mouth with a series of smaller circles, “past all the sucking cups that allow them to cling to their prey…” In the center a circle left empty, dark; he pointed to it. “Really down deep here, they’ve got a couple of very sharp teeth that function like knives. Really, they’re more parasite than predator. They attach themselves to an old and dying fish and,” he chopped downward through the air with his hand and Cotton recoiled a little at this man, this slight and bespectacled professor, “they slit the skin, secrete an anticoagulant, and gorge themselves on the blood of the dying fish. When the fish finally shuffles off this mortal coil, so to speak, the lamprey detaches and looks elsewhere.”

The image sat in Cotton’s belly like a lump of raw meat, heavy and wet. When he swallowed spit, his Adam’s apple felt swollen.

“Fish are lucky. They’ve got tiny, stupid brains, six–second memories, no cogent idea of what is happening to them at any given point. Just consider your last moments, the loneliness, the humiliation, as you die with this…” he gestured weakly at the mouth on the black board, “sucking against your side. Fish don’t care. They don’t know that they should. Nature does have, it appears, some compassion. Anyway, the lamprey is a single example — not a very good one, but one I’m sort of fond of — of a larger biological mechanism…”

Cotton loved Eisley then, wanted to become him and feel his own hair tangle over his forehead, to have spectacles that filled with light. He wanted those blazing crazy smarts, wanted a brain that sizzled like Eisley’s. And in those days, after that weird lecture when everyone in the room seemed to become aware of the hardness of their seats, he was a little afraid of him, too. Because that lecture had stopped being about biology. Because Eisley was talking about something else for a second, lost in a tangent that seemed to have swept him up and dissolved him and washed him over the entire lecture hall. And when he said that last bit, the thing about nature and compassion… Cotton could tell he was lying.

§

“You know the funny thing about these visits?”

Eisley looked up again. For a second, his glasses looked like they might flood with whiteness again, but just a flicker and then his eyes were on Cotton, those eyes that used to be so wild, so mad with the things he knew, now just sad and accommodating. He sighed and said, “What’s that, Cotton?”

“When you’re around,” Cotton said and shifted his weight on the hard, lumpy hospital bed. The memories of his dead–sleeping mind still stuck to him and he was grateful. “I feel better… Not… you know, not all the way right again. Just… I know where I am.”

Eisley nodded. His eyes left Cotton and he sighed again. He really hadn’t changed. Not in sixty damned years had he changed. His brown hair still crept down across his wide pale brow and he still brushed it back in place with the side of his finger like he didn’t even know he was doing it. He had the same suit. Even now, in spite of his compassionate tone and his pitying eyes, he was still performing, still impressing himself with his own aesthetic control.

Nobody really changed all that much. Not in the end.

The things in the shadows chattered and mumbled. They sounded like children… no… no, like the tapes he used to play for… for his grandkids, the ones, the… the Chipmunk tapes. In the van. On the way to… to what? Jesus, what a thing was this that he could remember the goddamned tapes but not the names of the kids he used to play them for. What a goddamned thing was this.

“I guess… this will probably be the last visit?”

Eisley leaned forward, rested his arms on his knees and squeezed his long thin hands together. His fingernails looked blue. His voice was clinical. “What makes you say that, Cotton?”

“I’m tired. I’m… running out of…” His mind locked up. He felt his mouth open up, heard the confused mewling, croaking noise that came out. He felt stuck, locked inside his own body, pounding his fists against the walls and screaming, No, damn it! Don’t do this to me now! Give it back, it’s mine, it’s been mine for eighty–four goddamned years! It’s my body, my mind, let me have it back!

“You’re running out. I understand.” Eisley stood up, brushed his hands down the front of his brown pants, the pleats standing out from the shadows they cast. They were too long on him, bunching around his well–polished loafers. This was the way with Eisley. Everything always polished. Everything always just slightly ill fitting. “I hope,” he said, his eyes disappearing again behind the great white flood in his spectacles, “that you’re right, Cotton. About this being the last, I mean. I hope that quite sincerely.”

The things in the shadows, slick and black, smiling with their whole faces, crawled forward. Cotton closed his eyes again.

§

He changed his major after that lecture with Professor Eisley. There was some fall–out. His father was an engineer. His grandfather, too, and even though neither man ever said anything, Cotton was sure they both felt a little betrayed. In the end, biology offered something to Cotton that engineering never would. It was the same something that had him up nights on his honeymoon in Jamaica, long after Audrey had fallen asleep. Just watching the bugs gather on the porch light of their small bungalow. It charged him. Because despite what Eisley said, and in part because of it, biology was about life. Every organism on earth had this crazy seizure of energy and emotion for a short period, had the chance to change everything, and then fizzled out and died. Maybe with a big romantic exclamation, a Cotton Lee kind of exit. Maybe with a period. And then there was something new. Something to change the things the first creature changed, change them even more.

And, of course, there was Eisley. Eisley in his office with his books and desk and his lamp that seemed to be designed to send that glare over his eyes. At every opportunity, Cotton would take a spot as Eisley’s lab or research assistant. Cotton with his white lab coat digging through the riverbanks or furiously scribbling notes from a thousand books about tree frogs or taking dictation as Eisley paced around his office with that weird lunatic sending lightning bolts from his brain. And yet, no matter the project, no matter how excited and crazy he became, there was something dishonest about everything he did. Like all of this was just to fill time. To keep up appearances. Because Eisley, Cotton knew even then, was the king of liars.

§

 “How long?” asked Cotton. He could see the shiny wet head of one of the shadowy things, the lamprey–children, the sucker–babies, just cresting over the metal guardrail of the bed. He could hear them everywhere, maybe fifteen of them in all, crawling across the walls and the ceiling like lizards. Chattering. “How long, Dr. Eisley?”

Eisley put his hands in the pockets of his blazer and grinned a little. “A long time, Cotton. They’ve been around for a very, very long time. And, I suppose, so have I, though not nearly as long.”

They crawled between his legs, pawing at those perfect deep pleats in his pants with their bulbous fingers. They were like his children, swarming around him, looking up at him with such a clear expression of fondness that they almost looked human. But they weren’t his children. He was their chauffer, their custodian, shuttling them around in the shadows all around him to find the next dying fish. They’d been doing it forever, maybe, and maybe Eisley wasn’t the only one. Maybe he wasn’t even Eisley, or maybe there was no Eisley and he sprang fully–formed into the memories of all of their flailing supper–times, granting context and familiarity and anesthetic. Maybe it didn’t matter.

Their grins disappeared. Their mouths changed. Cotton watched the skin around their dark slimy lips stretch until it looked like it would split, then settle like there had been no change at all. In the end, they all looked the same, their O–shaped mouths full of fleshy grey suckers and that infinitely, terribly dark hole at the very back.

Ah, Jesus. He had pissed himself. Hot tears swelled up behind his eyes, ran down the swell of his bottom eyelids, pooled in the deep old line where his eye socket met his cheek. He could see the dark bloom on the sheets, felt them stick to his hospital gown, felt both of them stick to his skin.

He wanted Audrey, wanted her to hold his hand and say, “Hush, now, I’ll call the nurse, we’ll clean you up.” He didn’t care if she looked tired, ready to go home, ready to be done, just as long as she’d be here right now, just in this one single moment, and tell him he didn’t have to be embarrassed of his body or his mind or the fact that he had just peed all over himself, that he and this stupid goddamned broken ice–box were not the same thing! Please, Audrey, for the love of God, please!

“I…” he said. “I feel… I don’t know…”

The little smile on Eisley’s face faltered, died. He looked sad. He closed his eyes and breathed deep through his nostrils. “Jesus, Cotton,” he said. He pulled his glasses lower onto his nose and rubbed the bridge with his finger and thumb. “I just want you to know that this part never gets any easier for me.”

What was it he had said about nature and compassion? That was the great big damned rub, wasn’t it? That was the great lie Eisley had perpetuated, that God or chaos or mindless evolutionary competition could birth something like these hungry little monsters and still be called compassionate. No degree of truth–telling now, no amount of confession, could excuse him for that, could it? Cotton hated him, hated that he had wanted to be him once. He wept.

The sucker–babies leapt onto him.

A thousand little cuts. The death of a thousand little cuts. That was familiar, somehow, like from a song or a poem or something… The Jabberwocky wasn’t right, but it was the only thing he could remember then. One of the grandbabies, how lovely she had been with her fat cheeks and dark eyes, sitting on the couch while he pantomimed the scene from Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.

They’d hung up afghans in the living room to act as curtains, he and Audrey, and he’d tied one around his neck as a cape, and Audrey had manned the super–8 camera. He struck a heroic pose and stared up at the imaginary jaberwock, with his jaws that bite and claws that catch. He pulled the plastic sword from his belt and his little grandbaby gasped. He’d glanced at her, at Audrey next to her. Her face… where was her face? “The Vorpal blade went snicker–snack.”

And then the memory dried up. He watched the grandbaby’s brown eyes turn black, watched her skin implode toward her skull, watched her mummify, watched the afghans burn and crumble to ash. The memory died. The lamprey things gorged themselves on it.

Eisley said, “I wish there were a more poetic reason for this. For them. I wish I could convince you of some grand cosmic choreography. I hope that gives you comfort that I know so little more than you do.”

His daughters at the breakfast table. Cheerios. Grapefruit halves. Halloween. The girls were both too old for it by then, but Audrey had hung up all these plastic spiders and hanging skeletons all the same. The spiders bugged the hell out of him. The legs were all wrong. “Daddy, why don’t you get a different haircut?”

“Huh?”

“You need a new one, you’ve had that one forever.”

Audrey. Damn it, why couldn’t he… remember her face? “Your father’s had the same haircut since his Navy days, sweetheart.”

“You never change, Daddy.”

“Nobody really changes, baby. Not much. Eat your Cheerios.”

Snicker–snack.

The memory burnt and blew away.

Eisley said, “The truth… the only truth… is that everything is hungry. All the time. And everything eats everything else.”

