Podcasts about aqueduct press

Main Fiction: "The Female of the Species" by Tara CampbellThis story was first published in Luna Station Quarterly, November 2013.Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She's the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and three collections: Circe's Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, and Political AF: A Rage Collection. Her fourth collection, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection, is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in 2021.Narrated by Tatiana Grey.Tatiana is a critically acclaimed actress of stage, screen, and the audio booth. She has been nominated for dozens of fancy awards but hasn’t won a single damned thing. She went to NYU and lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can find her at tatianagrey.com.Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/starshipsofa. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Holly Wade Matter joins the show today, as we talk about her new book "Damned Pretty Things", now available from Aqueduct Press and your local bookseller. Holly talks about the post-punk scene in Seattle, the perils of growing up with such a devilishly handsome younger brother, and how creative persistence pays off.Then we tune in to 70's AM radio for a breakdown of Short People, Randy's one-hit-wonder. There was never such a devoted sister - thanks for spinning Holly!

Holly Wade Matter joins the show today, as we talk about her new book "Damned Pretty Things", now available from Aqueduct Press and your local bookseller. Holly talks about the post-punk scene in Seattle, the perils of growing up with such a devilishly handsome younger brother, and how creative persistence pays off.Then we tune in to 70's AM radio for a breakdown of Short People, Randy's one-hit-wonder. There was never such a devoted sister - thanks for spinning Holly!

Holly Wade Matter joins the show today, as we talk about her new book "Damned Pretty Things", now available from Aqueduct Press and your local bookseller. Holly talks about the post-punk scene in Seattle, the perils of growing up with such a devilishly handsome younger brother, and how creative persistence pays off.Then we tune in to 70's AM radio for a breakdown of Short People, Randy's one-hit-wonder. There was never such a devoted sister - thanks for spinning Holly!

There are many places to hide strange nature. Mountaintop snows. Undersea trenches. In your pocket. Thanks to The Pine Hill Haints for permission to play their song. You should get to know them. Visit thepinehillhaints.com to learn more.Hidden lore poetry by Hal Y. Zhang. Hal Y. Zhang is a lapsed physicist who splits her time between ghosts of her once-green plants and the Internet, where she writes at halyzhang.com. Her language-and-loss chapbook AMNESIA was published by Newfound, and her women-with-sharp-things collection Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Arms is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press.

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times. Gary talks with Hugo and Nebula Award winner Suzy McKee Charnas about the delights of a public library during lockdown, her own pioneering work in feminist SF and vampire fiction, a new novel about Bram Stoker, returning to the reliable work of Poul Anderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas A. Disch, and Joanna Russ, and her own forthcoming titles from Aqueduct Press. Books mentioned include: The Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor Reluctant Voyagers by Elisabeth Vonarburg Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens Comet's Tale: How the Dog I Rescued Saved My Life by Steven D. Wolf Into Oblivion: An Icelandic Thriller by Arnaldur Indridason Paper Sun by S.J. Rozan Night of the Jaguar by Michael Gruber

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves. The monster has no heart. Mary has two. There is the one she keeps in her bureau— wrapped up in silk and parchment, burnt about the edges and stinking of salt. It is the heart of the man who was her lover and it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest. That is a mangled and un-pretty thing, but she takes it out of her chest sits it beside the other: two hearts on a writing desk. The vibrations send the papers flying. Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She's sold nearly 50 short stories to markets like Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons. Several novellas and a collection of essays on food and horror have sold to various small presses. She is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University, and Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is her second poetry collection. The first, Chemical Letters, was written while studying for her PhD (in science communication) and is about a woman who spends her afterlife in the periodic table. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter/Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves. The monster has no heart. Mary has two. There is the one she keeps in her bureau— wrapped up in silk and parchment, burnt about the edges and stinking of salt. It is the heart of the man who was her lover and it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest. That is a mangled and un-pretty thing, but she takes it out of her chest sits it beside the other: two hearts on a writing desk. The vibrations send the papers flying. Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She's sold nearly 50 short stories to markets like Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons. Several novellas and a collection of essays on food and horror have sold to various small presses. She is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University, and Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is her second poetry collection. The first, Chemical Letters, was written while studying for her PhD (in science communication) and is about a woman who spends her afterlife in the periodic table. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter/Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves. The monster has no heart. Mary has two. There is the one she keeps in her bureau— wrapped up in silk and parchment, burnt about the edges and stinking of salt. It is the heart of the man who was her lover and it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest. That is a mangled and un-pretty thing, but she takes it out of her chest sits it beside the other: two hearts on a writing desk. The vibrations send the papers flying. Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She's sold nearly 50 short stories to markets like Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons. Several novellas and a collection of essays on food and horror have sold to various small presses. She is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University, and Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is her second poetry collection. The first, Chemical Letters, was written while studying for her PhD (in science communication) and is about a woman who spends her afterlife in the periodic table. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter/Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anya Johanna DeNiro lives in St. Paul. Her fiction has appeared in Catapult, One Story, Minnesota Monthly, and elsewhere. She’s currently at work on a Young Adult novel entitled My Heart Is an Unslain Dragon. Her novella City of a Thousand Feelings is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in the winter of 2019.   LINKS @adeniro on Twitter AqueductPress.com   Upcoming Events: Laura will be reading at the Startled By JOY 2019 poetry reading and open mic on October 6th, 2019. The event takes place from 5:30 to 7:30 PM at the Troubadour Wine Bar, 2827 Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. Michael is teaching a class on barrel-aged beer on November 19th at Zymurgy Brewing on Main Street in Menomonie, Wisconsin   Anya’s Readings: Take Pills and Wait for Hips – 10:40 City of a Thousand Feelings – 36:56 Faint Voices Increasingly Desperate – 47:14   Michael’s Beer Pairings: W. Lee’s Harvest Ale 2002 Vintage, J.W. Lee’s & Company, UK (paired to Take Pills and Wait for Hips) – 15:26 Wittekerke, De Brabandere, Belgium (paired to City of a Thousand Feelings) – 34:07 Firebrick, August Schell Brewing Company, MN (paired to Faint Voices Increasingly Desperate) – 45:07   Interview Highlights: What is an Interactive Fiction game? – 25:44 Imagery, Allegory, Writer’s Intention – 27:51 How does the Glass-Bottom Boat Image in Take Pills and Wait for Hips relate to theme of transition as a transgender woman? – 31:09 What goes into getting an MFA? – 41:15 Writing in second person – 43:11 Writing in third person present tense – 51:32 Writing transgender protagonists – 54:45   COMING NEXT MONTH: Poet Donna Isaac.   Our theme music is from www.bensound.com.  

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 36 for April 13, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story for you. Today we have a return of Rose Lemberg, whose story "Stalemate" was published in episode 7. This is the last story for the Winter 2017 issue, and Spring 2017 is right around the corner! We also have a guest reader, Rose Fox, for this episode. Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Rose's work has appeared in Lightspeed's Queers  Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Unlikely Story, Uncanny, and other venues. Their Birdverse novelette "Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds" has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and longlisted for the Hugo Award and the Tiptree Award. Rose's debut poetry collection, Marginalia to Stone Bird, is available from Aqueduct Press (2016). Rose can be found on Twitter as @roselemberg, on Patreon at http://patreon.com/roselemberg, and on http://roselemberg.net.   Rose Fox is a senior reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and the co-editor (with Daniel José Older) of Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. They also write Story Hospital, a compassionate, practical weekly advice column about writing, and run occasional workshops for blocked and struggling writers. In their copious free time, they write fanfic and queer romance novels. They live in Brooklyn with two partners, three cats, the world's most adorable baby, and a great many books.   How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War by Rose Lemberg   At the budget committee meeting this morning, the pen in my hand turns into the remote control of a subsonic detonator. It is familiar—heavy, smooth, the metal warm to the touch. The pain of recognition cruises through my fingers and up my arm, engorges my veins with unbearable sweetness. The detonator is gunmetal gray. My finger twitches, poised on the button. I shake my head, and it is gone. Only it is still here, the taste of blood in my mouth, and underneath it, unnamed acidic bitterness. Around the conference table, the faces of faculty and staff darken in my vision. I see them—aging hippies polished by their long academic careers into a reluctant kind of respectability; accountants neat in bargain-bin clothes for office professionals; the dean, overdressed but defiant in his suit and dark blue tie with a class pin. They’ve traveled, I am sure, and some had protested on the streets back in the day and thought themselves radicals, but there’s none here who would not recoil in horror if I confessed my visions. I do not twitch. I want to run away from the uncomplicated, slightly puffy expressions of those people who'd never faced the battlefield, never felt the ground shake, never screamed tumbling facedown into the dirt. But I have more self-control than to flee. When it comes my time to report, I am steady. I concentrate on the numbers. The numbers have never betrayed me.   At five PM sharp I am out of the office. The airy old space is supposed to delight, with its tall cased windows and the afternoon sun streaming through the redwoods, but there’s nothing here I want to see. I walk briskly to the Downtown Berkeley BART station, and catch a train to the city. The train rattles underground, all stale air and musty seats. The people studiously look aside, giving each other the safety of not-noticing, bubbles of imaginary emptiness in the crowd. The mild heat of bodies and the artificially illuminated darkness of the tunnel take the edge off. When I disembark at Montgomery, the sky is already beginning to darken, the edges of pink and orange drawn in by the night. I could have gotten off at Embarcadero, but every time I decide against it—the walk down Market Street towards the ocean gives me a formality of approach which I crave without understanding why.  