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The following excerpt from I’m From Nowhere by Lindsay Lerman is reprinted here with permission from Clash Books.

I’m From Nowhere

It’s the afternoon now and a friend from high school, Rebecca, is picking her up. Rebecca has come into town for the funeral. She’s going to offer practical help; this is what Rebecca does. 

She picks Claire up, and together they drive to the store to get ingredients for meals they’ll make and freeze, to keep Claire going. The sort of thing one does for friends with newborn babies. It’s almost old-world now. Rebecca lives in the Bay Area, and like someone who’s lived in New York, she won’t let you forget this fact. It’s now a defining feature of her adult personality. The One Who Made it in a Big, Overpriced City and Now Has the Authority to Scoff at the Place She Came From.

On the way to the store, looking out the window, Rebecca says, “This place is fucking depressing.”

“I guess,” Claire responds, not turning to look at Rebecca as she speaks.

“It’s just a string of meth labs. Was it always like this?” Rebecca asks half-rhetorically. She says, “All these trailer parks and shithole houses” as though this were her first time visiting.

“I think the poor areas are pretty concentrated,” Claire says with a note of defensiveness. “There are just as many rich people here as poor people. What should the city do? Move the poor people out? Evict them and raze their shitty houses? Find a way to just give them all jobs? Tell capitalism to move back in?”

The mostly comfortable silence of friends bickering like siblings sets in. Rain starts to fall slowly. They pass a group of boys on their skateboards. A little pack of wolves edging into the street from the sidewalk, warning that the street is sometimes their territory too.

Rebecca’s eyes linger on the boys as she turns to Claire and asks, “Were you in high school when you lost your virginity? Is that something an old friend should know?” with a little laugh. “When was it?”

“You mean like when was the exact moment?” Claire asks, with her own little laugh. The boys are in the rearview mirror now, shouting happily at each other, pushing their hair out of their eyes. They look so small.

“Yes,” Rebecca says. “The moment when you lost your virginity. Had sex. C’mon.”

Feeling strangely puzzled by the question, Claire responds, “But it wasn’t just one moment. It was, well, continuous. For most of high school and the beginning of college.”

“You know what I mean, Claire. When did you first have sex?”

“Do you mean like penis-in-vagina sex? Oral sex? The first time I made out with a guy and let him take off my bra?”

“Jesus, you know exactly what I mean. I can tell you I was seventeen and it was with David and it was not great.”

Claire can feel some of her mental acuity returning, as though she were slowly waking up. Dinner with Luke last night sobered her up. 

But she’s not sure she can answer Rebecca. Not clearly. Because by the time she had Sex sex, it wasn’t very significant. Or maybe it was. But it was just another sexual thing to happen in a long, steady process of becoming sexual. Figuring out how to be a sexual being. The first moment of Sex sex was not a big deal compared to the first kiss, the first time a guy went down on her. Those were virginity-losing moments. There were many of them. She’s surprised by her clarity on the matter. It takes years of shitty Sex sex to finally have good sex. Holding hands and making out on a park bench was better than all those first times combined.

Watching Claire think, Rebecca asks, “Okay, fine, but who did you lose your virginity to?”

“Three or four different guys, I guess.”

Quickly seizing the opportunity to make Claire laugh, Rebecca says, “Oooh alright! All at once? Standard college-orientation orgy?”

Laughing at herself, god it felt good; she had forgotten that she had a sense of humor, at how she’d opened this door, Claire says, “Actually that sounds like no fun at all. But no, not an orgy. Three or four different guys who introduced me to sex, I guess.”

“So no one forced himself on you and just, like, made it happen?”

“No.” But.

***

What had happened at the dawn of her sexuality? In truth, she knows, it wasn’t as smooth or linear or painless as she makes it sound. 

She had mostly lost her virginity—all kinds of physical virginity and her conceptual virginity—to one person. The slightly older guy. Impossibly sexy. A wannabe poet. Oh god, am I still as pathetic, as clueless now as I was then? 

They had met through mutual friends. He was the townie who was too beautiful to be called a townie. His commitment to the work of appearing to be the half-stoned vagabond for beauty, day in and day out, was astonishing. Women more or less lined up to fuck him. Claire was terrified of him.

As a high-schooler, Claire was not one of the pretty girls, not really even one of the popular girls, so she had no idea what to do with herself when He seemed to notice her, to take her in with a long gaze and offer a devilish half-smile. She was not accustomed to such attention. One tiny flicker of attraction, of acknowledgement, from him and she was struck dumb. She would be sunk by him, she knew it. She couldn’t have cared less.

When she looks at photos of herself from high school, she understands why he noticed her. She was not cute or adorable in the way of the pretty and popular girls, but you could see that she would eventually—maybe even shortly—be beautiful. Not cute, not adorable, but beautiful, in time. A beautiful woman. 

She wonders sometimes how different her life might be if she hadn’t skipped cute or adorable and gone awkwardly into beautiful after some time being neither here nor there. Would I have stayed in this town forever? Settled down with one of the stupid boys I hated myself for finding attractive in high school?

He. She still doesn’t like to say his name, doesn’t want to particularize him. Thank god she has no photos of him, that he exists nowhere on social media. Let him remain universal—the cloud of walking sex and barely instantiated splendor—that he was to her back then. 

She watched him. Studied him. Drank in his posture, his gestures, his turns of phrase every time she saw him—at parties, at the coffee shop, wandering aimlessly downtown. 

She had never seen someone so confident spending so much time in public alone. He sat at the café with a book and a pen and some loose pieces of paper—just before the days of laptop ubiquity—composing his little lines, the center of this tiny world, an ocean in lithe, dark-eyed human form. 

He sat down across from her at the coffee shop one day, one hot afternoon at the end of her junior year, as she waited for her drink and her friend waited for the bathroom. 

“Hey,” he said casually. And she, drawing on a reserve of nonchalance she didn’t know existed, responded with an equally casual “Hey.”

Within a week, she was in his car, listening to Purple Rain and making out with a promising ferocity. His skilled hands and fingers. Good god his hands. His mouth that tasted of tobacco and beer. His lips against her ear: Her first drug. All of it her first serious high.

***

There is one night that stands out.

He was going, was leaving town—finally leaving this shithole—and he wanted to spend a night with her. Despite, or maybe because of his comprehensive sexual experience, he hadn’t pressured her for anything she wasn’t ready for. 

He had always watched her carefully, not wanting to push her too far and to push her away. Later she realized this was likely because he was getting it elsewhere, anywhere really, all the time, anytime. He was mostly tender with her, but it was incidental tenderness. It wasn’t for her, he wasn’t loving; he could afford to be patient with her.

But this night he is stoned. Stoned enough that he can’t watch her, or himself, closely, or at all. It’s one of his last nights in town, he reminds her. 

Maybe he has plans with different girls and women for each of his last nights in town, but she doesn’t care. On this night they’ve drunk their beers in her parents’ car, smoked some weed in the shed behind his dad’s house, wandered with clasped hands to the few open places in town. A grimy pool hall, the kind of rural bar she’ll eventually come to love and fear in equal measure, the convenience store attached to a gas station where he bums cigarettes from the girls who work behind the counter. 

She knows there’s nowhere else for them to go. They could do it in the car she borrowed from her parents, or they could do it in his dad’s house—if his dad’s not home—or they could do it out in the desert next to some scrub oaks and boulders. It wasn’t so hot then. They could wander outside for hours without fear of heat stroke.

The paradoxical and paralyzing fact of being in a rural town so small: The land stretches forever outside this town, but the town is small enough that privacy is unachievable. 

But none of this is on her mind then. This is the night of her first real sexual encounter and she can feel it coming. It’s like sensing the presence of another breathing creature in a darkened room. She knows it’s there, but she doesn’t know what it is. The fear and exhilaration intensify each other.

He must have known that the shrine was the only place likely to be empty in the middle of the night. St. Joseph is at the foot of the hill. The shrine winds up through the hill. She can see the cross at the top, the white ceramic Jesus glowing a little in the moonlight. He lights the candles at the shrine, slowly, carefully, taking his time like a seasoned pothead, and he takes her hand to lead her to a bench at the foot of the scene. 

There’s some sloppy, rushed kissing before he hurriedly pulls her shorts off, and her heart is pounding and she can’t believe this is happening but she knows for a fact that she is not ready. Not ready for this. He leans her back and stretches her out on the bench. She’s flat on her back and he’s climbing on top of her. She wants him to look at her face but she can’t—doesn’t know how to—tell him to look. At her. Can you see I don’t think I want this? She watches his face as his eyes roll around haphazardly in his skull, the whole side of him glowing red from the candles in their votives, as if he were being burned alive from a distance. 

He’s gone. He’s elsewhere. Take me away, take me with you, she had wanted to say earlier. But now she sees that he was never here to begin with. There was no him to take me along.

She turns her eyes to the sky, the stars hanging up there, the moon yawning down at her. 

This can’t be pleasure, she thinks.

**

Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her debut novel, I’m From Nowhere, is now available from Clash Books. Her translation of François Laruelle’s first book, Phenomenon and Difference, is also forthcoming.

The following excerpt from Ceremonials by Katharine Coldiron is printed here with permission from KERNPUNKT Press.

**

Never Let Me Go

When I was eleven, my aunt took me to the seaside with my two cousins, who were composed of pastry flour and margarine. I’d never seen anything as large as the sea before. Anything that dwarfed my life to a cracked nut. It was the first thing I ever loved.

I had read Hans Christian Andersen, and I knew “The Little Mermaid.” I knew about people who lived beneath the waves, beautiful women with yearning hearts and greedy witches with no hearts at all. At eleven I’d grown too old to believe I could live down there with them, but I did not exactly disbelieve in them. It was possible, I thought, to dive under the water and hear mermaids singing. If only just possible.

My cousins sang an atonal duet of complaint from moment one, but I focused on the sea to drown them. Drown them out, I mean.

Crash and foam. Fold and fall. Pull and expire. The bubbles and the tiny sand creatures and the restlessness and the blue, so blue, multihued like the cool shimmers in mother-of-pearl.

Queenly. My lady ocean.

I flopped into her lap with more enthusiasm than skill or safety. Above the surface boiled the opposite of peace, children gulls waves hotdogs popcorn butter fried dough sizzle colored towels umbrellas people people people. Underneath, wadded ears, clouded eyes. Dim noise.

All the day this high and low, bobbing like an apple––out of the sea and into the sea. I nearly forgot about my cousins. My aunt hollered intermittently. The lady’s murmur parched me, while the sun shone, benevolent until it burned my indoor skin.

When the air cooled and the breeze freshened, my aunt took up hollering and wasn’t inclined to stop. The swells emptied of bathers. Without thinking I turned and paddled out, an inept puppy fleeing an attempt to housetrain it. Further I went. The seaside smells dispersed. I thought of ice cream, the tin ladle of water by my bed. The water pocketed cold. I paddled on and on, the waves fading to weak, inconsistent frequencies. Sparks of sound, like sequins, from the shore.

A mouthful of seawater. Cough and it’s okay. But what’s down there, underneath? What can find my feet?

Dunk my head. Cough. It’s okay. The shore seems farther away than before. I paddle, but it doesn’t get any closer.

If I fall, will I sink forever?

Another mouthful, more. Cough, cough. Maybe this is not okay.

Paddle harder. Electric red in my mind. Paddle faster.

The shore is quiet. I can’t distinguish human figures, just a colorful blur.

I will be asked to do this again. It comes from nowhere, but beats like a pulse.

Dunk, for longer. My fingers, pruned, wave around like leaves in a quickening breeze. Cough, cough, cough, more water. Eyes burn. Skin stings. I’m helpless is what’s overtaking me, the sense of being dwarfed by something more powerful than I will ever be. Encircled in the ocean’s arms, squeezing my chest until my heart bursts and the dim becomes black. Is that singing? Triton’s children calling me down?