The sucker–babies squealed now, and inside his head, trapped in the steaming hot broken piece of shit brain of his, Cotton demanded to know where the hell the night nurse was, didn’t she hear them in here? Couldn’t she do something? He heard himself making that mewling noise again, that helpless whine. He pounded his fists against the inside of his skull. Wasn’t anyone out there listening? Couldn’t anyone get him out of here, damn it? Couldn’t someone find a way to get hi —

§

The Cotton Lee in the bathroom mirror of the Faith Community Church men’s room was handsome. Cotton had never seen himself as handsome, had never thought about it one way or the other, but that image in the mirror, the man with the black tux (he had forgone his Navy formals, and now he was glad), the patent leather shoes, his hair just a little longer than he usually wore it, or ever would wear it again after this day, was exactly and perfectly… handsome.

The door opened a crack and he saw in the mirror Mr. Danvers, Audrey’s father, peek in. He smiled, the bristles of his beard moving with his face. “How you feeling, Cotton?”

“Anxious.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, yeah. I can honestly say I’ve never felt better. Not once in my entire life.”

“Okay. I gotta get back to Audrey. You ought to get ready, we’re about to start.”

Cotton nodded, brushed a perfect strand of hair from his forehead, and followed Mr. Danvers out of the bathroom. He crossed the lobby, felt the sun on his face through the windows, took his position at the back of his groomsmen. This was it, this feeling right here, that he wanted to freeze and keep, to be able to revisit on a whim every lonely moment, surrounded by his friends, moments away from marrying the most perfect human being anyone could possibly imagine.

Snicker–snack.

(No, damn it. Not yet. Not this one, not when he had just found it again. Cotton pushed against his body, clenched his fists around the tail of the memory. Those little monsters would have to chew off his fingers to get this one away.)

The doors to the sanctuary opened. The procession walked in. Cotton’s feet were so numb that moving felt alien, like he had learned a new way of doing it. He stopped at the front of the sanctuary, turned and looked out at all these faces, all of them looking at him because they saw, they knew what he had. This sort of insane joy. Like this professor he’d had once.

Cotton’s best man (his name, then his face, dissolved to ash, blew away) gripped his upper arm.

Cotton nodded.

Snicker–snack!

Oh, Christ. This really was it, wasn’t it? This was the period on the sentence. The spiteful, stupid, quiet finale. He felt himself in two places at once, two times, two different universes occupied by sense and by nonsense, by joy and by ruination, by potential and by running–out. Those faces in the pews, they were all turning to mummies now, dry and dead, their smiles drawing up over their gums. This was no way to die. Like a fish. Like a stupid fish with a six–second memory. This was no way for a man to die.

The organ stopped with a blunt churr. And even though the organ player was gone, the music started up again. They had sung lyrics to this tune when they were little kids, hadn’t they? Here comes the bride, all dressed in white. Where is the groom? He’s in the dressing room. Why is he there? He lost his underwear! And then they’d all laugh like mad. Underwear! Get it?

The memory of the song died.

But, oh, Jesus. Here was something. The church was turning to dust around them. Even his tux was beginning to curl like old paper and flake away. But this really was something, wasn’t it? With the song gone, he could hear her heels clack against the stone floor. She held Mr. Danvers’s arm… but… Mr. Danvers was not attached. Already in the bellies of the sucker–babies, maybe. She took another step forward and the arm burst away in a million tiny specks.

Oh, yes.

She was perfect.

In that simple white dress, her clavicle curving proudly above the neckline. She smiled at him with all of the love in the universe. She redefined love, and Cotton saw his whole life there. The children he would have with her, the grandchildren, the fights, the sex, the books they would read sitting side by side on the sofa, the medications they would remind each other to take, the smiles, the anniversaries, the whole universe of what they would build, and the end, the finality, the loss, and how wonderfully part of it all it was.

The church was gone. There was a profound nothing around them, a complete absence, a vacuum of any–ness, And in its center was Audrey, smiling, standing with her arms by her side, one foot in front of the other. Looking like an exclamation point.

This story appears in the new collection Plow the Bones (Apex Publications).  Click here for information about the book. Original publication in Murky Depths #1, September 2007.

Douglas F. Warrick is a writer, a musician, and a world–traveler. His first published story appeared in Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest back in 2006. Since then, Douglas’s work has been published in a variety of periodicals, websites, podcasts, and anthologies, and has grown progressively stranger.

Douglas originally hails from Dayton, OH, but his travels have taken him all over Asia. Douglas has screamed Buzzcock’s lyrics with Korean punk rockers in the neon alleys of Seoul, marveled at the oddness of Beijing’s masked opera singers and illusionists, piloted a bicycle through Kyoto on the way to the Golden Temple, broken up a fight between an Australian tourist and a Thai street vendor in Bangkok, and learned that the world is much weirder and more wonderful than anything he could fabricate.

Visit Douglas online at www.douglasfwarrick.com.

For Ardath Mayhar

From the Journal of Paul Marder

(Boom!)

That’s a little scientist joke, and the proper way to begin this. As for the purpose of my notebook, I’m uncertain. Perhaps to organize my thoughts and not to go insane.

No. Probably so I can read it and feel as if I’m being spoken to. Maybe neither of those reasons. It doesn’t matter. I just want to do it, and that is enough.

What’s new?

Well, Mr. Journal, after all these years I’ve taken up martial arts again — or at least the forms and calisthenics of Tae Kwon Do. There is no one to spar with here in the lighthouse, so the forms have to do.

There is Mary, of course, but she keeps all her sparring verbal. And as of late, there is not even that. I long for her to call me a sonofabitch. Anything. Her hatred of me has cured to one hundred percent perfection and she no longer finds it necessary to speak. The tight lines around her eyes and mouth, the emotional heat that radiates from her body like a dreadful cold sore looking for a place to lie down is voice enough for her. She lives only for the moment when she (the cold sore) can attach herself to me with her needles, ink and thread. She lives only for the design on my back.

That’s all I live for as well. Mary adds to it nightly and I enjoy the pain. The tattoo is of a great, blue mushroom cloud, and in the cloud, etched ghost–like, is the face of our daughter, Rae. Her lips are drawn tight, her eyes are closed and there are stitches deeply pulled to simulate the lashes. When I move fast and hard they rip slightly and Rae cries bloody tears.

That’s one reason for the martial arts. The hard practice of them helps me to tear the stitches so my daughter can cry. Tears are the only thing I can give her.

Each night I bare my back eagerly to Mary and her needles. She pokes deep and I moan in pain as she moans in ecstasy and hatred. She adds more color to the design, works with brutal precision to bring Rae’s face out in sharper relief. After ten minutes she tires and will work no more. She puts the tools away and I go to the full–length mirror on the wall. The lantern on the shelf flickers like a jack–o’–lantern in a high wind, but there is enough light for me to look over my shoulder and examine the tattoo. And it is beautiful. Better each night as Rae’s face becomes more and more defined.

Rae.

Rae. God, can you forgive me, sweetheart?

But the pain of the needles, wonderful and cleansing as they are, is not enough. So I go sliding, kicking and punching along the walkway around the lighthouse, feeling Rae’s red tears running down my spine, gathering in the waistband of my much–stained canvas pants.

Winded, unable to punch and kick anymore, I walk over to the railing and call down into the dark, “Hungry?”

In response to my voice a chorus of moans rises up to greet me.

Later, I lie on my pallet, hands behind my head, examine the ceiling and try to think of something worthy to write in you, Mr. Journal. So seldom is there anything. Nothing seems truly worthwhile.

Bored of this, I roll on my side and look at the great light that once shone out to the ships, but is now forever snuffed. Then I turn the other direction and look at my wife sleeping on her bunk, her naked ass turned toward me. I try to remember what it was like to make love to her, but it is difficult. I only remember that I miss it. For a long moment, I stare at my wife’s ass as if it was a mean mouth about to open and reveal teeth. Then I roll onto my back again, stare at the ceiling, and continue this routine until daybreak.

Mornings I greet the flowers, their bright red and yellow blooms bursting from the heads of long–dead bodies that will not rot. The flowers open wide to reveal their little black brains and their feathery feelers, and they lift their blooms upward and moan. I get a wild pleasure out of this. For one crazed moment I feel like a rock singer appearing before his starry–eyed audience.

When I tire of the game I get the binoculars, Mr. Journal, and examine the eastern plains with them, as if I expect a city to materialize there. The most interesting thing I have seen on those plains is a herd of large lizards thundering north. For a moment, I considered calling Mary to see them, but I didn’t. The sound of my voice, the sight of my face, upsets her. She loves only the tattoo and is interested in nothing more.

When I finish looking at the plains, I walk to the other side. To the west, where the ocean was, there is now nothing but miles and miles of cracked, black sea bottom. Its only resemblance to a great body of water are the occasional dust storms that blow out of the west like dark tidal waves and wash the windows black at mid–day. And the creatures. Mostly mutated whales. Monstrously large, sluggish things. Abundant now where once they were near extinction. (Perhaps the whales should form some sort of GREENPEACE organization for humans now. What do you think, Mr. Journal? No need to answer. Just another one of those little scientist jokes.)

These whales crawl across the sea bottom near the lighthouse from time to time, and if the mood strikes them, they rise on their tails and push their heads near the tower and examine it. I keep expecting one to flop down on us, crushing us like bugs. But no such luck. For some unknown reason the whales never leave the cracked sea bed to venture onto what we formerly called the shore. It’s as if they live in invisible water and are bound by it. A racial memory perhaps. Or maybe there’s something in that cracked black soil they need. I don’t know.

Besides the whales I suppose I should mention I saw a shark once. It was slithering along at a great distance and the tip of its fin was winking in the sunlight. I’ve also seen some strange, legged fish and some things I could not put a name to. I’ll just call them whale food since I saw one of the whales dragging his bottom jaw along the ground one day, scooping up the creatures as they tried to beat a hasty retreat.