My good gray jacket protects against the chill coming up from the water. The people on the street—the executives and the baristas, the shoppers and the bankers—all stare past me with unseeing eyes. They shipped us here, I remember. Damaged goods, just like other states shipped their mentally ill to Berkeley on Greyhound buses: a one-way ticket to nowhere, to a place that is said to be restful and warm in the shadow of the buildings, under the bridges, camouflaged from this life by smells of pot and piss. I am luckier than most. Numbers come easy to me, and I look grave and presentable in my heavy jackets that are not armor. Their long sleeves hide the self-inflicted scars. I remember little. Slivers. But I still bind my chest and use the pronoun they, and I wear a tight metal bracelet on my left arm. It makes me feel secure, if not safe. It’s only a ploy, this bracelet I have found, a fool’s game at hope. The band is base metal, but without any markings, lights, or familiar pinpricks of the signal. Nothing flows. No way for Tedtemár to call, if ever Tedtemár could come here. Northern California is where they ship the damaged ones, yes, even interstellars.   Nights are hard. I go out to the back yard, barren from my attempts at do-it-yourself landscaping. Only the redwood tree remains, and at the very edge, a stray rose bush that blooms each spring in spite of my efforts. I smoke because I need it, to invoke and hold at bay the only full memory left to me: the battlefield, earth ravished by heaving and metal, the screech and whoosh of detonations overhead. In front of me I see the short, broad figure of my commanding officer. Tedtemár turns around. In dreams their visor is lifted, and I see their face laughing with the sounds of explosions around us. Tedtemár's arms are weapons, white and broad and spewing fire. I cannot hear anything for the wailing, but in dreams, Tedtemár's lips form my name as the ground heaves.   I have broken every wall in my house, put my fist through the thinness of them as if they're nothing. I could have lived closer to work, but in this El Cerrito neighborhood nobody asks any questions, and the backyard is mine to ravage. I break the walls, then half-heartedly repair them over weekends only to break them again. At work I am composed and civil and do not break anything, though it is a struggle. The beautiful old plaster of the office walls goes gritty gray like barracks, and the overhead lights turn into alarms. Under the table I interlace my fingers into bird's wings, my unit's recognition sign, as my eyes focus resolutely on spreadsheets. At home I repair the useless walls and apply popcorn texture, then paint the whole thing bog gray in a shade I mix myself. It is too ugly even for my mood, even though I’ve been told that gray is all the rage with interior designers these days. I put my fist through the first wall before the paint dries.   Today, there is music on Embarcadero. People in black and colorful clothing whirl around, some skillfully, some with a good-natured clumsiness. Others are there simply to watch. It’s some kind of a celebration, but I have nothing to celebrate and nothing to hope for, except for the music to shriek like a siren. I buy a plate of deep-fried cheese balls and swallow them, taste buds disbelieving the input, eyes disbelieving the revelry even though I know the names of the emotions expressed here. Joy. Pleasure. Anticipation. At the edge of the piers, men cast small nets for crabs to sell to sushi bars, and in the nearby restaurants diners sip wine and shiver surreptitiously with the chill. I went out to dates with women and men and with genderfluid folks, but they have all avoided me after a single meeting. They are afraid to say it to my face, but I can see. Too gloomy. Too intense. Too quiet. Won't smile or laugh. There is a person I notice among the revelers. I see them from the back—stooped, aloof. Like me. I don’t know what makes me single them out of the crowd, the shape of the shoulders perhaps. The stranger does not dance, does not move; just stands there. I begin to approach, then veer abruptly away. No sense in bothering a stranger with—with what exactly? Memories? I cannot remember anything useful. I wish they'd done a clean job, taken all my memories away so I could start fresh. I wish they'd taken nothing, left my head to rot. I wish they'd shot me. Wish I'd shoot myself, and have no idea why I don't, what compels me to continue in the conference rooms and in the overly pleasant office and in my now fashionably gray house. Joy or pleasure are words I cannot visualize. But I do want—something. Something. Wanting itself at least was not taken from me, and numbers still keep me safe. Lucky bastard.   I see the stranger again at night, standing in the corner of my backyard where the redwood used to be. The person has no face, just an empty black oval filled with explosives. Their white artificial arms form an alphabet of deafening fire around my head. The next day I see them in the shape of the trees outside my office window, feel their movement in the bubbling of Strawberry Creek when I take an unusual lunch walk. I want, I want, I want, I want. The wanting is a gray bog beast that swallows me awake into the world devoid of noise. The suffocating safe coziness of my present environment rattles me, the planes and angles of the day too soft for comfort. I press the metal of my bracelet, but it is not enough. I cut my arms with a knife and hide the scars old and new under sleeves. I break the walls again and repaint them with leftover bog gray, which I dilute with an even uglier army green. Over and over again I take the BART to Embarcadero, but the person I seek is not there, not there when it’s nearly empty and when it’s full of stalls for the arts and crafts fair. The person I seek might never have existed, an interplay of shadows over plastered walls. A co-worker calls to introduce me to someone; I cut her off, sick of myself and my well-wishers, always taunting me in my mind. In an hour I repent and reconsider, and later spend an evening of coffee and music with someone kind who speaks fast and does not seem to mind my gloom. Under the table, my fingers lace into bird’s wings. I remember next to nothing, but I know this: I do not want to go back to the old war. I just want—want—   I see the person again at Montgomery, in a long corridor leading from the train to the surface. I recognize the stooped shoulders and run forward, but the cry falls dead on my lips. It is not Tedtemár. Their face, downturned and worn, betrays no shiver of laughter. They smell unwashed and stale and their arms do not end in metal. The person does not move or react, like the others perhaps-of-ours I’ve seen here over the years, and their lips move, saying nothing. I remember the date from the other day, cheery in the face of my silence. But I know I have nothing to lose. So I cough and I ask. They say nothing. I turn away to leave, when out of the corner of my eyes I see their fingers interlock to form the wings of a bird.   Imprudent and invasive for this world, I lay my hand on their shoulder and lead them back underground. I buy them a BART ticket, watch over them as even the resolutely anonymous riders edge away from the smell. I take them to my home in El Cerrito, where broken walls need repair, and where a chipped cup of tea is made to the soundtrack of sirens heard only in my head. The person holds the cup between clenched fists and sips, eyes closed.  I cannot dissuade them when they stand in the corner to sleep, silent and unmoving like an empty battle suit. At night I dream of Tedtemár crying. Rockets fall out of their eyes to splash against my hands and burst there into seeds. I do not understand. I wake to the stranger huddled to sleep in a corner. Stray moonrays whiten their arms to metal. In the morning I beg my guest to take sustenance, or a bath, but they do not react. I leave them there for work, where the light again makes mockery of everything. Around my wrist the fake bracelet comes to life, blinking, blinking, blinking in a code I cannot decipher, calling to me in a voice that could not quite be Tedtemár’s. It is only a trick of the light.   At home I am again improper. The stranger does not protest or recoil when I peel their dirty clothes away, lead them into the bath. They are listless, moving their limbs along with my motions.  The sudsy water covers everything—that which I could safely look at and that which I shouldn’t have seen. I will not switch the pronouns. When names and memories go, these bits of language, translated inadequately into the local vernacular, remain to us. They are slivers, always jagged slivers of us, where lives we lived used to be. I remember Tedtemár’s hands, dragging me away. The wail of a falling rocket. Their arms around my torso, pressing me back into myself. I wash my guest’s back. They have a mark above their left shoulder, as if from a once-embedded device. I do not recognize it as my unit’s custom, or as anything. I wanted so much—I wanted—but all that wanting will not bring the memories back, will not return my life. I do not want it to return, that life that always stings and smarts and smolders at the edge of my consciousness, not enough to hold on to, more than enough to hurt—but there’s an emptiness in me where people have been once, even the ones I don’t remember. Was this stranger a friend? Their arms feel stiff to my touch. For all their fingers interlaced into wings at Montgomery station, since then I had only seen them hold their hands in fists. Perhaps I’d only imagined the wings. I wail on my way to work, silent with mouth pressed closed so nobody will notice. In the office I wail, open-mouthed and silent, against the moving shades of redwoods in the window.   For once I don’t want takeaway or minute-meals. I brew strong black tea, and cook stewed red lentils over rice in a newly purchased pot. I repair the broken walls and watch Tedtemár-who-is-not-quite-Tedtemár as they lean against the doorway, eyes vacant. I take them to sleep in my bed, then perch on the very edge of it, wary and waiting. At night they cry out once, their voice undulating with the sirens in my mind. Hope awakens in me with that sound, but then my guest falls silent again. An older neighbor comes by in the morning and chats at my guest, not caring that they do not answer—like the date whose name I have forgotten. I don’t know if I’d recognize Tedtemár if I met them here. My guest could be anyone, from my unit or another, or a veteran of an entirely different war shipped to Northern California by people I can’t know, because they always ship us here, from everywhere, and do not tell us why. Work’s lost all taste and color, what of it there ever was. Even numbers feel numb and bland under my tongue. I make mistakes in my spreadsheets and am reprimanded.   At night I perch again in bed beside my guest. I hope for a scream, for anything; fall asleep in the silent darkness, crouched uncomfortably with one leg dangling off to the floor. I wake up with their fist against my arm. Rigid fingers press and withdraw to the frequency of an old alarm code that hovers on the edge of my remembrance. In darkness I can feel their eyes on me, but am afraid to speak, afraid to move. In less than a minute, when the pressing motion ceases and I no longer feel their gaze, I cannot tell if this has been a dream.   I have taken two vacation days at work. I need the rest, but dread returning home, dread it in all the different ways from before. I have not broken a wall since I brought my guest home. Once back, I do not find them in any of their usual spots. I think to look out of the kitchen window at last. I see my stranger, Tedtemár, or the person who could be Tedtemár—someone unknown to me, from a different unit, a different culture, a different war. My commanding officer. They are in the back yard, on their knees. There’s a basket by their side, brought perhaps by the neighbor. For many long minutes I watch them plant crocuses into the ravaged earth of my yard. They are digging with their fists. Their arms, tight and rigid as always, seem to caress this ground into which we’ve been discarded, cast aside when we became too damaged to be needed in the old war. Explosives streak past my eyelids and sink, swallowed by the clumps of the soil around their fists. I do not know this person. I do not know myself. This moment is all I can have. I open the kitchen door, my fingers unwieldy, and step out to join Tedtemár.   END   “How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War" was originally published in Lightspeed's Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue in June 2015. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on April 18th with a GlitterShip original and our Spring 2017 issue!