I will be asked to do this again.

No, it’s a whistle. The squeeze is the grip of a Samaritan, a strong holidayer from the next county who saw my dark head go under one too many times and pulled me back, against the undertow, and delivered me unto my aunt, who put on a tremendous show, weeping and wailing over her darling Corrie as I spat up seawater and struggled to get off the cold sand, which abraded my indoor skin. Everyone held me down against the sand. I never found out the name of my rescuer.

I will be asked to do this again.

I have wondered, recently, whether the rescuer and the Directress are one. I have wondered whether there are any coincidences. I have wondered whether any child, any normal, untouched child, could be so bewitched by the sea as to ask for another trip to the seaside on the very same day she was nearly drowned in it, on the way back to her bed in the attic, while her cousins wrestled noiselessly over a bag of sweets. Is that child aware of her fate, distant as she is from it in circumstance, near as she is to it in element?

The ocean has no bottom. A lake is self-contained, no matter its size. My feet found a place to land. 

**

Katharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., the Washington Post, LARB, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, BUST, the Believer, the Rumpus, VIDA, Brevity, and elsewhere. She earned a B.A. in film studies & philosophy from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in creative writing from California State University, Northridge. She has read many, many books. Born in the American South to a professor of poetry and translation and a U.S. Navy captain, and raised along the East Coast, she now lives in Los Angeles. Ceremonials, out in February 2020, is her first book.

The following excerpt is from The Dollmaker by Nina Allan, recently published by Other Press, reprinted here with permission.

The Dollmaker

How do you go about killing a fairy queen? There are no books on the subject – I know, I searched – and ironically I found myself falling back on Lola’s own. After largely ignoring Lola’s oeuvre for most of my life, I now devoured it eagerly, reading all of her books in sequence right through from her debut – Cousins – to her most recent novel The City Gates, which had been published to ecstatic reviews just six months before. 

I found her plots as opaque and dull as ever, but one potentially useful discovery I made, and made quickly, was that Lola was obsessed by detail. Not just the forensic details that are central to solving crimes, but the practical and other mundane details of how they are committed. Toxicology was a favourite subject of hers, as was ballistics. In one novel – End of Service – she even had an excruciating five pages describing the commonest materials for making an effective garrotte, and where best to source them. 

I wondered how she knew all this stuff, how much of it was true. I couldn’t see myself wielding a gun, much less a garrotte, because I knew I was almost certain to make a hash of things. If I didn’t get killed myself, I’d almost certainly be caught, and then I’d be sent to prison for life, with the entire courtroom believing I killed my poor disabled aunt because she stole my boyfriend. 

It would have to be poison. Aunt Lola’s books furnished me with enough information to begin hatching a plan, but that still left me with the problem that had been bothering me from the start: did what worked for humans also work for the small folk? Would arsenic kill an elf queen, or would she wolf it down like sherbet, and lick her lips afterwards?

I had no idea. 

**

Aunt Lola made the procurement of deadly chemicals sound like the least of a would-be murderer’s difficulties, and she turned out to be right. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, and a city this size boasts more establishments selling under-the-counter merchandise than you might imagine. Poky little shops in the factory district, hole-in-the-wall outlets down every proverbial back alley, all seeking to do business and all without attracting the kind of attention that might prove harmful to trade. The place I decided to try was called Warbinski’s, a grubby emporium advertising itself as an Ironmongery and General Stores, where the proprietor would weigh out bismuth and antimony by the ounce. 

“And you don’t mind working with this stuff?” I asked him, a red-nosed, runny-eyed gnome of a man I presumed must be Mr Warbinski. I wasn’t buying anything that day. I had resolved to use Warbinski’s as a testing ground, to see what kind of reaction I might get when I started asking the kind of questions I needed to ask. 

I posed as a radio journalist, of all things. I told him I was researching a programme on old family businesses. 

Warbinski shook his head. “Used to it,” he said. “None of these materials are dangerous, so long as they’re treated with appropriate respect. Don’t want strychnine ending up in the sugar bowl now, do we?” 

He laughed uproariously, his nostrils flaring wide. I managed a smirk because I knew it was expected but it was difficult for me not to imagine that his supposed joke had been at my expense. When he offered me a cup of tea I quickly refused. 

“Just one more thing,” I said, as I was leaving. “Do you sell anything for fairy infestations?”

“Good Lord,” Warbinski said. He was doing his best to look outraged but I could tell it was a put-up job by the way his gaze was momentarily diverted towards the back of his shop. As if he were afraid I might be a decoy, and that even now a team of detectives were trashing his storeroom in search of blacklisted substances. “We don’t go in for that kind of thing here, indeed no. The materials you are referring to are only available under special licence. Cost an absolute bomb and definitely not worth the blowback if some idiot gets their sums wrong, goodness no.”

I decided I would have to take a chance. I took out my wallet and placed a note of a painfully large denomination on the counter, licking my fingertips and staring into his eyes as if we were both actors in some low-rent spy movie. “I’m sure you know where such materials might be available, though,” I said, deliberately. “What with your family ties to this part of the city being so extensive?”

He hesitated for less than a second before grabbing the note. “Zivorski’ll see you right,” he said. “Under the bridge and then right into Gagarin Street. Only I would strongly advise you against. Not to be messed with, those fae buggers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“This is just research,” I reminded him. “My enquiry was strictly theoretical.”

“Right you are, then,” said Warbinski, brightening up again. I knew he didn’t believe me for a second, but by his reckoning he’d done his moral duty and that was enough.  

**

Zivorski’s turned out to be a jeweller’s, and judging by the stones on display in the window, quite an expensive one – not what I had expected at all. I peered in through the bowed, nicotine-stained glass, trying to work out if Warbinski had been taking me for a ride after all. 

In the end I decided to chance it and went inside, pushing at the peeling door in its warped frame until a bell sounded, summoning the eponymous Zivorski. I was surprised by her youth, I suppose because the shop itself was so decrepit. 

What surprised me even more was that she was a dwarf. A human dwarf, I assumed, rather than fae, although the shock of seeing her, given the reason I was there in the first place, almost made me turn around and leave before I got in any deeper. 

What did I think I was doing in this part of town, anyway? My mother would have a fit. 

“Good afternoon,” said Zivorski. “How can I help?” 

She spoke quietly but firmly, without that edge of deference adopted by most service personnel. Her dress – a grey silk shift – was obviously expensive but without looking flashy. 

She knew how to play down her disadvantages, that was for sure. 

“Warbinski sent me,” I said. That at least was the unvarnished truth. 

“Leon? What’s he been up to?” Her guard seemed to drop at the mention of Warbinski’s name. The two were genuinely acquainted then, which at least was something. 

“I only met him today,” I said. I was about to launch into my radio journalist spiel but something in this woman’s expression gave me to understand that we were beyond that. “I went to his shop because… I have a problem. Warbinski said you might be able to help.” 

“Don’t tell me you’re intending to kill someone? There are easier ways of solving problems, believe me.” 

“She’s fae,” I said quickly, my trump card, although I had an idea Zivorski would have worked that out already. 

“I’m sure Leon will already have told you this isn’t a good idea,” she said at once. “So let’s skip that. It won’t be cheap.” The figure she quoted was indeed the better part of two months’ wages. Something of my dismay must have shown in my expression because she gave a wry smile. “These family feuds are best forgotten, you know. What was it your father said? Get on with your life?” 

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Come on,” Zivorski said. “That’s just ground-level telepathy. It’s perfectly harmless. The things your aunt could do to you are a hundred times worse. If she finds out, I mean. Have you thought about that?”

“That’s why I need her gone.” My voice sounded dry as a rusty hinge. “I can’t go on like this. Always wondering what she might do, what she might be thinking. It’s driving me mad.”

“Well, it’s your funeral.” Zivorski sighed in a way that suggested she dealt with fools like me every day of the week and was getting tired of it. She came out from behind the counter and I had the chance to observe how oddly shaped she was, the trim elegance of her upper body contrasting dramatically with the squat pelvis, the plump bowed legs, the unnaturally tiny feet. There was something powerful about her though, a decisiveness in her movements that said she didn’t care how she might be perceived, her body was splendid to her and she wouldn’t change it even if she could. She bent slightly to unlock the back panel of the window display then reached inside, drawing forth a tray of gemstone rings. She placed the tray on the counter before selecting one, an incredible square-cut topaz set in gold. The stone seemed to wink at me as if it knew something. I shivered. The topaz looked unnervingly like my aunt’s single, all-seeing eye. 

“There’s a tiny catch just under the stone, here.” Zivorski pressed lightly against the metal with the ball of her thumb. The topaz sprung open like a miniature door, revealing a tiny golden cavity beneath. Inside the cavity lay a spherical tablet, or capsule. It had the sheen of nacre. 

“This will dissolve in any liquid, alcoholic or otherwise. It runs through your victim’s system much like human tetanus, but at a hundred miles an hour. She will curl and shrivel before your eyes. It can be distressing to watch, I warn you, especially as she’ll probably be conscious until the very end.” She paused. “I might be able to give you something back on the ring afterwards, if that’s any help.”   

**

I left Zivorski’s with the ring in a leather casket and my bank account more or less empty. I walked back towards the centre of town, navigating the refuse-smelling backstreets and questionable retail outlets as if I’d lived in the slums of the factory district all my life. 

And it may well come to that, I thought, if any single part of this goes wrong. I wondered if it would really be so bad. No one knew me here and rents were bound to be dirt cheap. I could set up a beauty parlour. I’d have clients coming out of my ears in no time at all. I was surprised and a little appalled by how appealing it seemed, the idea of sliding out of one life and into another. I couldn’t help thinking about what Aunt Lola had said when I first went to live with her, about anyone being capable of murder, given the right circumstances. 

Did I truly mean to go through with this? I clasped my satchel to my chest, the trick ring inside. Zivorski had told me the poison in the capsule would only work on fair folk.

“Which gives the product an inbuilt advantage, you know, if you happen to have made a mistake,” she added, leaning heavily upon the last word as if she were offering me one last chance to resolve my predicament in a less radical way. And save myself some money into the bargain. 

The problem was that I didn’t want to save the money, not any more. I had even lost some of my hunger to see Lola dead. At some point during the planning process, my anger and hatred had reshaped themselves into something less visceral and more chilling: curiosity. I had become like one of Lola’s protagonists: secretive and introverted, obsessed with minutiae. 

It sounds incredible I know, but what I wanted most was to discover if I could get away with it. 

**

I waited three days, just to steady myself, then gave Aunt Lola a call. She sounded delighted to hear from me, her voice trembling with emotion. Or was that simply the result of a bad telephone connection?

“Sonia, dearest. I’ve been longing to talk to you. It’s been so difficult to know what to say.”

“I should have called sooner,” I said. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t remember ever having been in a situation where what I was saying felt so violently at odds with the thoughts in my head. The feeling was exhilarating, a sense of being ahead of the game, of knowing something my enemy – for was she not my enemy? – could never have guessed at. It was easy to see how this kind of power might become addictive. “I hate us not speaking. Can we meet?”

“That would make me very happy, my dear. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to hear your voice.”

She asked if I would prefer to meet up in town – neutral ground was what she meant – but I said no, I would come to the flat, the flat would be fine. 

I hadn’t been near the apartment since the day I found Lola in bed with Wil and the thought of going there now made me sick to my stomach. Nonetheless, we agreed that I would call round at three o’clock the following day. I rode up in the lift as normal, the rusty chugging sound so comforting in its familiarity that I could almost imagine calling off the murder plan and agreeing to move back in here, to let bygones be bygones. 