Exciting, huh? Well, that’s how I spend my day, Mr. Journal. Roaming about the tower with my glasses, coming in to write in you, waiting anxiously for Mary to take hold of that kit and give me the signal. The mere thought of it excites me to erection. I suppose you could call that our sex act together.

§

And what was I doing the day they dropped The Big One?

Glad you asked that, Mr. Journal, really I am.

I was doing the usual. Up at six, did the shit, shower and shave routine. Had breakfast. Got dressed. Tied my tie. I remember doing the latter, and not very well, in front of the bedroom mirror, and noticing that I had shaved poorly. A hunk of dark beard decorated my chin like a bruise.

Rushing to the bathroom to remedy that, I opened the door as Rae, naked as the day of her birth, was stepping from the tub.

Surprised, she turned to look at me. An arm went over her breasts, and a hand, like a dove settling into a fiery bush, covered her pubic area.

Embarrassed, I closed the door with an “excuse me” and went about my business — unshaved. It was an innocent thing. An accident. Nothing sexual. But when I think of her now, more often than not, that is the first image that comes to mind. I guess it was the moment I realized my baby had grown into a beautiful woman.

That was also the day she went off to her first day of college and got to see, ever so briefly, the end of the world.

And it was the day the triangle — Mary, Rae and myself — shattered.

If my first memory of Rae alone is that day, naked in the bathroom, my foremost memory of us as a family is when Rae was six. We used to go to the park and she would ride the merry–go–round, swing, teeter–totter, and finally my back. (“I want to piggy, Daddy.”) We would gallop about until my legs were rubber, then we would stop at the bench where Mary sat waiting. I would turn my back to the bench so Mary could take Rae down, but always before she did, she would reach around from behind, caressing Rae, pushing her tight against my back, and Mary’s hands would touch my chest.

God, but if I could describe those hands. She still has hands like that, after all these years. I feel them fluttering against my back when she works. They are long and sleek and artistic. Naturally soft, like the belly of a baby rabbit. And when she held Rae and me that way, I felt that no matter what happened in the world, we three could stand against it and conquer.

But now the triangle is broken and the geometry gone away.

So the day Rae went off to college and was fucked into oblivion by the dark, pelvic thrust of the bomb, Mary drove me to work. Me, Paul Marder, big shot with The Crew. One of the finest, brightest young minds in the industry. Always teaching, inventing and improving on our nuclear threat, because, as we’d often joke, “We cared enough to send only the very best.”

When we arrived at the guard booth, I had out my pass, but there was no one to take it. Beyond the chain–link gate there was a wild mêlée of people running, screaming, falling down.

I got out of the car and ran to the gate. I called out to a man I knew as he ran by. When he turned his eyes were wild and his lips were flecked with foam. “The missiles are flying,” he said, then he was gone, running madly.

I jumped into the car, pushed Mary aside and stomped the gas. The Buick leaped into the fence, knocking it asunder. The car spun, slammed into the edge of a building and went dead. I grabbed Mary’s hand, pulled her from the car and we ran toward the great elevators.

We made one just in time. There were others running for it as the door closed, and the elevator went down. I still remember the echo of their fists on the metal just as it began to drop. It was like the rapid heartbeat of something dying.

And so the elevator took us to the world of Down Under and we locked it off. There we were in a five–mile layered city designed not only as a massive office and laboratory, but as an impenetrable shelter. It was our special reward for creating the poisons of war. There was food, water, medical supplies, films, books, you name it. Enough to last two thousand people for a hundred years. Of the two thousand it was designed for, perhaps eleven hundred made it. The others didn’t run fast enough from the parking lot or the other buildings, or they were late for work, or maybe they had called in sick.

Perhaps they were the lucky ones. They might have died in their sleep. Or while they were having a morning quickie with the spouse. Or perhaps as they lingered over that last cup of coffee.

Because you see, Mr. Journal, Down Under was no paradise. Before long, suicides were epidemic. I considered it myself from time to time. People slashed their throats, drank acid, took pills. It was not unusual to come out of your cubicle in the morning and find people dangling from pipes and rafters like ripe fruit.

There were also the murders. Most of them performed by a crazed group who lived in the deeper recesses of the unit and called themselves the Shit Faces. From time to time they smeared dung on themselves and ran amok, clubbing men, women, and children born Down Under, to death. It was rumored they ate human flesh.

We had a police force of sorts, but it didn’t do much. It didn’t have much sense of authority. Worse, we all viewed ourselves as deserving victims. Except for Mary, we had all helped to blow up the world.

Mary came to hate me. She came to the conclusion I had killed Rae. It was a realization that grew in her like a drip growing and growing until it became a gushing flood of hate. She seldom talked to me. She tacked up a picture of Rae and looked at it most of the time.

Topside she had been an artist, and she took that up again. She rigged a kit of tools and inks and became a tattooist. Everyone came to her for a mark. And though each was different, they all seemed to indicate one thing: I fucked up. I blew up the world. Brand me.

Day in and day out she did her tattoos, having less and less to do with me, pushing herself more and more into this work until she was as skilled with skin and needles as she had been Topside with brush and canvas. And one night, as we lay on our separate pallets, feigning sleep, she said to me, “I just want you to know how much I hate you.”

“I know,” I said.

“You killed Rae.”

“I know.”

“You say you killed her, you bastard. Say it.”

“I killed her,” I said, and meant it.

Next day I asked for my tattoo. I told her of this dream that came to me nightly. There would be darkness, and out of this darkness would come a swirl of glowing clouds, and the clouds would melt into a mushroom shape, and out of that — torpedo–shaped, nose pointing skyward, striding on ridiculous cartoon legs — would step The Bomb.

There was a face painted on The Bomb, and it was my face. And suddenly the dream’s point of view would change, and I would be looking out of the eyes of that painted face. Before me was my daughter. Naked. Lying on the ground. Her legs wide apart. Her sex glazed like a wet canyon.

And I/The Bomb would dive into her, pulling those silly feet after me, and she would scream. I could hear it echo as I plunged through her belly, finally driving myself out of the top of her head, then blowing to terminal orgasm. And the dream would end where it began. A mushroom cloud. Darkness.

When I told Mary the dream and asked her to interpret it in her art, she said, “Bare your back,” and that’s how the design began. An inch of work at a time — a painful inch. She made sure of that.

Never once did I complain. She’d send the needles home as hard and deep as she could, and though I might moan or cry out, I never asked her to stop. I could feel those fine hands touching my back and I loved it. The needles. The hands. The needles. The hands.

§

And if that was so much fun, you ask, why did I come Topside?

You ask such probing questions, Mr. Journal. Really you do, and I’m glad you asked that. My telling will be like a laxative, I hope. Maybe if I just let the shit flow I’ll wake up tomorrow and feel a lot better about myself.

Sure. And it will be the dawning of a new Pepsi generation as well. It will have all been a bad dream. The alarm clock will ring. I’ll get up, have my bowl of Rice Krispies and knot my tie.

Okay, Mr. Journal. The answer. Twenty years or so after we went Down Under, a fistful of us decided it couldn’t be any worse Topside than it was below. We made plans to go see. Simple as that. Mary and I even talked a little. We both entertained the crazed belief Rae might have survived. She would be thirty–eight. We might have been hiding below like vermin for no reason. It could be a brave new world up there.

I remember thinking these things, Mr. Journal, and half–believing them.

We outfitted two sixty–foot crafts that were used as part of our transportation system Down Under, plugged in the half–remembered codes that opened the elevators, and drove the vehicles inside. The elevator lasers cut through the debris above them and before long we were Topside. The doors opened to sunlight muted by grey–green clouds and a desert–like landscape. Immediately, I knew there was no brave new world over the horizon. It had all gone to hell in a fiery handbasket, and all that was left of man’s millions of years of development were a few pathetic humans living Down Under like worms, and a few others crawling Topside like the same.

We cruised about a week and finally came to what had once been the Pacific Ocean. Only there wasn’t any water now, just that cracked blackness.

We drove along the shore for another week and finally saw life. A whale. Jacobs immediately got the idea to shoot one and taste its meat.

Using a high–powered rifle he killed it, and he and seven others cut slabs off it, brought the meat back to cook. They invited all of us to eat, but the meat looked greenish and there wasn’t much blood and we warned him against it. But Jacobs and the others ate it anyway. As Jacobs said, “It’s something to do.”

A little later on Jacobs threw up blood and his intestines boiled out of his mouth, and not long after those who had shared the meat had the same thing happen to them. They died crawling on their bellies like gutted dogs. There wasn’t a thing we could do for them. We couldn’t even bury them. The ground was too hard. We stacked them like cordwood along the shoreline and moved camp down a way, tried to remember how remorse felt.

And that night, while we slept as best we could, the roses came.

§

Now, let me admit, Mr. Journal, I do not actually know how the roses survived, but I have an idea. And since you’ve agreed to hear my story — and even if you haven’t, you’re going to anyway — I’m going to put logic and fantasy together and hope to arrive at the truth.

These roses lived in the ocean bed, underground, and at night they came out. Up until then they had survived as parasites of reptiles and animals, but a new food had arrived from Down Under. Humans. Their creators, actually. Looking at it that way, you might say we were the gods who conceived them, and them partaking of our flesh and blood was but a new version of wine and wafer.

I can imagine the pulsating brains pushing up through the sea bottom on thick stalks, extending feathery feelers and tasting the air out there beneath the light of the moon — which through those odd clouds gave the impression of a pus–filled boil —  and I can imagine them uprooting and dragging their vines across the ground toward the shore where the corpses lie.

Thick vines sprouted little, thorny vines, and these moved up the bank and touched the corpses. Then, with a lashing motion, the thorns tore into the flesh, and the vines, like snakes, slithered through the wounds and inside. Secreting a dissolving fluid that turned the innards to the consistency of watery oatmeal, they slurped up the mess, and the vines grew and grew at amazing speed, moved and coiled throughout the bodies, replacing nerves and shaping into the symmetry of the muscles they had devoured, and lastly they pushed up through the necks, into the skulls, ate tongues and eyeballs and sucked up the mouse–grey brains like soggy gruel. With an explosion of skull shrapnel, the roses bloomed, their tooth–hard petals expanding into beautiful red and yellow flowers, hunks of human heads dangling from them like shattered watermelon rinds.