Stalemateby Rose Lemberg He wakes to warmth. The floor beneath his head. He stares at the spider-patterns etched into the ceiling, tiny and dense, gray against darker gray. No power runs through them. Inert now. Unneeded.He wants to make the patterns work again.—how could anyone survive a descent through Calamity storms?  Above him, someone’s shiny dark shirt smells of static, a faraway storm passing. How are they still alive?Alive, forever, trapped inside this loneliness.A full transcript appears under the cut:----more----Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode seven for May 21st, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.Our story this week is "Stalemate" by Rose Lemberg.Rose Lemberg is a queer bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions, Uncanny, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction anthology, and other venues. Rose co-edits Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing poetry, with Shweta Narayan. She has edited Here, We Cross, an anthology of queer and genderfluid speculative poetry from Stone Telling (Stone Bird Press), and The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry (Aqueduct Press). She is currently editing a new fiction anthology, An Alphabet of Embers. You can find Rose at http://roselemberg.net and @roselemberg, and support her on Patreon at patreon.com/roselemberg.Stalemateby Rose Lemberg He wakes to warmth. The floor beneath his head. He stares at the spider-patterns etched into the ceiling, tiny and dense, gray against darker gray. No power runs through them. Inert now. Unneeded.He wants to make the patterns work again.—how could anyone survive a descent through Calamity storms?  Above him, someone’s shiny dark shirt smells of static, a faraway storm passing. How are they still alive?Alive, forever, trapped inside this loneliness.—where is their ship then? The Machine detected nothing—Two people. A dark face leans over.Who are you? Can you understand me?Oh, yes. The language is familiar—like the warmth of meals shared between friends unknown, like the glinting of the tall glass domes, their shadows trembling in the heat of double suns. The memories dance and reflect off the polished blank steel of his mind, then scurry away.“I remember,” he says, curling his tongue to make the clicking sounds this language requires.Your name, they ask. He knows one: Kabede, but it is not his. He rolls his tongue around it, shakes his head—a no.They take him away on a gurney. His eyes latch again onto the inert designs on the ceiling, and hold, and hold. A room. The person from before is here. The serial number stitched upon their sleeve reads 050089. This person—Eighty-nine—fiddles with the displaywall.Who are you? they keep asking. What is your number? What is your Q? Are you a miner? Did you fall from some other Habitat?Some other habitat? The displaywall shows only one, this one, Neriu Habitat, the single rotating sphere encapsulated in light—but he knows of a hundred siblings, spheres of metal free-floating in Calamity season. Upon the displaywall the storms come together and break, toss the Habitat upon the face of the ocean. Under the wave the storms are snakes of green that spit and lash their tails; above the wave the storms are dense gray columns that funnel up and consume the sky.Nothing can land on Gebe-2.Who are you? What is your number? What is your Q? Do you know this interface?Does he know this interface? His fingers trace a glyph in the air. The storms on the screen disappear, are replaced by an engineer’s dissection of the sphere along the vertical, showing the habitat’s levels—residential, control, mining, the engines with their clever navigating and locking mechanisms. He makes another glyph, flips the display to perimeter—the habitat’s receiving cavities and the inverted protrusions that are there to join seamlessly with—he counts—five other habitats, which, in turn, will join with others during the brief period of Convergence.Someone enters the room, and Eighty-nine turns away from the display. There’s a sewn badge upon Eighty-nine’s tunic—a grebe, a diving bird. Security commune? He’s not familiar with the sigil.They used the interface. They must be ours.No. The new person is squat and powerful, with wiry hair and piercing eyes. Their skin is dark like Eighty-nine’s. No, they cannot be ours. Their memory has been erased. They had to pass through the atmosphere for that. And that offworld suit—His eyes seek the newcomer’s badge out. Cormorant, for Control commune.  No, they will not let him hook up to the Machine until they know more. He could be dangerous to the Machine.If they are ours, the Machine will recognize…Shut up, Eighty-nine. How will the Machine recognize an off-worlder?But so much of it is familiar. He must have been here before. Will the Machine return his name? But he doesn’t want to know it.He doesn’t know why, but he had wanted this. His name is an empty cavity after a rotten tooth has been drawn. Will the Machine put the pain back?He feels its humming all around him. The Machine maintains the grass-cloth patterns of the display-free walls. It spreads warmth through the brick-patterned floor. It is in the displaywall, and in the silent ceiling grid. It waits for him now, an embrace of empty light.The two argue about his Q now. The Machine must assign it. How will he work if they don’t know what commune he belongs to?“Engineering,” he mutters. “Just put me in Engineering.”They take him back to the room, nothing more than a detention cell, where he spent the last night. Eighty-nine settles him into the hammock. The person’s hand briefly squeezes his. On Gebe-2, being alone is a punishment beyond measure.“I won’t be lonely here,” he says to the closing door, not sure what moved him to say it. On a ship full of people he is a stranger, but the place makes him feel like three hundred years of companionable silences. Not a ship. A habitat. He tries to adjust to the hammock, his body too broad and too pale in the artificial half-light. The coarse brown strands in the hammock’s weave smell like basket reeds, but they too must be artificial.—Dream with me.He dreams of Gebe, a city paved with reinforced cinnabar and etched with mazes, a city of soaring spun glass and masonry coffeeshops—but now its beauty’s been smothered under the red skies marred with streaks of black fume. Dead engines hurtle from the sky like bugs sprayed with insecticide, and he barely dodges to avoid the smoldering, screeching debris. He runs, choking on the smell of burning meat and charra oil, resin and feces. He screams at the sharp cries of wild birds released from their protected wildspaces, the crashing glass spires that only a short while ago danced gracefully into a fearless sky.Kabede. He must find Kabede.The university. How they’d cursed the architect who slapped a utilitarian concrete rectangle in the middle of blown-glass dreams, but the engineering school is the only one left standing. It is whole on the inside as well, and softened by age-old Gebian crafts; thousands of people, students and faculty, crowd here on embroidered lotus carpets, argue loudly under chandeliers of blown glass shaped like ibises. They grab his hands, smile up his face and ask for news, but he doesn’t have time. He smiles back, pushes past them to the stairs. Downward. Each level is plainer than the one above —no hand-loomed carpets or chandeliers here, and even the ebony stairs give way to metallic railings painted in pale green. Kabede must be here. It’ll be all right.His friend is at the bottom level, pacing in front of a huge black surface covered densely with blueprints and reading-screen files. Their eyes lock—Kabede’s pupils dilate, and their gaunt dark face splits into a grin. They embrace fiercely, then push away from each other. Kabede speaks, their words disjointed in a way of dreams and scientists. I must take them away from this war, from all wars, I must hide them away in a world without riches, a world undesirable to conquerors, a world stripped of all decoration with only what’s necessary to survive, like the Engineering building survived…Help me, my friend. Help me.He frowns back at Kabede. “You’d strip them of beautiful things just because other people would strip them of beautiful things?” It is, after all, what they are. The people of Gebe are artists, scientists, poets, craftsmen, yes, artisans, makers—it is because of this beauty that they are now hunted.Kabede’s arms fly, accompanying the frantic flight of their speech. A commune where everyone is together and everyone is needed, without trinkets or petty obsessions, without possessions, nothing to distract from the threefold purpose of efficiency, survival, refuge—“You will unmake them.”But Kabede won’t listen. We’ll measure people’s aptitude, and each will be assigned to a commune according to their Q—“You cannot take anybody off-world, Kabede. It’s a fantasy.”Build me a ship, Kabede pleads. You’ve been working on something— but it isn’t anyone’s business what he’s been doing out on the asteroid belt for the last thirty years.“No. No. I’m sorry.”He offers Kabede a game of chess; they’ve always played before parting. But no, there is no time today, and Kabede’s hands curl into fists.This war must end. He hangs in the hammock, neck bent like a trussed bird’s, while shadows regard him across the threshold. The Control person, and a visitor, a frail and ancient darkness against the door’s bright light. More ancient than he is? Impossible.The Keeper of Neriu Habitat gestures the light on and enters, but darkness steps in with them—a face mashed and old like a dried plum, eyes bright but crackled with a minute spiderweb of red around pupils the color of congealed blood. They speak, they praise the Control person’s caution. He is an unknown entity, possibly dangerous, but they are stretched thin and cannot waste workers, not with the Convergence only a month away. If there is danger, I trust the Machine can take it. Plug them in. More people come to take him to a room as faceless as the others, painted a different shade of rough tan, with the same spider-maze ceiling and warm floors. He doesn’t even try to memorize the faces, sounds, smells of the people that surround him. They aren’t his friends. And like with people everywhere, he cannot afford to become attached. Like the savannah blooms they will wither and die, and even when these people’s speech reminds him of someone he misses with every breath, it’s not the same. He cannot become attached.They clip the headset to his head. His eyes roll back. He is in a brown cube without smells or sounds, a space defined by grid-like shining walls. The middle of the room flares up with a projection of three transparent pails. The first is filled with some substance, darker than water.A disembodied voice speaks. Two miners are friends, but one got sick. The healthy friend had mined eight liters of gillium. The healthy one has two empty vessels. One vessel holds five liters, and the other three. How can the miner equally divide the fuel, so that both friends meet their quota?That voice—it hovers on the edge of recognition. It speaks of friendship. Does this Machine have a friend, one it would share everything with, equally, if it could, if it knew where to look?Solve the puzzle.He has no voice here, no hands, no body, no eyes. He cannot touch the jars, but when he wills them to move, they do. He solves the problem in seven turns. It cannot be done in less.The room flickers, and the amount of pails increases by one. The large vessel holds twenty four liters of gillium. The empty ones can hold five, eleven, and thirteen liters…Good-naturedly he finds a solution, and the pail puzzle is replaced by an equation exercise, and after it, another. He remembers how to solve such problems by solving them, but there’s disappointment growing inside him. He opens his mouth to speak.