Then I remembered the crucial element that had been missing from our phone conversation: Lola hadn’t mentioned Wil, not once, which must surely mean the two of them were still together. If they’d split up she would surely have told me, or at least dropped a hint.

It suddenly occurred to me that Wil might even be living with her now. I’d glimpsed Wil around the studio from time to time but I’d deliberately avoided him as much as possible and those friends of mine who were also friends of Wil’s kept a diplomatic silence. I had no idea how he was or what he was doing, which suited me fine. But this did also mean I’d left myself open to nasty surprises.  

I rang the bell. The familiar, harsh buzzing, then silence. I tried to compose myself, to be the person I was pretending to be – the person who had turned up on this same doorstep eighteen months ago with two bulging holdalls and a broken suitcase, in fact. It was only then that I realised that person no longer existed, that whatever happened in the next forty-five minutes she was gone for good. 

Then the door burst open and there she was, my aunt, wearing a beautiful hand-finished trouser suit and smiling like a movie star. 

Her hair looked as if it had been recently styled, the wispy auburn curls both softer and brighter. She looked radiant. If I’d had any doubts about how things stood between her and Wil, those doubts were gone now. 

I wondered if Wil knew what she was, if he even cared. 

“Sonia,” she cried. She threw her arms around me, kissed my cheek. “You look lovely, dear. Come inside.”

She didn’t even sound like her old self: mildly sardonic, wryly amused, cautious and consistent. It was as if she believed the whole world must now share her happiness, a joy so pure that its origins in deception no longer mattered. 

**

The truth is difficult, isn’t it? I want to tell you how this story ends, but I’m not sure how to do that. I could tell you about how we sat down together in Aunt Lola’s living room with the photographs and the books and that ugly bronze beetle of hers, how Lola talked and talked, insisting that when she first went for a drink with Wil it was just that – a drink – because they’d enjoyed each other’s company so much the previous evening. 

“You have to believe me, Sonia, I didn’t plan any of this.” She even blushed. “I think I might have been a little crazy for a while.”

Just for a while? I thought, but didn’t say. I kept my smile on and said it was all right, I understood, that’s what love does to people. She leaned forward in her chair then – the same chair Wil had been sitting in the night he met Lola – placed her hand on my arm and said yes, that was it exactly, and I did understand, didn’t I, that she loved Wil, that it was the real thing, that she wouldn’t have dreamed of coming between us otherwise. 

“I still feel ashamed,” she said. “Not of Wil and me, but of the way it all happened. You finding out like that. I can’t tell you how dreadful I feel. I wish I’d found the courage to tell you properly.”

I patted her shoulder and said she should stop blaming herself, that Wil and I had been on the rocks anyway, that the past didn’t matter now because I was with someone else, a jazz drummer named Marco I’d met when his band played the Maraschino three months ago. 

“Really?” gasped Lola. “Oh Sonia, that’s wonderful. When do I get to meet him?” 

She sounded genuinely pleased for me, too, suggested we should come round for dinner as soon as possible, me and the non-existent Marco, who I think I might actually have fancied if he’d been real. If Lola thought she had a monopoly on creative invention, she was wrong. I smiled and smiled, all the time thinking that if she said one more word about her and Wil and how maaahvellous they were together then I might just have to kill her. 

Which was funny really, because I was going to kill her anyway. 

“Let’s have tea,” she said at last. “And you can tell me more about Marco.”

She hurried off into the kitchen. I heard the sounds of running water and the rattle of crockery and at one point I even heard Lola singing although I might have imagined that. I got up from my seat and moved slowly around the room, running my fingers over the spines of the books in the bookcase, gazing at the framed photographs of film stars just as Wil had done and wondering if any of these things would pass down to me when my aunt was dead. 

She came back at long last, placed the tray on the low coffee table between us. We waited while the tea brewed, talking of nothing. Lola finally plied the pot, the liquid falling in a perfect amber arc, making that inimitable sound tea makes as it flows into a cup. It was only once she’d finished pouring that Lola realised she had forgotten the milk. Lola always took her tea black, in the Russian fashion, with a lump of sugar. Normally she would have remembered that I prefer mine white. Either she was just nervous or what with me being out of her life for so long she had genuinely forgotten. 

“How silly of me,” she said. “I won’t be a moment.” She hurried back to the kitchen. It was now or never. I hadn’t practised the manoeuvre at home because I was afraid it might jinx me. Perhaps I was just lucky, but I needn’t have worried. The whole thing went perfectly, as if I was used to poisoning people’s beverages for a living. A quick movement forward, press with the thumb, a tiny sound – plink! – like a solitary drop of water falling from the tap into the bath. The tablet dissolved so quickly I barely saw it happen. Which made it easier to tell myself afterwards that the horror of what occurred next was not my fault. 

Zivorski had warned me that it might be upsetting to see Lola die, to watch her agony, though in fact it was not. Rather I beheld it, as I might have observed something that was happening on a television screen, or the final day’s rushes from whatever film project I was currently involved with. Assessing them for bungled lighting or muffed lines. 

I think I would be right in saying that this was a perfect performance. Lola raised her cup to her lips, blew gently on the liquid to cool it as was her habit, took one quick sip and then another, grimaced slightly then replaced the cup in its saucer. I had just enough time – a second or so – to curse myself for not asking Zivorski how much of the liquid had to be consumed before the poison was effective, before Lola began to die. 

A look of terrified surprise came into her eyes, an expression I can best describe as acute awareness. Then her muscles went taut, all of them, at once. She jerked bolt upright in her seat, as if she’d been turned into a line drawing of herself, all points and angles. Her fingers gripped her knees like the talons of birds. I could see how she was trying to unclamp one of her hands, to reach for me, for the table, for anything, but her joints were locked tight. She couldn’t speak either, or scream. 

Instead, a terrible gurgling, the only sound her constricted throat could now produce. 

I sat and watched, gazing at her as the knife-bright awareness in her eyes changed to the dull fog of delirium, as her spine bent itself backwards in a paroxysm of desperation – I heard it crack – and her bent knees beat against her chest like demented drumsticks. 

The whole process took less than two minutes. A brief interlude, I suppose you might call it, unless you were Lola. When it was over her whole skeleton seemed to fold in on itself, a bunch of twigs wrapped in soiled rags, that’s what she looked like, her head lolling crazily off to one side like a broken doll. 

When I felt able to move I lifted the two cups carefully from the coffee table and carried them through to the kitchen. I emptied their contents into the sink, chased them down with hot water. Then I washed the teacups and carefully dried them, returning my own to the correct cupboard and replacing Aunt Lola’s in its previous position on the tray. I poured her another cup of tea, then dusted the handles of all receptacles with a clean cotton handkerchief I had brought specifically for the purpose.   

There would be other prints of mine, everywhere throughout the flat, but then why shouldn’t there be? I had lived there for more than a year, after all. I had visited my aunt this very afternoon, and found her quite well. 

**

Nina Allan is a novelist and short story writer. Her previous fiction has won several prizes, including the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel, the Novella Award and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. She lives and works in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute. The Dollmaker is her third novel.

“The String” by Victor Ladis Schultz was first published in failbetter.

The String

Herman Bloch was the first to fall ill, though back then we thought him merely overcome with grief. His niece had been killed. That awful business in Delaware. Sweet girl passing notes in class. Small mercy: she was the first victim. Never even saw the shooter, classmates say. Never felt a thing, we hope.

We were shocked for maybe ten minutes, not so much because a resident’s niece had died–however suddenly or tragically or violently–as because she had brought on us, a small-town nonplace out west, the hungry condoling eye of the entire republic. When the eye flitted to the next victim’s backstory, we reacted as infants passed from strange hands back to our mothers. The tension left our bodies. Best to forget all that. There there.

Herman tried to forget too. When he left town for the funeral he was still struggling to put on a brave face, but by the time he returned he looked rejuvenated. Reborn, almost. Bloch taught music at our middle school, and before long the children started to leak accounts of some truly bizarre songs in class: glacial dirges, no melody or dissonance, words that were foreign or nonsensical, possibly extraterrestrial, and sung only by Bloch. His interactions with the faculty raised as many eyebrows. His first week back, when the social studies teacher accused him of stealing her lunch, Bloch marched her straight to the faculty lounge, opened the fridge, and pointed out that he had eaten everyone’s lunch, not just hers, and what made hers so special anyway since she hadn’t even buttered the bread on her ham-Swiss? The principal let this pass with a verbal admonishment; grief can make us not ourselves. But when, one morning the following week, the custodian unlocked the school only to find Bloch asleep on a drop cloth in the gymnasium, the signature cerulean-and-gold walls now cozied by an almost comically gentle shade of pink, the superintendent had no choice but to place Bloch on administrative leave.

Administrative leave turned into psychiatric care. Bloch was a confirmed bachelor, lived alone. A neighbor found him catatonic in his own living room. He had fouled his clothes. Hadn’t eaten in days, certainly. His medical record showed no history of manic depression, no history of anything. 

The professionals in the psychiatric ward performed admirably. Bloch’s body was on the mend within a couple of days, but the most dramatic transformation took place in his personality. Gone was the hyperactive vandal, gone the bandleader from Mars. In their place stood Herman Bloch as he had been before the tragedy–but better. Colleagues who visited him noted a more patient temper and a subtler sense of humor. Most unmistakable was what seemed a newfound erudition, a certain but unpretentious knowledge of things that had once happened in the world. Current events too. At first we assumed he just had a lot of extra time to read the internet while he was in hospital care. Only when he began making equally certain pronouncements about the future did we take pause. 

Take heed, he said. The Harvest Festival will be canceled this autumn.

Take heed, he said. The snows this winter will be our worst yet.

For old Margot Belcher he had bigger news: Take heed, he said. Mrs. Belcher will have a son seventeen months hence, on the 21st of December.

Margot had never spoken to Bloch in her whole life. The doctors held him for further testing.

Not long after that the spree shooting at Ida happened. The casualty figures weren’t as high, of course, but imagine our surprise when one of the dead turned out to be the Cruz boy from over on Juniper Street. He had grown up here and then gone on to make something of himself. His family still lived in town: parents, a couple sisters. Good tight circle of friends. College kid, they’d called him, but never fancy college kid. Afterward he moved to Michigan to teach high school. History.

His mother, Maria, was the first Cruz to lose it. Tried to bury herself in her own backyard, middle of the night. His father, Eugenio, checked her into the hospital just in time for his own spell the next morning. Drove his jeep at speed right into the war memorial in the town square. When witnesses dragged him uninjured from the wreckage, they found he was soaked and naked, as if he’d jumped straight from the shower into the car. The Cruzes shut down quicker than Bloch had. Just a week after we heard about Ida, all four of them were glassy eyed in the hospital. Worse yet, the daughters’ families started to act up. One of their sons built a ham radio, then initiated a series of broadcasts comprising only epic screeds against individuals whose names no one had ever heard–not the boy’s father, not his siblings, not his few nonplussed listeners, not the deputy who visited the home just before the boy fell catatonic and joined his mamá and abuelos in the psychiatric ward. A few days later, the father sneaked off his job as a hunting guide. Stranded a few tourists in the hills. They were lucky to get out alive. He turned up the next week, bearded over and draped in the furs of recently slain mammals. We housed him with his family.

We had to cancel the Harvest Festival that fall. A slew of venders had dropped out unexpectedly.

We suffered through record snowfalls that winter. The trucks ran out of salt by January.

Margot Belcher learned she was pregnant that spring. She had a December due date.

We asked Bloch how he could have possibly known these things. He credited his muse.