In the center of these blooms a fresh, black brain pulsed and feathery feelers once again tasted air for food and breeding grounds. Energy waves from the floral brains shot through the miles and miles of vines that were knotted inside the bodies, and as they had replaced nerves, muscles and vital organs, they made the bodies stand. Then those corpses turned their flowered heads toward the tents where we slept, and the blooming corpses (another little scientist joke there if you’re into English idiom, Mr. Journal) walked, eager to add the rest of us to their animated bouquet.

I saw my first rose–head while I was taking a leak.

I had left the tent and gone down by the shoreline to relieve myself when I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye. Because of the bloom I first thought it was Susan Dyers. She wore a thick, woolly Afro that surrounded her head like a lion’s mane, and the shape of the thing struck me as her silhouette. But when I zipped and turned, it wasn’t an Afro. It was a flower blooming out of Jacobs. I recognized him by his clothes and the hunk of his face that hung off one of the petals like a worn–out hat on a peg.

In the center of the blood–red flower was a pulsating sack, and all around it little wormy things squirmed. Directly below the brain was a thin proboscis. It extended toward me like an erect penis. At its tip, just inside the opening, were a number of large thorns.

A sound like a moan came out of that proboscis, and I stumbled back. Jacobs’ body quivered briefly, as if he had been besieged by a sudden chill, and ripping through his flesh and clothes, from neck to foot, was a mass of thorny, wagging vines that shot out to five feet in length.

With an almost invisible motion, they waved from west to east, slashed my clothes, tore my hide, knocked my feet out from beneath me. It was like being hit by a cat–o’–nine–tails.

Dazed, I rolled onto my hands and knees, bear–walked away from it. The vines whipped against my back and butt, cut deep.

Every time I got to my feet, they tripped me. The thorns not only cut, they burned like hot ice picks. I finally twisted away from a net of vines, slammed through one last shoot, and made a break for it.

Without realizing it, I was running back to the tent. My body felt as if I had been lying on a bed of nails and razor blades. My forearm hurt something terrible where I had used it to lash the thorns away from me. I glanced down at it as I ran. It was covered in blood. A strand of vine about two feet in length was coiled around it like a garter snake. A thorn had torn a deep wound in my arm, and the vine was sliding an end into the wound.

Screaming, I held my forearm in front of me like I had just discovered it. The flesh, where the vine had entered, rippled and made a bulge that looked like a junkie’s favorite vein. The pain was nauseating. I snatched at the vine, ripped it free. The thorns turned against me — like fishhooks.

The pain was so much I fell to my knees, but I had the vine out of me. It squirmed in my hand, and I felt a thorn gouge my palm. I threw the vine into the dark. Then I was up and running for the tent again.

The roses must have been at work for quite some time before I saw Jacobs, because when I broke back into camp yelling, I saw Susan, Ralph, Casey and some others, and already their heads were blooming, skulls cracking away like broken model kits.

Jane Calloway was facing a rose–possessed corpse, and the dead body had its hands on her shoulders, and the vines were jetting out of the corpse, weaving around her like a web, tearing, sliding inside her, breaking off. The proboscis poked into her mouth and extended down her throat, forced her head back. The scream she started came out as a gurgle.

I tried to help her, but when I got close, the vines whipped at me and I had to jump back. I looked for something to grab, to hit the damn thing with, but there was nothing. When next I looked at Jane, vines were stabbing out of her eyes and her tongue, now nothing more than lava–thick blood, was dripping out of her mouth onto her breasts, which, like the rest of her body, were riddled with stabbing vines.

I ran away then. There was nothing I could do for Jane. I saw others embraced by corpse hands and tangles of vines, but now my only thought was Mary. Our tent was to the rear of the campsite, and I ran there as fast as I could.

She was lumbering out of our tent when I arrived. The sound of screams had awakened her. When she saw me running she froze. By the time I got to her, two vine–riddled corpses were coming up on the tent from the left side. Grabbing her hand I half–pulled, half–dragged her away from there. I got to one of the vehicles and pushed her inside.

I locked the doors just as Jacobs, Susan, Jane, and others appeared at the windshield, leaning over the rocket–nose hood, the feelers around the brain sacks vibrating like streamers in a high wind. Hands slid greasily down the windshield. Vines flopped and scratched and cracked against it like thin bicycle chains.

I got the vehicle started, stomped the accelerator, and the rose–heads went flying. One of them, Jacobs, bounced over the hood and splattered into a spray of flesh, ichor and petals.

I had never driven the vehicle, so my maneuvering was rusty. But it didn’t matter. There wasn’t exactly a traffic rush to worry about.

After an hour or so, I turned to look at Mary. She was staring at me, her eyes like the twin barrels of a double–barreled shotgun. They seemed to say, “More of your doing,” and in a way she was right. I drove on.

Daybreak we came to the lighthouse. I don’t know how it survived. One of those quirks. Even the glass was unbroken. It looked like a great stone finger shooting us the bird.

The vehicle’s tank was near empty, so I assumed here was as good a place to stop as any. At least there was shelter, something we could fortify. Going on until the vehicle was empty of fuel didn’t make much sense. There wouldn’t be any more fill–ups, and there might not be any more shelter like this.

Mary and I (in our usual silence) unloaded the supplies from the vehicle and put them in the lighthouse. There was enough food, water, chemicals for the chemical toilet, odds and ends, extra clothes, to last us a year. There were also some guns. A Colt .45 revolver, two twelve–gauge shotguns and a .38, and enough shells to fight a small war.

When everything was unloaded, I found some old furniture downstairs and, using tools from the vehicle, tried to barricade the bottom door and the one at the top of the stairs. When I finished, I thought of a line from a story I had once read, a line that always disturbed me. It went something like, “Now we’re shut in for the night.”

Days. Nights. All the same. Shut in with one another, our memories and the fine tattoo.

A few days later I spotted the roses. It was as if they had smelled us out. And maybe they had. From a distance, through the binoculars, they reminded me of old women in bright sun hats.

It took them the rest of the day to reach the lighthouse, and they immediately surrounded it, and when I appeared at the railing they would lift their heads and moan.

And that, Mr. Journal, brings us up to now.

§

I thought I had written myself out, Mr. Journal. Told the only part of my life story I would ever tell, but now I’m back. You can’t keep a good world–destroyer down.

I saw my daughter last night and she’s been dead for years. But I saw her, I did, naked, smiling at me, calling to ride piggyback.

Here’s what happened.

It was cold last night. Must be getting along winter. I had rolled off my pallet onto the cold floor. Maybe that’s what brought me awake. The cold. Or maybe it was just gut instinct.

It had been a particularly wonderful night with the tattoo. The face had been made so clear it seemed to stand out from my back. It had finally become more defined than the mushroom cloud. The needles went in hard and deep, but I’ve had them in me so much now I barely feel the pain. After looking in the mirror at the beauty of the design, I went to bed happy, or as happy as I can get.

During the night the eyes ripped open. The stitches came out and I didn’t know it until I tried to rise from the cold, stone floor and my back puckered against it where the blood had dried.

I pulled myself free and got up. It was dark, but we had a good moonspill that night and I went to the mirror to look. It was bright enough that I could see Rae’s reflection clearly, the color of her face, the color of the cloud. The stitches had fallen away and now the wounds were spread wide, and inside the wounds were eyes. Oh God, Rae’s blue eyes. Her mouth smiled at me and her teeth were very white.

Oh, I hear you, Mr. Journal. I hear what you’re saying. And I thought of that. My first impression was that I was about six bricks shy a load, gone around the old bend. But I know better now. You see, I lit a candle and held it over my shoulder, and with the candle and the moonlight, I could see even more clearly. It was Rae all right, not just a tattoo.

I looked over at my wife on the bunk, her back to me, as always. She had not moved.

I turned back to the reflection. I could hardly see the outline of myself, just Rae’s face smiling out of that cloud.

“Rae,” I whispered, “is that you?”

“Come on, Daddy,” said the mouth in the mirror, “that’s a stupid question. Of course it’s me.”

“But… You’re… you’re…”

“Dead?”

“Yes… Did… did it hurt much?”

She cackled so loudly the mirror shook. I could feel the hairs on my neck rising. I thought for sure Mary would wake up, but she slept on.

“It was instantaneous, Daddy, and even then, it was the greatest pain imaginable. Let me show you how it hurt.”

The candle blew out and I dropped it. I didn’t need it anyway. The mirror grew bright and Rae’s smile went from ear to ear — literally — and the flesh on her bones seemed like crepe paper before a powerful fan, and that fan blew the hair off her head, the skin off her skull and melted those beautiful, blue eyes and those shiny white teeth of hers to a putrescent goo the color and consistency of fresh bird shit. Then there was only the skull, and it heaved in half and flew backward into the dark world of the mirror and there was no reflection now, only the hurtling fragments of a life that once was and was now nothing more than swirling cosmic dust.

I closed my eyes and looked away.

“Daddy?”

I opened them, looked over my shoulder into the mirror. There was Rae again, smiling out of my back.

“Darling,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“So are we,” she said, and there were faces floating past her in the mirror. Teenagers, children, men and women, babies, little embryos swirling around her head like planets around the sun. I closed my eyes again, but I could not keep them closed. When I opened them the multitudes of swirling dead, and those who had never had a chance to live, were gone. Only Rae was there.

“Come close to the mirror, Daddy.”

I backed up to it. I backed until the hot wounds that were Rae’s eyes touched the cold glass and the wounds became hotter and hotter and Rae called out, “Ride me piggy, Daddy,” and then I felt her weight on my back, not the weight of a six–year–old child or a teenage girl, but a great weight, like the world was on my shoulders and bearing down.