“Do you know Kabede?”The room flickers, displaying now basic trigonometry problems. He solves one, two.“Where is Kabede?”The room blurs, reforms around holographic engineering designs—an airflow node first, then some complex console wiring, then a mining chute, all with nontrivial, tricky repairs. Lovely work. At last, his mind pulls reluctantly back.“I want to speak to Kabede.”The room is extinguished. He is expelled back into his long sweaty body sprawled on the floor.  They drag him up, slap a bird-badge upon his left shoulder. An ibis. He’s been assigned to Engineering commune.At night in the Engineering dormitory he tosses and turns in his hammock, stumbling into dreams. He dreams of Gebe, a city once paved with reinforced cinnabar and etched with mazes, a city of soaring spun glass and masonry coffeeshops—but now its beauty’s been erased, drowned in shrapnel, reformed and erased again under the perpetual red skies choked with toxic fumes. There is no sign of spun-glass spires. The museums have been leveled long ago, their contents evacuated, fought over—so many sacrifices to keep the treasures safe, but now they’re lost. Forgotten. He looks up, but the sky is empty of birds; no avian species are left on Gebe. No animals of any kind, not even insects. Only the humans survive.The university is a compound, the concrete rectangles of buildings crouch low to the ground. He remembers the poetry buildings, and history, art practice, music—but the arts and humanities had long ago been razed. Anthropology’s gone, too, once the most beautiful structure of all, with ornamental spires like cottontail reeds. The hot air smells of smoke and tar, fried canned meat and coffee. He doesn’t bother locating the cafeteria.Engineering is crowded, but the students are all silent, all crouching on the concrete floor, working on small electronic tablets. The carpets are gone, and the glass chandeliers had been replaced by military-grade lamps. Not a single student lifts their head as he passes through to the staircase.Kabede paces in the basement, room and person untouched by the two hundred years that elapsed since their last meeting. His friend’s always been here, framed between the concrete and the smoky air. Behind Kabede, on the table, a holographic image of a dome-like structure breaks into a hundred polished metal spheres that hurtle away from each other and join again. And have you built the ship for me, old friend?The ship, yes, a vast entity of metal mined from the asteroid belt by his bots. The ship—his ship—all complex designs and warmth, always incomplete, always growing. His home.“I haven’t promised you anything.”But this coming war will be the fifth, Kabede says, and the world has been drained of solutions. I need to take them off-world now, my friend, or this war may well be their last.“What are you trying to save?” Whatever’s been beautiful and sacred about Gebe has been destroyed by the wars, or by the Gebians themselves. “There’s nothing left here, Kabede. What value do your people have now, how are they better than millions of others dying on thousands of different worlds? Humans kill each other.” Or else they live small insignificant lives, and only the art they create will remain as they pass, only the art will matter long after they go.But of course, Kabede doesn’t believe in art. Art creates commodities desired by others. They come to trade for it first, then they come to steal, then they come to destroy it because we have too much, and then they come because they always came. It is a mistake to think that art survives death. You can’t survive your death, unless you choose not to die.“We may not die, my friend, but we are the children of loneliness.”I am not lonely, Kabede says. My people are with me. You do not see them, but I do. They are my family, my living, breathing people—and they are everything to me. As you are, old friend. And you are my friend. So help me.“Yes,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”Kabede nods, produces an ancient ebony-and-ivory chessboard. They sit down together at the table.Engineering brings his memories back, slowly. He’s always been good at making things work. As a child, he fixed the broken toy trains for the dimly-remembered children next door, he flushed toys down the toilet to see how much the drain would take before clogging, and then unclogged it again using a very long stick and an improvised drill. He fixed the grandfather clock silent since his grandfather’s youth. He cannot quite recall his grandparents, but he remembers how the cogs shone inside the clock, silent first, then shrill in hurried, disbelieving reawakening.He knows that even if all the memories return, the faces of his family won’t be among them.‘We may not die, my friend, but we are the children of loneliness...’How long ago? He remembers now how a scholarship took him away from his homeworld and brought him to Gebe, Kabede’s home—a world famous for its arts, a world illustrious with science. He’d learned so much there—engineering, of course, but also other things. The beauty of glass and groove and light. The Gebian language, with its seventeen emotions to experience art, that marked no genders in speech or custom.He remembers Kabede at the university, bent over some antique flimsy-display reader. Kabede couldn’t make it work again, being always far better at new designs. He remembers repairing the reader for Kabede, bits of century-old diplastic warped and soft like clipped-off fingernails. They learned about the Boundless from that flimsy—the most talented scientists chosen somehow to discard death forever, chosen perhaps by the older Boundless always secretly on the prowl, always searching.They found more information about the Boundless at the great library of Gebe, and a mention of a hidden meeting-place, a planet of wonders. But they have never met a single Boundless other than themselves, not to recognize. Death-lack seemed splendid at twenty, doubtful at best at four hundred or so.Four hundred years. Long enough to unlearn about love if one didn’t pay any attention to it in the first place.He shakes his head. People do not matter. Work matters. Work and art— those things that can be salvaged after the people leave you. Tangible things. Except, of course, Kabede. There’ll always be Kabede. Neriu Habitat is painfully small. The forty three engineers in his commune do not talk much, but sometimes they nod at him. Work matters—repairing the ailing Habitat, with never enough workers to direct. Always repairing, never expanding. Again he asks about Kabede. You must wait for the Convergence to see him, they say. Just do your work. He does—and it is soothing, like the air that circulates through the habitat, purified but always the same, never changing. They make nothing here that is beautiful. Only bland warmth. How is it better than pain? Eighty-nine comes to visit him in the dorms one evening, to play a game, like everyone does here. Eighty-nine teaches him games from Security commune, first simple and then increasingly elaborate clapping games that require coordination and quick thinking. He loses cheerfully to Eighty-nine, engrossed until his fellow dorm-mates intervene. Engineers don’t play such games, they say. “Chess?” he asks, but they don’t know the word, even though he speaks their language. They do not use any game-pieces, no frivolous objects shaped into arbitrary designs that serve no immediate purpose. Too much like art. Instead, they teach him games that require only the mind—language puzzles in which every letter is assigned a numeric value, and the value of whole words is calculated through complex equations. These he enjoys, but Eighty-nine doesn’t, and he does not want Eighty-nine to feel left out.“Let’s play something else,” he says.There’s an old game they play here that the people of Gebe played also. The questioner asks a quick question, any question, tricking the players into responding with the word yes; if they do, they lose.  Are you from here? Eighty-one asks him, an easy question. Then, is your Q higher than mine? Question after question, round after round in rapid succession to trick the players to respond with a short truthful yes in response to a trivial query. One after one, his Engineering fellows lose, and leave the game. Nine out of twelve remain. Seven out of twelve. Do you like it here? The yes is frozen on his lips. What’s not to like? The warm air, calculated to the perfect pleasantness he remembers from his university days, never changes here to a winter storm’s intensity or the sun’s summer scorching; fascinating detailed work; the Machine everywhere, comforting on the edge of his senses. Even the lack of adornment seems soothing now. What’s not to like? Only himself, his returning identity that’ll spit him out in the end, back into the vacuum of loneliness. He can unlearn it with these people. But they… The old Gebians—the people he came to love are burned, are buried, forgotten under the rubble of dreams. He cannot allow himself to become attached again.“I do not like myself,” he says.And us? Do you like us?“Yes,” he lies. Loses. His dreaming drains him further into memory. Ten thousand people on a ship that could hold thirty thousand more. The ship is huge—in the two hundred years since Kabede’s first question he’d perfected his miner bots and dismantled a few small moons. His modular designs for it are genius. Immodest, but true enough; after all, only geniuses become Boundless, only geniuses are punished for their competence with this unending pain.Forty thousand people could fit here easily, but the fifth war really is the last. Only ten thousand survivors, wounded and bleeding. Adults clutch emaciated children, elders crouch quietly, their toothless mouths open; those who still can walk around, frantically trying to be useful to someone, somehow, anything to escape the staring stillness. And Kabede—Kabede is not among them; his friend lies stretched out under the medi-dome, dying from a head wound that cannot possibly be repaired. A Boundless cannot die, but a Boundless can still be killed.It was a mistake to agree to Kabede’s request. They should have left the war behind, gone away together like he wanted. But instead he’d said yes. He’d found a world, a watery planet plagued by storms—increased by Kabede’s designs to such vehemence than nobody would bother to come here. The storms would hide Kabede’s world from curious eyes, prevent the colonists from leaving. Forever, peace—sheltering the people from all wars, taking them away even from themselves.He remembers wondering if the people would find a way to make art, but the walls of the engineering dorm are bare. The reeds of his hammock are woven into uneven patterns that dig into his skin and signify nothing.The ancient Keeper of Neriu Habitat comes to see him once more, in the Engineering dorm. The Convergence is coming, and Kabede, the keeper says, will see him in three days’ time.His eyes trace the spiderweb patterns of the