The next school shooting was that little academy in St. Louis. The dead gunman had good grades. When police identified him as the grandson of Frankie Metcalf, a lawyer who lives here, we started to panic. When the Cruzes and their kin began making predictions–Take heed, they said–we called an emergency council. Had to use the school’s gymnasium to hold everyone. The room gave off a febrile buzz and the walls seemed to be moving but they weren’t. Mayor Ford had a frog in his throat. His first words into the microphone sounded like a burr looks:

Ladies, gentlemen, this is what we know at this time.

What we knew was that eventually somewhere else would notice. Phones would ring, questions, questions, questions. Word of the sick would get out. We would become a case series. We came to an agreement: we would quarantine ourselves. No one in, no one out–it was the responsible thing to do and only what the republic would’ve done anyway. Meanwhile, perhaps the string, as we’d come to call the phenomenon, would break. Perhaps the next time a psychopath chambered a hollow point in study hall, none of us would lose anyone. Perhaps the sick would heal and life could be something familiar again.

Around the time Metcalf began talking of things to come, we heard about the next rampage. Oregon high school. Casualties were light: a few wounded, just one dead, just a footnote in the broadcasts. The one fatality was cousin to Mora Lee, our treasurer.

The Cruzes’ predictions were starting to bear fruit. Eugenio largely contented himself with the temperatures and tidal activity near the Puget Sound and the Sea of Cortez forty-two days hence, but Maria, it is known, accurately foretold the assassination of the governor down to the minute and caliber of bullet.

The ramifications multiplied quickly; one death often laid low several households. Soon no room remained in the psychiatric ward, then no room remained in any ward. No matter, as too many of the hospital staff had become patients for the facility to operate. For everyday maladies, healing happened at home, or not at all. Teaching too: the school was now a storehouse for oracles. Few lucid students and still fewer teachers had remained once the hospital reached maximum capacity, so we designated the middle school to house the excess ill.

Maria eventually became a pillar among them. The school had been her idea. Your farsight is a gift, she said, and instructed the gifted on its use. She urged her husband to cast about for visions of greater substance. She gave tell of natural disasters and morbidity rates and secret nascent rebellions in lands whose names appear on maps but sounded fanciful on her tongue. All came to pass, and as more time passed the string grew unchecked:

Uintah High, Vernal, Utah–our bank manager’s niece.

Live Oak Elementary, Lafayette, La–our sheriff’s great nephew.

Appleton North, Appleton, Wis–our barber’s cousin’s son.

Memorial High, McAllen, Tex–our principal’s sister.

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC–our baker’s daughter.

Thus did we begin preparing our own bread.

#

I was the last. Blood all over the country: they all ignored me. Kept their young in school. In the end the fated was my own son. Junior-high basketball game outside Cleveland. South Central Trojans vs Monroeville Eagles. My son played forward for the Eagles. My ex-husband had custody but never went to the games. By the time everyone’s ears stopped ringing the only two people left alive on the court were the mascots.

I leave the maternity ward. No one here but far off I can hear a woman screaming. I have an appointment elsewhere. Feel my way down the stairs to the lobby. Its stillness and gloaming. Its broken doors and aquarial windows. Anyone could see in from out there, if there were anyone.

Out into the street where Mr. Orozco used to stand crossing-guard before his niece fell victim to a maniac in algebra class downstate. No cars, no people, the streetlights haven’t come on yet. Still the screaming endless and thin.

So it’s not from the hospital then. Outdoors the direction is impossible to pinpoint. The scream bears the by-now unremarkable intensity of the tortured. You can’t unhear it but so what. The volume here sounds the same as it did in the maternity ward. I am clothed, I notice for the first time.

I do not stop at my house. No need. Nor do I check in on my neighbors: I was the last. As I push eastward, downtown, the pitch does not waver, the shriek does not fade. Here our own manias have left their mark. On one lot stands a spacious lodge built of naked mannequins. Up the street the church’s siding has been stripped and its awing stained glass boarded up: God’s work, the pastor said, over and over, after he lost his youngest brother.

Farther on, the bank’s roof has crumpled under the weight of a fallen cell tower. I stop. I can remember the mannequins and the church and the others, the messages left in the street or the acres of weathervanes planted like steel soy. The fires. I cannot remember the bank. The wind wheezes through the rubble. The scream eats the wheeze. One is of the throat, one of the earth, but which of which? This must have been my work then. I was the last.

At the edge of town, the exodus has begun. Maria directs. We need you, she says. I take my place at the rear. Massed thus we look like many, but the roads are many more that will peel us off the parade, one by one, carry the seers to the extremities of the republic. Surely at the end of such byways waits a host with a long memory for names.

Take heed. Years on, the fall of cities. Man, hunter. Woman, hunter. Child, hunter. Each by his own hand fed or slain. Then, the rising forth: rivers, reservoirs, seafloors. Man becomes fish once again, and woman summons him, and child summons him. They swim as one school, surge as one, as though bound by a single voice unvoiced. Sing, goddess, the anger of our sons.

**

Victor Ladis Schultz is a writer whose short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Third Coast, Confrontation, and other fine publications. By day he works as a copyeditor for a trade journal near Chicago. By night he works on a novel. Follow him on Twitter, where he tweets out minor quotations by major writers.

**

Image: Flickr / ashokboghani

“Trouble” by Kate Wisel, from Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, is reprinted here with permission from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Trouble

We were all the same age, our new neighbors and us. Our puppies were the same age, our new puppy and their new puppy. We learned this as the neighbors hauled boxes out of their car and our little prize thrashed his neck against the thick leash we’d bought at Petco. Unleashed, he mistook my ankles for chew toys. He found my cigarettes, even when I hid them, and ripped them to bits. We should call him Ashtray, I thought.

“That’s why we buy him toys, dumbass,” Niko had said. Cigarettes were already overpriced, and like a homeless person, I was picking through the promising ones.

Outside the new neighbors’ car, for a split second, we expected that we would become great friends. The neighbors and us, just like normal couples. Just like the puppies, normal puppies, who were pawing at each other like lovers.

“What’s your puppy’s name? Sorry I’m eating strawberries,” the girl said. She dropped the carton and the strawberries rolled next to her laundry basket. The puppies teamed up to demolish the berries, then chewed her sweatshirt collar, the gray sleeve darkening with slobber.

“His name’s Trouble,” I said. News to Niko, who looked at our puppy reluctantly, but I had him there. It wasn’t something he could argue with. Our puppy had hole-punching teeth and coal-lined eyes like an emo teenager.

“Get back,” I said. Trouble was spread eagle on the concrete as the neighbors’ puppy tongued his privates. I jerked his leash back. Not on my watch. I scooped up Trouble as he writhed in my arms, then started yelping like a Mormon girl during a kidnapping. I edged up the stairs while Niko charmed the neighbors. The girl bought it, and started talking his head off about how we should all go to dinner. Or make it.

“We should have a dinner party,” the girl said. “We’re twenty-six. We’re over partying.”

Briefly I saw myself from the view of the light fixture on the stairs, head-first, swollen eye, the door locked, bolted, my credit cards strewn below me like clues.

**

Later, while Trouble raised his leg to pee freely in the corner of the kitchen, I asked Niko if he noticed that both the girl and the guy neighbors had lazy eyes. I just thought, what were the chances? Both of their eyes milked at the center, identically, their pupils going googly like Magic 8 Balls.

“What does it matter?” Niko said, pouring bacon grease into a beer can. It matters to me, I thought. Did they look at each other, or half look at each other, and think, You complete me?

I hid under the dining room table with Trouble, squeezing him like a tube until he slinkyed out of my grip. I loved Trouble so much that I kind of wanted to hurt him. The muscles of his underside were so tender that to even look at him I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to shreds. Trouble stared back like he was so miserably disappointed in me, though he’d only known me a month. I thought of my brother when he was little and couldn’t speak. How he twisted his hands in front of his mouth. Blowing kisses, pointing to cookies in the aisle, then back to his mouth. Mouth to object, object to mouth. His sincere words dribbling out like applesauce. Since I couldn’t understand him, I would push him as hard as I could when no one was looking. I’d push him again, his helplessness the maker of my fury.

Trouble gagged, hunched, and heaved onto the hardwood. My cigarettes.

“No! Trouble! No!” I said. I pointed my finger to emphasize my anger, but it reworded itself as excitement. “Go! Trouble! Go!”

I kept my head in my hands as Trouble ran track around the table. He howled, barks like gunshots, his paws slipping and clicking on the hardwood.

“Why are you such a fucking baby?” Niko said, walking past, assaulting me with the sharp smell of new sneakers. At the coffee table he looked otherworldly, with his plate of stacked bacon, paleo fanatic that he was. Niko was gorgeous—everyone knew. He had slick black hair and tan skin like a man on the beach whose shoulder beads with water. Our children would be blended and according to any elderly lady in line at Stop n Shop, beautiful. I sometimes imagined their sparkling cheeks and kinky, highlighted hair. They would be him with my affectations. In photos, their eyes tiny riots, wild with inarticulate demands.

**

I want to tell you why I disliked our neighbors, the girl in particular, so you won’t hate me as much as my puppy hated me. The following week on the back stairs, the girl remarked on the convenience of our shared lawn out back. When she spoke, I couldn’t tell which eye to look into, so I looked at the lazy one. It swung up, receiving radio signals. 

“There’s going to be a lot of shit in that yard,” the girl said, like a fact. Maybe I didn’t know things, like why Trouble needed monthly shots when I didn’t have health care, but I knew damn well that we should clean up after him. We were adults. Every day, we were adults.

Back upstairs, I’d try to explain this to Niko, but then Trouble would start barking, and we’d freeze. Trouble’s barks were an alarm going off that we did not know how to disassemble.

“What do you want?” Niko would say. 

Trouble would hop madly at my waist. “You think I’m playing, esé? Say something.” 

Niko would step towards me. He’d say, “Why didn’t you set her straight?”

I’d jerk my head back without meaning to. Niko had hit me many times. More than many. More than hit. Smashed my face into the wall where a mirror from a garage sale hung by the door where I never failed to check my gaze. 

**

A month later, I stood on the lawn, shaking my knee. The sky was bleeding down the center like a knife wound. I was waiting for Trouble to go already so I could clomp back upstairs to watch Bravo and eat Doritos standing up. He would circle me, the Doritos a red bag of crack. Am I your fucking Matador? I’d think. His tongue hanging loosely, that deranged shark. It was among these thoughts that I noticed a piece of shit on the lawn.

“Do I have to do everything?” Niko said, all smug, like he was the smarter one. We were on our deck with the higher view of downtown. I’d forgotten to take out the trash. 

“You don’t even have a job.” Niko liked to remind me. School is a job, I thought. The twelve-pack of craft beers he’d drunk stunk from the sweat that ridged his bald chest, which was now up against mine. 

After I reset my nose with a pencil, I went to be alone in our guest room, where Niko’s electric guitars hung on the wall like a rich kid’s toys. I hid in the closet. I was the guest, to talk to the guy I’d been talking to. When he teased me, I teased back, a drip of blood tickling my lip, my old clogs smelling like burnt rubber.

**

The day after the Fourth, both in sweats, the girl and I stood on the lawn as our puppies rocketed towards each other, tumbling together like free-fallers. It was noon and I’d already had two Coronas. My right eye was a puff pastry enclosing a pink slit. I wanted to be alone. Really alone. Before Niko, before Trouble, the neighbors, before I could even remember. I wanted to be alone with the guy I wasn’t supposed to be talking to. I’d go anywhere with him.

“Trouble got bigger,” the girl said.

My heart sprang like a red punch from an arcade game because I couldn’t measure change with what was mine. But he wasn’t mine; I’d never asked for Trouble. Niko and I had woken up from a bad fight. A purple shiner covered my eyelid in a deep swell but matched my makeup, so we decided to go for a walk. We were walking past the thick window of a shelter. Niko thought Trouble could be a gift, a romantic gesture. Wow, I thought, I’ve never received a gift I’d have to walk for fifteen years.