Leaping away from the mirror, I went hopping and whooping about the room, same as I used to in the park. Around and around I went, and as I did, I glanced in the mirror. Astride me was Rae, lithe and naked, her red hair fanning around her as I spun. And when I whirled by the mirror again, I saw that she was six years old. Another spin and there was a skeleton with red hair, one hand held high, the jaws open and yelling, “Ride ’em, cowboy.”

“How?” I managed, still bucking and leaping, giving Rae the ride of her life. She bent to my ear and I could feel her warm breath. “You want to know how I’m here, Daddy–dear? I’m here because you created me. Once you lay between Mother’s legs and thrust me into existence, the two of you, with all the love there was in you. This time you thrust me into existence with your guilt and Mother’s hate. Her thrusting needles, your arching back. And now I’ve come back for one last ride, Daddy–o. Ride, you bastard, ride.”

All the while I had been spinning, and now as I glimpsed the mirror I saw wall–to–wall faces, weaving in, weaving out, like smiling stars, and all those smiles opened wide and words came out in chorus, “Where were you when they dropped The Big One?”

Each time I spun and saw the mirror again, it was a new scene. Great flaming winds scorching across the world, babies turning to fleshy Jell–O, heaps of charred bones, brains boiling out of the heads of men and women like backed–up toilets overflowing, The Almighty, Glory Hallelujah, Ours–Is–Bigger–Than–Yours Bomb hurtling forward, the mirror going mushroom white, then clear, and me, spinning, Rae pressed tight against my back, melting like butter on a griddle, evaporating into the eye wounds on my back, and finally me alone, collapsing to the floor beneath the weight of the world.

§

Mary never awoke.

The vines outsmarted me.

A single strand found a crack downstairs somewhere and wound up the steps and slipped beneath the door that led into the tower. Mary’s bunk was not far from the door, and in the night, while I slept and later while I spun in front of the mirror and lay on the floor before it, it made its way to Mary’s bunk, up between her legs, and entered her sex effortlessly.

I suppose I should give the vine credit for doing what I had not been able to do in years, Mr. Journal, and that’s enter Mary. Oh God, that’s a funny one, Mr. Journal. Real funny. Another little scientist joke. Let’s make that a mad scientist joke, what say? Who but a madman would play with the lives of human beings by constantly trying to build the bigger and better boom machine?

So what of Rae, you ask?

I’ll tell you. She is inside me. My back feels the weight. She twists in my guts like a corkscrew. I went to the mirror a moment ago, and the tattoo no longer looks like it did. The eyes have turned to crusty sores and the entire face looks like a scab. It’s as if the bile that made up my soul, the unthinking  nearsightedness, the guilt that I am, has festered from inside and spoiled the picture with pustule bumps, knots and scabs.

To put it in layman’s terms, Mr. Journal, my back is infected. Infected with what I am. A blind, senseless fool.

The wife?

Ah, the wife. God, how I loved that woman. I have not really touched her in years, merely felt those wonderful hands on my back as she jabbed the needles home, but I never stopped loving her. It was not a love that glowed anymore, but it was there, though hers for me was long gone and wasted.

This morning when I got up from the floor, the weight of Rae and the world on my back, I saw the vine coming up from beneath the door and stretching over to her. I yelled her name. She did not move. I ran to her and saw it was too late. Before I could put a hand on her, I saw her flesh ripple and bump up, like a den of mice were nesting under a quilt. The vines were at work. (Out go the old guts, in go the new vines.)

There was nothing I could do for her.

I made a torch out of a chair leg and old quilt, set fire to it, burned the vine from between her legs, watched it retreat, smoking, under the door. Then I got a board, nailed it along the bottom, hoping it would keep others out for at least a little while. I got one of the twelve–gauges and loaded it. It’s on the desk beside me, Mr. Journal, but even I know I’ll never use it. It was just something to do, as Jacobs said when he killed and ate the whale. Something to do.

I can hardly write anymore. My back and shoulders hurt so bad. It’s the weight of Rae and the world.

§

I’ve just come back from the mirror and there is very little left of the tattoo. Some blue and black ink, a touch of red that was Rae’s hair. It looks like an abstract painting now. Collapsed design, running colors. It’s real swollen. I look like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

What am I going to do, Mr. Journal?

Well, as always, I’m glad you asked that. You see, I’ve thought this out.

I could throw Mary’s body over the railing before it blooms. I could do that. Then I could doctor my back. It might even heal, though I doubt it. Rae wouldn’t let that happen, I can tell you now. And I don’t blame her. I’m on her side. I’m just a walking dead man and have been for years.

I could put the shotgun under my chin and work the trigger with my toes, or maybe push it with the very pen I’m using to create you, Mr. Journal. Wouldn’t that be neat? Blow my brains to the ceiling and sprinkle you with my blood.

But as I said, I loaded the gun because it was something to do. I’d never use it on myself or Mary.

You see, I want Mary. I want her to hold Rae and me one last time like she used to in the park. And she can. There’s a way.

I’ve drawn all the curtains and made curtains out of blankets for those spots where there aren’t any. It’ll be sunup soon and I don’t want that kind of light in here. I’m writing this by candlelight and it gives the entire room a warm glow. I wish I had wine. I want the atmosphere to be just right.

Over on Mary’s bunk she’s starting to twitch. Her neck is swollen where the vines have congested and are writhing toward their favorite morsel, the brain. Pretty soon the rose will bloom (I hope she’s one of the bright yellow ones, yellow was her favorite color and she wore it well) and Mary will come for me.

When she does, I’ll stand with my naked back to her. The vines will whip out and cut me before she reaches me, but I can stand it. I’m used to pain. I’ll pretend the thorns are Mary’s needles. I’ll stand that way until she folds her dead arms around me and her body pushes up against the wound she made in my back, the wound that is our daughter Rae. She’ll hold me so the vines and the proboscis can do their work. And while she holds me, I’ll grab her fine hands and push them against my chest, and it will be we three again, standing against the world, and I’ll close my eyes and delight in her soft, soft hands one last time.

“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” was originally published in the Macklay & Associates anthology Nukes. It later appeared in By Bizarre Hands, a collection of Lansdale’s short stories published by Avon Books, and in High Cotton: Selected Short Stories of Joe R. Lansdale, published in 2000 by Golden Gryphon Press.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and over two hundred short works, fiction, essays, reviews, columns and commentary. He has written for Batman The Animated Series, Superman the Animated Series, and others. He received the Edgar Award, Nine Bram Stoker Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and has also been awarded the title of Grandmaster from the Horror Writers Association. He is also the recipient of The Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, The Writers Guild of America, and is Writer in Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife Karen.

Little

Hush, little baby, little kumquat, little bird. Ming–tian is sleeping. She has pruned the bitter melon vines and swept the porch while dancing with a broom. She has chased away the good luck fishes in the pond, where she has lost her shoe. Soon it will freeze over. Now Ming–tian is snoring. She is exhausted from hours of practicing embroidery, of practicing calligraphy, of practicing a love song on the er–hu. Her fingertips have started to bleed. Her hand has been bandaged, yet while she dreams, her feet move as if she were still dancing. She scratches her face, leaving red lines on her cheeks.

§

Hush — Wash — Massage

Mother, Ming–tian is wiggling her toes. Again.

Hush, little kumquat. Hold them still.

Why do you want to bind her feet?

It will make her beautiful.

She is already beautiful.

It will make her marriageable.

Someone wants to marry her?

Only if her foot can be held in the palm of one hand.

But your feet are not —

Hush. Keep massaging her feet.

§

Ming–tian Dreams

Ping–an is an er–hu master, renowned in all of China for his skill with sustaining the highest, sweetest notes without breaking its strings. But his secret dream is to wield the calligraphy brush as expertly as he holds his er–hu bow. A master artist can draw a koi with only one brush stroke. Ping–an requires three. During his travels as an er–hu master, he has collected the thinnest rice paper and ground the finest ink stone. For his perfect brush, he has cut a stalk of bamboo and molded the horn of a water buffalo to hold the brush’s hairs. But throughout all of China, he has found no hairs fine enough for drawing, not from horses, nor rabbits, nor mice, not even the smallest hairs from the ear of an ox.

§

Love Shapes

Ping–an has a daughter who is in love with the er–hu. She is not just in love with the ripping tinny sound. His daughter is in love with the shape of the er–hu; how the bow is forever connected and grounded by the strings; how the top of the neck, crossed by two tuning knobs, feels like an unsaid question; how its two silk strings, carefully twisted, are pulled straight yet give in to the pressure of the bow or plucking of a finger; how the box at the base, covered in python skin, is so perfectly balanced, with eight angles, eight sides stretching taut the polished scales. It is a shape only man can make. It is the shape of harmony.

§

Wash

Mother slaughters a chicken for the bath. Her arms are awash in its blood. White feathers stick to her red arms.

§

Dedication

This only daughter of Ping–an is so in love with the er–hu that she would only marry someone who is completely dedicated to the cultivation of the er–hu.

Ping–an has an apprentice named Dong–sing who is desperately in love with his master’s daughter, who only notices him when he plays the er–hu. So he practices. He plays so much he forgets to eat. His skin stretches across his cheeks. His stomach collapses, then puffs out. His mustache grows so long that the ends sweep the floor like a wind–blown bitter melon vine when he sits to practice the er–hu. Sometimes when he practices, his bow slips slightly, and a high–pitched wail is coaxed from the fine fibers of his own hair when he sways just the right way. He wants his beloved to look at him when he plays, but she listens with her eyes and mouth closed.

§

Massage

Mother concocts a salve, mixing it over the fire. The herbs are so pungent she covers her face with a handkerchief. She covers her daughter’s face, too. Before the salve can cool, she begins to massage her daughter’s soon–to–be golden lotus feet.

§

Playing Thread

The daughter of an er–hu master is not allowed to play the er–hu. Her father believes she needs to work on her dowry, so she sews. She closes her eyes and pictures the thread as an er–hu string. With each stitch the sound becomes higher, sighing a wail. She plucks a muted vibration, plucks against her heartbeat, until it shreds.