ceiling. He designed them for his ship, just for beauty. Lit up, they were thin lines that rotated and danced, forming an imaginary starmap of the universe, with confirmed constellations warming up to an orange and the unconfirmed to a shimmery gray. Once he’d thought it Kabede’s mistake to believe that art doesn’t survive death, for if he were somehow to die, this ship of his, these minutely patterned ceilings would survive.He is alive yet, but his art, his ceilings are not in use here. Kabede would never approve of something so frivolous.Three days’ time.He remembers most of it now. Kabede gave him the memory leecher, to be installed in the upper atmosphere. If strangers came to Gebe-2 to wage their war, intent and knowledge would be drained of them before they fell into the storms.Once you have the habitats defined, transfer me, Kabede asked, back when they’d made their plans. I want to be embedded in my world. He begged against it, when Kabede was alive. “You won’t have a body anymore…” But his pleading didn’t matter. Kabede was dead now. There wasn’t enough left to exist when the hundred specified nodes were separate. Kabede would only be whole and aware when the habitats came together, briefly, once every three or four years, to synchronize their memories and share mined fuel. The rest of the time Kabede’s mind would be divided into a hundred pieces and scattered across the ocean, memoryless, friendless. A hundred habitats, Kabede had insisted—even if war were somehow to find this world, the people would be divided, easy to hide, safe.Such a waste. They should have left Gebe together to search for the hidden planet of the Boundless, on his ship. This ship.He remembers now how he broke it down. Unmade his home. Reforged it into a hundred Habitats for his only friend.Neriu Habitat screeches in joining others, like a flock of birds pressed together into a ball. Eighty-nine is there when they come to transfer him from Neriu to Deselin, but there is nothing to say.Deselin Habitat corresponds to the medical wing where Kabede had died. Most of what’s left of them survives here, and now, joined with other bits of their scattered cognition, Kabede is as whole as they will ever be. There is no need to don the headset—a hologram appears to him in the room recreated to be identical to the Gebe basement. It is Kabede as they were in death, tall and gaunt, their dark face glistening with projected sweat, but there is nothing to embrace. Only bits of colored light. “It’s good to see you.”I am glad you visit me, Kabede says.“How many times have I done this?”This is the third time. Every sixty years. Every twenty Convergences. Kabede’s image flickers. I’m sorry about your memory, old friend, but I have to protect my people. I will return it to you when you leave, and erase you again from the system. I wish…“Don’t say it, please.” But there is no need to speak. They know the dialogue by heart.I wish so much you’d stay.‘But nothing changes here, Kabede. Nothing evolves.’My people—‘—are ghosts.’They survive. It is peaceful, efficient—‘There is no hope.’Yes, he remembers now. They played this game before, went through the same moves over and over. And I will come again, and lose my memory, to see you. But no matter how we play this, it’s a stalemate, Kabede.There are no chairs for them to sit. They squat on the floor, with the holographic chessboard between them.END"Stalemate" was originally published in Lackington's issue 4, in 2014.This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on May 28th.[Music plays out]This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

THIS SHALL SERVE AS A DEMARCATIONby Bogi TakácsI.Tiles flip over, land to sea to land. Enhyoron grimaces, rocks back in their chair, eyes still fixed on the ever-changing map. I can feel their moods on my skin and my skin burns, flares with frustration, chafes against my simple cotton garb. I sit up on the futon and pull up one sleeve to examine my arm—lighter-toned in branching lines like the bare, defoliated frames of trees in winter. I used to be cut along those pathways, gleaming metal and shapeforming plastic set into flesh, embedded to remain inside—a part of me forevermore. A full transcript appears under the cut.----more---- [Music plays]Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode three for April 16th, 2015. I’m your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.First, some quick queer publication news: two new releases from Aqueduct Press (a feminist small press) have some queer content in them. Those are Caren Gussoff’s Three Songs for Roxy and Lisa Shapter’s A Day in Deep Freeze. Both books are part of the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces series and are available for purchase on the Aqueduct website at aqueductpress, all one word, dot com.Links are also available in the transcript on the GlitterShip website.Our story today is “This Shall Serve As a Demarcation” by Bogi TakácsBogi Takács is a neutrally gendered Hungarian Jewish author who recently moved to the US. E writes both speculative fiction and poetry, and eir works have been published in a variety of venues like Strange Horizons, Apex, Lackington's and GigaNotoSaurus, among others.E has upcoming stories  in Clarkesworld, titled "Forestspirit, Forestspirit" and in Queers Destroy Science Fiction titled "Increasing Police Visibility."In addition, e helped Rose Lemberg assemble the Alphabet of Embers anthology and will guest-edit the next issue of Inkscrawl, a magazine of minimalist speculative poetry. THIS SHALL SERVE AS A DEMARCATIONby Bogi TakácsFor A, M and R; for the path walkedI.Tiles flip over, land to sea to land. Enhyoron grimaces, rocks back in their chair, eyes still fixed on the ever-changing map. I can feel their moods on my skin and my skin burns, flares with frustration, chafes against my simple cotton garb.I sit up on the futon and pull up one sleeve to examine my arm—lighter-toned in branching lines like the bare, defoliated frames of trees in winter. I used to be cut along those pathways, gleaming metal and shapeforming plastic set into flesh, embedded to remain inside—a part of me forevermore.The Collaborators took it all out—Enhyoron took it out, softly murmuring as they adjusted, readjusted, readjusted; molded rather than cut. Magic as technology. Still, I wept in pain, thrashing against my restraints, keening like a foam-cat stuck in bramble.I shudder as the memory passes through me, but I don’t miss the metal—I only miss the domes of Red Coral Settlement, the sounds of all-surrounding water pulling me down into sleep every night. There’s no way back now, now that I’ve taken a stand in the war between land and sea settlements, and I’ve chosen neither.Enhyoron push themselves away from the wall console, stretch out their strong limbs, their wide shoulders. They move with firm determination. “It’s time to go.”“I have done so much wrong,” I mutter, my tongue slow. “The land will not accept me. The sea will not accept me,” I whisper to Enhyoron, and they grab me by the neck, push me down into the dirt.“They already have. You think I’m the only one?” Enhyoron says mildly, somewhere above me, standing guard over me.I smell green and the sweet-rot smell of spring decay. A band of invisible light connects my mud-sodden front to the ground and I weep in relief.Their words resonate in my head: “The planet accepts you before you can accept yourself.”We walk back—I’m unsteady on my feet, and my eyesight is hazed over with exhaustion.“This planet knows the meaning of sacrifice,” Enhyoron says, gaze firmly fixed forward toward our makeshift camp.I don’t get to mourn the technology softly scooped out of my flesh. I don’t get to mourn my break with my home. We have no time. The land has requested my presence, and the sea has given assent.Can I call my home an eyesore? Was it ever really my home? As the antenna-tops of Red Coral Settlement peek out of the water, all the stainless steel seems crude and out of place against the billowing clouds sweeping across the horizon, the ever-renewing waves of the sea. Still, do I want it gone?I turn around. The landfoam is encroaching, drawing closer to the cliff edge, heaping up in small iridescent piles. In a few days it will go through another growth spurt, rushing toward the water, solidifying, extending. A map tile will flip.Red Coral Settlement is foamproof. The people will be gathered inside, huddled together as the structure croaks, but holds. I’ve been through many such transitions on the borderlands. Settlements changing from undersea to underground. Hard chunks set into the soft soil and fluid of the planet-surface, unmoving when everything else flows. Disrupting. I am reminded of my body, run my hands down along my sides. The metal is gone, only the pain remains.Enhyoron knows my thoughts. “It’s not sustainable,” they say. “The settlements will be gone in another long cycle. The question is, how much damage can they do to the planet until then?”I used to live there. I know how much damage they did to me.Enhyoron pulls me close, and we hug; I mash my face into their coveralls.“I am afraid,” I whisper.They smooth down my tiny curls—I have hair on my head again, after so many years. “I know, Î-surun, I know.”II.The land and the sea were perturbed when the people started to guide the foam. Guide is a Settlement term, a poisonous euphemism. They forced it into their own paths, rushing along linear trajectories at high speeds to assault other Settlements. The borderlands changed shape in unprecedented ways. My nightmares started. The planet screamed.The first dream was the most terrifying. Sea-foam melted away the land like acid, as I’d seen many times, but then it turned around and surged toward me. I was naked, with no envirosuit. I panicked—I wouldn’t survive outside, the foam would eat away at me, the air would poison me. I woke stunned.The battle of Lapis Lazuli Settlement only came afterward.I wish I could say that I ran away from my task to guide. But I was instructed to seek out the Collaborators, pose as a defector and destroy them from within; Red Coral Settlement knew precious little about them, but deemed them dangerous.I took an envirosuit and a small buggy. I knew the Collaborators were somewhere out there, trying to live on the surface, not in shards irritating the planet’s skin. I knew they existed, but I had no more information.In retrospect, I just wanted to kill myself. After that battle. I was so eager, driving myself forward, into destruction. Akin to the destruction I had caused. Not seeking the Collaborators, just desperately trying to run away.I drove to a deserted clearing, flecks of foam hanging from the treesprouts and slowly worming themselves forward on the ground like mindless slugs. My hands shook so hard as I stripped out of my suit that I could barely unlatch the clasps.I knew foam spores were floating in the air outside the buggy. I deliberately exhaled, then held my breath as I opened the top hatch and clambered outside. Was this bravery?Of course it burns like acid; and it is drawn to magic, being of a magical nature in itself.It does not abhor technology; it only abhors attempts to coerce.What Enhyoron finished, it had started.I was thrashing in a puddle of my own body fluids when arms suddenly held me, when hands wiped the tears, the snot, the saliva, the blood off my face. I don’t remember well; I think I might’ve had a seizure, my brain giving in to