When he picked Trouble out of the litter, I thought he’d stay that same size forever, the size of an organ, sticky-soft and warm. We took Trouble home. He trembled by our feet, then ripped up the sectional Niko had bought without insurance.

“Cut it out, you fucking monster!” I screamed.

In my spot, in the closet of the guest room, he fell asleep and had puppy dreams in the cage of my arms. His paws batted the air in a field where we were free and unleashed. 

**

“Hey,” the girl said after the neighbor dog nipped at Trouble’s neck. The girl and I watched as they tugged at each other’s skin, then retreated, their eyes fixed intently on the other’s, waiting to pummel. I didn’t care about my eye, dabbing it with concealer and setting it with powder. I wanted her to see.

“They like each other,” the girl said. I knew what she meant. She meant us. She wanted us to like each other. She wanted it since that first day they pulled up with their goddamn sorcerer’s auras and dirty laundry.

“Stop it,” I said to Trouble.

“Do you want to go to that new Mexican place down the street? Just you and me?” she said.

I wanted to go, I did, but if I opened my mouth, the heat would crawl in. I wanted to sit next to her in the booth with my superior eyes, tracing my fingers down the row of similar but different margaritas. She was waiting, with her permanent grin on, I could tell, though I stayed busy watching Trouble.

He was lunging this way and that way, trapped in the yard, thinking he was free. Was he bigger and why couldn’t I tell? When would I know? And then the dogs started barking, cruel little yips, and I grabbed at the leash, but Trouble had this new kind of force as he lunged at the neighbor dog. I looked at the girl, thinking she would do something. But for the first time she said nothing. Dumb chick just stood there, waiting. I was wordless, wanting. Wanting to look where she looked, but she was looking at me.

**

Kate Wisel is a Boston native. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House Online, and Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street Prize, among others. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and was most recently a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she taught fiction. She currently lives in Chicago. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is her first book.

(c) 2019 Holding On To Nothing by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, reprinted with permission from Blair

Excerpt From Holding on to Nothing

Jeptha Taylor had been in love with Lucy Kilgore since he was sixteen and her smile was the reason why. She had a smile that made people feel safe. Jeptha, particularly. He wasn’t sure why exactly—he just knew a warm, contented feeling stole over him that struck him as exactly the kind of silent bliss a newborn baby feels when his mama feeds him. But when Jeptha pulled his Camaro, dark and shiny as a pond at midnight, into the parking lot behind Judy’s Bar on a hot Friday night in June, he had no idea that Lucy’s smile would be for him tonight, that it would spark through him and spread to her like a hay blaze—fiery, fast, and destructive. 

No, as far as Jeptha was concerned, tonight was only about bluegrass and ass, if he could get it. It was his first time at Judy’s Bar, and he felt a bit disloyal for being there. The bar had been open for four months and—being run by a Yankee—had been in disfavor for all those months with the local drinkers. Except for the real drunks, neighbors all, whose loyalty extended only to Jack, Jim, and whatever bar gave them the best shot at driving home shit-faced without getting caught. For those who could afford to be principled in their place of vice, the bar of choice was Avery’s Place, owned by a hometown boy named Avery who had spent ten years fighting the Pentecostals and the Baptists, both Freewill and Southern, for the right to open a bar in what previously had been a dry county. That a Yankee swooped in five years after Avery’s long fight finally ended and made use of the same provisions he had fought so hard to establish was enough for Jeptha, his friends, and the rest of the town to stay well clear of Judy’s Bar. Until, that is, four boys, so far unnamed in the paper even though everyone in town knew who they were, got high behind Avery’s Place one night in early July, lit a small fire in a patch of grass already dried out in the summer’s drought, and ran like hell when it whooshed into a patch of wiring that snaked up the outer wall of the bar. The fire caught hold in the electrical system and sparked its way from wire to wire, finally nesting in a box of receipts that Avery kept under a couple of bottles of 151 proof Everclear, reserved for the worst of the worst drunks. Within minutes, there was only a wall of flame where once there had been a bar, and Avery’s customers ran, taking their principles with them. 

Jeptha, not being a subscriber to The Review, the town paper, or really much of a reader generally, heard about the fire two days later from his friend Cody. Jeptha and Cody were bandmates in a Boy Named Sue, a bluegrass group that played Friday nights at Avery’s—Cody sang and played banjo, with Jeptha on mandolin. After a respectful period of silence, in which they thought of the drunken nights—both good and bad—they had enjoyed at Avery’s, Cody explained that Judy had called him two days after the fire (“Typical Yankee. Didn’t even wait for the damn ashes to stop smoking.”) and offered the band a job playing Friday nights at her place. Cody was principled, yes, but a fool? No. He’d accepted and gone on to call his band mates. Jeptha was happy to keep the gig, and all too happy to forget any moral stand he’d once had. He’d agreed to be there on Friday.

And so, Jeptha pulled his mandolin off the passenger seat of his car and made for the front door. He was showered for the first time in two drunken days, and most of the stink had worn off. He wondered if the girl who’d been in his bed last night—Brandy? Brandy Anne? She’d been bendy for sure, that one—would be in the bar and up for another go. Bluegrass and sex wouldn’t be such a bad Friday. He wondered if he’d need to remember her actual name to get her back to his place.

Occupied as his mind was, he hadn’t absorbed the fact of the full parking lot, so when he opened the door—happy to smell the right scent of beer, sweat, and leather that came flooding out—he was shocked to see the place packed to the rafters. He wasn’t sure he’d ever played in front of so many people. A trickle of fear gnawed at his belly. He elbowed his way through the crowd. He gave a quick nod and half smile to the girl from last night. She laughed and looked down at the table, but not before Jeptha saw a blush creep up her cheeks. He smiled to himself, pretty damn sure she’d be up for it again, assuming he could finesse the fact that she was sitting with a girl he’d slept with a few months back and never called again. He gripped his mandolin case and worked his way into line, feeling content. It had the makings of a good night. 

Jeptha finally caught the eye of the bartender and owner, Judy. She was in her sixties and, rumor was, had moved down to Tennessee to run this bar with a local man she’d met up in Boston. Jeptha was hard pressed to imagine why someone would move to Boston in the first place, and then, having flown the coop, decide to come back and with a Yankee in tow, no less. Still, here they were. Jeptha couldn’t say that Judy appeared happy about it. Her gray hair, which looked to have never seen the inside of a beauty salon, was pulled into a loose bun from which haphazard chunks escaped, and her t-shirt, wet in spots from the ice she dumped into glasses without so much as an attempt at aim, strained over a set of sagging, ponderous boobs.

She widened her eyes at Jeptha. “Yeah?” she said.

“Hi. How’re you?”

“What do you want?”

“Um, I’ll have a Bud Light, ma’am.” Jeptha shut his mouth. She was clearly a Yankee with no time for formalities. 

“A Bud Light and what?” 

“Just the beer, ma’am.” 

“Don’t call me ma’am.”

“Okay, ma—” Jeptha cut himself off when her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “Just a beer, please.” 

“You guys are too damn polite for your own good.” She slid the bottle across the bar and nodded at the stage. “You with the band?”

“Yes, ma—” Jeptha stopped. “Yes.”

“If you guys need anything tonight, grab Lucy. She’s helping out with the tables.” 

Jeptha turned to see the Lucy she was pointing at with her chin, and the trickle of fear in his belly grew to a flood. There she was—the wavy blond hair tickling her waist where her shirt rode up from bending over to take people’s orders; the pert little nose, turned up at the end in a way that was more cute than beautiful; and her cut-off skirt hugging curves he never got to see in church, back when he used to go. Most of all, there was her smile. Every time he saw it, he fell a little bit more in love.  

Jeptha knew Lucy’s smile didn’t mean anything when it was turned to him—birth had given her a nice one and she was polite enough to use it often, but Jeptha had never been able to help the feeling he got the few times she flashed it his way. Even though her smile made others feel safe, she rarely looked as if she felt that way. She instead sported a hunted look, as wary as a deer stopping to nose through a leaf pile for acorns in the fall, the kind of deer that looked so nervous, so ready to bolt, that Jeptha could never bring himself to even sight his rifle on it. Every time, a few seconds after warmth flowed through him at the sight of her smile, he’d see that wariness on her face and realize that he may as well have been standing in the woods without a gun, for all the chance he had of getting her. Especially now. He’d heard from his sister that Lucy was leaving town, moving to Knoxville to work and go to school. At least he wouldn’t have to see her anymore, though his stomach bottomed out at the thought. 

Jeptha grabbed his beer off the counter for a much-needed sip of courage. Despite the pulsing needs of the crowd, he could feel Judy’s eyes still on him. Her lips flickered. It looked like her last real smile had occurred sometime in the 1970s, and yet here were her lips, the edges moving up subtly toward her eyes. Jeptha mumbled thanks and walked toward the stage, uncomfortably aware of being watched. He kept his head down, trying to avoid making eye contact with Lucy. If he looked at her, the fear he was feeling would travel out to his hands and make them as useful as an arthritic bird dog.

“Y’all ready?” Cody asked, as Jeptha stepped up on the stage and wedged his beer between two amps. 

Cody nodded once and then tapped his foot—one and a two and a here we go—and launched into a riff on his banjo, which Jeptha and the fiddler and the drummer raced to catch up with. His fingers were stiff and stumbling. His stage fright, which usually decreased as he played, grew into an untamable creature, fed by the fear of playing poorly in front of Lucy. He played like he was six years old, holding the mandolin for the first time—his fingers glancing off the strings, missing his intros and staring into the crowd at Lucy during what was supposed to a solo. It was the kind of pitiful performance that makes a pick-up band think they ought to start practicing.

During the fourth song, he watched, mesmerized, as Lucy’s hips snaked this way and that through the crowd toward the band. She had a small tray in her hands, on which rested five shot glasses, full of what looked tantalizingly like whiskey. She waited at the left side of the stage a few feet from Jeptha until the song ended. 

“Hey,” she said after they wound the song to a half-hearted close. “It’s Jeptha, right? Deanna’s brother?”

“Unfortunately.”

“You said it, not me,” she said, her eyebrow raised. “Judy told me to bring these over. Said y’all couldn’t sound any worse drunk than you did sober.” 

Jeptha winced. “I was hoping y’all couldn’t hear that,” he said, passing out shots to Cody and the other guys. He nodded at the tray. “Who’s that one for?” 

“Me, I think.” 

“You get to drink on the job?” 

“You are.” She wrinkled her nose at him and straightened her shoulders, clearly annoyed. Jeptha felt like a fool. “Besides, Judy said I needed to loosen up, get some better tips.” 

“You look to be doing all right to me.” 

“If you count slaps on the ass as tips, then yeah, I’m rich as hell. Cheers,” she said and tipped the shot down her throat. In his hurry to keep up with her, a few drops of whiskey went down the wrong pipe, and he coughed so hard tears welled in the corners of his eyes. 

Lucy cocked her head at him, a teasing smile on her lips. Jeptha’s insides fizzed with a longing so fierce he felt it in his fingertips. “I’ll tell Judy to make the next one a lemon drop,” she said.

“Hey, that ain’t nice,” he said to her, but in his head he was thinking, Do it again. Please, God, do it again. 

All trace of teasing dropped off Lucy’s face, and she nodded seriously. “You’ll be great. I heard you play at church back when.” 

“You did?” 

“Yep. Besides, if you get nervous, imagine all these people naked. Not me, though. I want no part of that, thank you.” 

It was the longest conversation Jeptha had ever had with Lucy. She walked away as Jeptha tried and failed to keep his mind off the much-nourished fantasy of her naked. Finally, he shook his head and tore his gaze away. He nodded thanks to Judy, who mouthed, “For what?” followed by the tiniest, coolest of smiles. He relaxed under the influence of the whiskey and the image of a naked Delnor Gilliam tapping his foot against the floor, his gray, straggly beard bouncing off his belly in time to the music. He nodded at Cody, ready to play again.

**

Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, and Globalpost, among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street’s year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists (edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan.) Holding On To Nothing is her debut novel. Find her on Twitter @ecshelburne.

Excerpted from One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow with permission of
Lake Union Publishing. Copyright © 2019 by Olivia Hawker. All rights reserved.

AFTER HE TOOK HIMSELF OFF TO JAIL

I was leading the cows to the milking shed when my pa shot Mr. Webber. It was the end of the season for blackberries, and the fence beside the shed was thick with vines my ma had planted years before. The evening air smelled of berries, rich and sweet in the way that makes you close your eyes when you breathe in the scent. You can’t help but do it; the smell takes ahold of you and calls to your heart, and it makes you think of all the good things that have passed and all the good things yet to come, so you close your eyes and shut out everything else that’s real, everything that’s drab or sorrowful, all the things that hurt you like the thorns. That’s what I was doing when I heard the shot—standing with one hand on the gate and my eyes closed, thinking about those berries and how, after milking was done, I’d pick a whole basketful and share them with my brothers and baby sister, sweet and good with cream on top, the cream still warm from the cows.

But the moment the shot cracked the air, I opened my eyes and my hand. The pail of grain fell, and the cows pushed me aside to lip up what was spilled. I knew right then that something terrible had happened, something that would change us all forever. And I knew it was my fault—at least some—for I’d be the one who told me pa that the calf was missing, and he’d gone off to search for it. If I’d never told him, if I’d gone to find that calf myself, it would have been me who seen what no one else should have seen, and I would have left it all alone. Never said a word, just drifted off like a ghost through the dusk, with no one any wiser.

But instead, it was Pa who found them, under the poplars by the river, and now Substance Webber is dead.

I can’t say just how I knew it was trouble when I heard that shot. Pa fired his Henry rifle all the time, at coyotes and eagles who came for our stock, and at bears to shoo them away from the places where my brothers and sisters played. Maybe I heard a sound in the rifle’s voice. Maybe it was like a shout of pain torn from my father’s throat, worse than the time his horse slipped and fell on him, and his leg was broken in two places. Maybe it was just because my ma had been missing all evening, and I finally wised up enough to think it strange. She slipped off toward the river once she saw that all her children were fed and the shores were underway. It was a think she’d done for days now, but until the rifle sounded, I’d never thought twice about it. I was big enough to care for the little ones without being told.

As soon as I knew deep down in my heart that something had gone awry, I slapped the cows on their backsides to hurry them into the pen, and then I ran to the house, where the little ones were putting on their nightdresses. I said, everybody into the bedroom, and don’t coe out till I say so. They complained, because they always do, but they did as I told them. They always do that, too. I wanted them shut safely away when the trouble came up from the riverside to our little gray house. I didn’t want them to see the look on our pa’s face when he returned.

When Pa came back through the twilight, he was paler than a bad-omen moon. He walked with a stagger, like he was struck by some illness, and his eyes seemed to see nothing that lay before him—only what lay behind, what had caused him to raise his rifle and pull the trigger before he could think any better. He held the gun as if it was a foreign thing, and too distasteful to bear, one-handed by its stick with the muzzle dragging through the tall grass. Behind him came my mother, hair unbound and weeping into her hands.

I went outside to meet them both. I was scared all at once for them—afraid one of them should fall, like they were fragile, breakable things. The sight of me brought Pa from his daze. He stared at my face for a long time, and it was hard not to look away, for I’d never seen such agony in him before, and I knew right then that he was only a man, and mortal. No girl likes to realize that her father will die someday. Much less does she like to know that grief could be enough to kill him.

Beulah, he said, I done something wrong. I said, I know it, Pa.

He nodded. Pa never questioned this way I have—the knowing that comes to me from the movement of the wind or the scent of blackberries, or the sound of a gunshot by the river. 

He said, I got to go now, over to the Webber’s place, and tell that what all happened. And then I got to ride to town and turn myself over to the sheriff. It’s the only righteous thing to be done.

My mother wailed at that and staggered toward him, but Pa stepped back. He held up his free hand, a wall between them. It only made Ma weep more piteously.

I said, I’ll saddle Tiger for you, and he answered, No not Tiger. He’s a fast horse. I can’t say how long I’ll be gone, Little Mite, and you may have need of a fast horse, by and by. You’ll need the saddle, too. I don’t know if the sheriff will return my horse to my farm and my family. I’ve never done this before. Could be a man forfeits his right to his horse when he…when he does what I just done. Put a bridle on Meg; I’ll take her to town bareback.

I still liked to hear him call me Little Mite, even though I was thirteen and not little anymore. And I had never felt older or steadier that I did in that moment, when I stepped away from my parents to pull the old, slow mare from her paddock and ready her so she could carry off Pa to his fate. My mother was still weeping, her cries loud and long like the peal of a bell.

The pain in her voice was heavy to bear. I would have cried, too, if I’d had the lee, for I already felt the badness of it all, the distance between my mother and father opening wider like a crack in the earth. You’ll fall into that cold, damp darkness if you aren’t careful where to set your feet. 

But there was work to be done, and no time for crying. Not if we hoped to get by without Pa.

In time, my mother stopped weeping and huddled on the doorstep. In the first silver creeping of moonlight, she looked smaller and frailer than she ever had before. She hugged her body and rocked as if it was a baby she held in her arms, not herself—and she stared at my father, hungry, desperate for one look from him, one word. He gave neither.

I handed Meg’s reins to my pa, and he passed the gun to me. You how to use the rifle, he said.

I nodded. I wasn’t handy with a gun—I never had needed to be—but it was simple enough.

That much I knew. 

He said, I’ll send word, soon as I’m able. It’s up to you to think of something to tell the little ones, something they’ll understand.

I said, Is there anything you want me to tell Ma?

He stood listening to the crickets in the long grass. He wrapped Meg’s reins around his fist and tightened it till his knuckles blanched white. Then he took a deep breath, savoring the smell of his homestead and the coolness of a soft Wyoming night. He closed his eyes and stood like that for a long while. When he opened his eyes again, Pa said, In time, I’ll want you to tell your ma how sorry I am, and that I love her still. But that time ain’t come yet. Not yet.

I watched him ride away down the rutted path through our pasture, east toward the Webber farm. When night’s gray shadows hid him from view, I turned my back on Pa and face the house, and my mother wilting on the steps.

I went to her and unwrapped her hands from around her thin body, and pulled her to her feet, where she swayed. We didn’t speak, for I knew she had no words yet, and wouldn’t for days to come. That’s the way with Ma. Whenever a sorrow or a fear comes along to put a crack in her heart, she goes quiet—the only time she ever does. I knew she would say nothing while she was shrouded in grief and remorse, just as I knew that after he took himself to jail, my pa would send word and forgive her.

But until forgiveness came, I had to run the farm on my own. There was no one else who could do it. I wasn’t afraid. I haven’t found anything yet in this life that’s worth being afraid of.

**

Through unexpected characters and vivid prose, Olivia Hawker explores the varied
landscape of the human spirit. Olivia’s interest in geneal­ogy often informs her writing:
her two novels, The Ragged Edge of Night and One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow,
are based on true stories found within her own family tree. She lives in the San Juan
Islands of Washington State, where she homesteads at Longlight, a one-acre microfarm
dedicated to sustainable permaculture practices. For more information, visit
www.hawkerbooks.com/olivia.

The following excerpt from PIGS was reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Red Hen Press:

Excerpt from PIGS

The pigs ate everything. Kitchen scraps. Bitter lettuce from the garden. The stale and sticky contents of lunch boxes kids brought home from school. Toe nail clippings. Hair balls pulled up from the drain. After the pigs were done, there weren’t even any teeth left over, not even any metal from cavities filled long ago. 

They lived in a pen out back. The land was rocky but spacious, and the pen had been tucked in a corner out of sight for more years than any of the children could remember. It was made out of wood, gray, splintered boards nailed together in a haphazard way. Every five feet, the wood was anchored by posts. When you stood by the fence the pigs lumbered over grunting and stuck their snouts out between the rickety slats. It wasn’t always that they expected food. Sometimes they just wanted their snouts scratched. Sometimes they just grunted happily and settled back down in the shade. There were six of them. They never fought. They seemed to smile when you approached. But you had to be quick. If you brought a bucket of slop and poured it out too slowly without moving your hand away, you never knew what could happen.

Luisa was missing a finger. Not an important one. Just her left hand pinky, where she hadn’t moved away quickly enough one hot summer afternoon when she was feeding them shoes. It was summer every afternoon there. Soft and lazy and slow. The pinky came off in one clean bite before she even realized what was happening. She left with a feeling of shame, like it had been her fault the pig grabbed her finger. She wrapped her hand in her skirt and kept her mouth shut, and the stub didn’t start hurting until she lay down for the night. 

The land was actually an island. The island was surrounded by water that glinted green in the sun and clouded to gray in the shade. Some might have let the pigs run free, feral among the scrubby bushes. The pigs could have rooted happily for mushrooms or truffles, found entire brambles of berries to eat and maybe left the children alone. They could have gobbled up the entire world’s detritus without anyone’s help. But the grownups preferred the pigs confined. They preferred the relative safety of the fence. 

Luisa had lived on the island forever, or for as long as she could remember, which was the same as forever. There were other children too, three of them. Andrew, who sang in his sleep and had straw colored hair. Mimi, who was older, or at least taller, than the rest, and who liked to pretend she knew much more about the world than anyone else, and who couldn’t grow her hair long no matter how hard she tried. There was even a toddler. They called her Natasha. Her head was covered with loose blonde curls. She couldn’t have been more than three, and she giggled every time she heard the grunting of the pigs.

They were all afraid of the gray water, of the sea in a mood of despair. It wrapped the island like a scarf made of grief. It made you choke with tears to touch it.

The children slept together in the same room. It was a whitewashed room in a one-room hut, and they each had a space on the floor. It was comfortable and clean, and they were so used to each other that they never felt crowded. Mimi sometimes said she was getting older and needed more space, but the rest of them were happy to shove over and let her have it. They didn’t have beds, but they’d never heard of beds, and who needed beds anyway? They had blankets. They had pillows. They had mice that skittered along the edges of the room and ate breadcrumbs from the tips of their fingers.

The children ate fish for dinner every night. They picked berries and searched for bird eggs and kept watch from high rocks for sails and garbage on the horizon. Except for Luisa. The distance always blurred for her. Sometimes she wished she could get out on the water, get up close to those ships and find out where they came from. There was no way to tell from far away. But it was just a dream, and she never mentioned it to any of the others. Even in her head, she couldn’t figure out how to make a seaworthy craft.

It didn’t take long for Luisa’s finger to heal into a nice, neat stump. She rubbed it sometimes, and whispered to herself that it was time to grow up and stop being clumsy. She tripped over things easily. She didn’t notice roots or loose rocks or places where the earth buckled. She’d kick the ground in frustration and end up hurting her own foot. It was her fault she’d lost a finger. The pigs were fast, but if she’d been a little more agile they’d have snapped at air. She wondered what she’d tasted like. She hoped she’d tasted good, but not so good that the pig would want more. She tried to remember which one it was that had snapped at her, but even though she was pretty sure it was the one with black spots, she wasn’t sure enough to say.

Sometimes the children tested what the pigs would eat. The leather flaps of shoe tongues. The bent frames of glasses. Mardi Gras beads. Tin cans. Pistols. Cap guns. There seemed to be no limit to their appetite. The children would stand a few feet away from the fence and toss whatever they were testing high into the air. The pigs moved with an unexpected grace, opening their long mouths and catching whatever came sailing down directly between their teeth. The pigs were remarkable. The children watched them with amazement, their own mouths open, their hands, now empty, coming together of their own will to clap. Hub caps. The tassels off bicycle handlebars. Empty jars of mayonnaise. Gone, all gone in seconds.

The grownups on the island frowned at the children and never even pretended to help them with their chores. They drank espresso and smoked cigarettes and plugged their noses dramatically whenever the children got too close. As far as the children could tell, the grownups never cooked. 

“It’s not that they don’t know how,” Mimi said. She grabbed every opportunity to be the expert. “It’s that they don’t need to. Food appears. Why should they slave over a hot stove?”

“But what do they do?” Luisa said. “What do they talk about all day long?”

“Do they ever watch the pigs?” Andrew asked. 

Natasha gulped and puffed out her toddler’s cheeks.

Nobody had the courage to ask. When Natasha fell into the gray water and came out covered in spots and filled with an unquenchable thirst for a parent that even Mimi couldn’t solve, the grownups flinched at the sight of her. 

“What are they here for?” Luisa said. Sometimes she thought, “Maybe we should just feed them to the pigs.”

**

Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novel City of Ghosts and, most recently, PIGS (Red Hen Press). Her honors include the James W. Hall Prize for Fiction, an Artist Trust GAP award, and a Jack Straw Fellowship. In 2016 she was named Runner Up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Best of the Net Anthology, and Catamaran, among others. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington, where she teaches at Whitman College.  

Excerpted from The Future of Another Timeline copyright © 2019 by Annalee Newitz.

Irvine, Alta California (1992 C. E.)

Drums beat in the distance like an amplified pulse. People streamed over the dirt road, leather boots laced to their knees, eyes ringed in kohl, ears and lips studded with precious metals. Some gathered in an open square below the steep path to the amphitheater, making a bonfire out of objects stolen from their enemies. The smoke reeked of something ancient and horrific; materials far older than humanity were burning. A rusty sunset painted everyone in blood, and shrieks around the flames mixed with faraway chanting.

It could have been Rome under Nero. It could have been Samarkand when the Sogdians fled. It could have been Ataturk’s new Istanbul, or a feast day in Chaco Canyon. The technologies were industrial, Neolithic, and medieval. The screams were geochronologically neutral.

I paused, smelling the toxins, watching a woman with jet-black lips and blue hair pretend to eat a spider. One of her companions laughed. “Michelle, you are so gross! This isn’t an Ozzy concert!” They paused at the ticket booths to flip off the Vice Fighters, a gang of conservative protesters waving signs covered in Bible quotes. Some of them were burning CDs in a garbage can, and the stench of melting plastic formed a noxious bubble around their demonstration.

The Machine had not delivered me to an ancient war, nor to an anti-imperialist celebration. I was at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in 1992, deep in the heart of Orange County, Alta California. Soon I’d be seeing one of the greatest punk bands of the decade. But I wasn’t here for history tourism. Somewhere in this rowdy concert crowd, a dangerous conspiracy was unfolding. I needed to find out who was behind it. If these bastards succeeded, they would destroy time travel, locking us into one version of history forever.

I bought a lawn seat and raced up the winding pedestrian walkway to the seating area, lurid with stadium lights. The theater was relatively small and open to the sky, with a steep grade of loge seats above the prized orchestra section next to the stage. The lawn formed a green semicircle above it all, pocked with mud puddles and beer cans. Still, even up here, the air vibrated with anticipation for the headliner. Spotlights sent a cluster of beams racing around the stage.

Grape Ape’s lead singer Glorious Garcia strutted out alone, sequins on her tattered skirt shimmering in the glare. She let out a furious howl. “HOLA, BITCHES! IF ANYONE CALLED YOU A SLUT TODAY, SAY IT WITH ME! SLUT SLUT SLUT!” All around me, women joined the chant. They wore battered combat boots, shredded jeans, and wrecked dresses. They had tattoos and black nail polish and looked like warrior queens from another planet. Tangled hair flashed in every possible artificial color. “YOU SLUTS ARE BEAUTIFUL!” Glorious fisted the air and aimed her mic at the crowd, still chanting, “SLUT SLUT SLUT!” Back when I went to this concert for the first time, I was an angry sixteen-year-old with too many piercings for suburbia, wearing a military jacket over a 1950s dress.

Now I was forty-seven on the books, fifty-five with travel time.

My eyes flicked to the things I never would have seen back then. Everyone looked so scrubbed and affluent. Our rebel fashions were cobbled together from the expensive stuff we’d seen in some New York Times story about grunge. But what really jolted me was the way people occupied themselves as they waited for the music to start. Nobody was texting or taking selfies. And without phones, people didn’t know what to do with their eyes. I didn’t either. I watched a guy in a Dead Kennedys shirt urging a hip flask on a woman who was already so drunk she could barely stand in her platform creepers. She stumbled against him, swigging, and he gave a thumbs-up sign to his pal. The punk scene, once my inspiration, now looked like a bunch of future bankers and tech executives learning how to harass women.

The rest of the band charged on stage, Maricela Hernandez’s guitar squealing over the clatter of drums and bass fuzz. Cigarette smoke and sound merged into a throbbing haze around us. From my distant perch, Glorious was a tiny figure with the biggest voice in the world.

“THIS IS A SONG ABOUT THE GIRLS FROM MEXICO WHO ARE PICKING FRUIT IN YOUR IRVINE COMPANY FARMS! LET’S RIP DOWN THE FUCKING BORDER NET AND STOP THE KILLING!”

That took me back. In 1991, a huge group of refugees fleeing Mexico had drowned in the Gulf of California, just as they’d almost reached the safety of U.S. soil in Baja. They’d gotten tangled in offshore nets the border patrol set up to stop illegal immigrants.

The music tore through me until it merged with muscle and bone. I had a job to do, but I couldn’t move. Grape Ape was the only thing here that hadn’t been warped by my disillusionment. They still had the power to replace my cynicism with a feeling that careened between hope and outrage. Strobe lights churned the darkness, and the audience frenzy reached beyond fandom, struggling toward something else. Something revolutionary.

Then I felt a broad hand on my upper arm, squeezing a little too hard, and a large male body pressed against my back. I tried to elbow him and wriggle away, but the still-invisible stranger held me in place. He leaned down to whisper-yell in my ear, blotting out the music. “I know you must have many daughters at your age, and you are worried about their future.” His voice was smooth, and his warm breath smelled like lavender and mint. With his free hand, he started massaging my neck as he continued to grip my arm. “That’s why you come to places like this. To find a better way for women. We want that too. Maybe you’ll look past your prejudice against men and read our zine.”

At last he released me and I whirled to face him. He pulled his zine from a rumpled Kinko’s bag. Grainy Xeroxed images of women in chains adorned the cover, and letters torn from magazines spelled out the title: COLLEGE IS A LIE. Flipping through the pages of ten-point Courier font and smeary cartoons, I scanned a few typical punk rants against suburban brainwashing: college teaches conformity, turns you into a corporate drone, destroys true art, blah blah blah. But there was a weird strand of gender politics in it. Over and over, the anonymous authors preached that college “destroys feminine freedoms inherited from our ancestors on the plains of Africa” and “is anti-uterus.” I scanned a paragraph:

Women are naturally empathic, and college tortures them with artificial rationality. Millions of years of evolution have led men to thrive in the toolmaking worlds of science and politics, and women to become queens of emotional expression and the nurturing arts. College denies this biological reality, which is why so many women feel bad about themselves. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Fuck college! It’s time for liberation!

The entire zine was about why women should drop out of college. I looked sharply at the man, a nasty retort on my tongue, but his face stole my words. It couldn’t be. I would never forget those features, so perfectly formed it was as if he’d been grown in a vat full of men’s magazines. I’d last seen him in 1880, at a lecture on suppressing vice in New York City. He was one of the young men clustered around Anthony Comstock, lapping up the famous moral crusader’s invective about the evils of birth control and abortion. Later, at the protest, he’d given me a beautiful smile before punching me in the chest. Gasping for air, I’d dismissed him as one of the many YMCA boys under Comstock’s spell. Now it appeared he was something more—a traveler. I feigned interest in the zine and shot another glance at him. The man might be a few years younger than he’d been in 1880, so maybe this was his first time meeting me. His blond hair was currently spiked in an embarrassing imitation of Billy Idol.

He took my silence as an opening, and leaned closer again, touching my shoulder. “I can tell you don’t quite understand, but you’re intrigued. My friends and I are here to help if you need us.” He gestured to a few other men, all wearing black armbands around their biceps, handing out zines to other women in the crowd. Despite the distraction of Grape Ape onstage, they’d managed to get quite a few people to take one. Fear filled my guts with ice. This guy and his buddies were planting ideas, playing a long game. Trying to eliminate choices for these women in the future. It was a textbook example of a forbidden traveler’s art: editing the timeline.

I was looking for anti-travel activists, people who wanted to shut down the Machines. It was hardly the kind of political stance a traveler would take. But everything about this guy was off. So I followed at a safe distance, watching him whisper in women’s ears, pointing them away from one of their few pathways to power. Eventually, at the very edge of the loge section, the black armband men came together. I stood nearby and bummed a cigarette from an old crusty punk, catching snatches of the traveler’s conversation.

“I think we converted a few today. Good work.” That was the Billy Idol guy, the one I’d seen over a century ago in Comstock’s orbit.

“Do you think we’ll be able to make the edit before time stops?” another man asked.

“We may need to go back a century.”

“How long until we have our rights back? This is taking too long. I think we should hit the Machines now.”

The crowd began to roar, burying their voices.

A terrifying hypothesis coalesced in my mind. There’s only one reason why a traveler might want to lock the timeline, and that’s if he planned to make a final, lasting edit that could not be undone. I looked at the zine again. It was exactly the kind of propaganda that Comstockers would use to revert the secret edits made by people like me and my colleagues in the Daughters of Harriet.

The Daughters often debated whether we were working directly against another group. Even when it seemed like we made significant progress in the past, the present remained stubbornly unchanged. But we had no evidence of oppositional reverts, other than our constant frustration. It was like we were fighting with ghosts.

Now the ghosts had become men.

The Comstocker was delivering a final rallying speech. He gestured at the loge section. “This is what happens when men become victims. But once we take control of the Machine, nobody will remember this world.”

At that moment he looked over and saw me listening. His face went ugly and asymmetrical: he’d recognized me, and realized I wasn’t a temporal local.

“Get her! She’s one of them!” He pointed. Suddenly, four men with black armbands and pale skin had eyes on me.

I took off running, edging my way past the security guards, aiming for the mosh pit. Grape Ape roared through a song I couldn’t hear over the thump of blood in my ears. My momentum was swallowed by a swell of bodies, diverting our chase into a chaotic circle of flailing limbs. Women who smelled like cloves and disintegrating nylon rammed into us. The Billy Idol guy was so close that I could see the acid-wash streaks in his jeans when he grabbed me by the collar. “Get your hands off me!” I shouted. “I have friends at the Chronology Academy, and I guarantee they won’t like the way you’re trying to change the timeline with your shitty Comstocker zine. They’ll send you back to your home time and you’ll never travel again.” Onstage, Maricela shredded a solo. I glared and hoped he believed me, because there was no guarantee the Chronology Academy would agree that he’d violated regulations. Or that they wouldn’t catch me doing the same thing. But the threat worked. He released me with a sneer.

“You misandrist bitch!” He was close enough that I could smell his strangely sweet breath again. “You and your sisters are a genetic dead end. Next time I see you downstream, I’ll make sure you’re punished for spreading lewdness and vice.” Then he shoved me into a young woman who bounced away and smashed back into him with a maniacal cackle. Screeching and spinning with her arms out, she battered the Comstocker over and over until he fought his way out of the mosh pit and disappeared into the crowd. Good riddance—at least for now. I moved with the circle, bumped and bruised and safe inside its performative violence. Bursts of light from the stage illuminated the Comstocker rounding up his black armband pals and heading for the exit. Hopefully I’d scared them a little, though it had been stupid to reveal myself like that.

At least I’d confirmed Berenice’s report at the last Daughters of Harriet meeting. She’d traveled to early 1992 in Los Angeles, gathering data at ground zero for the anti-travel movement. One of her sources said he’d met some extremists hanging around in the alternative music scene. I suggested this concert would be a good place to look for them. This particular Grape Ape show had been famously controversial, called out by the Vice Fighters as a gateway to hell and by Rolling Stone as the most anticipated show of spring. Everyone would be here, especially if they considered themselves radicals.

Of course, I neglected to tell the Daughters that my younger self had been at the concert too. They never would have agreed to send me if I’d mentioned that little detail. Nobody knew what happened to travelers who met their younger selves; it was both illegal and so morally offensive that most scholars avoided the topic. The only detailed description came from a medieval manuscript about the life of an old, impoverished traveler who took the Machine back thirty years to advise himself to save money. When he returned to his present, the traveler found that his house had become a beautiful mansion. But then his bones began to break themselves, and he was plagued by attacks from a cloud of tiny demons that flew around his head unceasingly.

I wasn’t worried about demonic fantasies. They were a staple of medieval manuscripts, along with women giving birth to monsters. I was thinking about evidence-based threats to the timeline, our only timeline, whose natural stability emerged from perpetual revision.

The woman who’d harried the Comstocker earlier was spinning back toward me, and my stomach dropped. I’d been too rattled to recognize her before. Now I could clearly recognize Heather, one of my friends from high school. She barked her crazy laugh again, and I could see the Wonder Woman Returns T-shirt clearly under the lacy bodice of her dress. We’d all been obsessed with the Tim Burton Wonder Woman movies in high school, with their badass heroine in fishnets and leather.

I looked around in a panic. Was I here too? I thought I’d been in the loge section during the concert, which was why I’d avoided that area. But my recollections of tonight were murky. Maybe that was the problem. My younger self seemed so distant that I’d figured— stupidly—it would be easy to avoid her. I kept searching for my lost self until the spotlights poured illumination across the steeply angled seats and I caught a brief glimpse of her—me—with my two best friends at the time. Soojin was on my right, frowning with concentration as she studied Maricela’s fingering technique. And there, on my left, was the person who had been my best friend since we were little kids. The two of us were scream-singing along with Glorious Garcia, fists in the air. Seeing us from a distance, I realized how our closeness had even manifested in dressing like each other. We wore the same trashed vintage dresses and combat boots. People were always mistaking us for sisters back then, which wasn’t far from the truth. We were angry riot grrl clones, except for the hair.

A pasty white boy grabbed Heather roughly and she stumbled toward him, a red lipstick smile bright in her brown face. The boy’s right ear was crusted with safety pins and dried blood. Piercing injury. Very punk rock.

What was his name? A jagged shard of imagery was lodged in my mind, painful and opaque. Oh fuck. The slurry of psychological muck that usually buried my high school memories was gone, leaving behind a crisp picture of what that kid’s face would look like in three hours, when it was covered in blood. I stared at him as he twitched to the music, angry and alive. I had to intervene. If I didn’t, something horrific was going to happen. Many horrific things. And they would all lead, in the end, to a broken and beloved body, robbed of the consciousness that hurled it off a bridge.

Now that I was here, maybe I could undo that whole narrative and make everything right. I muscled my way out of the orchestra section, away from Heather’s laugh and my own age-reversed face, back down the path to the parking lot. Passing the merch table, I felt a painful twist of nostalgia as I read Grape Ape’s once-familiar slogans: MAKE BAJA MEXICAN AGAIN! SUCK MY PLASTIC DICK! SLUTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! At last I reached my rental car. I’d made it out before the encore, which should give me enough time to make an edit. As I turned the key in the ignition, recklessness oozed into me. Had I really come back because of Berenice’s report, or had I been hoping subconsciously for something like this to happen? Some excuse to intervene in my own past?

I wished I could remember my favorite shortcut from thirty-eight years ago, through Irvine’s palimpsest of malls, churches, and walled subdivisions. I’d have to brave traffic. Merging on the 405 freeway, I slowed down and considered what the hell I was doing. The Daughters of Harriet were waiting for me back in 2022, and I needed to tell them about the Comstockers. I should be headed back to the Machine. But this was an emergency. I had to save that boy’s life.

**

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their bookScatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.

Excerpted from Rebel Girls by Elizabeth Keenan. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Keenan. Published by Inkyard Press.

5

There was a goth girl in front of my locker. Or, more accurately, she was by her locker and trying to get it open, but completely blocking access to mine. She wrestled with the combination a few more times before banging on her locker, as though that would help open it up, her teased-out dyed-black hair moving stiffly in time with each loud thump of fist-to-locker. Under her white pancake makeup, her cheeks were red from the struggle.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, trying to maneuver around her so I could open my own locker and grab my stuff for physics. Mrs. Breaux didn’t accept late work. Last week, she’d even assigned us extra work to keep us occupied while school was canceled for three days during Hurricane Andrew. Thankfully, the storm didn’t damage Baton Rouge too much—not like Florida, and some of the parishes closer to the coast—but I still had to finish my homework by the light of a battery-operated hurricane lamp. Mrs. Breaux told us that it was light enough during the day, and daylight hours provided more than enough time to get homework done. She didn’t care that most of us had to help our parents clear up yard debris during the day.

So if Mrs. Breaux didn’t give us extra time due to a hurricane, she wasn’t going to care that I couldn’t find my homework folder on a random Friday when the weather was sunny and clear.

“Oh, hey, Red!” The girl turned to me with a bright smile that clashed with her almost-black lipstick and crinkled the corners of her eyes, where eyeliner swooped out like the Death character from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Her full-on goth look was a little outside what anyone could normally get away with in terms of hair or makeup, but the girl’s perkiness overrode any sense of the supposed darkness within.

“Hey…?” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Karen? Kandace? Kelly? What was her name? I vaguely remembered her from last year, pre-goth, but the transformation had overridden most of her identifying characteristics.

“Wisteria,” she answered, rocking back on her heels with a nod of finality.

That one was definitely made-up. Like all the goths’ names.

“I’m Athena.” You would have thought my name was made-up, too. But, no, my mom had definitely embraced her love of the classics when she named Helen and me.

“Oh, I know,” she said brightly. “I just like your hair.” At least someone besides Melissa did. Helen said it looked like I’d been assaulted by the Kool-Aid Man, and my dad had just shaken his head when he saw me get off the plane from Eugene with it freshly dyed red.

Wisteria looked back at her locker. “D’you have any idea what’s wrong with this thing? I never had any trouble last year?”

She said everything like a question, a trait I didn’t normally associate with goths. Then again, I hadn’t spoken to most of them. They tended to hang out behind the school smoking clove cigarettes and practicing sullen ennui.

I suspected Wisteria’s lack of trouble last year came from not actually locking her locker, as most people didn’t. I also suspected her current troubles came from Melissa, who liked to mess with people by casually twisting locks as she walked by. Wisteria’s proximity to my locker was a dead giveaway.

“Do you know your combination?” I felt obligated to help, since Wisteria’s struggle was most likely my best friend’s fault. We didn’t have much time between classes, but I couldn’t just bounce off to next period and leave her to suffer.

She nodded. “Yeah, but it just doesn’t work.”

I was going to have to get back at Melissa for this one. Messing with people’s lockers seemed a lot less funny when it was causing stress to someone who seemed like she didn’t deserve it. Not that anyone did, really.

“You need to twist right twice before your first number,” I told her, “then twist left past zero to your next number, and then right again to the last number.”

Wisteria tried again after watching me open mine. “It worked!” She jumped up and down enthusiastically. “Thanks!”

“No problem.” I grabbed my stuff for physics and shoved my religion notebook and calc binder into my locker.

Wisteria paused for a second and squinted at me curiously. “Uh, Red?”

“Mmm-hmm?” I half listened to Wisteria as I continued to search through my locker for my physics homework, which seemed to have gone missing among the chaos of my possessions.

“Uh, this is super awkward, but, I wanted to thank you and Melissa for all your pro-choice activism this summer?” Wisteria said, leaning in so that her voice dropped to an enthusiastic whisper. “It’s a really big deal? Because no one in this school gets it?”

I stopped my search for my physics folder and turned to give Wisteria my full attention. Two things confused me about this conversation: first, I’d had no idea that Wisteria was pro-choice. In theory, I knew there might be other prochoice people at our school, but that theory was, until now, unproven. The second puzzling thing was that she had no real reason to thank me.

Everybody knew about Melissa’s work on the front lines, but I couldn’t take credit for being a badass when my contributions to the pro-choice cause had maxed out at writing an essay for the zine Melissa handed out at the protests and buying a Rock for Choice T-shirt via mail order. Oh, and I also considered keeping Helen away from the protests as part of my civic duty.

I shook my head. “You’ve got it wrong. I totally support Melissa, but I was in Eugene at my mom’s all summer.”

“But your sister?” Wisteria looked at me with a face that mirrored my own confusion, tilting her head to one side and scrunching up her face so much that the curlicue eyeliner crinkled in on itself at the corners of her eyes.

“Helen was in Eugene with me all summer?” Now I was doing the question-voice thing, too, and tilted my head to mirror hers.

“Oh. Oh.” Wisteria’s eyes widened with an epiphany that I clearly wasn’t in on. “Never mind? I think I was given some bad intel?”

Okay, now that my sister was in the mix of a sentence involving “bad intel,” I needed to know what it was. I suspected it had something to do with that weird interaction between Leah and Helen almost two weeks ago, but since then, Helen had clammed up whenever I asked her about it, saying it was no big deal. She eventually resorted to putting on headphones and playing CDs on her Discman during Hurricane Andrew’s landfall so she wouldn’t have to talk to me. Then she’d ignored me all weekend, saying my cello practice was annoying her, and wound up going to her friend Sara’s house. Whatever was going on, she didn’t want my help.

“Wisteria, can you please tell me what you heard?” I pleaded. I wanted to be patient, but it felt like Wisteria had an aversion to being direct. And while it wasn’t Wisteria’s fault that I felt so in the dark, I’d had enough of being the only one who didn’t know what was going on.

“Really, Red, I think I just got confused,” she said with a hesitant smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you!” She paused again, and her smile faded. “It’s just—I heard that you and your sister were more, like, involved with the protests than that. Like, you may want to talk with your sister.” She widened her eyes with emphasis, like I was supposed to understand.

“Oooh-kaay.” I shrugged my backpack up on my shoulder. I usually let Helen fight her own battles, but this seemed serious. After school, I’d check in with her to see if she was all right.

But right now, physics—and the Cute Boy—called.

**

Elizabeth Keenan lives in New York City with her husband and small colony of well-behaved cats. She has a PhD in punk rock, which is as good/bad/cool as it sounds and resulted in lots of academic publications on punk and indie rock, third wave feminism, and gender and sexuality, including the most-downloaded article of all time at the journal Women and Music (which is both impressive and brought her zero dollars). She has been interviewed as an expert about grunge for CBS, about Riot Grrrl for NPR and Vice, and about third wave feminism for The Establishment. Her first novel, Rebel Girls, will be published in 2019 on Inkyard Press. When she’s not writing, she generally spends her time running along the Hudson and helping people navigate the terrifying waters of NYC real estate, because real artists have day jobs. You can follow her @badcoverversion.