§

Tuning

Dong–sing practices until he is ready for his courtship concert at noon. His beloved, attired in red bridal dress, sits in the front row next to her father, robed in white, his arms crossed. Wearing a blue tasseled hat and matching silk suit, Dong–sing is now a master of the er–hu, which sighs like a lover every time he sweeps his bow across its two strings. His mustache has grown so long it slithers behind him as he walks. His er–hu has grown a face in its octagonal base, and when he tilts it at a certain angle, he sees his beloved’s sleepy smile in the grain of the wood in back. He sees among the snake scales the shine of her onyx eyes. He tunes the strings too tautly, and yet he bows, and yet he plucks, and they remain whole until —

§

Another’s Dream Is Someone’s Reality

Someone winds and winds and winds pink satin ribbons up her legs. Too tight, and the blood will no longer flow to her toes, bruised and bandaged. Too loose, she might trip and fall on stage. She unwraps and rewinds.

§

The Number before Death

Mother plans meticulously. She has cut long cloths, more than twice her height. She has soaked them in a bucket of herbs and warm blood. She has studied the shape of each toe on each foot, clipping each toe nail, measuring the concave arches, guessing how far they will bend. She knows her own hands are too weak, so she has hefted the weight of three hammers. She hopes to only use one. She will need to strike swiftly to break the correct bones.

§

Er–Hearing

The apprentice holds his er–hu like a mother holding her dying child. His hat has collapsed over one eye, and his mustache, wet with sweat and tears, brushes the scales of his er–hu. As his apprentice weeps, Ping–an hears another sound, the voice of his daughter. Play so I can dance, she says. Play yourself. She runs to the stage and straightens her lover’s hat, trims and twists her lover’s hair, plucks at her lover’s mustache. The hairs vibrate, wailing louder as Dong–sing straightens, applies his bow. As his apprentice begins swaying, Ping–an hears another sound, the brushing of human hair, the finest in all of China, drawing salty koi across the stage floor.

§

Sway

Ming–tian is dancing like a flame while Dong–sing plays his hairs vibrating perfect fifths, resonating pentatonics. His fingers fly, his bow sighs, and melody wails in longing overtones. She twirls in excitement. Her beloved plays the perfect accompaniment. She poses and twirls and leaps and poses. Her slippers are a red that matches her dress. She steps on the broken er–hu string and hears a crack. She trips on her lover’s mustache. She shakes the stage.

§

Cut

The stage has cracks, Ping–an observes. He is crawling through the dirt. He sees Dong–sing’s hair falling through. He tastes the metal of his knife. He grabs a tuft and fingers the fine, wet hair. The stage creaks, almost groans. He pulls. He takes.

§

Crack

Mother breaks her daughter’s feet. First the toes, then the arches. Ming–tian is almost eight, too old, and her bones are too formed.

The first crack nearly pierces Mother’s ear, yet, strangely, Ming–tian does not move, does not moan. The second crack stings Mother’s eyes, yet Ming–tian does not speak, does not snore, does not even sigh. As she winds and winds the cloth, Mother finds she cannot open her eyes, glued shut by unshed tears.

§

Dream Coda

His beloved Ming–tian limps to the audience, first row. Her bow–shaped lips quiver, and she is listening, open–mouthed like a bright koi. Beside her sits his master, clothes stained with dirt, eyes and mouth closed, arms crossed against his chest. What is he hiding? Dong–sing cares not. He is playing from his bones, and his fingers are slippery with blood and sweat. He watches the color rise in the cheeks of his beloved. Her dress the color of white, Ming–tian kneels and a pool of red blossoms around her. She is smiling. Her father snores. She is sighing: hush.

§

Bound

The bandages were wound in a figure–eight, over the toes, under the foot, around the heel, over the instep. Over Under Around Over — Over Under Around Over — Over Under Around Over… The bandages, dripping red, hold fast her feet. They cannot contain the stench of salve or the scent of rotted bitter melon vines. They cannot contain the hurt of cracking. Or the screaming like an er–hu bowed with a toothy saw.

§

Awakening?

After the concert, Dong–sing runs to his beloved, her eyes shining. They do not touch. They do not speak. He stares not at her eyes but her lips, her bow–shaped lips. He dives. They taste like soy sauce, rust and bitter melon.

§

Brush

Ping–an bundles the hair, still damp, into the well–worn horn of a water buffalo that fits into the hollow of a perfect bamboo stalk. At last. Grinding the ink against the stone, his hand is trembling, rustling the rice paper. With one single stroke, he draws a koi, lopsided, mouth closed. Perhaps the koi is humming. He draws another. With just one stroke.

§

Stirring of Golden Lotus

Ming–tian bites her lip. Mother wipes the sweat off her daughter’s brow. Mother hums a lullaby that no er–hu could ever play.

§

Hush

There is no screaming, no stringing, no wailing, no cracking of bone. Shhhh, my kumquat. There is only silence, and wrapped within the hush, Ming–tian is dancing, red ribbons laced around her legs, balancing perfectly on her beautiful, broken feet.

Emily Jiang is the author of Summoning the Phoenix, a collection of poetry and prose about modern–day child musicians playing traditional Chinese musical instruments. Emily holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and a BA in English from Rice University. She is also a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, the Chautauqua Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. In other words, she is an over–educated writer. Her short fiction has won several awards, including Top Prose Prize in The Binnacle’s Ultra Short Competition, First Place in the Tom Howard/John Reid Short Story Contest. Her poetry has been published in Stone Telling, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, TheCascadia Subduction Zone, and The Moment of Change anthology of feminist speculative poetry. She wrestles with words everyday. Sometimes she wins. Other times, it’s a draw.

Once, among the indigo mountains of Germany, there was a kingdom of blue-eyed men and women whose blood was tinged blue with cold. The citizens were skilled in clockwork, escapements, and piano manufacture, and the clocks and pianos of that country were famous throughout the world. Their children pulled on rabbit-fur gloves before they sat down to practice their etudes, for it was so cold the notes rang and clanged in the air. It was coldest of all in the town on the highest mountain, where there lived a girl called Ilse, who was neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor wicked. Yet she was not quite undistinguished, because she was in love.

One afternoon, when the air was glittering with the sounds of innumerable pianos, a stranger as stout as a barrel and swathed to his nosetip walked through the town, singing. Where he walked the pianos fell silent, and wheat-haired boys and girls cracked shutters into the bitter cold to peep at him. And what he sang was this:

Ice for sale, eyes for sale,
If your complexion be dark or pale
If your old eyes be sharp or frail,
Come buy, come buy, bright ice for sale!

Only his listeners could not tell whether he was selling ice or eyes, because he spoke in an odd accent and through a thick scarf.

He sang until he reached the square with its frozen marble fountain. The town had installed a clock face and a set of chimes in the ice, and now they were striking noon.

“Ice?” he said pleasantly to the crowd that had gathered. He unwound a few feet of his woolen cloak and took out a box. The hasp gave his mittens trouble, but finally it clicked open, and he raised the lid and held out the box for all to see. They craned their necks forward, and their startled breaths smoked the air.

The box was crammed with eyes.

There were blue eyes and green eyes and brown eyes, eyes red as lilies, golden as pollen; eyes like pickaxes and eyes like diamonds. Each eye had been carved and painted with enormous care, and the spaces between them were jammed with silk.

The stranger smiled at their astonishment. He unrolled a little more of his cloak and took out another box, and another, and then it was clear that he was really quite slender. He tugged his muffler past his mouth, revealing sunned skin and neat thin lips.

“The finest eyes,” he said to the crowd. “Plucked from the lands along the Indian Ocean, where the peacock wears hundreds in his tail. Picked from the wine countries, where they grow as crisp as grapes. Young and good for years of seeing! Old but ground to perfect clarity, according to calculations by the wisest mathematicians in Alexandria!” His teeth flashed gold and silver as he talked.

He ran his fingers through the eyes, holding this one to the light, or that. “Is this not pretty?” he said. “Is this not splendid? Try, my good grandmother, try.”

That old woman peered through eyes white with snow-glare at the gems in his hands. “I can’t see them clearly,” she admitted.

“Well, then!”

“Lucia,” she said, touching her daughter’s hand. “Find me a pair like I used to have.”

“How much?” Lucia said.

“For you, the first, a pittance. An afterthought. Her old eyes and a gold ring.”

“Done,” the old woman said. Lucia, frowning, fingered two eyes as blue as shadows on snow.

The stranger extracted three slim silver knives with ivory handles from the lining of his cloak. With infinite care and exactitude, barely breathing, he slid the first knife beneath the old woman’s eyelid, ran the second around the ball, and with the third cut the crimson embroidery that tied it in place. Twice he did this. Then, in one motion, he slid her old eyes out of their hollows and slipped in the new. Her old blind eyes froze at once in his hands, ringing when he flicked them with a fingernail. He dropped them into his pockets and tilted her chin toward him.

“I can count your teeth,” the old woman said with wonder. “Your nose is thin. Your scarf is striped red and yellow.”

“A wonder,” someone said.

“A marvel of marvels.”

“A magician.”

“A miracle.”

She pulled off her mitten and gave him the ring from her left hand. “He’s been dead twenty years,” she said to Lucia, who did not look happy. “I can see again. Clear as water. What a wonder.”

Then, of course, the stranger had to replace the shortsighted schoolteacher’s eyes, after which the old fellow cheerfully snapped his spectacles in two; the neglectful eyes of the town council; six clockmakers’ strained eyes; crossed eyes; eyes bleared with snow light and sunlight; eyes that saw too clearly, or too deeply, or too much; eyes that wandered; eyes that were the wrong color.

When the sun was low and scarlet in the sky, the stranger announced that he would work no longer that day, for want of illumination. Half the town immediately offered him a bed and a roaring fire. But he passed that night and many more at the inn, where the fire was lower, colder, and less hospitable, and where, it was said unkindly, one’s sleeping breath would freeze and fall like snow on the quilts. He ate cold soup and sliced meats in the farthest corner, answered all questions with a smile, and went to bed early.

After twelve days he bundled his boxes about him and left the town, his pockets sunken and swinging with gold. The townspeople watched as he goat-stepped down the steep trail until even their sharp new eyes could no longer distinguish him from the ice-bearded stones and the pines and the snow.

These new eyes, they found, were better than the old. The makers of escapements and wind-up toys found that they could do far more delicate work than before, and out of their workshops came pocket watches and pianos carved out of almond shells, marching soldiers made from bluebottles, wooden birds that flew and sang, mechanical chessboards that also played tippen, and other such wonders; and the fame of that town went out throughout the whole world.

Summer heard, in her house on the other side of the world, and came to see.

The first notice they had of her approach was a message in a blackbird’s beak, then a couple red buds on the edges of twigs, and then she was there. Out of respect she had put on a few extra flowers this year. It was still cold–summer high in the mountains is like that–but the air was softer, the light gentler.

No one saw her courteous posies, however. A little before she arrived, their eyes had begun to blur, then blear, then melt. They saw each other crying and felt their own tears running down their faces, and for no reason at all except summer. Then they understood, and wept in earnest, but it was too late.

By summer’s end everyone had cried out the new eyes. The workshops fell still and silent, and tools gathered tarnish on their benches. The hundreds of clocks around the town stopped, since no one could find their keys and keyholes to wind them up again. Only the pianos still rang out their frozen notes now and again, but the melodies were all in minor keys. The town was full of a cold, quiet grief.

Winter was coming, and they would have starved without Ilse, who hadn’t sold her eyes. Her sweetheart had written atrocious poems to them, and although they were the same plain blue as anyone else’s, she couldn’t bear to part with them even for new eyes the colors of violets, blackberries, and marigolds. So she helped the town tend and bring in its meager harvests of beets and cabbage, and on Wednesdays she filled a sack with clocks and toys and went down the mountain to sell them at market, until there were none left. During the day her head swam with the pianos’ lugubrious complaints, and at night she ached in every bone.

“Mother,” she said, as they ate their bare breakfast together, “shouldn’t someone go looking for the surgeon?”

“No one will find him.”

“What will you do if you never find your eyes?”

“We’ll manage. We have you to see for us.”

“I’m going to look for him,” she said.

“Absolutely not.”

So Ilse packed up her summer clothes, a loaf of bread, two onions, and the fourteen silver coins her mother kept in a jar on the shelf, and the next day she set off down the mountain.

In all her sixteen years, she had never strayed beyond the market in the shadow of the mountain, where the town’s clocks and pianos were sold. But now she passed town after town, few of which she knew, and bridges, and streams, and meadows stained with the dregs of summer, and now trees that did not stand as straight as soldiers but spread their shoulders broad and wide. She climbed up one of these as night fell, and tucked her head against her knees, and slept.

A soft noise, like paper or feathers, woke her in the middle of the night. Ilse opened her eyes in fear, expecting robbers and thieves, but saw nothing. Still she was full of dread. She thought of the silver she had stolen, and her sightless mother in a silent house, and her sweetheart, lonely and wondering. She thought of the long road ahead of her, with likely failure at its end, and shivered. For where could she begin to look?

“You are thinking too loud,” someone said close to her ear. She nearly fell out of the tree. Next to her, an old crow shifted from foot to foot, cleared its throat, and spat.

“You can talk?”

“Only when people’s thoughts are so noisy I can’t sleep.” It sighed. “What would it take to quiet down your brain?”

“I am looking for my townsmen’s eyes.”

“Eyes!” The crow whistled. “A treat, a delectable treat. I should follow you.”

Ilse snatched sideways, swiping a bit of dark down between her fingers. The crow tumbled out of the tree with a screech.

“You’ll do no such thing,” she said.

“Peace, peace.” A wing brushed her brow. “You’ll find what you’re looking for. You’ll find your sight, and theirs. And you’ll not like what you see when you see the world truly, too-quick girl with the odor of onions.”

He flapped his way to a higher branch; she could hear him combing out his rumpled feathers. “I don’t take kindly to being grabbed at, onion girl.”

“Just let me find what I’m looking for,” she said, and shut her eyes. Afterwards, but for the bit of down stuck to her clothes, she could not say whether she had dreamt it all.

§

On the third day, as she trudged down the road that went nowhere she knew, she met a flock of spotted goats with yellow bells about their necks, and then their shepherd, who was chewing a stalk of grass. He greeted her, and she asked with no great hope whether he’d heard of a peddler of eyes.

“Yes, miss,” he said. “Walk a little farther, until you reach a village with sunflowers around it, and go down the street to the last house. My daughter is home, and she knows much more about your magician than I do.”

Ilse thanked him and went on. The village ringed by sunflowers was smaller and muddier than her own, and the road ended at the smallest and muddiest house. The cat on the roof had only half his coat, as he had been a fierce warrior in his day, but he opened one eye and yawned at her. A young woman opened the door. Asked about the peddler, she smiled and winked her eyes one after the other. One of them was a shade greener than the other.

“I lost this one falling out of a window. My father and I waited four years before the good man came back. We had nothing to pay him with, at least nothing worth it, and I would have gladly taken a grandmother’s cataract. But he said I was a lovely girl and picked out a greener eye than my first for me. A sweet soul.”

“He left my village blind.”

“You must be mistaken. He wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“He has three silver knives with ivory hafts, with ivy engraved in the ivory. His skin is dark and his nose is sharp.”

“Well,” the goatherd’s daughter said. “Well. He does look like that. And he does have three knives. But I really don’t think—”

“How can I find him?”

“Now, that’s tricky. That will take a little explanation. But you’re in no rush, are you? He doesn’t travel quickly, and you don’t look like you’ve eaten yet today.” She hewed a generous piece of brown bread for Ilse and poured out a bowl of cream for her, as well as a bowl of milk for the cat.

“I still think you’re wrong somewhere. Surely he wouldn’t. So kind.”

Ilse ate the bread and drank the cream so fast she left a crumb on her cheek and a pale spatter on her chin.

“Now,” the goatherd’s daughter said presently, “you’ll be going to the city. If you unraveled today down the road, you’d find the city at the end of next week. There are three towers at the corners of the city, with three broad streets between them, and where the streets meet is a brick square. Ask in the square where your magician might be. Someone there will know more.

“But you’re not taking the road in those clothes, are you?”

Ilse was suddenly aware of how heavy and hot her woolen summer smock and rabbit-fur cloak were, and how strongly they reeked of onions.

“Let me find you something lighter. You can leave those here, for when you return.”

So Ilse exchanged her fur and wool for an armful of patched but comfortable linen, put a piece of bread and a slice of cheese in her pocket, and continued on her way. Now and then she passed a farm cart creaking on its way. Now and then, with a nod from the driver, she climbed into one of those cart and rested. She came upon a few crows pecking in the dust, but though she greeted them politely, they never answered.

The longer she traveled, the closer together grew the villages and fields. She was tired of the road and the yellow dust that lay in a film on her mouth, and she thought many times of her soft bed at home, and the color of her sweetheart’s hair, and the air as pure as snow. Sometimes she considered turning around, but she never did. After wearing out her shoes by the thickness of seven days, she saw, black against the evening, three towers as formidable as teeth, and that was the city.

A soldier in fine scarlet-and-cream stood to attention at the gate, which was barred. He had a silver spear in his hand and silver mail beneath his tabard.

“It’s past sunset,” he said, frowning at her through his helmet. “No one enters or exits the city at night. Go home.”

She said, “My home is in the mountains, but I’ve come looking for a magician, a doctor, who can take the eyes out of your head and put them in again. He took all the eyes out of our town.”

“I’ve heard of such a doctor,” said the soldier. “He mended my fourth cousin’s weak eyes, years ago. But you can’t mean him. He wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“Perhaps it was unintended.”

“You’d do well to ask in the square tomorrow. Tomorrow, mind you. I cannot let you through.” He held his spear a little straighter. “Unless you can show me something as bright as sunlight. That might fool me for a little while.”

“I only have a little silver,” she said, patting her pockets. But they were empty.

“Moonlight will do.”

“No, I have nothing. I left my silver in my smock, and I left my smock at a goatherd’s cottage, and that’s a week’s walking.”

The soldier huffed into his moustache. “What a foolish girl you are.” He took a key from his belt and opened a low door in the gate, just tall enough for her to slip through. “I have a little one your age, just as silly as you. You’d feed yourself to wolves if I kept you outside. Hurry up, won’t you. And stay out of trouble.”

“Thank you,” Ilse said, and he shut and locked the door behind her.

Here and there the flame in a lamppost flickered and swayed. There were many more streets than she had expected, running every which way. Uncertain of what to do, she went back and forth, past dark windows and bolted doors; open doors with laughter, hectic music, and light spilling out of them; past rubbish in the gutters and pools of water shining in the dark. Shadows slid past her, silent and purposeful. She felt unseen eyes following her.

At last, lost and dispirited, she peered into a shop window and saw a vitrine lined with pocket watches and the pale faces of tall clock cases in the dimness beyond. Some of them looked familiar. She pressed her nose to the gold-lettered glass, wondering if she knew the hands that had made them. She wanted very much to touch them, but the door was locked.

There was nowhere else she could go. She sat down in the doorway and put her head in her hands and, unwillingly, fell asleep.

If strange hands rifled her pockets while she slept, they found nothing, and she did not know. When she woke, it was morning. An old man with a broom was standing over her, displeased.

“Well, get along now,” he said. “Go on.” He held the shop door open and swept a little dirt over her, then tried to sweep her off the step.

“Please, which way to the square?”

“Which way to the square?” The shopkeeper stared. “Are you mad?”

“I came into the city yesterday,” she said.

“With no place to stay? You are mad.”

“Won’t you tell me?”

“Never let it be said I was uncharitable toward the insane,” the shopkeeper said. He disappeared into the shop–a bell jangled inside–and just as she decided to leave, reappeared with a small stale cake.

“There you go,” he said. “Down the lane, a left, a right, a right, a left, a right, two more lefts, and you’re there.” And he went back into the shop.

The square was broader than she expected, and busier, lively with stalls and carts and striped awnings, the glitter of gold and silver on tables, the odors of fruit and fish and spices, the squabble of bargainers and women shouting apples.

Weaving her way through the tables and crowds, dazzled and bewildered, she stopped beside a table set with magnificent glass apparatuses: telescopes, periscopes, beakers, loupes, spiral condensers, burning glasses, spectacles. Behind a towering stack of old books sat the glassblower, his nose in a book, a mole at the tip of his nose. She asked whether he knew the magician.

“Of course! Of course!” he snorted.

“Where can I find him?”

“Why, he’s marrying our Queen next month! Only,” he said, and winked, “no one knows that it’s him, our peripatetic physician, our humble expeller-of-drusen, ablator-of-sties. Word is she’s betrothed to a Solomonic magician from far away, the Indies, the Sahara, what have you. But she’s had milk eyes from the day she was born, our poor Majesty, and only one fellow could have fixed those. The usual reward, of course, would have been half the kingdom, or ennoblement and emolument. But he’s a handsome one, our doctor. And ambitious. Why are you looking for him? Did he steal your heart, too?”

She told him.

“Ha! What a mistake to make. It’ll be easy to find him. He’s caged in the royal palace; you can’t miss it. Finest house in the city, and no one can have finer, for fear of beheading. Tallest house in the city, too, by law. She had all the weathervanes sawn off the churches, and would have chopped down the towers, too, except they persuaded her to build her house a little taller. You can see it from here.”

It was indeed the finest house in the city, ringed by green gardens and ponds full of tame swans. Guards bright with old-fashioned weapons marched around its perimeter.

She crumbled a bit of her cake for the swans as she pondered what to do. Then she looked at the wet black legs of the swans.

It was not easy to tear one of her skirts to strips; she had to put her teeth to it. Every four inches she tied a loop, and when she had finished she spread it loosely and broke the rest of the cake over it. As the swans stabbed up the crumbs, she eased the knots shut around their scaly legs. Then she tugged. One of the swans hissed and bit her finger, but the rest, startled, took off in a white cloud. Clinging to their feet for dear life, she rose higher and higher in the air.

Once she was dizzyingly high above the city, she untied the swans one by one, until she held a single blustering cob by the feet. They sank together through the air, landing painfully on the tiles of the palace roof; and then she let him go, as well, and looked about her.

In one corner was a hunchbacked tower, patchy with lichen. To her left and right the castle walls plunged below the eaves. Ilse scrabbled across the slate tiles, kicking one loose–it skittered down the sloping roof and vanished over the edge–and losing a shoe. When she came to the open window she hauled herself up and into a rich bedroom.

A goat-slender man, studying himself in his mirror, whirled around at the noise. She thought she recognized the pointed nose and chin, the glittering eyes.

“Who are you?”

The room was hung with tapestries; the bed was spread with silks and velvets; even the magician’s coat glittered thickly with jewels. She was suddenly, painfully aware of the patches on her clothes. But she thought of her sweetheart and mother, and she stood up straight and addressed him.

“Now!” the magician said, after she had finished her story. “I never meant to do that! I cut ice eyes for you because I thought they’d never melt.”

“Will you give them their eyes back?”

“Impossible. Others needed them.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to marry the Queen in a month,” he said. “It’s about time I settled down. She’s a lovely woman. Proud, though. She won’t permit me to work as a petty physician. Must marry a man of leisure, you know. I can’t even make you new eyes of rock crystal and glass. Who would restore them?”

“So you are leaving my town blind,” Ilse said. “So you have taken away their eyes, their wedding rings, and their livelihoods, and you’ll never return them. You are going to marry a Queen and live, as they say, happily ever after. What a marvelous magician you are!”

He hesitated. “That’s putting it rather badly. I could teach you, I suppose. If you are intelligent enough. If you are nimble enough. It might take five years, or ten, depending on how quickly you learn.” He glanced doubtfully at her clothes. “But afterward you could restore sight wherever you wished.”

“Yes,” Ilse said.

“But we must first ask the Queen.”

They found the Queen reading Schiller with her feet propped on a leather ottoman, now and then weeping a decorous tear. She was not a cruel woman. She listened to Ilse’s story and sighed, and afterwards gently reproached her betrothed. But their request displeased her.

“Am I to give you up, my love, for ten years so you can train the girl?”

“Hardly–”

“You may have his instruction,” she said to Ilse, “for one year. I will postpone the wedding for that long, because it is unseemly for a King to teach surgery. But after one year we shall marry, and you will go home.”

Grateful and dismayed, she kissed the Queen’s white hand.

And so for a year she studied under the magician, by sunlight, moonlight, and candlelight, paging through abstruse medical texts and reproducing in wet, squiggling lines on blurry paper the elegant anatomical diagrams her teacher marked with a finger. Often she went without sleep and food in her haste to learn.

The magician taught her the structure and composition of the eye, its fine veining, innervation, and musculature; the operation of light and color; sixteen theories of sight from philosopher-doctors in various kingdoms; and common diseases and their remedies. All of this, he said, he had gathered from years of wandering in strange lands among strange people. And when she was exhausted with studying, he told her stories from his travels.

In the flicker of shadows on the wall, her eyes unfocused from much reading, she thought she could see the people he described: the woman who married a tiger, the parrots who kept state secrets, the ship that flew in the air. She fell asleep in her chair with his words still running in her ears, and he dropped a coat over her before he retired, and so they passed many nights.

By the end of the year she could switch the eyes of rabbits, cats, and sparrows without harming them, without even a drop of blood falling on the magician’s knives.

“All that I can teach, you know,” he told her one night. “Take my knives, and take this box. I have had time to fashion new eyes for you and yours. Glass and rock crystal, this time.”

She fell on her knees and thanked him.

“But there is one more thing. I know no one as quick and capable as you, or as kind. If you will have me, I will marry you instead of the Queen.”

“That is kind of you, but I have a sweetheart at home,” Ilse said.

“He won’t have waited for you.”

“He has. I am certain.”

“Very well,” he said, annoyed. “Go home to him, then.” He was not gracious enough to invite her to the wedding, or even to replace her tattered clothes. So with the box under her arm, and the three silver knives hung at her side, Ilse left the palace.

The soldier at the gate barred her path with his spear. He had a hard face and a rough red beard.

“What are you carrying, girl?”

“Eyes that the Queen’s magician gave me.”

“Gave you? You in those rags? Unlikely. An export fee of three gold crowns.” He laughed at her. “Of course you can’t pay. But you’ve a pretty face, and I’ll overlook this for a kiss.”

She turned to go.

“Or,” he said thoughtfully, “I could have you arrested and imprisoned. For theft, probably.”

And she saw that he meant it. So she kissed him on his bristly mouth, a sick twist in her stomach, feeling his hands slide up and down her sides, and then he laughed and waved her through.

The road seemed twice as long now. The days grew colder as she went, for it was autumn again, and her clothes were thin, and the road was rising toward the mountains. The crows in the trees croaked and chuckled as she passed.

After many days of weary walking, she saw with great relief the goatherd’s village. The sunflowers were brown and rattled in the wind, but the cat still sat on the goatherd’s roof, and it stretched and purred at her.

She rapped on the door. The goatherd’s daughter opened it slightly. Faint lines were sketched into her forehead. Somewhere in the cottage, a child began to wail.

“What do you want?”

“I left a wool smock and a fur cloak with you. Last year, it was. And there were fourteen pieces of silver in the pocket.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You fed me and you gave me these clothes to wear. Don’t you recognize them? Keep the clothes, if you like, but please give me my mother’s silver.”

“We feed paupers all the time. Of course I can’t remember each one. But there’s no food in the house today. There’s no food in all the village.” She shut the door.

Ilse had no choice but to continue. The higher she climbed, the colder it was, and she shivered when she lay down to sleep on the lichen-studded stones. But she kept herself warm remembering her sweetheart’s smile and her mother waiting for her in darkness.

At last she heard the faint sound of pianos. Tired though she was, she quickened her pace. Soon she saw woodsmoke in the sky, then chimney pots, then houses.

It was as she remembered it. Only now the notes that rang in the cold air were cheerful, and the people walked as though they could see. Ilse went into her own house and found her mother slicing vegetables.

“Ilse?” the woman said uncertainly, lifting her face. Ilse caught it in both hands and kissed it.

“Mother, you’ll never guess where I’ve been.”

“Out into the world. But what are you wearing? Go put on something warm.”

“Not yet. Hold still.” And with practiced gentleness, Ilse set two blue eyes in her mother’s face.

§

She visited her sweetheart’s, then. She ran to him and embraced him and he said, “Ilse?”

“Yes, it’s me, I’m home.”

“Oh, Ilse–I’m happy you’ve come back.” He paused. “This is Elsa–the goldsmith’s daughter–I married her in the spring.”

“How wonderful.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I have something for both of you.”

§

After a fortnight of careful work, all the town could see again. It turned out that they had fared well enough without their eyes. Ilse was well wished, well fed, blessed, and thanked, and made to tell her story again and again, until the smallest child could recite it. It was pleasant being home. She had missed the sound of ice-tuned pianos and the sweet mountain wind.

When Elsa the goldsmith’s daughter gave birth, all agreed that the blue-eyed girl would be a matchless beauty and a legend in the kingdom. Her father wrote achingly terrible sonnets to those eyes.

Sometimes Ilse stood at the edge of town and looked over the world that fell away from her, farther than she could see. Sometimes she wondered how the magician and his Queen fared. More often, though, she thought of the strange lands he had told her about, where he had learned his strange arts: jewel-colored jungles, thick with flowers and snakes; or white sands running into a green sea; or dark pine forests alive with deer and wolves and red foxes. She would sit at the mountain’s edge until her face was numb with cold, looking, wondering.

§

One day, no one could find her.

E. Lily Yu was the recipient of the 2012 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Boston Review, and Eclipse Online, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.