the unbearable, unassailable input.Two brown eyes stared at me, skin the same if lighter shade. A round face, a thick neck disappearing into leaf-brown coveralls. I had no room for thoughts in my head—I didn’t know if this person was one of the Collaborators, and the group had no uniforms, just a symbol. A symbol I had not known then: the open hand.I could not speak. But I grabbed their coverall sleeves and would not let go.This was how I first met Enhyoron. The planet alerted them, sent them to me. A disturbance, again.At first, they didn’t ask questions. No one did—not a single one of these bright, non-uniformed and only loosely organized cavalcade of people of all kinds of genders, shapes and sizes. I even saw someone like me, neither of the two most common genders as Enhyoron was both. Could the Collaborators even be called a group, or just a set of people with mostly aligned goals? I still don’t know.The people waited for my reconstruction to run its course. My own lack of language isolated me better than any quarantine.My previous life is cast in gloom and wrapped in gauze. I lost a lot; planet-adaptation is usually gentler because it is usually supervised. It still pains Enhyoron that they could not have been there from my first breath of unfiltered air.But I remember this. I remember signing up, back in Blue-Ringed Octopus Settlement, talking to a dark-skinned lady wrapped in a turquoise uniform and discussing my options. At that point, I was sure I had options.I had the magic, and a deep willingness to serve. Serve my people? I hadn’t understood yet that it was best to avoid ones speaking in the abstract.They would re-form me, neurotechnology and implantations and all the training; ostensibly to help me control my magic. Also, always unsaid: to help them control me. And I gladly complied.I wanted no part in a war. But after Blue-Ringed Octopus was washed away and us stragglers, ragged and shocked survivors with wide-open eyes, were picked up by Red Coral, they told me I had no other choice but to fight; for I had the power. And the foam could be guided.I saw Lapis Lazuli Settlement crackle and burst under the pressure, imploding upon itself deep inside the earth. I was among those who made it happen. They pulled power out of me, tore it out of me—guided it, they said—until I was utterly spent, until there was nothing left, until the enemy settlement was gone. The eternal war of land settlements against the sea, sea against the land.But the sea itself, the land itself spoke out, their voice hammering in my head. No longer tolerating the people’s actions.I didn’t know if the others had heard. I heard, but did not listen. Not until much later.All around me it was soft and twilight-dark. Enhyoron was there, running a hand along my smooth if patchily colored skin. Admiring their handiwork? I understood how much effort it had been to remove the shards and slivers from my body, to remove the contamination.I knew them beyond speech, from the way they carried themselves, from their gentle accepting kindness, and the words shaped themselves in my head long before my mouth could move.They helped me walk, take the first hesitating steps. How much of my nervous system had been regrown? A staggering percentage. They helped me eat, spoon-fed me, guided my hands in the true sense of the word. They were patient, and I tried so hard, with all the eagerness that I had to serve, so cruelly exploited once; even before I knew that it wouldn’t be exploited again. They could’ve done anything to me in that state. They chose to heal me.They hadn’t betrayed me, hadn’t sent me to destroy life. And I wouldn’t betray them. Not now, not ever. “I wish to serve you,” I said, my first sentence. They shook their head, a sad smile on their androgynous face. “You understand nothing.”We talked. So much we talked!“I… I wasn’t built to destroy,” I said, voice edging into a whine; again after so many times. The well of tears was very deep. “Originally…”Enhyoron leaned close. “Are you sure?”I thought of the configuration of implants. Intrusion, invasion. Settlement. Even my spine cut open. They had said it was for my benefit, it was to improve my magic, I was a civilian—this ran through my head: I was a civilian, before the destruction of Blue-Ringed Octopus, before I was conscripted into war—magic had so many peacetime uses…But who would need this in peacetime? Was there ever peacetime on this planet, or just brief cessations of neverending hostility, like tiny gasps of breath? What had I agreed to, in my eagerness, my naivety—I had thought this would be good, I could be helpful—I thought of the settlements scarring the planet.“When the entire establishment is corrupt, it corrupts those who serve it,” I said slowly, haltingly.“If you have a need to serve, it is best to serve a person, not an organization,” Enhyoron said. “A person who respects your no.” They were silent for a moment. “A person you trust. A person you love.”I knew they were alone. I knew they were painfully lonely. I knew they were thinking of themselves.But it was only much later that they accepted my service.Improve. Like guide. Words themselves are twisted, take on new meanings. I had to disentangle myself from that bramble, and I fear I’ve only partly succeeded.What would Enhyoron ask of me?III.The landfoam waving in the wind, hanging off the cliff wall in thick fluffy braids. Red Coral Settlement in the distance, on the water—in the water.I’m not serving Enhyoron to cause destruction, I tell myself, but yet I know not what they will ask of me—what the planet itself will ask of me. Yet we are aligned, we are together.“Those who wish to stay inside their cages can stay,” Enhyoron says. “I’ve disavowed coercion.” It strikes me I know little of their past; but they say these words with conviction and force. There has been something to disavow. “Kneel,” they say on a more gentle tone, and I do so. The landfoam twines around me, touches my skin. It feels warm and dry. I bend my head and close my eyes. “I will guide you,” Enhyoron says and a twinge of fear runs through me. Too-familiar words. But they continue differently:“We protect life,” Enhyoron says. “We do not seek to harm. We do not destroy—we seek to build. We seek to sustain—not to dismantle. What is harmful will, with time, dismantle itself.”They put their hands on my head and guide me as the magic rises up in me, running along paths in my body that still feel new. Power soaring to the sky. The landfoam rises, rises; multiplies with a newfound strength drawn from me. I shudder, but I know my reserves are deep. I recall the destruction.Enhyoron holds me from behind, crouching down into the mud. I breathe with their breath. “This shall serve as a demarcation,” Enhyoron says, “a border we vow to uphold, a chain-link of mountains to stand between sea and land. And we will uphold it, until person will lift arms against person no more, until we collaborate with the planet instead of settling, until the time of intrusion runs out and the body rejects the invasion.”They pause. Their words give me renewed strength. The planet itself ripples.“We isolate the harmful,” they say. “We do not deny its existence. And once it is gone, the planet can reassert itself, and the border between land and sea will again move freely on the foam.”A sudden flash of insight—from outside my skull? Is the foam the planet’s defense mechanism?“We are the planet’s defense mechanism,” I whisper to Enhyoron as the giant spires of the mountains solidify, and I waver, my energy spent; spent but not ripped out.Offered of my own free will, I think and smile. And of my own free will it will likewise replenish itself; for I choose to live. I have stopped running away.Enhyoron embraces me as I topple forward, holds me firm and tight.END“This Shall Serve As a Demarcation” was first published in Scigentasy in July 2014.This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the  Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you again on April 23rd.[Music Plays Out]

THE TRUE ALCHEMISTby Sonya Taaffefor Mat JoinerWhatever they left in the garden, Seth, I don’t think it wants to stay there.The man and the woman who came about the gas meter yesterday, or maybe it was the water bill? I had a deadline, I barely noticed them except for the noises they made, the crunch of shoes on stiff grass, scrapes and clangs as if they were wrestling the dustbins back against the garage door, a sudden snap of bracken that startled me until I remembered the rose-canes you’d pulled down in great, dry-cracking armfuls, their petals the soft and blotted brown of foxed paper, dead as the end of Sleeping Beauty——I forgot to call the city to take them away, brambling like baling wire beside the shed...A full transcript appears under the cut:----more----[Music plays]Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode two for April 9th, 2015. I’m your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing these stories with you.My intro is going to be much shorter than it ought to be this week. Um, it turns out I was sick all of last week and that it was pneumonia. Of all things. I know. Seriously, what are the chances.Although, speaking of chances, I want to thank everyone who took the chance and pledged money toward the GlitterShip Kickstarter campaign. We successfully funded on April 8th and our final tally was $5,015!This means that not only is GlitterShip funded through the first year, but I’ll also be able to bring on other readers for many of the stories going forward, and there will be four episodes a month instead of two, and one story a month will never have been published anywhere ever before!I’m still working on the logistics regarding the submissions period for original fiction, but as soon as I know, I will make an announcement and update the submissions guidelines.This week, I have three very short stories for you by three awesome authors.I’m starting with “The True Alchemist” by Sonya Taaffe.Sonya Taaffe's short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in anthologies including Aliens: Recent Encounters, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, and The Best of Not One of Us. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats. She maintains a livejournal at Myth Happens.THE TRUE ALCHEMISTby Sonya Taaffefor Mat JoinerWhatever they left in the garden, Seth, I don’t think it wants to stay there.The man and the woman who came about the gas meter yesterday, or maybe it was the water bill? I had a deadline, I barely noticed them except for the noises they made, the crunch of shoes on stiff grass, scrapes and clangs as if they were wrestling the dustbins back against the garage door, a sudden snap of bracken that startled me until I remembered the rose-canes you’d pulled down in great, dry-cracking armfuls, their petals the soft and blotted brown of foxed paper, dead as the end of Sleeping Beauty—I forgot to call the city to take them away, brambling like baling wire beside the shed. Two of the city’s representatives banging around in our back garden and I didn't think to ask them, crouched over my computer with a legion of tea mugs cluttering up among the books and less than sixteen hours before Nora was going to run out of excuses to make to the publisher on my sorry, late-arsed behalf, I didn't even mark the color of their eyes or the length of their hair. They were white as winter sunshine, dressed in coveralls as if for dirtier work than reading a meter. You won’t have any more trouble, sir, the woman said on her way out, or maybe it was the man; I was nearly throwing them out at that point, giving that rattled manic grin that is supposed to pass for comradely homeownership, presumably to soften the slam of door in face—I knew I should have pretended to be sick, or in the shower, or just not at home. I’m a bad liar when I don’t have time to think. I’m too good at it when I do. Seth, the garden’s fucked. Call me tonight or come home. Or both.Seth, I know the conference isn't over till Sunday, but could you just tell them it’s an emergency—the cat’s on fire, the kitchen blew up, your husband is having a baby? I got the article sent off on time and I haven’t slept since. Or I can’t tell if I’m sleeping, rolling over and over through dreams of the same cold, entangling sheets, vacant and huge around one person in this bed that’s a jigsaw puzzle for two, the same little sounds rustling up the back stairs, fanning underneath the windowframe with the icy slip of the air. It sounds like footsteps moving unhurriedly on frost-brittle grass, the squeal and judder of metal dragged over asphalt chips; it sounds like a trampling of dead branches, each as sharp and sick as a bone-break, the knuckle-pop crackling of twigs wrung like a neck. So fast. I think murder instead of horticulture, intruders instead of rats or the cats that hunt them. The swimming cathedral light before dawn looks like the underside of water to a long-drowned man. I made a point of shaving, combing my hair, putting on a different sweater. I haven’t been out all day. I've taken all my pills, including the ones I try to ration; Nora knows I'm feeling skittish—it’s not like she can pretend not to when I turn in a page and a half of self-recrimination with the other twenty-five about Philoktetes and the poisons and cures of language. I'll call Dr. Linsey if it gets much weirder. I won’t call anyone. I’m crap at self-care. I’ll just sit here drinking our ever-diminishing hoard of tea and typing run-on sentences, knowing it’s not like New York is three days away by transatlantic steamer anymore and it doesn't matter. Our neighbors are right there on the other side of the kitchen window—washing dishes, in fact, side by side with soapy plates and dishrag in some urban equivalent of a tranquil, pastoral scene—and it doesn't matter. I might as well be on the far side of the moon. If the moon were haunted by the smell of oil and leaf-mold, slick as a slug’s track or petrol-spill. Seth, this is bad. I hate that fucking mobile, I wouldn't check my e-mail on it to win a bet, but I've started carrying it like a locket, as if it really contained something of you. I’d check the gas meter if I could go outside. Or the water. I went outside. I want to stress that very carefully. I unlocked the back door and I went down and I stood in the garden, freezing, hugging myself over the sweater I hadn't thought to supplement with a jacket or even a scarf, breathing out sharp quick clouds that hurt as much to draw breath for as it did to stand there with the no-colored sun in my eyes, the sky pressing down on my hair and my shoulders and the backs of my hands, seeing me. The neighbors with their curtainless windows, locked in newlywed oblivion: two mirrors gazing into each other endlessly. Passing cars, passers-by, graffiti hanging over the wall. The air.Our garden, Seth. It doesn't move after all. It might be a machine, if machines were pinned and carved from rose-thorns and rain-torn petals and withered cuttings, blown dandelions and willowherb wreathed in seed-silk like a questioning cigarette; it might have grown there, if rails of brick-spiked iron and clagged tin could throw out runners, coil delicately to follow the sun. There was a ragged round of copper crept in green from the edges, turning like a suncatcher as the verdigris crawled. There was a spiderweb beaded from one prong of fused glass to a tarnished silver spike of lamb’s ear, glittering cleanly in the morning chill. It saw me. That was when I went upstairs, and I left a message at your hotel, and I did not take any more of my pills than I was supposed to, and I went to bed. It was cold and bright and the sounds came up through the walls, from nothing moving around where the neighbors, or me, or anything at all could see. After a while it started to sound familiar. After that I really couldn't sleep. I dreamed anyway. There was a door. How is this supposed to end, Seth? You’d drop everything if I checked myself in, but I don’t want to be that hungry ghost when I don’t need to, Eurydike-reeling myself in and out of the dark to see if you’ll brave it one more time for me; I don’t want you to find me with an empty bottle or emptier wrists, curled in the rime-blackened ruins of our garden like a child on a cold hill’s side. You've got epidemics to talk about and I've got my contagion here at home, allowed passage like every good haunting—any more trouble, but then maybe I don’t. It smells very strongly like burning now, acrid as antifreeze, sweet as spiced woods, and I think of an engine turning over, cogs and pistons and sap and steam. I think of pavement cracking like a caddis-husk, ice-starred earth rumbling like a drum. If it doesn't want to stay here, Seth, I won’t stop it: I’ll hold the gate for it just as I let it in, or I’ll sit here and drink the last of the black ginger tea, typing sentences that don’t stop as usual; we’ll get more when you’re home. The cat’s not on fire. The garden’s fucked, but aren't we all? Maybe it will tell me when it goes, knowing we feel the same way about an audience. I’m truthful when I need to be, too.ENDOur next story is “Ulder” by Vajra Chandrasekera.Vajra lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Black Static, and Shimmer, among others. You can find more work by him at vajra.me.ULDERby Vajra Chandrasekera“Ulder,” said the man in the hat, leaning in, lips barely moving. His eyes darted, as if anyone else on the train would hear him through their prophylactic earplugs. We were the only two with ears open."What?" I said, too loud. The man in the hat leaned away, mouth tight, beard bristling. He didn't look at me again.At the station, guardsmen took the man in the hat away. I watched them go out of the corner of my eye; they'd knocked his hat off when they took him down, and his hair was tousled from the scuffle. I couldn't see the hat anywhere, but there were so many people on the platform. I imagined it, briefly, crushed and stepped on somewhere in the press.I mentioned the word to Kirill in bed that night, and he stiffened, asked me where I'd heard it."He didn't tell you what it meant?" Kirill asked when I'd told him the story."What does it mean? Do you know?"Kirill hesitated so long that I prodded him to see if he'd fallen asleep. "You know I hate it when you keep secrets," I said."Don't be melodramatic," Kirill said.And then he told me what the word meant.It was several days before I thought to ask him how he had known the word. I spent those days in a haze, raw and newborn. The wind seemed colder. I started letting my beard grow. The long bones in my shins felt weak, as if from fever. And the word, it reverberated in me, growing echoes like fungi in the dark.Ulder, I said to myself at my desk, working and writing. But only inside, so that the other people in my office wouldn't hear me. I needn't have worried; they all wore prophylactics anyway.Ulder, I said to myself when I saw uniforms on the street, guardsmen arresting someone.("Disappearing," Kirill had once said, early in our acquaintance. "Not arresting, disappearing them." And I only thought, this man is free and beautiful. But if I had known the word then I would not have thought ulder, because Kirill was never that.)Ulder, I whispered when they broadcast the prayer-anthems, tinny from loudspeakers, in the evening as I walked to the railway station. I used to mumble along to the prayers out of habit, never seeing what was in front of me.Ulder, ulder, ulder.I said it out loud the next time Kirill and I slept together. It had been almost a week, because we couldn't afford to be seen together too often. Kirill flinched as soon as I said it. He rolled out of bed, lighting one of his contraband cigarettes."Now who's being melodramatic?" I said.The cigarettes were very Kirill. That was both the extent and the nature of his rebellion; slick, sly, sweet-smelling, carcinogenic."I was afraid you'd react to it this way," Kirill said. "Some are immune to memetically transmitted disease. But you--""MTDs don't exist," I said. "I've told you, it's just state propaganda against disapproved ideologies. Ulder--""Don't say it to me," Kirill said, laughing his bitter tar laugh and coughing. "What do you know about it? I was the one who told--"I don't want to talk about the fight. That's not the way I want to remember him. But we shouted a lot, and I think someone must have heard.A few more days went by, and I wanted to make it up to him. So I went to see him at the teahouse where we usually met after work. But even as I got there, I knew from the commotion that something was wrong. I didn't recognize Kirill's walk at first, pressed between the guardsmen as they marched him out of the building and into the waiting van. I only realized it was him when he laughed, bitter like tar.Not knowing what else to do, I took the train home. It was crowded, as always, and I hung from the strap like a drowning man. And when the young woman, the only other person in the carriage without earplugs in, caught my eye, I didn't have a choice.I knew what would happen, that it wouldn't go unremarked, that you'd be waiting for me on the platform with your batons.But in her eyes I saw a moment of openness, that fragile and fractured thing I had always seen in the mirror and never recognized until I heard the word, and though I knew she wouldn't understand and I couldn't explain, I leaned in and said “Ulder”, the word naked and bright like fever in my mouth.ENDOur next story is "The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced" by Sarah Pinsker.Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette, "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," Sturgeon Award winner 2014 and Nebula finalist 2013. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, The Journal of Unlikely Cartography, Fireside, Stupefying Stories, and PULP Literature, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, and The Future Embodied.She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels (the third with her rock band, the Stalking Horses) and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland and can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.THE SEWELL HOME FOR THE TEMPORALLY DISPLACEDby Sarah PinskerJudy says, "It's snowing."I look out the window. The sky is the same dirty grey as the snow left from last week's storm. I stand up to look closer, to find a backdrop against which I might see what she sees. The radiator is warm against my knees."You don't mean now." It's not really a question, but she shakes her head. She looks through me, through another window, at other weather. She smiles. Whenever she is, it must be beautiful."Describe it for me," I say."Big, fluffy snow. The kind that doesn't melt when it lands on your gloves. Big enough to see the shapes of individual flakes.""Do you know when you are?"She strains to catch a different view. "1890s, maybe? The building across the street hasn't been built yet. I wish I could see down to the street, Marguerite."Judy isn't supposed to leave her bed, but I help her into her yellow slippers, help her to her feet. I try to make myself strong enough for her to lean on. We shuffle to the window. She looks down."There's a Brougham* waiting at the front door. The horse is black, and he must have been driven hard, because the snow that's collecting elsewhere is just melting when it hits him. There's steam coming off him."I don't say anything. I can't see it, but I can picture it."Somebody came out of the building. He's helping a woman out of the carriage," she says. "Her clothes don't match the era or the season. She's wearing jeans and a T-shirt.""A Distillers T-shirt," I say."Yes! Can you see her too?""No," I say. "That was me, the first time I came here. I didn't stay long, that first time."I hear the creak of the door. It's Zia, my least favorite of the nurses. She treats us like children. "Judy, what are we doing up? We could get hurt if we have an episode."She turns to me. "And you, Marguerite. We should know better to encourage her.""Your pronouns are very confusing," I tell her.She ignores me. "Well, let's get down to lunch, since we're both up and about."Zia puts Judy in a wheelchair. I follow them down to the dining room, slow and steady. She pushes Judy up to the first available space, at a table with only one vacancy. I'm forced to sit across the room. I don't like being so far away from her. I would make a fuss, but I try to tell myself we can stand to be apart for one meal. I keep an eye on her anyway.Judy isn't fully back yet. She doesn't touch her food. Mr. Kahn and Michael Lim and Grace de Villiers are all talking across her. Mr. Kahn is floating his spoon, demonstrating the finer points of the physics of his first time machine, as he always does."Meatloaf again," mutters Emily Arnold, to my left. "I can't wait until vat protein is invented.""It tastes good enough, Emily. The food here is really pretty decent for an industrial kitchen in this time period." We've all had worse.We eat our meatloaf. Somebody at the far end of the room has a major episode and we're all asked to leave before we get our jello. I can't quite see who it is, but she's brandishing her butter knife like a cutlass, her legs braced against a pitching deck. The best kind of episode, where you're fully then again. We all look forward to those. It's funny that the staff act like it might be contagious. I wait in Judy's room for her to return. Zia wheels her in and lifts her into the bed. She's light as a bird, my Judy. Zia frowns when she sees me. I think she'd shoo me out more often if either of us had family that could lodge a complaint. Michael and Grace are allowed to eat together but not to visit each other's rooms. Grace's children think she shouldn't have a relationship now that she lives in so many times at once. Too confusing, they say, though Grace doesn't know whether they mean for them or for her."How was your dinner?" I ask Judy."I can't remember," she says. "But I saw you come in for the first time. You said 'How is this place real?' and young Mr. Kahn said 'Because someday all of us will build it.'""And then I asked 'When can I get started?' and he said 'You already did.'"I can see it now. The dining room was formal, then. Everyone stared when I came in, but most of the smiles were knowing ones. They understood the hazards of timesling. They had been there, or they were there, or they were going to be.Judy takes my hand. I lean over to kiss her."It's snowing," I say. "I can't wait to meet you."END*Brougham was changed to "carriage" for the audio version.“The True Alchemist” was first published in Not One of Us #51 in April 2014. “Ulder” was first published in Daily Science Fiction in July 2014. “The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced” was first published in the Women Destroy Science Fiction edition of Lightspeed Magazine in June 2014. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you again on April 9th with a selection of three flash fiction stories.[Music plays out]This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live. Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award. (The winner will be announced April 3). “I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” Brissett says in her New Books interview. In some respects, Elysium is simple: it tells a story of love and loss between two people. But Elysium is also complicated because those two people morph from scene to scene, changing from two brothers to father/daughter to husband/wife to boyfriend/boyfriend to girlfriend/girlfriend. When imagining the future, conventional science fiction often focuses too much on gadgets and not enough on people, Brissett says. “We think [science fiction] is about … the new machines we’ll have, the little gadgets that will make our lives easier … but I think the civil rights movement is one of the most science-fictional things that could have probably happened, because all of a sudden this entire group of people that was totally ignored showed up at the table and said ‘We want in.'” As a child, Brissett found the Wonder Bread future depicted in The Jetsons frightening. “I remember watching as a kid the Jetsons and thinking ‘That is an absolutely terrifying vision of the future. Where are all the black people?'” she says. “The future belongs to everybody. It doesn’t really belong to any one group. And yet when you see visions of the future, it’s usually mostly white heterosexual people wandering around.” In the early 2000s, Brissett owned an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she experienced the publishing industry’s struggles firsthand. Rather that discourage her from becoming a writer herself, the experience seems to have solidified her desire to tell stories in the way she wants to tell them. “You have to love this field to be here. If you’re here for money, you are certifiably crazy,” she says. Spoiler Alert From 6:45 to 10:24 we talk about a major part of the plot, which is revealed on the book jacket but isn’t explained until near the end of the book. Listeners might want to skip this part (and not read the jacket copy) if they want to approach the story as a mystery whose answer lies in the book’s structure. Related Links * Elysium was inspired, in part, by Roman Emperor Hadrian’s love of Antinous. * Brissett mentions her recently deceased friend, the writer Eugie Foster. * She also mentions a number of her teachers, including Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live. Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award. (The winner will be announced April 3). “I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” Brissett says in her New Books interview. In some respects, Elysium is simple: it tells a story of love and loss between two people. But Elysium is also complicated because those two people morph from scene to scene, changing from two brothers to father/daughter to husband/wife to boyfriend/boyfriend to girlfriend/girlfriend. When imagining the future, conventional science fiction often focuses too much on gadgets and not enough on people, Brissett says. “We think [science fiction] is about … the new machines we’ll have, the little gadgets that will make our lives easier … but I think the civil rights movement is one of the most science-fictional things that could have probably happened, because all of a sudden this entire group of people that was totally ignored showed up at the table and said ‘We want in.'” As a child, Brissett found the Wonder Bread future depicted in The Jetsons frightening. “I remember watching as a kid the Jetsons and thinking ‘That is an absolutely terrifying vision of the future. Where are all the black people?'” she says. “The future belongs to everybody. It doesn’t really belong to any one group. And yet when you see visions of the future, it’s usually mostly white heterosexual people wandering around.” In the early 2000s, Brissett owned an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she experienced the publishing industry’s struggles firsthand. Rather that discourage her from becoming a writer herself, the experience seems to have solidified her desire to tell stories in the way she wants to tell them. “You have to love this field to be here. If you’re here for money, you are certifiably crazy,” she says. Spoiler Alert From 6:45 to 10:24 we talk about a major part of the plot, which is revealed on the book jacket but isn’t explained until near the end of the book. Listeners might want to skip this part (and not read the jacket copy) if they want to approach the story as a mystery whose answer lies in the book’s structure. Related Links * Elysium was inspired, in part, by Roman Emperor Hadrian’s love of Antinous. * Brissett mentions her recently deceased friend, the writer Eugie Foster. * She also mentions a number of her teachers, including Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live. Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award. (The winner will be announced April 3). “I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” Brissett says in her New Books interview. In some respects, Elysium is simple: it tells a story of love and loss between two people. But Elysium is also complicated because those two people morph from scene to scene, changing from two brothers to father/daughter to husband/wife to boyfriend/boyfriend to girlfriend/girlfriend. When imagining the future, conventional science fiction often focuses too much on gadgets and not enough on people, Brissett says. “We think [science fiction] is about … the new machines we’ll have, the little gadgets that will make our lives easier … but I think the civil rights movement is one of the most science-fictional things that could have probably happened, because all of a sudden this entire group of people that was totally ignored showed up at the table and said ‘We want in.'” As a child, Brissett found the Wonder Bread future depicted in The Jetsons frightening. “I remember watching as a kid the Jetsons and thinking ‘That is an absolutely terrifying vision of the future. Where are all the black people?'” she says. “The future belongs to everybody. It doesn’t really belong to any one group. And yet when you see visions of the future, it’s usually mostly white heterosexual people wandering around.” In the early 2000s, Brissett owned an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she experienced the publishing industry’s struggles firsthand. Rather that discourage her from becoming a writer herself, the experience seems to have solidified her desire to tell stories in the way she wants to tell them. “You have to love this field to be here. If you’re here for money, you are certifiably crazy,” she says. Spoiler Alert From 6:45 to 10:24 we talk about a major part of the plot, which is revealed on the book jacket but isn’t explained until near the end of the book. Listeners might want to skip this part (and not read the jacket copy) if they want to approach the story as a mystery whose answer lies in the book’s structure. Related Links * Elysium was inspired, in part, by Roman Emperor Hadrian’s love of Antinous. * Brissett mentions her recently deceased friend, the writer Eugie Foster. * She also mentions a number of her teachers, including Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices