Podcasts about Lethe Press

Happy Holidays! This episode is about festive "medieval" poetry. If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here. I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble. Sources: Andrews, William. At the Sign of the Barber's Pole: A Study in Hirsute History. Lethe Press, 2008. Cook, Megan. "Dirtbag Medievalism," Avidly. July 14, 2021. Eco, Umberto. Travel in Hyperreality. Harcourt, inc, 1986. Jackson, Sophie. The Medieval Christmas. The History Press, 2013. Scott, Walter. Marmion. Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1896. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, we spoke with Patrick E. Horrigan, academic and author of American Scholar, published by Lethe Press. Since recording this episode, American Scholar was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Awards in the Gay Fiction category. Congratulations, Patrick! Patrick is also the author of two other novels, plays, essays, and more. He and taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn, and was a previous winner of Long Island University's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, among many other accolades. We had a great time talking to Patrick about his career as an author, his history in academia, his past experiences at Columbia and LIU Brooklyn that helped shape him, his latest novel, the inspiration behind it, and much, much more. This episode was informative, illuminating, and an all-around great interview! Don't miss out on listening in. And learn more via Patrick's website or follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Born of Night Without Warning ep.685 CHRISTOPHER O‘HALLORAN (he/him) is the factory-working, Canadian, actor-turned-author of PUSHING DAISY, his upcoming debut novel from Lethe Press (2025). His shorter work has been published or forthcoming from Kaleidotrope, NoSleep Podcast, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and others. He is editor of the anthology, Howls from the Wreckage. Visit COauthor.ca for stories, reviews, and updates on upcoming novels.   ---- Listen Elsewhere ---- YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/TallTaleTV Website: http://www.TallTaleTV.com   ---- Story Submission ---- Got a short story you'd like to submit? Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.TallTaleTV.com   ---- About Tall Tale TV ---- Hi there! My name is Chris Herron and I'm an audiobook narrator. In 2015, I suffered from poor Type 1 diabetes control which lead me to become legally blind for almost a year. The doctors didn't give me much hope, predicting an 80% chance that I would never see again. But I refused to give up and changed my lifestyle drastically. Through sheer willpower (and an amazing eye surgeon) I beat the odds and regained my vision. During that difficult time, I couldn't read or write, which was devastating as they had always been a source of comfort for me since childhood. However, my wife took me to the local library where she read out the titles of audiobooks to me. I selected some of my favorite books, such as the Disc World series, Name of the Wind, Harry Potter, and more, and the audiobooks brought these stories to life in a way I had never experienced before. They helped me through the darkest period of my life and I fell in love with audiobooks. Once I regained my vision, I decided to pursue a career as an audiobook narrator instead of a writer. That's why I created Tall Tale TV, to support aspiring authors in the writing communities that I had grown to love before my ordeal. My goal was to help them promote their work by providing a promotional audio short story that showcases their writing skills to readers. They say the strongest form of advertising is word of mouth, so I offer a platform for readers to share these videos and help spread the word about these talented writers. Please consider sharing these stories with your friends and family to support these amazing authors. Thank you!   ---- legal ---- All stories on Tall Tale TV have been submitted in accordance with the terms of service provided on http://www.talltaletv.com or obtained with permission by the author. All images used on Tall Tale TV are either original or Royalty and Attribution free. Most stock images used are provided by http://www.pixabay.com , https://www.canstockphoto.com/ or created using AI. Image attribution will be declared only when required by the copyright owner. Common Affiliates are: Amazon, Smashwords  

Patrick Horrigan's novel, American Scholar (Lethe Press 2023) centers on James (Jimmy) Fitzgerald, who teaches American Literature at a prestigious university, is in a happy (open) marriage that allows him to enjoy a much younger boyfriend, and has just published a novel about literary critic, Harvard Professor of History and Literature, F.O. Matthiesen, who was forced to hide his love for artist Russell Cheney during a time before homosexual love and marriage were accepted. The sister of Jimmy's first serious boyfriend shows up at a book signing for Jimmy's new novel and hands him a letter that sends him spinning back to memories of the first man he ever loved. James describes his sexual awakening and recalls haunting moments with Gregory, whose self-destructive personality was part of Jimmy's impetus for writing American Scholar. Horrigan's novel, which weaves in the study of Queer Theory, Jimmy's sexual awakening, and fears of the AIDS virus then sweeping across the globe. Horrigan whips back and forth from that difficult time to 2016, when his now middle-aged protagonist is now a professor and published author, but political polarization following the presidential election has inspired new fears throughout the gay community. Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Patrick E. Horrigan received his BA from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the novel Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press; Indie Book Award finalist for best LGBTQ2 fiction) and the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (Lethe Press; winner of the Dana Award for fiction as well as the Mary Lynn Kotz Art-in-Literature Award, sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). His other works include the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing up Gay at the Movies (University of Wisconsin Press), the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail, and (with Eduardo Leanez) the solo show “You Are Confused”! He has written artists' catalogue essays for Thion's LIMI-TATE: DRAWINGS OF LIFE AND DREAMS (cueB Gallery, London) and Ernesto Pujol's LOSS OF FAITH (Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York). His essay “The Inner Life of Ordinary People” appears in Anthony Enns' and Christopher R. Smit's “Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability” (University Press of America). Horrigan and Eduardo Leanez are the hosts of “Actors with Accents”, a recurring variety show in Manhattan. Winner of Long Island University's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, he taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn. He has played the piano throughout his life and currently works as a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Patrick Horrigan's novel, American Scholar (Lethe Press 2023) centers on James (Jimmy) Fitzgerald, who teaches American Literature at a prestigious university, is in a happy (open) marriage that allows him to enjoy a much younger boyfriend, and has just published a novel about literary critic, Harvard Professor of History and Literature, F.O. Matthiesen, who was forced to hide his love for artist Russell Cheney during a time before homosexual love and marriage were accepted. The sister of Jimmy's first serious boyfriend shows up at a book signing for Jimmy's new novel and hands him a letter that sends him spinning back to memories of the first man he ever loved. James describes his sexual awakening and recalls haunting moments with Gregory, whose self-destructive personality was part of Jimmy's impetus for writing American Scholar. Horrigan's novel, which weaves in the study of Queer Theory, Jimmy's sexual awakening, and fears of the AIDS virus then sweeping across the globe. Horrigan whips back and forth from that difficult time to 2016, when his now middle-aged protagonist is now a professor and published author, but political polarization following the presidential election has inspired new fears throughout the gay community. Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Patrick E. Horrigan received his BA from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the novel Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press; Indie Book Award finalist for best LGBTQ2 fiction) and the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (Lethe Press; winner of the Dana Award for fiction as well as the Mary Lynn Kotz Art-in-Literature Award, sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). His other works include the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing up Gay at the Movies (University of Wisconsin Press), the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail, and (with Eduardo Leanez) the solo show “You Are Confused”! He has written artists' catalogue essays for Thion's LIMI-TATE: DRAWINGS OF LIFE AND DREAMS (cueB Gallery, London) and Ernesto Pujol's LOSS OF FAITH (Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York). His essay “The Inner Life of Ordinary People” appears in Anthony Enns' and Christopher R. Smit's “Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability” (University Press of America). Horrigan and Eduardo Leanez are the hosts of “Actors with Accents”, a recurring variety show in Manhattan. Winner of Long Island University's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, he taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn. He has played the piano throughout his life and currently works as a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Patrick Horrigan's novel, American Scholar (Lethe Press 2023) centers on James (Jimmy) Fitzgerald, who teaches American Literature at a prestigious university, is in a happy (open) marriage that allows him to enjoy a much younger boyfriend, and has just published a novel about literary critic, Harvard Professor of History and Literature, F.O. Matthiesen, who was forced to hide his love for artist Russell Cheney during a time before homosexual love and marriage were accepted. The sister of Jimmy's first serious boyfriend shows up at a book signing for Jimmy's new novel and hands him a letter that sends him spinning back to memories of the first man he ever loved. James describes his sexual awakening and recalls haunting moments with Gregory, whose self-destructive personality was part of Jimmy's impetus for writing American Scholar. Horrigan's novel, which weaves in the study of Queer Theory, Jimmy's sexual awakening, and fears of the AIDS virus then sweeping across the globe. Horrigan whips back and forth from that difficult time to 2016, when his now middle-aged protagonist is now a professor and published author, but political polarization following the presidential election has inspired new fears throughout the gay community. Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Patrick E. Horrigan received his BA from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the novel Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press; Indie Book Award finalist for best LGBTQ2 fiction) and the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (Lethe Press; winner of the Dana Award for fiction as well as the Mary Lynn Kotz Art-in-Literature Award, sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). His other works include the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing up Gay at the Movies (University of Wisconsin Press), the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail, and (with Eduardo Leanez) the solo show “You Are Confused”! He has written artists' catalogue essays for Thion's LIMI-TATE: DRAWINGS OF LIFE AND DREAMS (cueB Gallery, London) and Ernesto Pujol's LOSS OF FAITH (Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York). His essay “The Inner Life of Ordinary People” appears in Anthony Enns' and Christopher R. Smit's “Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability” (University Press of America). Horrigan and Eduardo Leanez are the hosts of “Actors with Accents”, a recurring variety show in Manhattan. Winner of Long Island University's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, he taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn. He has played the piano throughout his life and currently works as a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Scotty talks to author Daniel Braum about the glories of "The Twilight Zone" (both the show and the magazine), writing "on the borderline" and the use of "night-time logic" in weird fiction, using generational trauma as a bridge to another culture in fiction, trusting your own vision vs. the market, and not being afraid of ambiguity. They also discuss Braum's short stories "The Hand of Fire" (from "The Jewish Book of Horror" anthology) and "How to Stay Afloat When Drowning" (from Braum's collection "Underworld Dreams"), as well as his novella "The Serpent's Shadow" which is being released in print for the first time from Cemetery Dance Publications. You can find Daniel on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@danielbraum7838 To read "The Hand of Fire," pick up "The Jewish Book of Horror," edited by Josh Schlossberg, from the Denver Horror Collective: https://denverhorror.com/the-jewish-book-of-horror/ To read "How to Stay Afloat When Drowning," pick up the collection "Underworld Dreams" from Lethe Press: https://www.lethepressbooks.com/store/p563/Underworld_Dreams.html You can find "The Serpent's Shadow" at Cemetery Dance Publications: https://www.cemeterydance.com/serpentshadowBRAUM This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Dave, Leonard and Cameron discuss the first two stories in the anthology, Behold the Void, written by Philip Fracassi. Soft Construction of a Sunset. Altar. Fracassi, Philip. "Behold the Void." Lethe Press, 2020. Original Print 2017. Contact: www.monsterdear.monster

Teatime with Miss Liz coming to the table to share his T-E-A and his journey with his screenwriting horror stories and so much more is the one and only Philip Fracassi. A teatime you don't want to miss. Philip Fracassi - Screenwriter / Author September 29th, 7 pm EST LIVE SHOW Miss Liz's YouTube Channel Podcasting Stations around the Globe Philip Fracassi is the author of the award-winning story collection, Behold the Void, which won “Best Collection of the Year” from This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine. His newest collection, Beneath a Pale Sky, was published in 2021 by Lethe Press. It received a starred review from Library Journal, was named “Best Collection of the Year” by Rue Morgue Magazine, and was nominated for a Bram Stoker award. His novels include A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, and Boys in the Valley. Philip's books have been translated into multiple languages and his stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Dark Discoveries, and Cemetery Dance. The New York Times calls his work “terrifically scary.” As a screenwriter, his feature films have been distributed by Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Television. He currently has several stories under option for film/tv adaptation. Philip lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Elizabeth Copps at Copps Literary Services. Social Media Links: https://www.facebook.com/philipfracassi https://twitter.com/PhilipFracassi https://www.instagram.com/pfracassi Website: www.pfracassi.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/misslizsteatimes/message

Today we are joined by author LA Fields to discuss how she puts real people from history into her fictionalized books. From Oscar Wilde to Abe Lincoln and many more in between, Fields is an expert at mining the historical record for real examples of anecdotes that lend themselves to homoerotica and romance. So do you wanna know how Honest Abe really felt about Walt Whitman, at least from LA's perspective? You know you do. Give us a listen and find L.A. Fields wherever you get books (GoodReads, Lethe Press, Rebel Satori Press) and on socials: author_lafields on Twitter, and la_fields on Instagram.

A group of kids on summer break use an app to hunt virtual ghosts. But, as is so often the case, when we play with the supernatural, the unexpected happens, and rules we don't understand come into play.A.C. Wise‘s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Shimmer, Tor.com, and The Best Horror of the Year Volume 10, among other places. The podcast version of her story Final Girl Theory, which appeared at Pseudopod, was a finalist for the 2013 Parsec Awards. Additionally, her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, as well as twice more being a finalist for the award, and has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella published by Broken Eye Books. Along with her fiction, she contributes the Women to Read, and Non-Binary Authors to Read columns to The Book Smugglers.You can read The Stories We Tell About Ghosts at https://www.whiteenso.com/ghost-stories-2022Follow us on twitter at: Japanese Ghost Stories @ghostJapanese Instagram: WhiteEnsoJapanFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/kaidankai100/Help me pay the contributors for their work. Donate to the Kaidankai through Ko-Fi. Thank you!https://ko-fi.com/kaidankaighoststories

In this podcast Anya Martin interviews Adam McOmber about his most recent Weird novels The Ghost Finders (Journalstone) and Jesus and John (Lethe Press) and more. This episode was recorded on Wed. Nov. 10, 2021 Show Notes In this podcast, Anya Martin interviews Adam McOmber about his most recent Weird novels The Ghost Finders (Journalstone) and … Continue reading

Daniel is the author of the short story collections The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales, The Wish Mechanics: Stories of the Strange and Fantastic, Yeti Tiger Dragon, and Underworld Dreams. The Serpent's Shadow, his first novella, was released from Cemetery Dance eBooks. He is the editor of the Spirits Unwrapped anthology from Lethe Press, and the host and founder of the Night Time Logic reading series in New York City which can also be heard on the Ink Heist podcast. His work has appeared in publications ranging from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet to the Shivers 8 anthology. He can be found at bloodandstardust.wordpress.com and on Twitter @danielbraum Links: The Go Fund Me for the folk horror project, The Dark Heart of the Wood, coming in 2022 from Oxygen Man Press, including Daniel's short story "Where the Jaguar King Lives in the Dark Heart of the Wood" is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-dark-heart-of-the-wood Underworld Dreams is available for Kindle, in Paperback, and as an audiobook via Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Underworld-Dreams-Daniel-Braum/dp/1590215834 Daniel's next reading is September 23, 2021. Link to the Facebook event page and the You Tube Channel is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1481016415630091 And here is the You Tube Channel where the reading will be and also an archive of many past readings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkYNJMDrsEM

We're kicking off Pride Month by heading to the gayest town in the USA and investigating the flamboyant ghost of the Rose & Crown Guest House.  However, this jolly ghost teaches us an important lesson about life and how to live it.   Follow the Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crimesandwitchdemeanors Submit your feedback or personal stories to crimesandwitchdemeanors@gmail.com  Like The Podcast on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crimesandwitchdemeanors  Episode Transcript: Available below the sources in the show notes Visit the website: https://www.crimesandwitchdemeanors.com    SOURCES: Alice Foley Newspaper Clippings. (n.d.). Retrieved June 1, 2021, from http://www.provincetownhistoryproject.com/PDF/asg_000_027-alice-foley-founding-member-of-provincetown-aids-support-group.pdf     Brathwaite 4/3/2019, L. F. (n.d.). A Home at the End of the World: Provincetown and the AIDS Crisis. LOGO News. Retrieved May 29, 2021, from http://www.newnownext.com/a-home-at-the-end-of-the-world-provincetown-and-the-aids-crisis/04/2019/ Lipari, L. (n.d.). Provincetown Activist Babbitt Dies At 48 After Long Illness. 1.     Desroches, S. (2018, October 24). Ghost in a Gown. Provincetown Magazine. https://provincetownmagazine.com/index.php/2018/10/24/ghost-in-a-gown/     Miner, R. (n.d.). Homo Haunts: New England's Gay Ghosts Come Out of the Closet | Boston Spirit Magazine. Retrieved May 29, 2021, from http://bostonspiritmagazine.com/2012/09/homo-haunts/     MYERS, K. C. (n.d.). Early Cape AIDS activist dies. Capecodtimes.Com. Retrieved May 29, 2021, from https://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20090426/NEWS/904260326       Provincetown, Massachusetts—Wikipedia. (n.d.). Retrieved May 31, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincetown,_Massachusetts     Rose & Crown Guest House – Provincetown Business Guild. (n.d.). Retrieved May 31, 2021, from https://ptown.org/business-directory/rose-crown-guest-house/     Rose and Crown Guest House. (n.d.). Rosecrown. Retrieved May 29, 2021, from https://www.roseandcrownptown.com Summers, K. (2009). Queer Hauntings. Lethe Press.

This week, we're excited to welcome John Mantooth to the show to celebrate his latest collection, Shoebox Train Wreck, which is out now through Lethe Press! We're excited to have John back on the show after his last appearance with Ian Pisarcik. I'm pretty sure both of us at Ink Heist were initially introduced to John's work through his Earl Marcus novels, which were released under the name Hank Early. When we heard he was going to release a collection under his own name, which finds John further blurring the lines of genre, we knew we had to get our hands on it! Shoebox Train Wreck is packed with stories that feature memorable characters and settings that will sweep you up into the narrative. And make no mistake, most of these stories are emotionally devastating and will stick with you long after you close the pages. John is an incredible talent and if you're looking for a collection that features one jaw-droppingly good story after another, you need to get your hands on Shoebox Train Wreck.

"The Amazing Exploding Women of the Early Twentieth Century," published in Apex Magazine, issue 122, February 2021. Read it here. https://apex-magazine.com/ A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, as well as twice being a finalist for the Sunburst Award, twice being a finalist for the Nebula Award, and being a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella published by Broken Eye Books. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling, is forthcoming from Titan Books in June 2021, and a new collection, The Ghost Sequences, is forthcoming from Undertow Books in Fall 2021. In addition to her fiction, she contributes review columns to Apex and The Book Smugglers. Visit her at her website. A storyteller of many forms, Aly Grauer has been known to perform onstage, on podcasts, at ren faires, and at world-class theme parks. Of late, she is the audio editor for Skyjacks: Courier’s Call, where she also performs as June Hymnal. Aly is also a writer, teaches dialect lessons, provides narration for audiobooks, and occasionally creates small roleplaying games. Aly and her husband Drew live in Chicago, IL where they both serve as heated furniture for their two cats, Queen Felicia and Wedge. This Apex Magazine podcast was produced by KT Bryski. Theme music by Alex White. Other music in this podcast includes "Melodie Victoria," "Almost New," "Frogs Legs Rag," and "Reawakening," all by Kevin MacLeod and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Learn more at www.incompetech.com. Some sounds in this podcast provided by the Free Sound Project. Find out more at www.freesound.org. Apex Magazine podcast, copyright Apex Publications. Apex Magazine is a bimonthly short fiction zine focused on dark science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Find us at http://www.apex-magazine.com

This week we're excited to welcome J. Daniel Stone to the show to discuss his latest novel, Stations of Shadow, which is out now through Lethe Press. We talk about his works, including Stations of Shadow, Blood Kiss, and The Absence of Light. Daniel is a must-read author and all three of those titles are must-read books. Oh, and this is a must-listen episode. We had a blast with Daniel and, as usual, learned a ton of stuff along the way.

Judith Lee Herbert’s chapbook Songbird, published by Kelsay Books, was a finalist in the Blue Light 2017 Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in Bards Annual, Before the Dawn, NCPLS Review, LIQ, These Fragile Lilacs, First Literary Review East, Mothering in the Middle, and The Ekphrastic Review. Her poems placed 2nd in the Mid-Island Y 2018 Contest and Honorable Mention in the NCPLS 2018 Contest. DANIEL BRAUM is the New York based author of the short story collections The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales (Cemetery Dance), The Wish Mechanics: Stories of the Strange and Fantastic (Independent Legions 2017) and the chapbook Yeti Tiger Dragon (Dim Shores 2016). His third collection, Underworld Dreams is forthcoming from Lethe Press. The Serpent’s Shadow, is his first novel. He is the editor of the Spirits Unwrapped anthology from Lethe Press (October 2019) and the host and founder of the Night Time Logic reading series in New York City. Claire Zajdel is a writer originally from the Chicago area. She is mostly a playwright. Her plays have been produced or developed at 59E59, Dixon Place, Theater for a New City, The Hudson Theatre Guild, and more. Her writing has also been in Breadcrumbs Magazine, Fringebiscuit Magazine and more. She is a graduate of Tisch School of the Arts' Dramatic Writing program.

Raders by Nelson Stanley   They called themselves the Raders, and if you didn’t know, you’d swear that they were waiting for something: a bunch of boyed-up cookers, second-string hot hatches and shopping trollies adorned with bazzing body-kits parked down at the overcliff again, throttles blipping in time to the breakbeats. Throaty roar from aftermarket back-boxes you could shove your fist up, throb of the bass counter-pointed by an occasional crack as a cheap six-by-nine gave up the ghost. Occasionally a sub overheated, leaving nothing but ear-splitting midrange and treble howling into the gale blowing rain off the sea. Mya had pushed half a pill into Maggie’s hand when the red XR2 picked her up outside the all-night Turkish takeaway, and Maggie regretted dropping it already, though at first she’d thought the high percentage of whizz in it might lend her enough chemical bravery to finally say what she wanted. Now her eyes rolled in her head and the rush made it difficult to speak. Sparks came off the edges of the headlights splitting the mizzle outside. Her nervous system uncoiled and re-knitted itself, reducing her to a warm soup through which the uppers fizzed and popped.     [Full story after the cut.] Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 72 for June 10, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, which starts off a new issue that you can pick up at GlitterShip.com/buy, on Gumroad at gum.co/gship08, or on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and other ebook retailers. If you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them. http://www.storybundle.com/pride Our story today is “Raders” by Nelson Stanley. Before we get to that, though, here is our poem, “Vampiric Tendencies in the Year 4500” by Renee Christopher. Renee Christopher is an SFF writer and poet currently making it through her last Iowa winter. Noble / Gas has nominated her poetry for a Pushcart, and her first short story can be found in Fireside Fiction. Follow her on Twitter @reneesunok or on Mastodon @sunok@wandering.shop   Vampiric Tendencies in the Year 4500 By Renee Christopher   Moon-sewn mothgirls clot          near light, their search for glow similar to mine. The door left          ajar          allowed us both alternate methods for creation creatures merged          with cosmic teeth. Stars managed to adapt          find those who, thick as molasses, gleamed upon the trellis          of a new future. But what I look for flutters past a stand of deer          —bright and wingless, with champagne fingers and summer tongues. At least, the searing          reminds me of a time when the sun burned hot and fast.          Now the blood  I need drips neon from above, filters through          decadent soil in a system unknown. In this quest for light          source, I am not alone.   Nelson Stanley works in an academic library in the UK. His stories have been published recently in places like The Dark Magazine, the Lethe Press anthology THCock, Black Dandy, The Gallery of Curiosities, The Sockdolager, and Tough Crime. One of his stories was included in the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology Extended Play.   Raders by Nelson Stanley   They called themselves the Raders, and if you didn’t know, you’d swear that they were waiting for something: a bunch of boyed-up cookers, second-string hot hatches and shopping trollies adorned with bazzing body-kits parked down at the overcliff again, throttles blipping in time to the breakbeats. Throaty roar from aftermarket back-boxes you could shove your fist up, throb of the bass counter-pointed by an occasional crack as a cheap six-by-nine gave up the ghost. Occasionally a sub overheated, leaving nothing but ear-splitting midrange and treble howling into the gale blowing rain off the sea. Mya had pushed half a pill into Maggie’s hand when the red XR2 picked her up outside the all-night Turkish takeaway, and Maggie regretted dropping it already, though at first she’d thought the high percentage of whizz in it might lend her enough chemical bravery to finally say what she wanted. Now her eyes rolled in her head and the rush made it difficult to speak. Sparks came off the edges of the headlights splitting the mizzle outside. Her nervous system uncoiled and re-knitted itself, reducing her to a warm soup through which the uppers fizzed and popped. Waves thrashed at the rocks below the edge of the cliff. An occasional dark shape—a seagull, perhaps, blown off-course and away from the bins—fluttered into the edges of the headlights’ glare and then reeled away into the greater darkness. Hydro and tobacco exhaust vented through half-opened drivers’ windows and flavored the edges of the sooty exhaust smoke from a dozen engines running too rich. One or other spun dustbin-lid size alloys on the wet, loose tarmac with an angry howl, holding it on the handbrake, then—just when you might think that a clutch was about to melt—drop it hard so that fat low-profiles tramped up into the suspension turrets as the tires found purchase, slewing away to nail it down the narrow cliff road, returning from its circuit a few minutes later to rejoin the loose congregation in the car park. “See. What I mean is, we could be like... See? We don’t have to like... What I mean...” Maggie trailed off, frustrated not so much, perhaps, by her inability to articulate her emotions than by the inefficiency of talking as a medium for expression itself. Why couldn’t she just touch Mya, and have her know exactly what she meant? How she felt? She chewed savagely upon the inside of her bottom lip and fervently wished she’d brought some chewing gum, breath fast through her nose. She started to roll a ciggie, but her hands were shaking and tobacco and papers seemed alive in her hands. In the driver’s seat, Mya was doing her lippy in the rear-view, an action made more difficult by the way she was surfing the breakbeats pulsing from the stereo, pausing occasionally to puff on the spliff hanging out of the other side of her mouth. With a sigh that seemed practiced she twisted her lippy shut and dropped it amongst the scree of empty Embassy No.1 packets, roached Rizla cartons, baggies and half-crushed tins of cheap cider littering the dashboard. “Look,” she said, placing both hands on the steering wheel, as if what she had to say required anchoring herself more firmly to the car, “With you now it’s all ‘What I want’ and ‘What I think is’ and it just... I knew it’d get like this. Knew it. What you don’ get is, I don’t care. It’s over, girl. Let go.” Chemicals rushed into Maggie’s head like someone filling up a bath. She was frantically rubbing a rolling paper flat between her thumbs, gaze pinned to the wrinkled rectangle as if somewhere upon it was written a way out of this, a way to get Mya back. “I suppose I do need you,” Mya went on, leaning back in the Recaro and idly picking at a blim-hole in the upholstery while puffing luxuriantly on her smoke. “But not the way you need me. I can’t be the thing you want, y’know? It was fun, while it lasted, but is what it is, girl.” She glanced over at Maggie. “But you can still help, if you like.” Maggie—lorn and reeling from the chemicals thudding through her central cortex—tried to answer, but all that came out was a small hiccuping yelp. She nodded frantically. “Jesus fuck,” Mya said, and shoved the j toward her passenger. “D’you wan’ some of that?” she said, and it seemed to Maggie that there was love in the gesture, in Mya’s voice, real love, an outpouring of care and concern, and even if it wasn’t what Maggie wanted—that surging roil in her groin, the brimming of her heart that accompanied her memories of the two of them twined together in Mya’s bed, under the Congo Natty poster, the way Mya held her hand in public once or twice, walking back through the rain and the ghost-haunted dawn, hoodies pulled up against the wind—then, still, it unlocked such a river of sweet-flowing sadness inside Maggie that she thought she might melt, right there in the XR2, melt outward in a great silent wave of warmth that blossomed from some secret core inside her body and pulsed through her, turning her flesh to something at once liquid and as evanescent as smoke. “Jesus fuck,” Mya said again, peering into Maggie’s face. “If you vom all on my Recaros I swear down I will kick you out right here, get me?”, but Maggie knew she wouldn’t, knew she wouldn’t do that, and she was right.   Outside, other cars were gathering, as if drawn by the bass or the lights, as if boyed-up hatches were sad deep-sea creatures, huddling together for mutual warmth around some abyssal vent. Inside, in the thick dusty warmth blowing out of the demister, Maggie shucked off her hoodie and T-shirt, down to her bra, worming her shoulder blades into the fabric of the passenger seat. Though she rolled her eyes at this, Mya was at least calmer now that Maggie had smoked herself into a place of happy burbling. She cranked down the window as a battered G1 CRX pulled up, fishtank lights glowing underneath the sills and an acre of filler across its back three-quarter panel as if it suffered the ravages of some terrible disease. The relentless, tinny grinding of mid-period Sick of it All pounding from the CRX met the XR2’s sweetly dubbing Jungle, twisted in the rain into a horrifying new hybrid. The boy in the CRX, baseball cap pulled down low, leaned out the window and put his hand out for a fistbump, got left hanging, pulled it in reluctantly and settled further down into his Parka. “It’s nearly time,” Mya said to him. He sniffed. “Aye.” “You gonna lead?” He shrugged, somewhat restrained by his seatbelt. “Thought you were gonna. As it’s, like, your party n’that.” All around the car-park hatches were circling now, splashing through the puddles: a well-loved 205 GTI with engine mounts so shot that it kangaroo-ed on the clutch, pitching the front-end like an obsequious underling kowtowing to its superior so that the add-on plastic chin spoiler spat a spray of gravel in front of it. A cooking Sierra twin-cam done out to look like a Cossie decided to show the front-drive pretenders what they were missing out on, and started power-oversteering around the edge of the circling hatches, back end slewing dangerously close before a hefty stomp on the throttle and an armful opposite-lock sent it whirling away. Maggie, eyes rolling saucer in her head, could only see trails of light, fireworks steaming in the dark, light spidering out of itself to scrawl the night, after-images licking at the edges of the rain. “Where we going?” she said, struggling upright in the seat, pulse thrumming up through her, a solid lump in her throat. “We’re gonna take a trip to Faerieland,” Mya said as she took the XR2 out of the carpark, the Raders peeling off after her, each trailing a respectable distance behind the other, jostling for position down the narrow slip road. “The land of the dead, the shining place on the hill where the Good Stuff comes from, where they take you when it’s all over.” Maggie watched the empty wet streets go past, everything wet and filthy, the streetlamps chrysanthemum bursts of light. The Raders peeled off and followed one-by-one in a continuous rising and falling of fat aftermarket tailpipes and tinny drum’n’bass, punctuated occasionally by the telltale clunk-woosh of a dump valve some joker had bolted on to a naturally-aspirated Golf. They snaked down the road leading from the overcliff, overly-fat radials whispering across the wet tarmac then ka-thumping awkwardly as they bottomed out on the potholes because they’d lowered their suspension by cutting their coil springs with an angle grinder. “Think on,” said Mya, checking her reflection in the rear-view, “Think, Maggie. A place—well, not quite a place—somewhere they talk in the high-pitched whistle of bats, words you hear not with your ears but something lodged in the back of your brain. They got stuff there, one tiny hit’ll burn through your soul, let you touch the face of God and strip away your skin, make you forget all the shit life drops in your lap.” Beyond the glass, the neon frontage on dingy shops and cheap bars spread and blurred in firework streaks. Maggie convulsed in her seatbelt, clawing at the tensioner as it ratcheted too-tightly around her stomach. The XR2 lurched over a speed-bump outside Syndicate—the townie girls lined up on the wet pavement clutching their purses, tugging ineffectually at two inches’ of skirt as the rain blew in sideways from the seafront, the young boys with too much hair product reeking of cheap body-spray and grabbing their crotches as they shotgunned cans of lager—and for a second Maggie thought she might actually be sick, but luckily it passed. “A place where you never have to think,” said Mya, idly flicking ash off the end of her j as she took to the wrong side of the road to pass a dawdling hatchback—big swoosh of locked brakes against wet tarmac, cacophony of horns blaring into the night—“Where you never get hungry, or sad, or old.” Maggie opened her mouth to speak, but Mya chose that moment to take the inside, getting both nearside wheels up on the curb as she passed a recovery lorry turning on to the main road, orange spinning light sending weird tiger stripes strobing across the interior of the XR2. As Mya straightened up, fighting the bit of aquaplane as she brought it level, she continued: “There was this girl, see. She was just like any other. Stupid but not free. She met another girl, and fell in love. The sex was fucking epic—” and at this Maggie gave a low moan—“for starters, but wasn’t just meat-meet, wasn’t just something in the cunt or the brain or the blood. This other girl showed the first one things she’d never seen. A new way of looking at the world—” Traffic lights bloomed like fireworks through the rain-swept windscreen as Mya, faced with the inconvenience of a stop signal, took a shortcut through the carpark of a pub, narrowly missing someone’s Transit pulling out of a space then nipping back into the snarl of traffic, agonised howls of horns behind them like the baying of something monstrous. “A new pair of eyes.” Maggie nodded, chewing on her bottom lip. “The world seemed changed,” Mya went on. “Everything was magic.” The speed of their passage smeared the neon of a kebab shop across the night, and Maggie, her hand up to wave away a stray strand of hair that she swore was scuttling across her face like a spider, was left staring, open-mouthed, soul tightening in her throat as it sought to escape the skin, astonished at the colored lights crawling and twisting across her skin. “She showed her things she never dreamed existed, never dreamed could exist. Then, her lover told this girl that she couldn’t have her, that it wasn’t to be. Where her lover came from, she said, that place was different to ours, and she had to go back there. She came from far away, from a place out beyond the days of working shit jobs for the man and burning up your nights in Rizlas and watching them drift,” Mya said, exhaling a long cloud of dope smoke. As it hit the windscreen and flattened out Maggie watched the coils interpolate and shiver in a slow-motion swirl, and the spirals twisted and convulsed and in the whirl there were bodies churning, moving against each other in a liquid tumble, figures clotted together and sliding through each other and as she watched featureless heads opened empty mouths in silent screams of ecstasy and lust— Taking another big roundabout, Mya let the XR2 go sideways for shits and giggles, whoosh of tires on wet asphalt, and the stately procession of the Raders followed, each making the same playful half-wobble in the Ford’s wake, then out on the ring-road past industrial estates lit up garishly by high-powered halogens. Maggie dry-swallowed the lump in her throat, convulsed slightly, gasped out: “I think I’m gonna need another pill, if we’re going to a rave.” Mya ignored her. “This other lover, she told the girl she was in deep, that where she came from they never died, but every so often one of them had to pay a price, tithe to the Man Who Waits, the Man Who Must Be Paid, and that it was her turn to pay.” On the edge of a judder of chemicals as they sped down the pulsing freeways of her blood, Maggie found her voice: “I’d’ve loved to have gone to a rave with you. We never did, did we? There was that big one, down by the river, in the old tire factory? We never made it,” and she trailed off, the memory of that night coming back to hit her: going round someone’s house to score, the crunch of the purple-y crystals in the baggie with the smiley on it. Too greedy to wait, they’d each cut a line that glistened like finely-ground glass on the back of a CD case, huffed it back, shrieking and clapping and giggling at the burn as it dissolved their mucus membranes. They’d staggered out of the dealer’s house arm-in-arm, already giggling, bathed in the streetlamp’s orange glow, hands slipping between hoodies and jeans against the cold. Before they knew it they were fucking each other raw in an alley behind the closed-down Tesco Express, panting against the bins, colors streaming from the edges of their vision as fingers worked in the cold.   Mya’s hand dropped swiftly off the gearstick, squeezed Maggie’s knee. “Nearly there,” she whispered. Maggie was halfway to replying “No, no you fucking weren’t, with the Mollie you took ages to come, I had to go down on you, knees in a puddle, my Diesels got fucking wet through,” when she looked up, and saw. The lights of a deserted superstore glowing through the murk like the warning lights of a ship out at sea. To either side light industrial units glowered through the rain. Something that might’ve been a dog scurried through the puddles collecting on the uneven tarmac, shook itself, then squeezed through the gap in a fence and was gone. The road descended as it cut across a valley. At the top of the valley sides, brooding behind razor wire, huge dark shapes reared against the night sky. The XR2 turned up a driveway you could get an articulated lorry through, between steep banks choked with wet gorse. She pulled up in a huge open space across which the low-profiles bucked and jinked, big wheels nervous over the ruts. Ahead of them, a locked gate, skin of plate iron welded onto a framework of quarter-inch box-section, topped with barbed wire like icing on a birthday cake, stained with something that shone dark in the backwash off the streetlights, something that might’ve been oil. “Mya, babe,” said Maggie, “where the fuck are we?” The rest of the Raders, fallen behind in traffic or cut off from the XR2 by stop lights, began to wheel out of the night on to the forecourt, pulling up in a rough circle. One by one, the engines died, leaving just the reflections of their under-sill lights on the wet tarmac and their headlights cutting through the rain, deepening the shadows on the huge organic-seeming shapes sprawled up the side of the valley. From behind the ringing in her ears, Maggie thought she heard a sound far-off like bells, irregular, plangent, as if they’d taken a wrong turn and were down by the sea and could hear the ships still rolling at anchor in the wind, or when you’d gone to a free party and got mashed and passed out next to a sixteen foot high speaker and woke up with your head ringing and chiming, every sound distant and jangling for the next few days. Mya smiled, leaned back in the driver’s seat, pulled another joint from a crevice on the dash, held it by the twist-shut and shook it to level it out. “This is Faerieland, babe.” Mya, an easy smile playing about her lips, sparked up the j. Maggie, spiking on another wave off her pill, nodded, started frantically chewing out her lip. “Is this like when we—” Mya pressed a finger to her lips and the dry knuckle against Maggie’s mouth smelled of hash and tobacco and the pleasantly artificial tang of raspberry lipstick. “This is like nothing you’ve ever seen,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Now. Why don’t you unclasp your seatbelt?” Maggie fancied she could hear a sort of whistling twitter, a high-pitched oscillation at the edge of hearing, like weaponized tinnitus. The noise got under her skin, wormed its way inside her nerves, crawled along her limbs and set itself just behind her eyes, where it fluttered and beat against the inside of her head like a moth caught in a lampshade. The noise—and whatever she’d taken—made it difficult for her to think straight. She rubbed frantically at her eyes, which seemed to have dried out, and a starshell burst across her vision. “It’s nearly time,” Mya said, taking a deep hit off her j. “They’re here.” When Maggie looked again, things were moving in the darkness at the edge of the headlights, detaching themselves with a slinking motion from the huge shapes up on top of the hill, flowing through the night, drawing near to the edge of the pale circles cast by the Raders. Then—just when she thought she might be able to see what they were—edging back, staying tantalizingly out of reach. They moved on all fours. There was the suggestion of an angular, branched shape, like a four-branch exhaust manifold. A headlight found the edge of one of them for a second, but they were gone so quickly it was impossible to make anything else out other than the suggestion of wet fur, oil-slick pelt, stealthy stalking in the ebon night. “What the fuck we doing, Mya?” Mya shook her off. She held her right hand out of the car, in the rain, as if leaning to get the ticket from a tollbooth, then let it drop. The headlights of the Raders went off in a volley, and the night bloomed with afterimages that writhed violet and ultramarine and a pure, actinic cobalt that burned into Maggie’s retinas as if she’d been staring intently at the base of a MIG welder. Through or under these distortions moved other, darker shapes, suggested by the gaps between the swirling colors on the edges of the twisting light. The chittering increased, like the noise a tweeter made if you wired it in when spliffed up so that it was grounding to earth via the RCA connector. “The only way this girl’s lover could be free, was if someone could take her place.” Mya smiled at Maggie, and there was sadness in it, a sadness that wrenched Maggie so that she jerked and flopped, a spasming convulsion that took all of her strength from her and left her hanging from the seatbelt, spent and useless as a discarded condom hanging from a fence. She tried to raise her head and it sagged useless and boneless on her neck. The darkness rippled and shifted. Something was pulling itself in to existence, shapes coalescing from darkness, shapes Maggie half-recognized, tantalized as they formed then—just on the cusp of understanding—flowed into something else. Waves of prickling heat chased themselves across her, as if she was coming up again, but she was cold, bone cold, breath shallow like one nearing death, alone and lost in some icy hell. Mya slipped her own seatbelt off and stepped outside, into the hush. She opened Maggie’s door and unclipped the belt, and Maggie fell forward, body gone liquid and useless, all her bones melted into a delicious slow ooze. The kiddie from the CRX with the baseball cap appeared at her side, and together he and Mya hauled Maggie out of the seat, trainers skidding on uneven greasy concrete, half-carried and half-dragged her limp scarecrow body between them, laid her gently on the wet rough cement. A shipwreck puddled on the ground, Maggie’s eyes rolled up to the looming outlines against the clouds, and suddenly—with a burst of icy clarity like a siren cutting through your high, telling you it was time to fuck off out of the rave and head for home—she knew where she was. This, this was the place where the dead go. She could smell it, corruption, the sickly smell of ancient automotive glass gone sugary and fragile, of prehistoric hydraulic grease thickening like wax as it seeped back to the tar whence it came, fishy castor-oil tang of gone-off brake fluid and the tired dead-dinosaur ghost-smell of very old petrol, an undercurrent of spoiling, long-banned industrial pollutants, the waxy whiff of chrome-effect plastic as it expired in the wind. Immense effort, all she had, everything given to a squirm of her neck, cheek scraped by wet concrete, and she could see—how could she see? Vision finally adjusted to darkness or some passing benediction of whatever it was Mya had given her?—a makeshift board up on the slope, where someone had painted the word “FAERIELAND” in thick daubs of blue paint. Behind and above it, the huge misshapen outlines against the sky resolved themselves, trompe l’oeil turning the vast near-organic mass to cars piled atop each other in collapsing columns, sprawling aggregation of vehicular death, charnel-house of discarded bangers, piles of engines rearing against the sky like hearts piled up after some battlefield atrocity, ragged rusting wings hanging off like torn pinions of dying angels, Mcpherson strut-assemblies unbolted but left attached so that they dangled from brake lines like new appendages extruded by some automotive nightmare creature testing which shape would be best to crawl out of its pit and stalk across the land, delivering vengeance to those who’d left it here after years of faithful service, those who deserted it to rot in the polluted air and sink slowly into the mire of mud and the butchered remnants of its comrades. The place where the dead go. Faerieland. The land of the dead. And, out from that huge pile of automotive corpses, out from under the shattered sills and pent-in roofs, flowing out like poison from trailing umbilical fuel lines and ventricles of disassembled engines, from the aortas of shattered fuel injection systems, from underneath chassis twisted like paper and from cracked-open gearboxes, out from the jeweled synchromesh and delicately-splined shafts of sundered transaxles and torn-open wiring harnesses spewing copper filaments like multicolored nerves, they came. The real Raders, the OG crew. They poured into the space before the cars like oil hitting water, as their forms adjusted to the limits of their new environment. They made the stuff of the night sing across human neurons and their wake through what we call the real produced a noise like far-off carillons of many bells and a chittering like angry bats. As they came down the hill the air hummed with their presence, spat and crackled and buzzed like high-voltage lines in wet weather, like a pylon singing to itself in the rain. The scrapyard smell receded and the night filled with the evanescent, sickly-sweet smell of violets—flickering across the nose then gone!—then an overpowering burst of eglantine and woodbine, stopping up the throat like death. The steeds they rose had lashed themselves together out of the rotting pile of scrap: corrugated flanks flaking away in oxide scabs, stamping hooves fashioned from brake discs, hydraulic piping and flex from cable looms bulging like sinews at their shoulders, mismatched headlamps for the eyes, exhaust-smoke breath billowing out in clouds from fanged maws made from the teeth of gearwheels and the lobes of camshafts. Their hounds were vast and black and bayed silently at their sides, the thick ruff of their pelt giving way at the shoulder to gleaming metal that heaved and rippled like flesh along the necks that held their great steel-antlered heads aloft. Impossible, implacable, reveling in their alien exhilaration, driven by compulsions innominate and terrible, they poured out into the night, churning up the bank as they came for Maggie. She sat blinking—unbelieving—as her doom streamed down the hill toward her, heart thudding slow in her chest. The Raders watched, for a time. Then, one by one, they fired up their engines and followed Mya’s XR2, as it swept back out onto the rainy streets. END   "Raders" is copyright Nelson Stanley 2019. "Vampiric Tendencies in the Year 4500" is copyright Renee Christopher, 2019. 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, leaving reviews on iTunes, or buying your own copy of the Summer 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy. You can also support us by picking up a free audiobook at  www.audibletrial.com/glittership. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of "Désiré" by Megan Arkenberg.

These Are the Attributes By Which You Shall Know God by Rose Lemberg   Father is trying to help me get into NASH. He thinks that seeing a real architect at work will help me with entrance exams. So father paid money, to design a house he does not want, just to get me close to Zepechiar. He is a professor at NASH and a human-Ruvan contact. Reason and matter­—these are the cornerstones of Spinoza’s philosophy that the Ruvans admire so much. Reason and matter: an architect’s mind and building materials. These are the attributes through which we can know God. And then, of course, there’s particle technology.   Full story after the cut: Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 68 for March 18, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "These Are the Attributes By Which You Shall Know God" by Rose Lemberg, and "Female Figure of the Early Spedos Type, 1884-" by Sonya Taaffe. This episode is part of the newest GlitterShip issue, which was just released and is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and now Gumroad! If you’re one of our Patreon supporters, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. For everyone else, it’s $2.99. GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible and a free audiobook to keep. Today's book recommendation is The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison. In a world ripped apart by a plague that prevents babies from being carried to term and kills the mothers, an unnamed woman keeps a record of her survival. To download The Book of the Unnamed Midwife for free today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership — or choose another book if you’re in the mood for something else.     Sonya Taaffe reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in Forget the Sleepless Shores (Lethe Press) and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, A Mayse-Bikhl, and Ghost Signs. She lives with her husband and two cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper belt object.       Female Figure of the Early Spedos Type, 1884- by Sonya Taaffe   When I said she had a Modigliani face, I meantshe was white as a cracked cliffand bare as the brush of a thumbthe day we met on the thyme-hot hills above Naxosand by the time we parted in Paris, she was drawinghalf-divorced Russian poets from memory,drinking absinthe like black coffeewith the ghosts of the painted Aegean still ringing her eyes.Sometimes she posts self-portraitsscratched red as ritual,a badge of black crayon in the plane of her groin.In another five thousand years,she may tell someone—not me—another one of her names.   Our story today is "These Are the Attributes By Which You Shall Know God" by Rose Lemberg, read by Bogi Takács.   Bogi Takács (prezzey.net) is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person currently living in the US as a resident alien. Eir speculative fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in a variety of venues like Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons and podcast on Glittership, among others. You can follow Bogi on Twitter, Instagram and Patreon, or visit eir website at www.prezzey.net. Bogi also recently edited the Lambda Award-winning Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016, for Lethe Press. Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed‘s Queer Destroy Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine, and many other venues. Rose’s work has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and other awards. Their Birdverse novella The Four Profound Weaves is forthcoming from Tachyon Press. You can find more of their work on their Patreon: patreon.com/roselemberg       These Are the Attributes By Which You Shall Know God by Rose Lemberg   Father is trying to help me get into NASH. He thinks that seeing a real architect at work will help me with entrance exams. So father paid money, to design a house he does not want, just to get me close to Zepechiar. He is a professor at NASH and a human-Ruvan contact. Reason and matter­—these are the cornerstones of Spinoza’s philosophy that the Ruvans admire so much. Reason and matter: an architect’s mind and building materials. These are the attributes through which we can know God. And then, of course, there’s particle technology. The house-model Zepechiar has made for my family is all sleek glass. It is a space house with transparent outer walls; the endlessness of stars will be just an invisible layer away. “I do not want to live in space,” dad hisses. Father hushes them. Zepechiar’s model for our new house is cubical, angular, with a retro-modern flair. The kitchen is the only part of it that does not rotate, a small nod to dad’s desire for domesticity. Outside of the kitchen capsule, the living spaces are all zero-g with floating furniture that assembles itself out of thin air and adapts to the body’s curves. There is no privacy in the house, but nobody will be looking—out there, in space, between the expanses of the void. “Bringing the vacuum in is all the rage these days,” the architect says. I pretend indifference. Doodling in my notebook. It looks like nothing much. Swirls, like the swirls our ancients made to mark the landing sites for Ruva vessels. For thousands of years nobody had remembered the Ruva, and when they returned, they did not want to land anymore on the curls and swirls of patterns made in the fields. They had evolved. Using reason. They razed our cities to pour perfectly level landing sites. They sucked excess water out of the atmosphere and emptied the oceans, then refilled them again. But then they read Spinoza and decided to spare and/or save us. Because we, too, can know God. If we continued studying Spinoza, Ruvans said, we’d be enlightened and would not need sparing or saving. I want to build something that curls and twists between hills, but hills have been razed after the Ruva arrived. Hills are frivolous, an affront of imagination against reason, and it is reason that brought us terraforming particle technology that allowed us to suck all usable minerals from the imperfections of the earth: the hills, the mountains, the ravines, the trees, leaving only a flatness of the landing sites between the flatness covered by angular geodomes. I learned about hills from the rebel file. Every kid at school downloads the rebel file. All around the world too, I guess. I don’t know anybody else who actually read it. I do not notice anything until my father and dad wave a cheerful goodbye and leave me, alone with Zepechiar. He’ll help me with entrance exams. Or something. He pulls up a chair from the air, shapes it into a Ruvan geometry that is perhaps just a shade more frivolous than reason dictates. He says, “Your father lied about the purpose of your visit. What is the reason behind it?” I mumble, “I want to get into NASH.” “Show me your architectural drawings,” Zepechiar orders. His voice is level. Reason is the architect’s best tool. I hesitate. Can I show him— No. I need something safer, so I swipe the notebook, show him a thing I made while he was fussing over dad’s kitchen: a cubical model of black metal and spaceglass, not unlike Zepechiar’s house model for my family. The distinction is in the color contrast, a white stripe of a pipe running like a festive tie over the steel bundle. Zepechiar nods. “Show me what you do not want to show me.” There is something in his voice. I raise my hand to make the swiping motion, then stop mid-gesture. “You could have convinced dad to say yes to that kitchen,” I say. “They would have cooked breakfasts for eternity, looking out into an infinite space until their heart gave out.” “I’m selling my architecture, not my voice,” he says, but something in his voice is bitter. Bitterness. Emotion, not reason. He is being unprofessional on purpose, perhaps to lull me into trusting him. “Why did you decide to become an architect?” I ask, to distract. A tame enough question. My father’s money bought me an informational interview. “Architecture is an ultimate act of reason,” Zepechiar says. It’s such a Ruvan thing to say. I must have read it a hundred times, in hundreds of preparatory articles. “I teach this in the intro course. Architecture is key to that which contains us: houses. Ships. The universe. The universe is the ultimate container. The universe is God. God is a container of all things. We learn from Spinoza that we can only know God through reason; and that is why we approach God through architecture.” “If God contains all things, would God contain—” swirls? Hills? Leviathans? “The thing you do not want to show me?” says Zepechiar. His voice lilts just a bit, and I am taken in. I swipe my hand over the notebook, to show Zepechiar what will certainly disqualify me from NASH. It is a boat that curves and undulates. Its sides are decorated in pinwheel and spiral designs. There is not a straight angle anywhere, not a flat surface. I have populated my Ark with old-style numbers—the ones with curves. There are two fives, two sixes, a pair of 23s. Zepechiar rubs his forehead. “What are the numbers meant to indicate?” “Um… pairs of animals.” I read that in the rebel file, but I do not know what they are supposed to look like. “This… is hardly reasonable,” says Zepechiar. “You know what Spinoza said. The Bible is nothing but fantasy, and imagination is anathema to reason.” I am stubborn, and yes, I’ve read my Spinoza. Scripture is no better than anything else. But God’s existence is not denied. I say, “You could use reason to replicate the Ark in matter.” “Yes,” Zepechiar says. Yes. We can use particle technology to manipulate almost any matter. Even sentient matter. His voice hides a threat. “I want to know where you learned this. And why did you draw this.” God told Noah to build the Ark and save the animals. Ruvans just sucked all the water out of the seas, froze some, boiled the rest, and put it back empty of life. The rebel file does not always make sense, but this is clear. “I wanted to recreate the miracle of the Ark, to imagine the glory of God.” Zepechiar says, “No. It is only through reason that you can reach God. God is infinite, but reason and the material world are the only attributes of God that we can reach. I want to know where you learned this.” His voice. His voice bends me. The rebel file. Everybody knows about the rebel file. Nobody cares about the rebel file. I can speak of it. Nothing to it. Just say it. Do what he says. Use reason. Straighten every curve. I mumble, “Ugh… here and there, kids at school, you know.” “I don’t.” He squints at me, halfway between respect and scorn. “Erase the Ark.” I breathe in. I have always been stubborn. “I do not want to erase the Ark. It is a miracle.” He breathes in. His hand is on my arm. “Miracles are simply things you cannot yet understand. Like particle tech and sentient matter.” He folds me. I’ve heard of the advanced geometry one can only learn at NASH, but this is more than that, this is something more. It is nauseating, like I am being doubled and twisted and extended. Dimensionally, stretched along multiple axes until my human hills—my curves, my limbs—are flattened into a singular geometric shape, a white pipe that runs around along the lines of the design studio, wrapping around the cubic shape of it like a festive ribbon. I am… not human anymore. I am sentient matter altered, like the rest of Earth, by Ruvan/human particle technology. I see Zepechiar from above, from below, in multiple angles. I have no eyes, but some abstract form of seeing, a sentience, remains to me. “I want to know,” Zepechiar says, “who altered you.” He falls apart into a thousand shiny cubes, then reassembles himself again, a towering creature of glimmering metal, a Ruvan of flesh behind the capsule of dark steel. I, too, am altered by him now, a thousand smaller cubes scattered by his voice, reassembled into the dimensional model of the house in the void. I see dad and father standing above my form. Perhaps they never left. They do not seem to care if Zepechiar is human or Ruvan. Zepechiar speaks to dad. “The perfect kitchen just for you—look at these retro-granite countertops, self-cleaning—” He pokes me. “Where did you learn this?” I think back at him, quoting the Scripture the best I can. “Two by two, they ascended the Ark: Male and female in their pairs, and some female in their pairs and some male in their pairs, and some had no gender and some did not care. Some came in triangles and some came in squares. And some of them came alone.” Like the Leviathan. The Leviathan holds all the knowledge the Ruvans discarded for reason’s sake, all the swirly landing sites, their own hills, their poetry. The Leviathan is the Ruvans’ rebel file. I no longer know my initial shape. I am made of hundreds of shining squares. My parents are here, in the room, but they do not know me. They are human—all curves and lilts of flesh. Forever suspect. I am Ruvan/human now. I am an architectural model, sentient matter transformed by an architect’s reason—and architects are the closest thing to God. “Think about all the damage scripture did,” says Zepechiar. “Holy wars, destruction, revision, rewritten over and over by those who came after but made no more sense. Think about what imagination did to this planet and to ours. It is dangerous. It makes you dangerous. But I will make matter out of you.” I am a house. Floating in space, rotating along all my axes. Inside me, the kitchen is the only thing that is still. I have been human or Ruvan, I do not remember, but I carry two humans inside me. They no longer remember me, but they came in a pair. I am their Ark. Zepechiar made me. A Ruvan/human architect. An architect is the closest thing to God. But so are the buildings architects create. So am I. Slowly, I begin to shift my consciousness along the cubic geometry of my new shape. Slowly, I move the space house, away. Where, in the darkest of space, there swims a Leviathan.   END   “Female Figure of the Early Spedos Type, 1884-" is copyright Sonya Taaffe 2019. “These Are the Attributes By Which You Shall Know God” is copyright Rose Lemberg 2019. 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, leaving reviews on iTunes, or buying your own copy of the Summer 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy. You can also support us by picking up a free audiobook at  www.audibletrial.com/glittership. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Ratcatcher” by Amy Griswold.

In this podcast Anya Martin talks about Sleeping with the Monster, weird fiction, Lethe Press, and much more. About Anya Martin Anya Martin is a fiction writer based in Atlanta. Sleeping with the Monster, her debut short story collection, was published by Lethe Press in autumn 2018. Original photo credit: Ray Dafrico Show notes [03:15] Sleeping … Continue reading

In this podcast Anya Martin talks about A Stuffed Bunny in Doll-Land, lessons growing up, first experiences with horror, and much more. About Anya Martin Anya Martin is a fiction writer based in Atlanta. Sleeping with the Monster, her debut short story collection, was published by Lethe Press in autumn 2018. Original photo credit: Ray … Continue reading

Episode 49 is part of the Autumn 2017 / Winter 2018 double issue! "Granny Death and the Drag King of London" is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL. Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/     Granny Death and the Drag King of London By A.J. Fitzwater      Monday, November 25, 1991. Lacey James had been working for Redpath Catering for three months when Freddie Mercury died. "Fuck," she mouthed around her fist and bit harder into her numb flesh. The news was hours old, but still her oesophagus made odd wheezy hiccups, and she couldn't swallow past the perpetual lump of granite in her chest. "Fuck fuck fuck." All going terrible, the weird black sparkles that invaded her vision at a whiff of death would arrive soon, the awful memories of helping nurse Stevie and Toad would nail her, or the creepy old lady that haunted funerals on her catering beat would turn up. Or all at once. Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Now Freddie. Not another one. Not Freddie. No. Hold it together. Big bois don't cry.   [Full transcript after the cut]   Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 49 for February 13, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. I'm sorry that it's been so long since I last brought you any fiction—to make it up to you, this episode is part of a double issue, which means that there are six originals and six reprints coming your way as quickly as I can get them out for you. I would also like to officially welcome Nibedita Sen as GlitterShip's official assistant editor. She will be helping out with keeping the Ship running smoothly... and hopefully more on time than it has been in the past. Today we have a poem and a GlitterShip original for you. The poem is "Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting," by Bogi Takács read by Bogi eirself. Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person currently living in the US as a resident alien. Eir speculative fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in a variety of venues like Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons and podcast on Glittership, among others. You can follow Bogi on Twitter, Instagram and Patreon, or visit eir website at www.prezzey.net. Bogi also recently edited Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016, for Lethe Press. Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting by Bogi Takács   Try it now – guaranteed enjoyment or your money back! Loss of life not covered under the terms of the user agreement. The classic original: Shapeshift to a surface color the inverse of your environment [reverse chameleon]To confuse people: Shapeshift to duplicate a nearby object, then change as others move you around [pulse in rhythm / undulate / who turned the sound off]For a drinking game: Shapeshift into a weasel for 5 seconds whenever someone drinks a stout [some puns deserve to remain obscure] [mind: wildlife needs to be careful around humans] To make a somewhat mangled political statement: Shapeshift into an object whose possession is illegal in the state and/or country you are entering [no human is illegal] [weaponize your thoughts / fall under export restrictions] [make sure to read the small print] To receive blessings: Shapeshift into a monk when in the 500 m radius of a Catholic church, respond to Laudetur [nunc et in æternum – practice] [works well in combination with previous]For the trickster types: Shapeshift into a set of food items, then change back to your original shape as the first person attempts to eat you [do not change back] [change back after you passed through the alimentary canal / the plumbing / all water returns to the sea] To satisfy extreme curiosity: Shapeshift into a cis person, at random intervals of time. Cry for 5 minutes. Change back [how did that feel?]       The GlitterShip original short story is "Granny Death and the Drag King of London" by A.J. Fitzwater, also read by the author. Amanda Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press's "At The Edge" anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater There is a content warning for slurs, homophobia and a lot discussion of AIDS deaths.   Granny Death and the Drag King of London By A.J. Fitzwater      Monday, November 25, 1991.   Lacey James had been working for Redpath Catering for three months when Freddie Mercury died. "Fuck," she mouthed around her fist and bit harder into her numb flesh. The news was hours old, but still her esophagus made odd wheezy hiccups, and she couldn't swallow past the perpetual lump of granite in her chest. "Fuck fuck fuck." All going terrible, the weird black sparkles that invaded her vision at a whiff of death would arrive soon, the awful memories of helping nurse Stevie and Toad would nail her, or the creepy old lady that haunted funerals on her catering beat would turn up. Or all at once. Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Now Freddie. Not another one. Not Freddie. No. Hold it together. Big bois don't cry. The brick wall of the east end church (where the hell am I today?) didn't do its job of holding her up and she slumped behind the rubbish skip. She didn't care if that bastard Rocko docked her pay for a wet and dirty uniform. She didn't care about the latest job rejection letter crumpled in her pocket. She didn't care if the cold bricks made her back seize up; there'd be no sleep tonight. The back door pinged on its spring-hinge, banging off the scabby handrail, and Lacey sprang to her feet. "Oi!" Rocko Redpath barked, all six foot two of his dirty blondness. "How long does it take one to take out the rubbish. Move one's dyke arse." Not a dyke, arsehole. Lacey let her square ragged nails do the work on her palms. "Coming." "You better be." The stagnant scent of cabbage and wine biscuits gusted out as the door banged shut. Why do I have to keep putting up with this git? Because I can't get a serious job in this town. No one wants a dyke import. Loser. Lacey knuckled her dry eyes and straightened her ill-fitting jacket best she could. The darts under the arms made it too tight across the chest even though she'd bound up with a fresh Ace bandage that morning. Come on, loser. Be the best king Freddie'd want you to be. Inside, the strange blast of cold concrete and oven heat sunk claws into Lacey's flesh. She bit her lip hard to hold back another dry heave sob. Breathing deeply sometimes delayed the black sparkles. But this was a funeral. They were bound to come. Stainless steel clanged. Ovens whooped. Crockery clattered. Scones hunkered everywhere. Girls in too tight skirts bickered with too young chefs in too skinny pants. Rocko Redpath lorded over it all. Redpath sounded like a lad but he dressed Saint Pauls, pretending he was James Bond on a Maxwell Smart budget. "Jesus, you kiwis are all so bloody lazy." He sneered, the perfect villain. "What's the matter, Lace? Who took a dump in your cornflakes?" Only my friends call me Lace, arsehole. "Got the news a friend died," she mumbled as she swung towards the door with a tray of finger sandwiches. Was that a flinch from Rocko? "Aww, poor widdle Wace all boo hoo. You gonna cry, widdle girl?" He clicked his fingers in front of her face, blocking her path, sunshine breaking across his craggy, broken-nose face. "Wait, wait. I think I heard it on the news. That rock star fag you like. That who you mean?" That...feeling. A tickle on the back of her neck; it was how she imagined if the black sparkles were made flesh. All jokes about gaydars aside, she was one hundred percent dead on (dead. on) at picking them. She knew some closeted gay guys had massive internalized issues, but Rocko? One of the girls whipping cream flinched, her pink mouth popping open in shock. "But Freddie only announced two days ago..." Rocko snapped his fingers in her direction and pointed, finger quivering slightly. "Quiet. Lace. That homo with the mo. That who you cut up about?" Shut up I need this job shut up. Good girls don't get into fights. "Ah forget it. One less virulent motherfucker clogging up the NHS." Rocko flipped a hand. Lacey flinched away. Rocko's eyes were red like he was on another bender. "Do yer job. Go say hello to your favorite funeral-loving geriatric." "What?" "Eff-day Granny-yay," Rocko stage whispered as he whisked aside dramatically and held the door open. Fuck. Now this. Granny Death. Parishioners were doddering into the hall while bored kids played in the dusty blue velvet curtains. Ancient radiant heaters fizzed and popped, and Lacey dodged along the walls from cold to heat. She needed a new pair of brogues as desperately as she needed a haircut, but neither was in her next pay day. The black sparkles arrived. The languor of death clung tight to church walls, its nails scraping along the gravel lodged in her chest like on a blackboard. Freddie Freddie Freddie's dead that fucking virus who's next you's next DEAD. Lacey swung with the sandwich tray through waves of evil-smelling olds. Sure enough, there she was in all her silver coiffed, green-pink-cream-yellow floral glory. The scent of lavender smacked Lacey in the face clear across the hall. Fucking Granny Death. An emotional vampire. An ever moving shark in necrophiliac waters. She was worse than the front page of The Sun. "Excuse me, dear. Could you tell me where the powder room is please?" Fucking hell! She was Right There. Her face wrinkled by a smile and expectation, but still oddly smooth. Her eyes weren't blue like Lacey had expected but a very light green. God, I spaced out again. Concentrate. They'll send you right back to the loony bin. "Umm." Where it always is in these cold concrete pits of 1950s hell, you creepy old bat. "Down that ramp by the kitchen, then straight ahead." "Thank you, dear." Granny Death's walking stick thumped a death march on the heel-scarred floor. Lacey bit her free fist again, squeezing her eyes shut. They made a liquid pop when she opened them. The black sparkles parted just enough. In between the strands of perfectly set silver hair on the back of Granny Death's head, a gold eye stared out at Lacey, bloodshot, like it had been crying. What the...?! That's it. They said this is what happens to girls who wear too much black. I've got that fucking virus and it's made me batshit. The idea of some loony old lollypop lady going round churches scaring the beejus out of mourners weighed heavy. If she turned up at Freddie's funeral, I fucking swear... The stench of ammonia and cheap soap hit Lacey full in the face as she pushed into the ladies toilets. Granny Death leaned against the cracked sink, hands folded primly before her. "Well, this is interesting," she said. "What?" Lacey pulled up short. The finality of the door boom sealed her in. Oh shit. What if she's some sort of serial killer? "You can See." "What?" Granny Death sighed and rolled her eyes. Lacey shuddered, imagining that third eye doing the same. "Come now, dear. I know you're not stupid. I don't have all the time in the world. There are other funerals to get to today. What did you See?" Freddie, help me. That fucking virus is eating my brain. "Uh. I get black sparkles," Lacey stammered, wriggling her fingers beside her temples. "But you...you've got an eye in the back of your head." "Hmm." Granny Death's stillness disturbed Lacey. Come on, this is absurd! "What do you mean 'hmm'?" she demanded, hands on hips in an attempt to make herself bigger. "You have an eye in the back of your head, lady!" "I mean 'hmm' because usually they see horns—" Granny Death twiddled her fingers above her head. "—or hooves. Or wings. Sometimes just bloody stumps of wings, depending." "On what?" Lacey glanced behind her, but no one came in. No rampaging horde of hell beasts? Granny Death chuckled as if she could hear the noise constantly taking up space in Lacey's head. "Whatever they gods pleases them. Whatever they think lurks under the skin of a harmless old lady." Lacey backed up two steps. "Lady, there is no god in this world if AIDS exists. There's an explanation for everything. I'm having a meltdown coz it's a bad day. You don't seem harmless to me. What are you? What's with all the funerals?" "Hmm. So you've seen me before." Granny Death stroked a beard that wasn't there. "Damn right. I see you stuffing sandwiches in your handbag at least twice a week." Now it was Lacey's turn to fold her arms, but it didn't have quite the same effect as Granny Death's quiet poise. "Is this how you get your jollies? Knocking off the catering staff, scaring them into not reporting you to the police?" Granny Death didn't stare at Lacey like she imagined a whacko would size up their prey. "You have questions. You deserve answers." Granny Death scooped up her walking stick and took an assured step towards towards Lacey. "I take the sandwiches because I like them. No, I don't like scaring people. Funerals are hard enough places as they are. And people who See—" Granny Death scratched the back of her head. "—do so because they are close to the end of the line." Oh god, I do have that fucking virus. Despite her tiny stature, Granny Death came face to face with Lacey. She continued: "You have lost someone very dear to you recently. That agony slices through The Templace. We feel those cuts." Lacey flinched, but Granny Death didn't pat her on the shoulder awkwardly in comfort. She didn't even say she was sorry. What's the point of saying you're sorry to the bereaved, anyway? The black danced close around Lacey's vision again. Granny Death nodded. "When you're ready for the full truth, we'll be ready for you. We'll find you. We need more good people." Granny Death pushed out through the toilet door, her lavender scent obscuring the dankness. "Wait!" Lacey called. "Who is this 'we' you speak of?" The third eye winked, and Granny Death glanced back. She didn't smile or grimace, sneer or raise her eyebrows. "Death," came her quiet reply. "I work for the entity you know as Death."     Tuesday, November 26, 1991.   Even the tube couldn't lull Lacey into a desperate rest. Calling in sick allowed Rocko a hysteria-tinged rant about lazy kiwi dykes. The tea-bags her flatmates had left for her—what she had stolen from the Redpath pantries had run out—gave her no sense of comradeship. Throwing the letter from Gore, New Zealand unopened in the rubbish extended none of the usual satisfaction. Wrapping herself around a hot water bottle in her dank Hackney flat didn't bring any comfort. The impossible backwards lean, open lips, and microphone as extension of self of her Queen: Live at Wembley poster was a constant reminder. I'll never see darling Freddie live, see him alive, now. I'm two years too late. Did you know way back when, dear Freddie? Did you have that fucking alien in your brain, and you were just ignoring it? Don't look don't look don't look don't look death in the eye. The crowd on the tube did their best to ignore the girl in a cheap suit, though her pride and joy was the only thing holding her together. The granite lump in her chest grew too large, the mountain of its pressure almost choking her. The younger ones eyed the AIDS posters like they'd leap out and bite them. Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. All Gone. All invaded. All stats. Maybe I picked it up off the shit piss blood vomit. Maybe it's been dormant in my mattress all this time. She'd had no experience in nursing, but she did her best when the families of her friends shut their doors, ignoring their wasting away until it was time to play the magnanimous heroes and return their soul to where it didn't want to be.    A strange thought grabbed her: Had Granny been there? Had she witnessed? A too skinny guy in a too big trench coat coughed, and Lacey swore everyone in the tube car flinched. Never going to eat going to die emaciated and covered in lesions never going to fuck again. Would Granny Death come and laugh at my funeral? She'd be the only one I'd want there. Where had that come from? Logan Place would now be packed with, but a crowd meant touching. A crowd meant all new sorts of pain, a public display of grief she couldn't face yet. Old Compton Street felt the safest place to be. The girls there knew when to touch and when to not. It would be a shitter of a wake, but at least she could bum free alcohol off Blue. Someone behind her barked a laugh just like Rocko's and she had to turn to check it wasn't him. He'd been his usual self on the phone, but his nastiness had sounded forced. Judging tone of voice, pitch, weight of the words had been a skill she'd honed over her years to avoid the knife tip slipping under her ribs. Questions. Granny said she had the answers. What a load of horse shit. No one has answers to anything. Not a yes for a good job. Not to this virus. "STOP WHINING," said her mother, thousands of miles and years ago. "Why can't you just wear a dress like all good little girls? You'd look so much prettier." I don't want to be pretty. I want to be handsome. The walk from King's Cross looked the same. The tourists, the red buses, the yuppies in their Savile Row suits, the casuals in their too clean Adidas trackies yelling slurs at the too tired girls in their big wigs and small skirts. Some caring Soho record store blared out Bohemian Rhapsody. Street lights flickered up, too bright for the street, too dim for the faces. How can you all carry on like nothing has changed? It had taken Lacey an entire year to work up the gumption to walk back on to Old Compton Street after a disastrous first visit to the Pembroke in Earls Court. Even three years on she often had to stop and take a moment to check if she was allowed on the street, but women in suits or ripped jeans and plaid either ignored her or offered small up-nods. Lacey shivered, resisting the urge to touch-check the mascara on her upper lip and sideburns. Her chest binding and suit were alright, but just alright. She didn't have the money to keep up with Soho. I like my suit. My suit likes me. The door to The Belle Jar was propped open. Lacey watched a pair of kings enter the black maw before working up the courage to approach. Flipper sat inside the stairs on a slashed up chair, licking closed a thin rollie. The muscled bouncer stood up when she saw Lacey, but didn't offer a hand. The girls round here knew how things went. "Fucking sucks, man," Flipper grunted, her blue eyes more steel than sea. "Tell me about it," Lacey sighed. "You're taking it well." Flipper undid the two buttons of her Sonny Crockett jacket, then did them back up. Lacey shrugged. "You want in? Blue says no cover charge tonight and tomorrow." "Good of her. Might ask for a shift." "Yeah. The girls have been crying into their Midoris since the news broke. It's like a fucking morgue in there." Flipper offered Lacey a drag of her cigarette, but Lacey shook her head. More down-in-the-mouth kings, queens, femmes, and butches passed by (just for once all moving in the same direction; marching to or from death?). Flipper blew out a long trail of smoke. "Funeral is tomorrow. Private thing." "Yeah, saw that on the news." Lacey couldn't look at Flipper in the eye. The big girl had tears forming (no no don't please fuck what do I do). Lacey barrelled down the stairs. The sticky-sweet stench of years of liquor trod into the carpet, sweaty eye shadow, weed, and clove cigarettes rose up to greet her. Bronski Beat throbbed gently from the speakers. Girls lounged over every upright surface, too many glasses scattered across table and bar top. None of them were anywhere near old enough to be Granny. Have you ever seen an old drag queen? An old dyke? Where do they go? Two shot glasses banged on the bar. "How the fuck is Maggie Thatcher still alive, and Freddie Mercury isn't," growled Blue, sloshing tequila. Lacey accepted the offering without complaint despite her bad relationship with tequila. How is anyone alive while Freddie isn't? "We only just get the country back from the old witch, now this." Lacey tried on a joke for size. "God fuck the Iron Lady," Blue growled. They tugged the bottoms of their waistcoats, saluted with their glasses, and slammed. "Next one you'll have to pay for, darlin'," Blue said after they coughed it down. "Don't worry. I 'spect tonight will be easy selling the top shelf." Lacey took a long hard look around the bar. It was already too full. When girls got all up in their liquor, tears and fists tended to fly. "Great, we're short-handed. I'll give you six percent, cause I'm feelin' generous." Blue slid a glass of water towards Lacey. "Ten." Lacey grimaced at the DJ who had just put on Adam Ant. It was too early for Adam Ant. No one got up to dance. Lacey gave the DJ the fingers. "Seven and a half. Final offer." "Tally carries over if I don't use it all tonight." The DJ gave Lacey the fingers back and lit a cigarette. Blue sighed. "Fine." "Tell that dick to play better music." "Oh god, shut up," slurred some girl at the bar with bright red lipstick. "I happen to like Adam Ant." "Lacey. Drop it," Blue said in a low voice. "Go sell something to table five. They've got dosh." The lipstick girl's top lip curled up and she whispered something to her friend. A flash of silver caught Lacey's eye as someone slid onto an empty stool. "What's the best whiskey you would recommend?" Lacey's tongue went numb. "You!" "Hello, dear." "Hey, Blue! You see this old bag here?" Lacey pointed at Granny Death smoothing out her gloves on the sticky bar top. Blue gave a don't-care shrug and turned away to serve Lipstick again. "Sure. I see her round here all the time. Her money is good as any other girl's." All the time? Oh my god, not Blue no no no NO. Lacey sat, blocking Granny's view of the rest of the bar. "This funeral bloody well isn't for you," she growled. "Perhaps not," Granny replied. Her eye shadow was a green twenty years out of date. "But I go wherever I'm needed, and tonight I am needed here." Lacey leaned to get a better look at the back of Granny's head. Sure enough, the red-rimmed gold eye blinked at her. She gestured at Blue to pour out a couple fingers of whiskey. Granny smoothed out a note, Blue pinged it into the register without comment, and made the first mark on Lacey's tally. Lacey drank without salute. "Come to get your jollies off a pack of miserable kings and queens, huh?" "I get my jollies off a good cup of tea and watching Star Trek," Granny replied, sipping delicately at her drink. "I get no joy from seeing people in pain. I'd take it all away from all you lovely dears if I could. I like your clothes. I like your faces." Granny sighed. "It's not fair. He was a very nice chap." It's not fair. Lacey grimaced and helped herself to another measure. She didn't care she was drinking too fast. "Then what's with—" She circled a hand. "—doing Death's dirty work tonight? Freddie's funeral is tomorrow." Granny dabbed her lips with a paper serviette. "Mister Bulsara does not get just one funeral, my dear. There are many funerals, big and small, happening all over the world. The unmarked ones are just as important. There's no quality control on this particular passing. Mister Bulsara's essence has well and truly passed through a Rift to the next dimension. A stable Rift in the Templace is simply a random, if rare, occurrence." Lacey rudely crunched ice through the speech. "Nice line, grandma." Granny placed the glass carefully on the bar. "I am no one's grandmother, let alone anyone's mother. This is a calling, not a job. And besides, despite what this form may allude to, I could not procreate if I wished to. Which I do not." Bloody hell. "I have another, more important reason to be at this particular funeral," Granny continued. "I am here for you." Lacey slid backwards off her stool, hands up. "Woah now there, whack job." I AM dead, I just don't know it. Granny sighed. "I am here with a proposition—" "You got to be shitting me. Our age gap has to be illegal." Lacey backed up further until she bumped into Lipstick, who cussed her out for spilling her drink. "—of a position within our administration. Death wants you to apprentice to me. You can See me. You talk about the black sparkles. That's a prelude to being trained to see the Rifts.." "I said, you owe me another fucking drink, you ugly cunt!" Hate that word hate it go on call me it again. "And I said hold your fucking horses," Lacey growled. But when she turned back, Granny Death was gone. Only the prim outline of pink lipstick on her glass suggested she had even been there. Lipstick shoved Lacey in the shoulder. "You fucking ugly dyke cunt. Replace my drink now or I fucking swear." "Or what?" Lacey whirled, fingernails cutting her palms. Don't don't, be a good girl. Everyone's desperate. Desperately sad, desperately drunk, desperately afraid. Lipstick scowled. She looked just as scared as Rocko had been the day before. "Have some common decency." Lacey lowered her voice. "There's a funeral going on here." Lipstick's friend tugged on her arm. "Come on, not tonight." Lipstick shook her off. "Oh yeah? Which of these ugly trannies did us a favor and fucked off?" Lacey's fists ached. Heat rushed from her groin to the top of her skull. Good girls don't get angry anger is so ugly. Lipstick's friend whispered at her. "Oh riiight. Wah wah. One less gay white man to colonize our spaces," Lipstick spat. "That's it, you're cut off," Blue growled. Don't don't I've got this. "He's not gay. He's bisexual, like me. And Parsi. He's from Zanzibar."  "Wot?" Liptstick got so close Lacey could taste the sour sweetness on her breath. "Bisexual? You hiding a dick in there too?" By now the friend was backing away, hands up, wanting no part in Lipstick's charade. Lacey knew the taste of a bully's fear. "Wrong one, asshole. Bye-secks-ual." "You a Paki loving tranny? Is that it?" Lipstick sneered. "You better stop," Lacey said. There was something satisfying in the simple threat. "Or what? Bisexual. Bullshit. You're either with us or against us. No wonder he died. So fucking promiscuous. Good riddance to bad rubbish." The bar disappeared. The granite in Lacey's chest didn't so much as shatter as simply melt away. What she had imagined as meters-thick solid rock was nothing more than a millimeter thin shell that gave way beneath the lightest touch. Kitty. Stevie. Gin-Gin. Toad. Paulette. Manil. Freddie. The names became a chant, faces whirling about, grating along her knuckles, clipping the rims of her ears, the smell of antiseptics and fresh washed sheets clogging up her nostrils.  Infect. Rinse. Repeat. The granite infected her fists, like she was attempting to build a wall one punch at a time. "Lace." Blue's voice. "Hey, Lace." Hands on her arms. Arms across her chest. "God damn it, Lace." Flipper's voice, angry, cold, annoyed, satisfied. Lacey struggled to shake off the infecting hands, but they held tight. Lipstick stood near the stairs, a wall of girls in suits blocking her in. Blue stared the girl down, her words lost beneath the screech of stone on stone in Lacey's head. Lipstick had a hand over her bloodied nose. The virus is passed through the sharing of infected bodily fluids. Someone sauntered out of the bathrooms. "Hey Blue. The condom and dam dispensers are empty," they shouted, oblivious to the tense scene. Flipper's hands relaxed, and she smoothed Lacey's hair with a sigh. Don't TOUCH me... "What?" grumbled Blue. "I've refilled them once tonight already." A figure at the top of the stairs, weak twilight framing curly hair into a halo. When they turned away, a golden point of light shrunk with each step, like a train moving back up a tunnel. Doom moving in reverse. That's right, little virus, you better run.     Wednesday, November 27, 1991.   Lacey fingered the scratch down the side of her nose. 'Tis nothing. How much of me is left under her fingernails though? The crowd milled about Logan Place in respectful patterns. Most were sitting, waiting for something, anything. Lacey ran her fingers along the flapping letters tacked up on the fence, catching a word here or there. I should write something let him know but I can't I can't what are words inadequate how could I compete. "Hello dear." Granny Death blocked her way, wrinkled face scrunched up at the outpouring of love and grief. Lacey hung her head. "I'm sorry you had to see that display last night. It wasn't like me at all." "You're not sorry, and of course it was you. That was you in that moment, the you you needed to be." Granny Death didn't scold. Blue had done that enough. "I'm banned from The Belle Jar for a month," Lacey said. "That other chick's banned for life. She's not going to press charges because that was her third strike. Caught her flipping coke in the bathroom. Blue assures me she threw the first bitch slap, but, well, I don't remember. It was pretty tame by all accounts. But I did land a good one on her nose." "And you're very proud of that." "First and last, Granny. First and last." But it felt GOOD. Flick of the wrist, and you're gone baby. Lacey looked up from her battered sneakers, raised an eyebrow. "You said you have a job for me. Some interview that was, then." "So you believe I am who I say I am." Granny Death pressed a floral note in amongst the forest of words. Lacey didn't recognize the language. "No. Yes. I don't know." Lacey sighed and rubbed her eyes, catching the edge of the scratch. She licked blood off her finger. "Everything's...weird. Heavy and light at the same time. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I'm having a dissociative break." "Yes, it has been a strange few days," Granny Death replied, sounding surprised at being surprised. She pulled the shade of a tree around them and the quiet murmur dampened further. "What do you want to believe?" Granny continued, taking out a pack of hard mints. Lacey sucked the lolly thoughtfully until the taste stung the back of her nose. "That Freddie isn't dead," she said, voice as meek as if her mother stood over her. "It doesn't work like that," Granny said. "We only see them to the edge of the Rift. What becomes of them after? Death doesn't even know." "You make Death sound like a semi-decent kinda person," Lacey said. "As far as employers go, they're better than most," Granny said. "It's a service someone has got to do. And the benefits aren't all that bad. Form of your choosing, extended life span—" "—free lunch." "You get to know who does the better catering," Granny admitted. Suddenly her eyebrows lifted. Expecting a spectral figure in a black robe come to put her blood on the dotted line, Lacey turned to follow her gaze. Rocko Redpath slinked through the crowd, features set in a brokenness Lacey could never have imagined his rat-like face achieving. He held the hand of a handsome muscle man. Lacey couldn't move, couldn't breathe. Rocko was right in front of her. He flinched, shuffled a little. Muscles said 'You right, love?' Lacey gave her boss a nod. Rocko nodded back, fumbled in his net shopping bag. A peace offering: a packet of PG Tips. He melted into the crowd. "So, I'm beginning to suspect I don't just See things when it comes to Death," Lacey said. "I knew about Rocko, and it wasn't just gaydar. Not sure if I forgive him though." "You don't have to," Granny said. "Let time do its thing. Life has a way of surprising you." "Does Life have an admin division too?" Lacey shoved the packet of tea into her backpack, and scrubbed at her face with her palms. Her scratch caught again. Pain is good. I can feel it this time. "I presume so, but we don't do Sunday barbeques in Hyde Park," Granny replied, deadly serious. "Never the twain, and all that." "Something like that," Granny said. A ripple passed through the crowd. People were returning to the house after the service. Some paparazzi called out, jostling for space. Fucking paps. "So, is a benefit one of those eyes in the back of your head?" Lacey asked in an undertone. Her fingers tingled, and she felt like her body was rushing through a tunnel, rushing through all the spaces in the world at once but the meat of her brain stood stock still, sloshing up against the thin eggshell that held her inside. Asking for release. Let me out, let me be. "Dear." Granny patted the air above Lacey's hand. "We have eyes in all sorts of places." Together, they waited out the rest of vigil in silence. Because silence felt good.     Monday, April 20, 1992.   Lacey paused in her duties of handing out red ribbons, condoms, and dams to watch in wonder as Extreme stormed the Wembley Stadium stage with a hot shit rendition of 'Keep Yourself Alive'. Seventy-two thousand people surged, thundered, cried, and laughed. It was turning out to be a hell of a funeral. Granny Death popped up beside Lacey, one of her hideous floral scarves tied around her forehead like an aging hippy. It went well with the terrible green polyester flares, sleeveless pastel pink twin set, and pearls. "How the hell did you get tickets!" Lacey laugh-shouted over the roar of the crowd. "This concert sold out in three hours!" "I have a little sway here and there." Granny clapped out of time with the music. "What, Death is a Queen fan?" "Something like that." Lacey squinted up into the glary Easter Monday sky. The weather held, actually pleasant for London temperatures, but the haze made it difficult to spot Rifts. Granny followed her gaze. "Relax. This is a day off." "You? Saying relax?" Lacey made a whip-crack noise. "Someone else is covering our territory for the day," Granny replied, jiggling her ample hips. That's new. More passers-by dug their hands into Lacey's box of goodies. She'd have to go back for a refill soon. Just like Blue had to keep refilling the dispensers in the bogs at the Belle Jar. Just like supplies had to topped up at the house. 'No rubber, no loving' had become the slogan whenever someone brought a date home to the Hackney flat. Even Blue had gone to get herself tested. Clear. Thank the Templace, she's all clear. Lacey carried her own letter detailing her HIV negative position like a good luck charm in a hidden inner suit jacket pocket. Granny followed her at a trot as she took a swing through the upper terraces, getting winks and up-nods from the odd king or butch. "That's nice dear," Granny said, sipping a beer. "What is?" "Seeing you smile." "Ugh, Granny." Lacey rolled her eyes. "Don't be so sloppy." Freddie, my darling. I miss you so hard gone away gone away. The chunk of granite in her chest orbited once. Glittering dust sanded off, softening an edge. Rubbing the hopeful bump on the back of her head, Lacey stared hard into the white hazy sky, forcing her eyes—all of them—to stay dry. With a gleam like the dust from the fresh edge in her chest, a Rift pondered its way open over the top of stadium. "Granny, look!" Lacey pointed up. "That's the biggest I've seen yet!" "Well done!" Granny clapped her hands, bouncing in place. Lacey was sure the old bat would ache like buggery the next day, and she'd be fetching cups of tea and hot water bottles. "Goodness me, that's a pretty one!" And it was pretty, layers of blue-shot silver with sparkling black on top, the edges curled up like a smile. Lacey nudged Granny. "He's watching us, I swear!" "Now you're just being fanciful." Granny danced off into the crowd. Her voice wafted back along with a teaser of lavender perfume. "You know the Rifts are only a one way trip." The Rift stayed open for the entirety of the concert, the longest Lacey had seen. Every time she looked up at the iridescent void, the Nothing that held Everything, her voice inside quelled to a quiet murmur. Tomorrow. I'll take my letter down to the fence at Logan Place tomorrow...   END "Seven Handy Ideas for Algorithmic Shapeshifting" is copyright Bogi Takács 2018. "Granny Death and the Drag King of London" is copyright A.J. Fitzwater 2018. 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 we'll be back soon with a reprint of "Smooth Stones and Empty Bones" by Bennett North.

Welcome to this special episode of Behind the Prose. Special, because I bet you didn't think it was coming! More special, because it features former guest, literary historical fiction writer and fellow New School Creative Writing MFA Grad Scott Alexander Hess. This time, I talk to him about how he wrote his latest novella, Skyscraper, while he was in the middle of writing a novel. In this episode, besides hearing me butcher the name of his publisher, Lethe Press, you’ll learn why I disappeared and why I’m back!

  Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 47 for September 23, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a poem by Jes Rausch, "Defining the Shapes of our Selves," and a GlitterShip original, "The Last Spell of the Raven" by Morris Tanafon. This is the last original story from GlitterShip Summer 2017, which you can pick up at glittership.com/buy if you would like to have your own copy. More importantly, however, this means that the Autumn 2017 issue is coming out soon! Jes Rausch lives and writes in Wisconsin, with too many pets and too much beer for company. Nir fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Lethe Press. Find nem not updating nir Twitter @jesrausch. "Defining the Shapes of our Selves" by Jes Rausch   Book One when we reached Fire Nest on Summit, hot sun hanging low in the sky like an egg, biding, the dirt streets were dusty as smoke. So this is what the capitol of the Dragon Lands is like, i said, and, i never dreamt i’d be here, breathe in dust that must once have been the scales of ancients. There, you said, and pointed out a spire among spires, the twisting of another sculpted tail in a sea of swirling tails and horns and There, you said, and interrupted my awe with one of your smiles, man to me. When we reached Fire Nest on Summit, our pouches full of rubies, the aura of crime marinating them to a fine delicacy, we strode down streets dusty with smoke, smoky with the scent of food and sounds and flashes of golds and crimsons. We were here for a reason, a purpose, a journey, and here we were at the door carved of real dragon bone before the set of scale-clad guards, to bargain and banter and barter our way into the deal of a lifetime. Said the guard who stepped forward, He requires men and women meet specific challenges attuned to their natures to pass, and Step this way, to you. When we reached Fire Nest on Summit, you walked through your designated door, and i left behind in your dust, was told to wait when the guard could not determine which frame fit. Said the guard, it is better this way, after all, you cannot meet the challenges without a reason, a purpose, a journey. Book Two When I stepped into the apartment I heard the burble of the fish tank, that constant watery murmur that gives me what little comfort it can. I turn on all the lights today, and a little music too. The curtains already drawn, this little home a sanctuary where I can pee however I want to, and with the door open. Out there in the world deemed real, I can try too hard to talk with coworkers, meet company standards, go by unseen. But here I can make chicken tikka. Chicken tikka doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t care if you live or die either, so in a way, it is the world deemed real, and here, in my home I can devour it. Book Three when we slid into Io Port 7 dock, powered down, cleared the security scans, and disembarked after five long hours of waiting around in the mess, prisoners in our own ship, i was ready for a bit of fun. Ten months out in a vacuum will do that to you. Chasing odd jobs around stars, snagging a get-rich-quick scheme out of orbit is a tiring way to live. Dull as an old hull, random as a time of death. Our boots made the obligatory clank- clank noise down the corridors, our voices blocked them out. See, i was never free ‘til i reached for a star and grabbed a bucket of rust, made the engines run on sweat and blood and nightmares. See, you can smell the aching shell of it from the inside, but then, you probably never will. i take care choosing a crew who can withstand the raw scent of a being rotting from the inside out, fighting against the lack of friction for all days. When we emerged from the decaying ship, pristine outer hull, and slid ourselves into Io Port 7 dock and down and down the corridors already the rest and relaxation curled its way up to us. Somewhere in the center of port, a band was playing, Venus Colony 3- inspired beats pulsing and ebbing through the artificial grav. Some persistent restaurant owner was preparing dishes from Old Earth, warm smells competing for dominance with the aromas of Orion-inspired cuisine. When we descended into Io Port 7 dock, followed the sounds and smells down to get our access passes from the automated entrance bot, i entered in my name, retinal scan, handprint, voice sample. i completed the three-part questionnaire: reason for visit, profession, personal information. i turned to accept my pass scan, and the bot flashed dismissal. I’m sorry, the cold voice said, but you don’t have the appropriate body mods to legally be permitted to select that gender. I count only two of the required five. END       Morris Tanafon lives in Ohio but still feels like a New Englander. His work has appeared in Crossed Genres and Mythic Delirium and he blogs sporadically at https://gloriousmonsters.wordpress.com     The Last Spell of the Raven by Morris Tanafon     When I was very young, I watched my mother win the Battle of Griefswald. Standing knee-deep in our ornamental pool, she transformed the surface into a picture of Germany, and dripped fire from her hands into the water. I stood with my tutor in the crowd that watched, and did not understand why she gripped my shoulders until they ached, or why the people watching cheered and gasped. I saw the fire snake around the houses, and tiny people running from it. But until I was older I did not understand that it had been real. Nobody talked to me about magic. My father never spoke of it, and my mother believed that I took after my father and had no talent for it. Still, at the age of seven I used it for the first time—a desperate child will reach for any tool. I knew that magic existed, from my mother’s conversations with her friends, and that it could be used to do wonderful things. And I knew that my cat Morrow was dead. So when I was given the body to bury it, I took her out to the backyard instead, and performed my best guess at a spell. The form was foolish, but the intent genuine, and intent was all it needed. Morrow stirred, and my cry of delight caught my mother's attention. She looked from me to the cat, heard five seconds of my babbled explanation, and began screaming. "Galen, you idiot!" She slapped me. "Things that come back are barely alive, and now you've wasted a spell! If you use more than four spells you die, do you want to die?" I began screaming, convinced I was going to drop dead on the spot, and the reborn Morrow added a thin, ugly caterwaul to the din. It was my father who ended the stupid affair, in one of the rare moments he left his study. He scooped up Morrow, plucked me away from my mother, and took us both inside, ignoring my mother's spitting rage. I don't know what she did after that. It didn't matter to me at the time, because my father took me into his study. I had never seen the interior before, and when he put me down I froze in place, afraid I’d break something. He dropped Morrow in my arms; I could feel her tiny, tinny heartbeat against her ribs. She smelled like mothballs and felt like paper-mâché, as if I hugged too tightly I'd crush her. "I have no say in the matter," my father said, "but I suggest you never use magic again." I must have looked ready to start screaming again, because he began speaking quickly—something he never did. "I would never have married Evelyn if I knew she was a magician. In the country I come from, it is despised, for good reason. Who would willingly rip their soul apart?" He sat down, drumming his fingers, and watched me for a minute. I stared back dumbly—I still didn't understand. "There's a story we tell children," he said. "Once, a raven was swallowed by a whale, and inside it he found a little house. There was a beautiful girl there, with a lamp by her side." Morrow scratched my shoulder. I put her down but she stayed by my legs, winding around them. "She told the raven: The lamp is sacred, do not touch it. But every few moments she had to rise and go out the door, for she was the whale's breath." I wanted to ask why the whale's breath was a girl, but my father signaled me to be silent. "And the raven, being arrogant and curious, waited until she was gone and touched the lamp. In an instant it went out, the girl fell down dead, and the whale died too, for the lamp was the whale's soul." I pressed my hands to my chest. "You're not going to die," my father said. "Not if you stop now. But listen—the raven dug its way up through the whale's dead flesh, and found it beached. There were men gathered around. And instead of telling them, 'I meddled with something beautiful and destroyed it', the raven merely cried, 'I slew the whale! I slew the whale!' And he became great among men, but lived a cursed life thenceforward." The meaning was not obvious to a seven-year-old. "Am I cursed?" "All magicians are," my father said flatly, "for that raven, greedy for the power he tasted from the whale's soul, became the first magician. Now go, and think about what I told you." I went, and I did. To this day, that's the longest conversation my father shared with me.   Morrow perished again seven years later, despite my best efforts. I fed her bugs and graveyard dirt and tiny pieces of liver and locked her in my room to prevent her from jumping off a too-high surface and crushing her fragile front legs. But I forgot to lock the door one day, and a maid wildly kicked at the grey shape that appeared in front of her, and that was the end of Morrow. I was angry, but the maid cried and helped me gather up the pieces, and she was very pretty. That, at fourteen, had begun to matter, and I forgave her enough to give her part in the burial service. My mother watched from the window until Morrow was well buried.   When I wove my second spell I knew what I was giving up, and I knew my mother would kill me if she discovered what I’d done. I was to go to university that autumn, and become certified as a magician in service to the Crown, as my mother was—I risked that as well. I thought the price cheap in exchange for a smile from Asuka. Fujimoto Asuka, the ambassador's daughter. We attended the same parties, hated them with the same passion, and exchanged weary looks over the rims of our wineglasses until I finally got up the courage to speak to her. She had come with her father to England to find a magician to change her body's shape. She was born with one wrong for her. We were a good match for that summer—she appreciated my adoring glances and felt kindly toward magicians. I was glad of admiration from one as worldly as her. On the last day of summer, I convinced Asuka to slip away during a party. She didn't take much convincing, and it's a miracle we weren't caught—giggling like schoolchildren and exchanging significant glances anyone could read. Perhaps the other guests were humoring us. We went to the nearby lake, so well-tended it was our ornamental pool writ large, and I took off my shoes. "You asked me how magicians first came to be," I said. "Nobody knows the full history, but I can tell you one story." The pictures I made in the water were not real, but they looked it. Even now, with my regrets, I feel a twinge of pride thinking of the spectacle. I'd studied ravens for months, memorizing how they moved, and drew inspiration for the woman from Asuka; and like any good storyteller, I lied, adding my own spin. I transformed the raven into a man in the last moments and sent him and the whale's breath, hand-in-hand, into the crowd of gaping humans. Their descendants were magicians, I told Asuka. The raven saved the breath-girl at the last moment by lighting the lantern with a piece of his own soul. When I was done, Asuka's eyes glittered with tears. She promised to write to me; but the autumn was cold and long and the mail services from Japan to England not too reliable, and after a few exchanges our talk petered out.   I expected my parents to find out about it, but they never did. Instead, I had to explain to the records officer at Iffley College. Anyone who wished to register as a magician had to give an account of all magic they had used. She made notes as I spoke, and squinted at me as if she could see magic filling me to a certain point like a cup. “From the sound of it,” she said, “you have three spells left. That’s the minimum for a certified magician—you have to give two spells in service, and one left over to keep you alive. You’d have to get through university without using any magic.” That should have been my cue to turn away from the path of a magician, but I was stubborn and scared. I was not particularly good with mathematics, writing, speaking, or any other useful trait, and I feared my father might not leave me much when he passed away. Magic, no matter how I'd misused it, was the one thing I was certain I could do. I resolved to hoard my last three spells until graduation.   Iffley should have been the site of my third spell. It was reasonably progressive, so male students were allowed in female student's rooms if the door remained open—as if, Amel said, girls and girls and boys and boys got up to no trouble together. Amel Duchamps was my best friend, and one of my only friends at Iffley. Most of the magicians there had more spells to their name than I, and loved to talk about what they planned to do with their two 'extras' after the service to the Crown was given; most of the non-magician boys thought me strange and shy. Girls suspected that I only wanted to speak to them for amorous reasons, which was far from the truth—after Asuka, my heart was too raw for romance. I wanted friendship. Amel provided that and more. She was not a magician, but she did not fear them-—or anything. When she was ten, a horse had gone wild and crushed her legs. The doctor had asked her: would you rather leave them dangling, or cut them away? Amel chose to have them cut, and she told me that all her fear was cut away with them. She had gone about taking dares after that, everything from eating bees to sticking her hand into stinging nettles, and at fifteen she volunteered for experimental mechanical legs. They were beautiful, wide white-and-bronze things with gears winking through the joints. The ones being produced now, mostly for military veterans, are more workmanlike; but the woman who designed Amel's wanted to make her fifteen-year-old test subject smile, so she had boots painted on the feet and winding vines on the calves. "Imagine if magic took a piece of your body, instead of your soul," Amel said to me the day we met. "Then I'd be the one who'd spent two spells. I imagine the first would take your legs up to the knees, the next would go to the hips, then your torso... and finally you'd just be a head, rolling along. Fancy that!" She was a year older than me, but never seemed to notice. We loved each other absolutely in the way of friends, with never a hint of lust; and we both loved the boy in the room across from me with every bit of romance and lust in us, although we never dared reveal that to him. His name was Isaac; he was blind and he had the most beautiful voice I had ever heard. "How's himself?" Amel would always ask when I came to see her, and I'd tell her what Isaac had done lately. Then we'd move on to food, magic, sympathy over the cross of races we both were—English and Inuit for me, French and African for her. Iffley was a hard school, and the deeper into our education we got the more time we spent simply talking and the more our performance faltered. I might have failed altogether and been forced back home had—had the event not occurred. I know very little about the attacker; only that he was a magician, and had decided how to spend each and every one of his spells. The newspapers, of course, spent weeks on the matter, on the carnage from beginning to end and the inspiration for it and the attacker's history and potential madness, but I don't want to know another thing about him. I know all I need to: the third dark, wet January I was at Iffley, I had gone out into the town for a much-needed drink and was returning in the afternoon when I heard the screams. I saw the blood, splattered in haphazard patterns over the wall, like wet lace slapped against the bricks. And for one minute I saw him, the killer, in the doorway across from me. He was bright-eyed with excitement, his hands curled up near his chest as if he had been physically tearing away pieces of his soul to do this with; and he looked at me. For a moment, I saw him consider. But, as I was to learn later, he was on his last spell, and I was just one man. Why waste your power on one man when you can run to another room and kill a crowd? He turned away from me. And I, freezing as if I were seven years old again, let him. Someone will stop him, any moment now, I thought. Some other magician, one of the ones with all five spells. They can spare it. A minute later he cast his last spell and fell dead. A magician in the room even managed to deflect part of it. But that last spell still claimed lives—one teacher, one bystander who had been forced into the college, four students. Amel Duchamps.   I threw myself into my work in an attempt to forget, but it didn't help. Amel should have been the magician, I thought over and over. She had given up her legs in an instant. She would have given up a piece of her soul. But what could I do now? I graduated Iffley College and the Crown claimed me. The last scraps of my soul no longer belonged to me.   My third spell is not worth remarking on. It was a military operation, one part of a massive whole. Performing it, I felt the pain of separating soul from soul for the first time, and I wondered if the pain came with age or only with reluctance.   At thirty I spent my fourth spell in a moment's decision. I had another purpose, another spell laid out for me, although I can no longer recall what it was. Suffice to say I was accompanying a group of soldiers, police and other magicians, retrieving hostages that had been taken from the Royal Opera to the house of an art-obsessed crime lord in Liverpool. I found Isaac among those rescued. I got up the nerve to greet him, but he only tilted his head. Then he opened his mouth and showed me that the criminal devil had taken his tongue. I did not think about it, or even tell him what I was going to do, which in hindsight I should have. I kissed him lightly, passing the last easily taken scrap of my soul mouth to mouth, and restored his tongue. "It's the least I can do,” I said. My superiors raged. My mother heard of it and sent a letter to tell me how stupid I was. Isaac embraced me, which was the high point of the whole affair. But I realized that I could not hear his voice without remembering Amel, and how much she had loved him as well, and so I could not be with him long. When I received orders of discharge I bid him farewell and good luck, and set off wandering. I found work as a teacher, here and there, although what people most wanted me to do was give lectures on how greatly I had wasted my magic—provide an example to the younger generation of magicians by accepting responsibility for my foolishness. That I could not do, and sooner or later I had to move on from a place when the attention grew to be too much. My life was lonely. But it warmed me a little to think of a piece of my soul clinging to Isaac, like a flower-petal on the back of his tongue, reverberating with the sound every time he sang.   In the summer of my thirty-sixth year, my mother died and the aggression between England and Germany flared into war once again. Newspapers made poetry of it, suggesting that Germany was given courage to attack by my mother's death. They ran photographs of the Battle of Griefswald, the side that had taken place in my old home's ornamental pool, and some reporters tried to interview me on the matter. With mourning as my excuse, I returned to my old home and locked myself in. My father had gone back to his land of birth, and wanted nothing to do with the house or me. In time, interest died out. The war occupied everyone's attention. Sides were taken, attacks were made, and after a while I stopped bothering to read the newspapers. With a place to live and the money my mother left behind, I no longer had to go anywhere, and as the days passed I wanted to less and less. People only spoke of magic when they spoke of how it might be used in the war. I was despised, quietly, for my lack of contribution. I came to see the few kindnesses I was still shown as undeserved, and I retreated into my home completely, stocking up on food so I wouldn't need to leave for a long time. A few people still found me. Young men and women going off to war passed through my part of the country, and some of them stopped at my door. I didn't understand why; finally, I allowed a girl named Katherine inside just to see what she wanted, and over a cup of weak coffee she blurted out that she only had three spells left. I realized that she wanted to tell me about the first two. That was what they all wanted, really, the people who knocked at my door. Some had three spells left, some two, but all of them had spent the first on impulse. Katherine had cursed her stepfather's vineyards. A boy called Natanael had resurrected his favorite apple tree after it had been struck by lightning. Gita had brought a patch of earth to life, and it followed her around. "It used to be bigger," she said, looking down at the muddy little golem. "I think someday it will wash away completely." All I could do was listen, but I realized that was all they wanted. Eventually they stopped coming. Germany was inching across England's shore near my home, and people fled the area. I stayed deep within my house, and it might have been mistaken for empty; certainly, nobody came to evacuate me. I lived in a looming house over a ghost town, with the sounds of warfare drawing nearer every day, and I could not bring myself to care. I began working my way through the wine cellar. It was when I was down there, one day, that the bombs came down. I felt the earth shake over my head, and when I mounted the stairs an hour later my house had collapsed around me. Cavernous walls bowed in, shattered windows were obscured with earth, the wooden beams of the house creaked and groaned under the weight of rubble. It was dark and stifling and still large, like the belly of a whale, and in the center of the floor lay a bomb. It didn't seem about to go off, so I circled it at a distance and tried to remember what I'd read about German bombs. There had been an article in the last newspaper I'd bothered to look at. They were iron shells full of destructive magic, released when their metal shell was cracked or some requirements for the seething spell within were met. Every one one-fifth of a magician's life, and the Germans were beginning to drop dozens of them. I remembered Iffley, the blood on the walls and the cracked windows, and bile rose in my throat. That man had chosen to use his magic in that way, but I could not imagine that a rational magician would agree to it willingly. I felt a strange sympathy for the magician who had spent part of their soul in such a manner. But what were the requirements for this spell? It had been dropped rather precisely here. Perhaps, ascribing more credit to me than I deserved, they thought I might follow in my mother's footsteps and kill a great deal of their people. Still, why would it be meant for me and not awaken when I stood within twenty feet of it? A thought struck me, and I almost laughed aloud; then I remembered that nobody was here to think me mad, and I did laugh. They had meant the bomb for a magician, of course. But while my spell for Isaac had been publicized, my earlier expenditures were shrouded in mystery. They had expected a magician with at least two spells left. My one remaining scrap was not enough to trigger the bomb unless I stood next to it. I left it where it lay and went to investigate the doors.   My bad luck held, and they were all blocked by wreckage. I was trapped and help was not likely to come. And for all that I'd willingly shut myself off from life, I felt a pang of huge and echoing terror at the thought. I wanted, for a fiery moment, to survive; or at least to know that my death would be noticed, that I would be mourned. If I had still possessed two spells, I would have used one then. But I only had one, and the moment passed. In two weeks' time I had run through most of my food, and had nigh-unconsciously begun spending time nearer to the bomb. It was a contest of wills, fueled by my ragged mind; it seemed to me that my own weakening instinct to live fought against the soul-fragment of the magician who wished me to die. I spoke to it, sometimes. Would have named it, if I were a little more mad. Told it the story of my life, as far as I knew it. "We haven't gotten to the ending yet," I informed it, in a conspiratorial tone, "but I know I shall die. It only remains to see how." In my defense, I was rather drunk during those weeks, and in my further defense, my father kept a far more extensive wine-cellar than I did a pantry. Recalling my mother, I can hardly blame him. Regardless: after two weeks, as I sat and studied the bomb and wondered how swift a death it might be to trigger it, I heard noises faint and far above me. I thought at first they were delusions—I had imagined, many nights, the sound of a cat padding through the hallways, or the creak of mechanical legs—but I kept listening, and realized they were the sounds of digging. Someone had come. I leapt to my feet, head spinning, and looked upwards. I could hear a voice now, shouting, but it was too far away to recognize. But as I stood there, shaking, so overwhelmed I did not know whether I felt joy or terror, I heard another noise: a slow and measured cracking. There must be magicians in the group above. The bomb began to tremble, like a hatching egg, and in a moment it would split open. I wished that I did not have time to think. Magic, excusing the spell I performed unwillingly, always came in a moment of impulse. But the metal egg cracked slowly, and my hands trembled, and my traitor mind said Wait a moment longer. It has not gone off yet; they might be near enough to call to, soon, and someone else— Someone else, I knew with utter certainty, would come too late. That did not make the magic come easily, it did not spur me on without thought, but it gave me the strength to raise my hand toward the shivering spell on the floor. "You were meant for me," I reminded it, and as the shell finally opened I enclosed it. The force was strong, almost stronger than I, and had to go somewhere, so I directed it toward the part of the ceiling which I had heard nothing from. I had to hope that was enough. The spell was silent, save for the roar of the roof parting before it, and nothing more than a glimmer of light to my eyes. I sank to my knees, watching the ceiling split open, and saw the cloudy sky for the first time in weeks. "I slew the whale," I said. My tongue felt thick and heavy in my mouth. "I slew the whale." Far away, I heard a shout. I still could not recognize the voice, but it seemed familiar. Perhaps it was one of the young magicians who had stopped at my door. Perhaps it was Isaac. Anything seemed likely, in that moment. The cloudy sky dimmed before my eyes as my vision failed, but my mind's eye seemed to sharpen. I thought I saw the house from the outside, clear as day, and felt a cat winding around my legs, her purring weight incredibly familiar. The weight transformed into water and I stood, for a moment, in the lake where I wove Asuka’s spell. Some say a magician splits into five pieces at their death, but it felt more like becoming whole. And here—no, this cannot be death, for I find myself back in Amel's room in Iffley, where I never worked a spell, and she smiles at me so hard her eyes crease up to almost nothing. "How's himself?" she asks, and I answer, and while I do she gets up—her legs no longer creaking as badly as they did—and paces to the door to open it. Morrow slips half of her long grey body inside, but in the way of cats she can't make up her mind; as Amel and I sink deeper into conversation she comes in and goes out, in and out, in and out and in and out.   END "Defining the Shapes of our Selves" is copyright Jes Rausch 2017. "The Last Spell of the Raven" is copyright Morris Tanafon 2017. 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 we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Circus Boy Without A Safety Net" by Craig Laurance Gidney.

Episode 42 is part of the Spring 2017 issue! Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/   The Passing Bell by Amy Griswold   My hired horse threw a shoe between Bristol and Bath, and by the time the wearying business of getting another nailed on was complete the shadows were growing long and the wind was sharpening its knives.  “It’s kind of you to put me up,” I said, jingling pennies in my pocket to encourage such generosity.  In a town so small it had neither pub nor inn, I considered myself fortunate to be offered the chance to sleep in the blacksmith’s loft.      Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is "The Passing Bell" by Amy Griswold. Amy Griswold is the author (with Melissa Scott) of DEATH BY SILVER and A DEATH AT THE DIONYSUS CLUB from Lethe Press. Her most recent work (with Jo Graham) is the interactive novel THE EAGLE'S HEIR from Choice of Games. She lives in North Carolina, where she writes standardized tests as well as fiction, and tries not to confuse the two.     The Passing Bell by Amy Griswold   My hired horse threw a shoe between Bristol and Bath, and by the time the wearying business of getting another nailed on was complete the shadows were growing long and the wind was sharpening its knives.  “It’s kind of you to put me up,” I said, jingling pennies in my pocket to encourage such generosity.  In a town so small it had neither pub nor inn, I considered myself fortunate to be offered the chance to sleep in the blacksmith’s loft.  “Glad to, if you’ve got the coin,” the blacksmith said.  “Only the missus is particular in her way about knowing something about strangers who are going to sleep under her roof.  What’s your name, and what’s your age, and what’s your trade, good man?  For she’ll ask me all three.”  “Rob Tar is my name, and my age is twenty and six,” I said.  “And I’m an able seaman aboard the Red Boar out of Bristol.  My girl Minnie lives in Bath, and I’m on my way to keep her company a while until we sail again.  I’ve never claimed to be a good man, but I’ll be no trouble to you, and I can pay you for supper and bed."  In fact I had three months’ pay, most of it stuffed down my shirt to pose less temptation to thieves.  “Will that satisfy your lady?” “It should,” Mister Smith said, with a sheepish sort of shuffle that would have looked more at home on a boy than a big man with biceps like hams.  “You understand, she’s a particular sort of woman.”  He seemed to notice for the first time that his dogs were circling me suspiciously, as if waiting for the cue to set their teeth into an intruder.  “Get by, dogs, we’ve a guest tonight.” He led me into a kitchen where a warm fire was glowing and went aside to speak with the presumed mistress of the house, a young wife but hardly a merry one, her dun hair matching her dun dress so that she looked faded, as if washed too many times.  I was beginning to get some feeling back into my feet when she came over with bread and salt fish. “That ought to do for a sailor,” she said, and I nodded polite thanks, though in truth I’d eaten enough fish while at sea that I’d have preferred the toughest fowl or most dubious of hams.  “If you’d come a week ago, we’d have had nothing for you but pork.”  “Too bad,” I said, and tried not to think about crisp bacon. At that moment, a dull music split the air, the heavy tolling of a steeple-bell.  It rang twice, paused, rang twice again, and then began a doleful series of strokes.  It was the death knell, and I put on my most solemn face, thinking how awkward it was to be a stranger in a small town at such a time.  “Who do you suppose has died?” “I expect no one yet,” Mister Smith said.  His wife said nothing, only stood with her mouth pressed tight together, listening to the tolling bell.  In a small town such as this, I could well believe they kept up the old custom of ringing the bell as soon as the parson heard news of a death, but to ring it before the death seemed perverse. “Surely there aren’t any hangings here,” I said.  A condemned prisoner was the only sort of man I could think of whose death might be predicted with certainty beforehand.  “I suppose if someone’s lying deathly ill . . .”  “We’ll know by morning,” Mister Smith said.  “The bell never lies, you see—”  He broke off abruptly as the bell finally came to the end of its dull refrain and seemed at a loss for how to go on. “Twenty-six,” Mistress Smith said, and when I turned at her tone I saw that her face had turned gray with some strong emotion I didn’t understand.  “Nine strokes to tell a man, and twenty-six to tell his age.  Don’t tell me I miscounted.” “I’m sure you didn’t,” the smith said.  He twisted the leather of his apron in his hands, looking from one of us to the other.  “It might be best if you found your bed now.” “The hour is growing late,” I said, because I misliked his wife’s expression, and had developed aboard ship a keen sense of how the wind was blowing. The man picked up a lantern and led me back out into the chill dooryard.  The ladder up to the loft above the forge was rickety, and he held the lantern to light my way.  “You mustn’t mind my wife,” he said.  “Our troubles here are nothing to do with you.” Well, only the most incurious of born lubbers could have refrained from asking the question after that. “What did she mean about the bell?” “There’s somewhat wrong with our church bell,” Smith said.  “The parson rings it in the ordinary way after every death in the town, but you can hear it all through town the night before.” It took me a moment to parse that.  “You mean the bell rings before someone dies?” “The bell sounds before someone dies, but the parson doesn’t ring it until after.  It’s been that way as long as anyone in town can remember. You mustn’t think we’re entirely ungrateful; when it tolls for your old uncle, you can go round and see him beforehand and say your farewells, you see?  But it’s hard when it tolls for a child, or a man in his prime with little chance of passing away peacefully in his bed.” The light from the lantern shifted, as if his hand were less than steady on its handle.  Outside its circle of light, black branches bent against a dark sky that was beginning to spit frigid rain.  “This wouldn’t be a tale spun to frighten travelers, would it?” I asked.  “For I’ve heard them all in my time.” “I swear it’s the plain truth,” Smith said.  “And it’s a bad night for traveling, but I’ll understand if you’d rather be on your way.”  He paused a moment and then added, “It might be for the best.  You heard what the bell told.” “I’m willing to take the chance,” I said.  “I’ve heard more frightening stories than this.” “It’s no more than the truth,” the man said, but with resignation, as if he were used to skepticism from strangers.  He hung up the lantern, and turned abruptly to go.  “Your horse is shod and I’ve got your coins for the night’s lodging, so I expect we’re square, and there’s no more that needs to be said.”  He tramped out, leaving me to ascend the ladder in no mood to settle down easily to sleep. I shivered for a while under the thin horse blanket spread over an equally thin pallet, and then realized that the forge and the kitchen of the house shared a common chimney that went up the opposite wall.  I made my way over to it, hoping to warm my hands at least, and I heard the mutter of voices through the wall.  After a bare moment’s hesitation, I pressed my ear unashamed to the stones, having long profited from such caution.  “Give me the hatchet,” I heard Mistress Smith say, and was abruptly glad I hadn’t balked at eavesdropping. “You don’t need the hatchet,” Mister Smith said.  “I mean to leave it in the good Lord’s hands.” “You mean you don’t mean to lift a hand yourself to save your life, when it’s you or that stranger who’ll die tonight.  Well, you needn’t get your hands dirty if you scruple to it.  Just you give me the hatchet, and tell anyone who asks that you slept sound.” “And what do you mean to say, when the town watch comes knocking?” “Old Bill?  I’ll tell him that I woke at a noise in the courtyard, and came out to see men running away.  He’ll set up a hue and cry that will take the rest of the night.  You’ll see.”  There was a feverish certainty to her voice.  “All you need do is leave it all to me.” “I won’t have it, I tell you.” “I don’t care what you will and won’t have.  You’re not much of a man, it seems, but you’re my man, and I don’t mean to wager your life on the toss of a coin.  Give me the hatchet, and don’t you set foot outside until I come back.”  I had only a few moments to escape.  I had a knife, which I took up now, and the cover of darkness on my side.  For all that, my heart was pounding in my chest; I’ve never been a brawler, nor been much in the habit of fighting with women.  I made for the ladder, but before I reached it I heard the sound of footsteps below.  “Do you lie comfortably?” Mistress Smith’s voice rose up. I thought of feigning snores, but lacked confidence in my own dramatic skills. “Quite comfortably,” I called back down.  “I’ve everything a man could want.” “I thought I’d bring you a hot drink,” she said.  “A bit of a toddy to take the chill from the air.  Do come down and drink it before it gets cold.” “It’s very kind,” I said, putting my back to the loft wall and hoping that a swung hatchet wouldn’t go through it.  “But I never touch the demon drink, not since I got religion.” “A sailor who’s an abstainer?” she said.  “I never heard of such.” “It’s true all the same,” I said.  “It pleases my girl, you understand.” “I’ve a blanket for you at least,” she said.  “And you can come in with me and fetch a cup of hot milk.” “Thank you kindly, but I’ll lodge where I am.”  I held my breath, and heard the ladder creak as she put her foot on it.  It creaked twice more, and then her head and shoulders appeared framed in the doorway and light glinted off the hatchet blade.  I kicked her square in the bosom, though I’m not proud to say it, and knocked her and the ladder both down from the loft.  I swung down after her, seeing her sprawled in the straw, unhurt but struggling to rise, and went for the hatchet. She grasped it as well, her hands clawing at mine, raking them with her fingernails.  “Will you give over!” I tried to shoulder her away.  “You’re wrong in what you think.  I’m no man of twenty-six.” “You claim now you were lying?” Her face was close enough to mine as we struggled that I could smell her breath.  “There’s a strange habit, for a man to tell lies about his age to everyone he meets.” Her grip on the hatchet loosened as she spoke, and I tightened my own.  “So it would be,” I said.  “But I’m no man, and that was the lie I told.  That and the bit about the drink, which I admit is a besetting vice.  I put on breeches to go to sea, but I’m a woman all the same underneath them, and never more glad of it than today.”  I forebore to add that my girl was glad of it too, as I felt under the circumstances it would be taken as cheek. She laughed in my face.  “That’s a nasty lie to save your skin.” “I’ll prove it if you like,” I said.  “If you’ll give over your attempt to chop me up for firewood long enough.” At that moment, her husband came in, and I shoved her toward him, hoping that he’d catch the hatchet out of her hands.  He plucked it away from her with his left hand and tossed it aside, but as he let her go I saw that he had a cleaver in his right hand.  I saw the bulging of his shoulders and thought I must know what a chicken felt like at butchering time. “It came on me that it was wrong to leave the missus to do what must be done,” he said. “I’ll swear any oath you like, my mother named me Kate,” I said, and reached for the top button of my shirt. “A wicked wench who’ll dress up as a man can’t complain if she’s buried as one,” the woman said, and I saw a look pass between her and her husband that made my heart sink.  “What the parson doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” “I’m sorry to have to do it,” Mister Smith told me, but he was lifting the cleaver, and I turned tail and ran. I heard the clamor of dogs barking behind me, and rethought in a hurry my initial plan to make for the road out of town.  I looked about for a tree to climb, and saw none.  There was a stone wall at the end of the lane, though, and I went pelting toward it with what sounded like a whole Bedlam of dogs baying at my heels. They leapt snarling as I scrambled up the wall, but any sailor, lad or lass, can climb like a monkey, and I reached the top of the wall and dropped down on the other side.  I was in a little churchyard, but before I could slip away over the wall on the other side, the parson came out to see what was the matter with the dogs, who were still howling in a perfect fury.  Though he wore spectacles balanced on his narrow nose, he also had a heavy stick in his hand and looked as if he were willing to use it. “The blacksmith set his dogs on me,” I blurted out.  “I swear to you I’m no thief.” The parson didn’t loosen his grip on the stick.  “I don’t believe Mister Smith is in the habit of setting his dogs on innocent strangers.” “It’s on account of the bell, the passing bell,” I said, and couldn’t help looking up at the tower that threw its shadow over us both.  The bell tower was just a rickety little thing by the measure of city churches, but the pool of gloom it cast over the churchyard seemed heavy and dark.  “His wife put him up to it, for she thinks it’s either him or me who’ll die tonight.” The parson came forward a little, then, and looked me up and down through his spectacles.  “I never knew the blacksmith’s age,” he said, as if speaking as much to himself as to me.  “I try not to know, you see.  But in a town so small, it’s hard not to be aware . . .”  He shook his head, and there was something closed in his expression.  “I think I had better see you out the gate,” he said. “The dogs are still out there,” I pointed out. “That’s really not my concern.” “And you a parson.” “I can’t stop what’s to come,” he said.  “You must understand that, you must see.  I’ve tried, sometimes, when I knew.  There was a girl, a child of thirteen . . . I sat up with her all night, in the church, and we prayed together.  She wept, and I told her to have faith, that the Lord would protect her.  And an hour before morning her fear overcame her, and she rose to flee.  I caught hold of her, I demanded she stay, I promised she would be safe.  I struggled with her.  And she fell, and her head struck the altar steps.  And God was silent.” He reached out and caught hold of my collar to march me toward the gates.  My hand rested on my knife, and then I took it away again, not sure if I could bring myself to stab a man of the cloth, even to make my escape.  “I don’t see why you can’t just resolve not to ring the bell anymore,” I said.  “If you don’t ring it in the morning . . .” “I did not ring it that night,” he said, still marching me along, as if by thrusting me out the gates he could banish the memory.  “I sat on the altar steps in misery, and at the first light, I heard the bell tolling.  It was little Johnnie Boots, the choirboy, who had taken it into his head to ring the bell for me as a kindness, since, as he said, I must have been taken ill.”  He paused before the high wooden gate, and outside I heard an eager chorus of barks, and then the even more ominous growling of dogs who see their aim in sight.  “There are some who have called for us to take down the bell,” he said.  I silently cheered on “some,” whoever they might be.  “But it is the Lord who put this curse on us, and when he judges us free of sin, he will take it away again.  When we have been made clean.”  His knuckles were white on his stick, and his eyes were on the horizon, as if he saw some horror there I couldn’t see.  “I have prayed, but of course my sinner’s prayers have not been answered,” he said.  “Pray now, and perhaps yours will be heard as mine have not been.” I put my hands together, although I had done precious little praying of any kind since I’d taken up my present life.  It sat badly with me to beg for my life anyway, like a craven captain pleading for quarter on his knees.  Dear Lord, I’ve been a wicked woman but a good seaman, I said silently.  You’ve winked at my deceit, and let me live when better men have died.  If you care for wicked women, as I’ve heard you did in life, show me one more trick to save my skin.  The parson was reaching for the gate, and I blurted out, “A moment more!” “You’ve had time for your prayers.” “A moment to wish my girl goodbye,” I said, and drew out the locket I carried.  It was a little tin thing with a half-penny sketch inside, but the boy who drew it had caught Minnie’s laughing eyes, and it was worth a fortune in gold to me.  She’d scolded me for going back to the sea, though it was my wages that kept her all the time I was away, and told me at some length that if I drowned she wouldn’t have a single prayer said for my worthless wayward soul. “You’ve had that as well,” the parson said, and reached for the latch on the gate.  I reached again for my knife, wondering if I could stick him without hurting him too much, and what the townsmen would do to me if they caught me after that.  Being hanged for stabbing a parson seemed even worse than being hacked apart for nothing. And then I had it, all at once, like a breath of wind snapping open a slack sail.  “One thing more!” I demanded.  “I had a traveling companion on the road, another sailor who took ill and died by the wayside.  I buried him as best I could, but I’d be easier in my mind if the passing bell were rung for him.  His name was Tom, and I know his age as well, for he told me at the end he was born twenty-six years ago to the day.”    The parson stood staring at me for a long moment.  “Do you expect me for one moment to believe such a story?” “Is it any of your business to doubt it?” I asked, and reached into my coat to draw out my purse.  “If I had come to you a week ago, would you have questioned whether there was a man named Tom or a roadside grave?”  “I would not,” he admitted.  I held out my purse to him, and while I’d like to believe he took it in pure gratitude for the escape I offered him, I can’t say that its weight didn’t figure in his decision as well. “Then go on and ring the passing bell for poor old Tom,” I said.  “For I think I have worn out my welcome in this town, or at least it has worn out its welcome with me, and I am eager to be on the road again.” I followed him to the foot of the tower stairs, and watched him ascend.  I waited until the sound of his steps told me he had gone a full turn of the stairs, and then started up after him, keeping my own steps quiet.  Even after everything that had happened, I was not entirely prepared for what I saw when I mounted to the bell-tower; the parson was heaving on the bell-rope, his back to me, and the bell was heaving as well, the clapper slamming into its sides hard enough that I could see its tremor, but no sound came from the bell, no sound at all.  The only sound was the wind, keening through the wide openings on all sides of the tower like a crying dog. I waited, breath held, until the bell made its final swing and the parson released the bellrope.  I scrambled around him, evading his surprised attempt to catch me back, and clambered up onto the beams that held the bell in place.  The bell was an old one, and held only by thick ropes, not by a heavy chain; it was the work of a moment to hack the stiff ropes in two. There was a clamor like brazen hounds baying in hell as the bell came crashing down.  It tumbled out the open side of the bell tower, clattering for a moment on its edge and then plunging toward the earth. “They do say the Lord helps those as help themselves,” I said, jumping down.  The parson crossed himself and backed away from me. “There’s some devil in you, and I’m not sure whether to try to cast it out or thank you for what you’ve done,” he said.  “Call it payment for all the hospitality I’ve had in this town,” I said.  “But now I must be away.”  I took off down the stairs at a run, and plunged out into the open air. I stopped short when I saw the bell lying fallen on the churchyard stones.  It was cracked and split, crumpled like the body of Mister Smith, who lay fallen beneath it, with his dogs circling round him, cringing now and whimpering. The parson came out after me, and made the sign of the cross over the dead blacksmith in silence.  “He was a good man,” he said after a while. “I expect he was,” I said.  “You mustn’t blame yourself.” “Nor will I,” I said, for it seemed the blacksmith had been doomed from the time the bell first sounded, and at least now the bell had rung its last. “But can I have my purse back, then?  I expect I can find a man to ring the passing bell for my old mate Tom somewhere considerably nearer home.” The parson gave me a look as he handed it over that I suppose I well deserved, but what can I say?  I’ve never claimed to be a good man, but I am Minnie’s best girl, and she’d been waiting patiently for me to bring her home my pay, and to come back to her safely from the sea. END   “The Passing Bell” was originally published in Temporally Out of Order and is copyright Amy Griswold, 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 soon with a GlitterShip original.

On this episode of the Comic Book Bears podcast, the CBBears are thrilled to welcome to the show Joseph Carriker! Joe has been writing in the gaming industry for over fifteen years and is about to release his first prose novel - Sacred Band from Lethe Press.  Sacred Band is a queer themed super-hero tale which depicts the rise of a loose-knit super powered team dedicated to helping those who fall between the cracks in a world where the golden age of heroes is decades past. After that Steve, Bryan and Bill spend some time discussing the first episode of Legion, the new X-Men related TV series on FX! (Mini-spoiler - they all liked it! A lot!) http://josephcarriker.com/sacred-band/ https://twitter.com/oakthorne https://www.facebook.com/sacredbandnovel/  

In this podcast Ray Cluley talks about writing suspenseful scenes, antarctic horror, music to write to and much more. About Ray Cluley Ray Cluley has been published in Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave from TTA Press, Shadows & Tall Trees from Undertow Press, and Icarus from Lethe Press, as well as featuring in a variety of anthologies. … Continue reading

In this podcast Ray Cluley talks about full-time and part-time writing, authentic storytelling, research for stories and much more. About Ray Cluley Ray Cluley has been published in Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave from TTA Press, Shadows & Tall Trees from Undertow Press, and Icarus from Lethe Press, as well as featuring in a variety of anthologies. … Continue reading

Marcy Arlin teaches Theater for Social Change at Pace University and is artistic director of the OBIE-winning Immigrants' Theatre project and is a Fulbright scholar to Romania and the Czech Republic. She is a long-time member of BSFW, Theater Without Borders, Broad Universe, and her work has been published in Daily Science Fiction, Perihelionsf.com, Broad Universe Sampler, and Man.In.Fest theater journal. Marcy has several more short stories out there and is working on a sci-fi murder mystery. Author Richard Bowes has published six novels, four story collections and over eighty short stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Lambda Award, a story South Million Writers Award, and an International Horror Guild Award. His most recent novel, Dust Devil On a Quiet Street, was on the 2014 World Fantasy and Lambda short lists. A new edition of his 2005 novel, From The Files of the Time Rangers, a Nebula finalist, will appear later this year from Lethe Press. Last year, his 9/11 story, "There’s A Hole In The City," got a very nice review in The New Yorker. Recent and forthcoming appearances include: Fantasy Magazine's Queers Destroy Fantasy special issue, Interfictions, Nightmare, Grendel Song, and the anthologies The Doll Collection and Black Feathers. He is currently writing stories that will be chapters in a novel about life as a gay kid in 1950’s Boston. Bradley Robert Parks lives, writes, and performs in and around Brooklyn, NY, where he founded the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers (BSFWriters.com). His passion for writing blossomed while growing up in a family of genre readers. While he's been pursuing writing for a while, the crazy energy of NYC and BSFW have given him the focus and motivation to finally get published. His stories have appeared on BuzzyMag.com and on the Kaleidocast podcast. He also sings and narrates stories when time permits. Along with these achievements, he's obtained one husband, Michael, and Insanity Anne Magoo (best cat ever). Keep up with his exploits on Facebook or at BradleyRobertParks.com.

Her Last Breath Before Wakingby A.C. WiseShe is a city haunted by a ghost.When the architect dreams, her sinews are suspension bridges, her ribs vaulting arches, her bones steel I-beams, and her blood concrete. In her dreams, the city is pristine and perfect. She is perfect.The architect has a lover who is afraid to sleep. At night, the lover lays her head against the architect’s chest. Instead of breath and pulse, she hears the rumble of high-speed trains.Full transcript after the cut.----more----Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 21 for February 2, 2016. I am your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.Today's story is "Her Last Breath Before Waking" by A.C. Wise.Before I get to the story, I just wanted to mention that GlitterShip is currently eligible for the Best Fancast category of the Hugo Awards. I wasn't really sure if GlitterShip was a "fancast" or a "semiprozine" but I thought I should check just in case anyone asked me.That said, if you like GlitterShip, the best thing you can do is tell your friends to start listening. If they're interested in LGBTQIA short fiction but are unable to access audio (or just don't like it!), they can read all of the GlitterShip stories on our website at glittership.comA.C. Wise's short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Shimmer, and, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in October 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Find her online at www.acwise.net.Our guest reader this week is Amanda Fitzwater.Amanda Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Lethe Press’ “Heiresses of Russ 2014”, “Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists”, and recently an essay in Twelfth Planet Press’ “Letters to Tiptree”. Look out for stories coming soon from Shimmer Magazine and The Future Fire. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater   Her Last Breath Before Wakingby A.C. WiseShe is a city haunted by a ghost.When the architect dreams, her sinews are suspension bridges, her ribs vaulting arches, her bones steel I-beams, and her blood concrete. In her dreams, the city is pristine and perfect. She is perfect.The architect has a lover who is afraid to sleep. At night, the lover lays her head against the architect’s chest. Instead of breath and pulse, she hears the rumble of high-speed trains.The architect stands on the balcony of her close apartment looking over the city-that-is and seeing the city-that-might-be. She smokes thin cigarettes and mentally replaces the burnt-out factory and its blind-eye smashed windows with a row of gleaming, silver towers. Once she builds them, her towers will scrape the stars.“The city is rotten,” she says; she doesn’t turn around.“I like the city,” says the architect’s lover, so softly she might not be heard. “It’s where we met.”But the architect isn’t listening. Her hands sketch forms on the air, rewriting the view with shimmering art deco buildings, glistening fountains, and wide, chilly plazas.The architect’s lover creeps outside to stand beside the architect. She hates visiting the architect here; it’s too high. The wind plucks at her. She doesn’t like seeing the city spread out this way, reduced to brick and wood, stone and smudges of light. Her own apartment is close to the ground, where she can step out the door and feel worn cobblestones beneath her feet.Sometimes, even though she knows the architect would disapprove, the architect’s lover goes outside barefoot. She stands in her doorway and breathes in the stench of factories, blanketing the city in smoke. She breathes in the crackling, golden scent of fresh bread from the bakery on the corner. She breathes in the rotting geraniums in her neighbor’s window box. But most of all, she breathes in the stink of the river, because once upon a time it smelled like the promise of a new world.On those days, the architect’s lover curls her toes around the worn-smooth cobbles and drinks in the life of all the people who came before her — every horse’s hoof, every shoeless urchin, every factory-man and whore, every rainfall wearing the cobbles as round as they are now. It makes the city feel alive. It comforts her.More than once, she has tried to show the architect her city, the one she sees with her feet curled around the cobblestones, but the architect only frowns. The architect has plans. The architect’s lover would re-write the city with new-forged memories; the architect would re-write it with glass and chrome.The architect slides her arm around her lover’s waist, drawing her closer to the view, but she’s still looking at the city.“One day this will be beautiful,” the architect says.The architect’s lover looks at the architect instead of the city — the plane of her cheekbones, the sweeping lines of her neck and throat, the dark spiral of her hair.“It’s beautiful now,” she says.In the morning, the architect’s lover finds plans scattered throughout the apartment. She lay beside the architect all night, listening to the high-speed rumble of dreams moving under the architect’s skin. The architect couldn’t have drawn the plans. She must have shed them from her body in her sleep like unwanted skin.In two weeks, a tower rises where the architect’s hands traced the air, even though there have been no work crews, no scaffolds, no sound of hammers and nails. Like the plans, the architect must have dreamed it, brought it into being by force of will.The architect’s lover cannot remember what stood there before the tower, if anything at all. This makes her weep, sitting alone in a café near the river, where the architect will not see. The architect’s lover wants to remember everything about the city, imprint it on her bones: here is where she held the architect’s hand, there is where they watched long barges pole down the canal. If she can keep the city from changing, maybe she can keep the architect from changing as well.People pass the café where the architect’s lover sits, but no one seems to notice the tower. It has always been there. They take it for granted; this is the way the city is meant to be. When she tries to ask about it, people merely shrug. They walk faster; they look at the architect’s lover with strange, indulgent smiles. They shake their heads before going about their days.The next time the architect’s lover visits, the architect calls her out onto the balcony. She points to the tower that has always been there.“You see?” the architect says, indicating the top of the tower, a pyramid of glass all lit up with giant spotlights and faceted like a jewel. “One day I’ll buy you a diamond bigger and brighter than that one. I’ll string stars around your waist and wrap moonlight around your throat. I’ll drape you in fur and put pearls and feathers in your hair. You’ll never want for anything.”The architect’s lover shudders; she imagines drowning under all that weight.The architect’s lover still longs to become the architect’s wife some day, even though she fears she will die of neglect if she does, so long as she doesn’t die of a broken heart first. She has tried not to love the architect every way she knows how, but her heart keeps circling back to the day they met. It is a fixed point in time, and for the architect’s lover, it will never change.They were both strangers in the city, recognizing in each other someone else who had not yet learned to call it home. They discovered it together, exploring every street, every alley, every rooftop and doorway. As they did, the architect’s lover wrote each location on her heart, remembering the way the architect looked when she touched that lintel, this railing. The architect’s lover never saw the city until she saw it through the architect’s eyes, and now they are inextricably intertwined. After so long adrift, these twin points, architect and city, anchored her. In the secret places inside her skin and her bones, her name for both architect and city is home.What secret name the architect has for her, the architect’s lover does not know. This, she does know: The architect never learned to name the city home and she will rewrite all the places they’ve ever been together — the smoky café where they first met, drinking absinthe and watching bloated corpses float down the river; the crumbling bridge where they shared their first kiss, the architect tasting of heady wine and the architect’s lover tasting of nothing at all; the factory where they first fucked, the rough brick against the architect’s lover’s back, and broken glass crunching under their boots. Even the rotten pier where the boats that brought them both from different places long before they knew each other first landed.Even so, the architect’s lover cannot fall out of love.All the places she has written on her heart will vanish. Her heart will remain. But when those places are gone, who will they be — the architect and the architect’s lover? Who will they be, separate and together? With no history, what hope can there be for their future?The architect’s lover is afraid the architect will rewrite her if she falls asleep. So she stays awake, eating cold, tart plums the color of new bruises. She smokes cigarettes she can’t stand the taste of, and drinks coffee so thick the spoon stands on its own when she forgets it halfway through stirring.She does all these things and tries not to think of the architect’s hands on her body when they fuck, placing causeways in the curve of her hip, a spiral staircase winding around her spine, a domed cathedral to replace her skull.She can’t tell the architect of her fear. She can’t tell her she’s afraid, or she’ll lose the architect even sooner. She is losing her. Has lost her. Will lose her again and again. She wants to lose her, and yet the architect’s lover is afraid of coming unmoored again, losing the only place she can call home.So instead she tries to imagine making herself vast enough to hold a city entire, her arms long enough to encompass bridges and canals, wrapped so tight nothing will ever crumble. Even in her dreams, in the rare moments she lets herself sleep, she fails.These are the architect’s dreams.One: She replaces her bones with scaffolding. Her eyes become window glass, shattering sunlight. Her jaw sings a bridge’s span, made musical by the tramping of a thousand feet. All through her are tunnels, connecting everything. Her veins are marble. Her foundation stone. Her heart a cavernous station thundering with countless trains. She is vast and contains multitudes. And she is beautiful.Two: She is very young and playing on the river bank with her brother and her cousin. It is summer and they are barefoot, squishing mud between their toes, feeling the wet, green life of fish and frogs and stilt-legged birds. They break off reeds from the shore and whip-thin branches from the overhanging trees, weaving them into impossible, organic structures. She is not the architect yet, in these dreams, but hers are always the strongest buildings. Her brother and cousin are too impatient, their fingers too quick. They splinter the reeds, snap the wood, and throw the wrecks into the sun-glinting water. They don’t want it badly enough. Her constructions can withstand anything, bound by her force of will.Three: She is very old, but ageless. Her skin, stretched taut over bone-that-is-not-bone, is so thin the light shines through it. There is metal everywhere she can fit it. She has carved away as many pieces of herself as she can and still walk, still breathe. She has cut windows in her flesh, replaced skin with glass so the delicate structures within, the winding catwalks and promenades, are visible. She is light, so light, but she abhors the body that remains, holding her down.At night, she calls her children to her. They come creeping from the shadows, their fingers bloody from tearing her city apart by day and building it anew as dusk falls. Metal spines protrude through their skin. Electricity sparks in their bones, makes their eyes glow. They never speak, but they crackle. She has given them whips to hold, downed power lines with frayed copper ends. At her bidding, they flay her, drawing blood from her remaining skin. She closes her eyes, cries ecstasy from a throat clogged with emotion. They are so perfect, her beautiful children, but it is never enough.She is never enough.Four: In her house near the river, she lies snugged tight between her brother and cousin, breathing in their dreams. Elsewhere in the house, her mother, father, and uncle snore. The door bursts open, shatters, raining splinters. Her family, all of them, is dragged from their beds, pushed barefoot into the snow.She can see her breath as they are marched, all in a line, to the river and forced out onto the frozen surface. Under the snow, the ice is impossibly blue, and under the blue, the water is impossibly black. She is separated from everyone but her mother, who grips her hand so tight their bones grind together, and refuses to let go. There are other families, nearly the whole village, teeth chattering, shivering, confused. One man protests, and a soldier in his warm coat and fur hat breaks the man’s nose with the butt of his gun. The man makes a choking noise. He spits blood on the ice, and one yellow-white tooth. He doesn’t protest again.One of the soldiers wears a star on his hat. He barks a command in a language she doesn’t understand, and two of his men go to either end of the shivering line. They walk slowly, with their guns drawn, and shoot every third person they come upon.One, two, three. Crack. One, two, three. Crack. Her father, uncle, and cousin are sixth, eighteenth, and twenty-first in line. Her mother is thirtieth, and she is thirty-first.Each bullet is the sound of the ice cracking, her heart breaking, the feel of her mother’s cold-chapped hand grinding against her bones then letting go as the force of gravity and the terrible color of blood upon the snow pull her down.Her brother survives. She survives. The solider with the star on his hat lays a heavy hand on her shoulder. He leans forward and breathes in her face, against her ear. His breath, the only hot thing on the frozen lake, smells of sausage and cheap whiskey.“Go,” he says. “Go, and take your brother with you. I want you to remember. I want you to carry this moment with you wherever you go.”There are tears on her lashes, freezing in place. She will never let them fall. They are perfect, inverted globes, holding the last image of her family. If they fall, they will shatter, and her family will be lost forever.This is what the architect dreams.The city changes. Weak and rotten flesh is scraped away to reveal shining bone. Towers rise. Bridges cross and re-cross the city. A train thunders from uptown to midtown and beyond, rattling windows paned in sparkling glass.The architect recruits an army of children, urchins with dirty fingers. The architect’s lover sees them in the shadows of old bridges, chipping away fragments of old stone. She sees them in the streets, hurling those chunks of stone through dirt-streaked windows, exploding brick dust from ancient buildings, hastening decay. She sees them digging between the cobbles, pulling them like teeth, prying between ancient boards until they snap. Their fingers are everywhere.She listens to the architect’s plans. She listens to the trains run beneath the architect’s skin when she sleeps. The city will never be finished, never be done. By night the children will build it up, by day the children will pull it down, and put new, shining structures in its place when the moon rises again.The city will never be complete. The architect will never be complete.Although they have never spoken of it, the architect and the architect’s lover disagree.To the architect’s lover, the river smells of promise, a particular promise that smells of her mother’s skin — fried onions, boiled cabbage, and harsh soap.To the architect, the river is the smell of sickness. It is the feel of her brother’s fevered skin under the palm of her hand. The river is the color of his eyes, glazed, muddy silt from its bottom occluding his sight. It is the sound of him parting blood-cracked lips at the end, rattling out one last breath, and calling her by her mother’s name. It is the memory of him surviving the ice, and dying — as so many others did — on the refugee-choked boat carrying them to a new life, a new shore.The architect is determined she will stitch the river closed. Her thread will be iron and steel, binding up the city’s wounds, sealing her brother’s ghost underneath its skin like a bruise, where it needs must fade.Sometimes the architect likes to imagine she never touched down on the city’s shore. When her brother died, she climbed up on the rail of the boat, crowded with so many stinking refugees, and let herself fall into the churned, muddy water. She sank, rag doll arms and legs drifting loose around her, hair trailing like weeds. She breathed out and out, silver bubbles rising toward the surface, the only bright and beautiful thing in all the muck. She did not jump, but sometimes she wishes she did. Sometimes, even though she knows it is not true, she convinces herself she did jump. The river swallowed her whole. Some other girl, a drowned girl, a ghost, entered the city in her place.At her core, who the architect truly is, is different. She is still under water, still exhaling, watching those bubbles rise. She is waiting. And one day soon, she will breathe in, light, perfect, and stripped clean. She will breathe in. And wake.She tries to tell her lover these things, but she knows her lover doesn’t hear them. Somewhere, somehow, they lost their way. They met in one city, and somewhere along the way, they diverged. They look at the city now, and they see different things. The architect wonders if she can ever build a bridge strong enough to pull her lover across. And if she can’t, what will happen to them, then?The architect’s lover takes to drinking. She drinks in cafes and bars along the ever-changing river, which she scarcely recognizes anymore.Is that the place where she met the architect? Or was it over there? What of the factory, the stone bridge? What of the taste of the architect’s skin, smoky with the factory’s ghosts, sweat-slick beneath her lover’s lips? What of absinthe cradled on the architect’s tongue, and their hands held palm to palm — so tight — bone to bone? So tight they will never let go. Where are the echoes of their heels cracking in rhythm, one, two, three, as they run from one place to the next, running wild into the future?The architect’s lover doesn’t recognize herself anymore. She doesn’t know where she fits — not on the streets, where cobbles no longer rise to meet the arches of her feet; not against the architect, where sharp juts of bone meet her fingers in place of the soft hollow of a throat, the gentle curve of a hip, or the warm swell of a breast.She drinks and she smokes until her memories blur, until their edges round and grow soft like the scarcely-remembered thousand-year cobble stones. The architect’s lover shouts at strangers, her words slurring as she tells them of factories and piers and bridges that never existed.She tells them of home.When she slips up and says she is the architecture’s lover, not the architect’s, no one corrects her.She is a ghost, in love with a city.And in time, because she is afraid and she doesn’t know how to fall out of love, the architect’s lover takes home a beautiful boy whose name she can’t be bothered to remember. She fucks him precisely because it means nothing. Smoking still more cigarettes, eating chilled and bruised plums, watching him sleep, she is terribly afraid she’ll marry him one day. Still never knowing his name, the architecture’s lover will use up her body bearing the beautiful boy’s children. Children who will become the monsters of the architecture’s dream.The architect, the architecture, is all angles and planes now, the glint of steel, concrete skin. The architecture’s lover doesn’t recognize anything anymore. She is a stranger in a city she once loved, a city that held so much promise. A city she called home.The architect’s lover remembers her mother putting her on a boat. There were so many boats in those days, all leaving from different places, but all traveling to the city — a place of promise, a place of dreams. She remembers clinging to her mother’s skirt, sobbing and not wanting to let go as her mother’s hands — red and blistered from washing — urged her up the wooden gangway.“It’s a better life,” her mother told her. “You’ll have opportunities I never had, things I can’t give you. You’ll be happy there, in time. Promise me you’ll try.”She remembers gripping the ship’s rail so hard her knuckles turned white, leaning out over the churning water, waving and straining her eyes until her mother was only a vanished speck on the horizon. Landing on the city’s shore didn’t take the pain away, but stepping from the boat’s swaying deck onto firm land once more, the architect’s lover straightened her spine, keeping her promise to try. Determined to make her mother proud.This is not the city she once called home.This city is hostile. It is like the place she came from, on a boat, so long ago, a place that pushed her out, not wanting her anymore. It does not love her. It barely knows she’s alive.And yet, still, she cannot fall out of love.The architecture’s lover looks at the beautiful boy whose name she doesn’t know, and tries to love him. Silent tears run down her cheeks; she doesn’t remember why.The architect stands on her balcony high above the shining city. Her city. Towers stab defiant at the sky, bridges stitch old wounds closed, trains hum deep underground, and the winking glass that is everywhere catches the sun. Strong and true, it will never crack, never break, never crumble.Her skin is planed clean, scraped thin. Still, it is too heavy for her bones. But there is time, she knows. This is only the beginning.The architect shades her eyes, and looks toward what was once the river. People stride along what are no longer banks, small as ants from up here. They are laughing, smiling. Women, sleek in cool silk the color of her towers. Men, in crisp suits the color of ice cream that will never melt. Their teeth are impossible in the sun. They don’t remember a life other than this one. She has made it so.Everyone should have the luxury of forgetting the times when they weren’t as happy as they must be now.Still, something tugs at the edges of the architect’s mind. There is a ghost in the city. The shadow of towers, spewing smoke, and the memory of a kiss, and salt-tasting skin against her lips haunt her mind. Before her marble skin, before the columns of her spine, the tension bridge of her jaw, before the diamond pane windows of her eyes, wasn’t she someone else? Wasn’t there someone who knew her as she was, and loved her just the same?There, amid the ant-bustle on the once-shores, is a lone girl. Her feet are bare and spattered with mud. She is looking straight at the architect, across all the distance, and the people part around her like water breaking around a stone. Like she isn’t there.The architect wonders: Is that her? Or someone she used to know?Even though she can’t see them from her balcony, the architect knows: The girl’s eyes are the color of stirred silt, and blue ice. There are weeds in her hair. She raises her hand — a drowned girl, waiting to breathe, waiting to rise from the river and come ashore — and waves to the architect, but she does not smile.The architect’s lover leaves the café. She is utterly lost. She recognizes nothing here.She goes toward the water, some vague memory pulling her. But the map written on her skin is muddled. The streets, everything she thinks she knows, has been re-written.The architect’s lover is looking for someone, but she doesn’t know who. No one looks familiar here. Except…Except there is a girl, standing and looking across the water. It is a girl the architecture’s lover almost knows. The girl has eyes like silt and ice. They remind the architect’s lover of home.The architecture’s lover raises her hand, catching the girl’s attention. The girl looks at her, and the architect’s lover falls to her knees. A name catches in her throat and stalls. She can’t remember. She weeps, and doesn’t know why. In her mind, there is one word, echoing persistently and meaning nothing: Home.The architect stands on her balcony, and looks at the girl and the water. For a moment, the architect thinks there is something she has forgotten. Then she puts the thought from her mind.Soon the city will be perfect. She will tear it down and rebuild it until it is so.The architect turns. She does not raise her hand to the girl on the shore. Or the weeping woman on her knees by the girl’s side.The architect goes inside. And she does not say goodbye.END"Her Last Breath Before Waking" was originally published in 3-Lobed Burning Eye in December 2013.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 be back on February 16th with "Into the Nth Dimension" by David D. Levine.

Eureka!By Nick MamatasAdam hadn't worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn't bring himself to put it in the box he'd set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear's on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now.Full transcript appears under the cut.----more----[Intro music plays.]Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 18 for October 13, 2015. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.Our story today is Eureka! by Nick Mamatas.Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law, The Last Weekend, and the forthcoming Lovecraftian murder-mystery I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best American Mystery Stories and Poe's Lighthouse, magazines including Tor.com and Asimov's Science Fiction, and in the recent collection The Nickronomicon. Nick has written about Edgar Allan Poe for Weird Tales, The Smart Set, and Wide Angle.Eureka!By Nick MamatasAdam hadn't worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn't bring himself to put it in the box he'd set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear's on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now.No, not now. Then. Then Adam was just another baby bat, because eyeliner and bad music is what nerds thought cool was. And everyone in New York's goth scene was at least bi, or at least self-identified as bi despite never sucking a cock or doing more than kissing another girl on the dancefloor. So it was something to do.Was it New Year's Eve? Couldn't have been…no, it must have been. What was his name? Adam remembered everything about the man from Poe's house, how he kissed with his eyes wide open and searching, his snickering during the long subway trip up to the Bronx, how his breath somehow didn't steam out of his mouth on the walk through the park, but what the hell was his name? Something old. Maybe, Josef with an f but it's not like Adam asked for an ID or saw a pile of junk mail for the park ranger on the old cottage's stoop."I need your assistance," Josef—that was good enough a guess for now—had said. He was tall and dark and thin and shined somehow under the lights of the nightclub, like a crane that had pulled itself out of an oil spill."Hmm," Adam said, his lip still on the rim of his glass.Josef leaned in and shouted into Adam's ear to be heard over the music. "I've seen you here before. I want you come home with me. I've met many people in my time in this city. To put it delicately, I've seen the inside of many tastefully decorated apartments." His breath smelled of cloves, which Adam liked then, and still liked now. Now, in the present, he brought the shirt to his face and hunted for a whiff. Nothing but dust and the scent of cardboard.That night, Adam felt sweaty, very suddenly, and itchy. But he stood on his toes and, for a moment concerned about his own breath, shouted back, "You sound like a serial killer. It's not as enticing as you think!"Josef laughed, and Adam was relieved that it was a human laugh, complete with a smile you might see on television. So many goths were so affected that you never got to meet the fleshy little man pulling the levers in the brain of the giant bombazine-enrobed homunculus.Josef shouted back, "It gets better. I'm a park ranger!" He held up a long finger and dug into his pocket for his wallet, then flashed his work ID. Adam snatched the whole wallet from Josef's hand and waited for one of the stage lights to spiral around to the edge of the bar where he and Josef stood. The light flashed and in those two seconds, the NYC identification card sure looked authentic.Of course, the ID! Adam thought as he struggled with a packing-tape gun. But he was only sure for a moment.  I didn't ask, he offered it! Was that the name on the ID, or did I put it on the ID now, myself, through the act of trying to remember…? He sealed the box of cast-off clothes shut.Adam handed the wallet back. "You don't look like a park ranger," he said."I wear black leather knee-shorts in the summer, and a velvet kerchief," Josef said. That jack-o-lantern smile again.In the now, Adam turned to his bureau and to the small hand mirror balanced between its top and the wall. He tried to mimic Josef's smile. Nope, still too fat. Christ, did he get old, just over the last few days it felt like.Josef was a very special park ranger. He said he was the sort of park ranger he knew Adam would like. Josef was in charge of the Poe house, in Poe Park."And with what do you need my assistance?" Adam asked. He pressed his arm against Josef's arm. This was all so easy. A Christmas miracle, a week after the fact?"Two things. The band that goes on at midnight—Creature Feature?" Josef began."Yes?""They're terrible!""I know," Adam said. "Everything is dark and terrible." He shifted away from Josef's gaze, took what he hoped was a sophisticated sip of his drink, and then added, "but those guys are truly awful. So what's the second thing?""I've been with many men," Josef said. "Many women. But never where I live. I've always been to their apartments, or just cruised around.""You're back in serial killer mode!"Josef pushed his lips against Adam's ear, so Adam could feel the words on his flesh. "I live in the Poe house."There was packing to do. So much packing. And unpacking. Adam snorted—a flashback within a flashback? Why not? Why was he folding clothes to give away? Adam was nervous, he needed to keep his hands busy. He couldn't smoke anymore; nobody smoked anymore. So, even further back, into the era from which he had kept no clothes. High school Adam was just another suburban brat in Dockers and polo shirts. He didn't read, he left MTV choose his music—and this was before Nirvana, when 120 Minutes was on too late to watch regularly. But Poe, in tenth grade, changed everything. Weird little stories that barely seemed to be in English, and in them anything could happen. A slow and careful murder with no hero to save the day. A detective that solves a crime, but with no sense of justice. "You can't send an ape to prison, and even if you could it wouldn't mean much more to the ape than a zoo"—Adam actually wrote that on the essay exam for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and enjoyed a rare 99+ from Mr. Goldstein.And that was that. Adam would be a writer, though he knew better than to tell anyone, or to even engage in any writing. Even diaries could be discovered. Adam would keep it all in his head. He'd be an English teacher, and he'd study in the city, at Eugene Lang, to get away from his parents and experience a little bit of life during the week before taking the Metro North back up to Danbury with a load of laundry. Then he found the goth scene, and made a point of keeping his stranger garments back in the dorm, stuffed under the bunk.It would have been too perfect for the old Poe paperback to be at the bottom of Adam's closet now, as he packed his little room on a sunny North Beach day. The complete works, which he never made it through, were on his smartphone anyway. Came bundled with the e-reader. The towel Adam had been using as a curtain was already packed, and it was hard to read off the phone screen with the sun's rays coming through the window unimpeded. Only a few more boxes left.Adam was a naïf back then—he had heard of the Poe House that NYU owned, and figured that the subway ride from the Lower East Side to the border of the West Village would be short and convenient in the snowy night. Clearly, Josef was somehow responsible for Washington Square Park. Cleaning up the syringes, or polishing the cement chessboard tables or something. City work, union work. It's all supposed to be money for nothing. But at West 4th, Josef led him on to the D train."Now you'll discover my problem," Josef said, snickering. The train was packed with drunks. Mostly lots of Long Island girls with high hair and wobbly heels and their fat Italian boyfriends with rings the size of human eyes yelping and guffawing their way to Times Square, but there were a selection of quieter locals lolling about in the seats. Josef hugged one of the poles for straphangers and shouted in Adam's ear. "The Poe Cottage is in the Bronx." All the blood left Adam's face that moment and Josef smiled. "That's right," he said."I…don't mind," Adam shouted back. He tried to smile, but his lips felt blue and dead. He'd never been to the Bronx. Had never met anyone from the Bronx. It was a strange little island—no, it was the only part of New York City that wasn't an island, the Bronx really was part of mainland America—that so far as Adam knew was comprised of 100 percent raging crack addicts and black street gangs who breakdanced on flattened cardboard boxes all day and mugged old ladies at night.Adam sucked on his teeth now, thinking of his old idiocy. College and moving to the West Coast had beaten most of the casual racism out of him, and that was a good thing. "But all I got in exchange was guilt," he said, aloud, to himself. Then he huffed and returned to sorting the socks with holes in them from the socks without holes in them."What's your favorite Poe?" Adam had asked Josef that night. He almost said, Mine's "The Masque of the Red Death", but didn't want to sound stupid and obvious, so he said nothing more."Eureka!" Josef yelled, but nobody turned. "I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical," he said, each adjective louder than the last. "Of the Material and Spiritual Universe:— of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny.""Oh," Adam said.Josef smiled and leaned down and brushed his lips against Adam's. Adam waited for someone to scream Fags! or just for a knife in the kidney, but neither was forthcoming."It's okay; it's not on the usual syllabi," Josef said, keeping his mouth close and voice down. The train had stopped at 42nd Street, and let out a bunch of confused bridge and tunnlers who didn’t know how far Times Square was from Bryant Park, so the car was a bit quieter now."Poe called it a prose poem, but it's not really poetic. It's essentially a lecture about the creation of the universe. He basically predicted the Big Bang theory.""Okay," Adam said. He wanted to get off the train and go home. And do what? This was his first time staying in the city instead of watching the ball drop on TV with his grandmother."Let us conceive the Particle, then, to be only not totally exhausted by diffusion into Space. From the one Particle, as a centre, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically—in all directions—to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space—a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms," Josef recited, smiling and pleased. He drew himself up to his full height, leaving Adam to contemplate the nipples visible through his black mesh. Those would need to be warmed up later, Adam decided, with his very own tongue."Previously vacant space," Adam repeated. "That doesn't really sound like the Big Bang theory to me." Josef frowned, so Adam quickly added, "but not bad for a poet from the 1840s. Sheer literary insight, and he almost got it right.""No," Josef said. "He got it all right. It's the modern world that's got it all wrong. You'll see."Adam wasn't quite sure at what stop it happened, but at some point he and Josef became the only two white people in the train car. They'd passed through some sort of racist mesh, a geographical sieve. He hoped he would see everything Josef had to offer. It had better be worth it.It was nearly 2 am when Josef led Adam up to Knightsbridge and the Grand Concourse. Adam heard the voice of his old grandmother saying how nice everything in the city used to be before those people started moving in. It was depressing now, but not dangerous. Just dead. Everyone had watched the ball drop on their shitty little televisions, then turned off the lights and went to bed. Josef walked quickly, with determination, a prize tropical bird again."Do you like Public Enemy?" Josef said, seemingly out of nowhere. Adam walked through a puff of his own steaming breath, to catch up."What?""You know. 'Fight the Power.' Chuck D and Flava Flav? I saw them a couple of years ago, with Sisters of Mercy.""Oh, no," Adam said. He'd been in high school a couple of years ago, and only knew what little Sisters of Mercy MTV played. "I missed that show.""It was great. Gang of Four opened—old school punk, that is. And nobody came; Radio City was practically empty, just like the streets up here are tonight. That's what reminded me," Josef said. He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered, finally playing human again for a moment. "I got a great t-shirt. It says, it's a black thing. you wouldn't understand. I should have worn it tonight. I'm freezing my tits off." Josef ran his palm over Adam's velvet top. "You're a smart lad," he said.Adam was smart enough not to ask how Josef actually lived in a tourist attraction. Did he stow everything in a closet, or have to take all his meals out?  Poe Park was small, but bright thanks to the blanket of diamond show on the ground. A stone tablet on the walkway read eureka! and went without snow. There was probably something with the relative temperature of the tablet versus the modern concrete Adam thought, then he realized that everything he'd been thinking—the fear, the trivia, had all been to put aside his wonder and craving for the taste of Josef's cock.The cottage itself was a small little two-story number with a porch. It wouldn't have been out of place in Danbury, with some old cat lady or poor family with seven kids stuffed into it. Josef trotted ahead again and waved Adam around the corner. "The digs are in the basement. You can see my problem, yes? I made a New Year's resolution to have sex in my own bed, in my own place, sometime this year.""Well, it's already next year," Adam said. He flashed a crooked smile and pointed to his watch. "See?""Oh, in that case you'd better just get back on the train and go home." Josef stood straight as a rod and waited. Adam puffed out a breath and smiled. Then Josef smiled back. They tumbled joyfully down the concrete steps and into the cramped studio.Josef's hair was long and chaotically spiked. One of the wayward points practically scraped against the low ceiling. There were milk crates stuffed with books and CDs along one wall, a futon on the other, and a laptop blinking away in the corner. No real kitchen, but there was a sink and a hot plate and a microwave and a coffee maker. Not much closet space either, if the puddles of black clothing on the floor were anything to go by. It smelled a little moldy, a little tangy, like old sex.Even now, Adam can taste the next morning's coffee on his tongue. Part of why he had moved to North Beach was that one of the little Italian dives served coffee that almost tasted like Josef's.Josef ran his hand along one of the walls. "The cottage was originally down the block," he explained, suddenly professional. "It was moved here when the subway came in. This basement is modern, and serves as the foundation for the cottage in its new location right over our heads. Had it been a nineteenth century basement, the walls likely would have been of hewn stone, plastered over…" He trailed off, seemingly unsure of what to do next.Adam walked right up to him. "You're a park ranger, not a serial killer. I believe you. Kiss me, stupid," he said, and Josef did indeed kiss him stupid, sucking on Adam's tongue softly, like it was a half-hard cock.The basement was cold, and the boys were cold too—their limbs were more like a quartet of icicles looking to melt than anything else. The winter had never left Adam's bones, not even after fifteen years in California. He shivered in the middle of his empty room, only now realizing how closely he had arranged its layout to match Josef's basement studio. Back in 1993, belts slid off, knees all pointy and white rose up, and Adam buried himself in Josef's lap, mouth open wide.Josef leaned back and muttered something. First it was the usual—good boy, my little facecunt, more more.Then, something odd. "Especially attractive Adam…"No. Especially attractive atom.Then some more muttering Adam didn't catch, as he was busy trying not to use his hands on Josef's cock, but just his mouth and lips and tongue and jaw.  "I propose," Josef said turned on to his side, his fingers seeking out the crack of Adam's ass as he said the words.Adam jerked upright. "Wait, what?" He smacked Josef's hand away. "What?"If I propose to ascertain the influence of one mote in a sunbeam upon its neighboring mote, I cannot accomplish my purpose without first counting and weighing all the atoms in the Universe and defining the precise positions of all at one particular moment. If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger, what is the character of that act upon which I have adventured?Adam looked at the boxes on the floor of his bedsit. Seven to keep, three to donate, one just to fling out the window, but he didn't have the balls for that. San Francisco wasn't that kind of place anymore. The Imp of the Perverse had left the world, it seemed. It was a small life he had. That was the character of the act upon which he had adventured, Adam realized.Josef was stronger than he looked. He had a wiry strength to him, arms like rebar. But his face was suddenly soft, so soft, like a child. Like Poe's little virgin wife, Adam thought, dying of consumption. "Please don't tell me to stop," Josef said, practically whimpering. "Please don't." He kissed Adam's shoulder, took his cock in one hand and pumped a finger into Adam's ass with another. "Please don't tell me to stop."Adam didn't say anything. It was dark in the basement—everything was black on black, and when he turned his head he couldn't even see the little green light from Josef's computer. He couldn't see the white knuckles wrapped around his dick, or the edge of the wall, or anything. The world fell away from Adam, and the dark grew ever longer in every direction.The futon was gone.No. Adam's legs were gone, his thighs were. The world was gone. Adam was a point, floating in infinite black space.No. Not space either. The previous vacancy. Adam was terrified—the little ripple in the velvet of the night that he was quivered, and the universe shook with him. Then he sensed them. The other men. The men that Josef had brought down here. The man that had brought Josef down here for the first time to suck and fuck, years prior. Decades of men, with thick hands and huge round shoulders. Little men, willowy like girls, their fingers tracing at what were once the borders of his body. Toothless grins and soft soft gums around his cock. Terrible bloodshot eyes, the pressure of blood pushing through the capillaries. Then the man himself, with his head huge like a white pumpkin's, scrounging for winter roots in the field across from his home, and finding only the previous vacancy in the dirt between his desperate fingers. Adam could eat that agony, feed off it for years. And before Poe, men in wigs, then breeches. Brown men with smooth chests and nipples like chestnuts. And before them, men of vintages of yet unknown, or types that could never be forced to fit into the taxonomies of the species.  Adam didn't see them, he wore them like a snake slithering back into a strange discarded skin.Thus, according to the schools, I prove nothing.Adam gulped something older than air. But he could feel his tongue again, his teeth, and Josef's as well.There is no mathematical demonstration which Could bring the least additional True proof of the great Truth which I have advanced—the truth of Original Unity as the source—as the principle of the Universal Phaenomena.Somewhere, miles and eons south of his brain, Adam felt his body experiencing an orgasm. It was distant and remote, like listening to a tinny radio through a closed door.I am not so sure that my heart beats and that my soul lives:—of the rising of to-morrow's sunAnd he was cold again. Bare feet on concrete and scraps of cloth.I do not pretend to be one thousandth part as sure -- as I am of the irretrievably by-gone Fact that All Things and All Thoughts of Things, with all their ineffable Multiplicity of Relation, sprang at once into being from the primordial and irrelative One."Do you see?" Josef said. "Did you see it?" Only now was steam coming from his mouth as he spoke. He nestled closer to Adam and asked again, and again. "It's us. It's the whole world. Created from one, not two. Just one. We are all that we ever need, see? Did you see?"Adam said the worst kind of truth—the literal sort of truth that burns hotter than the worst of lies. "I didn't see anything."Josef pulled himself away, sticky crotch peeling from sticky crotch, and hugged himself on the far side of the futon. "I'm not sure I believe you, but I know what you mean," he said. "Well, think about it."Adam did, all night, not sleeping, trying to listen for Josef's breathing, trying to hear the sunrise and the morning frost melt in the grasses over his head. When Josef finally woke up, he was reasonably chatty in the way a goth boy would be. He asked after Adam's dreams and if they had been twisted and nightmarish. Adam had none he remembered. Josef then made coffee, followed by apologies for having no cream for it.He smoked a clove cigarette—the smell filled the little room instantly—and nudged at his clothing with a precise and subtle foot when trying to decide what to wear for the day. "New Year's Day. The cottage is closed, so I can wear black on the outside." Adam wanted those toes jammed down his mouth. "The way I feel on the inside!" Josef finished, then guffawed loudly at himself like a cartoon donkey. Adam drank his coffee and realized that he didn't have to make excuses for an early exit. The cup in his hands was a farewell.One of the local homeless guys hooted as Adam shouldered the last of his boxes into the hatch of his Zip Car."Yo, they rent out your room yet?" he asked."Of course they did!" Adam said, louder and angrier than he wanted, but he didn't turn around. "It's the Bay Area.""Where you going off too?""Storage warehouse in Oakland.""And after that?"Adam did turn around at that question. He didn't even recognize the guy, and he thought he knew all the homeless guys and all the SRO bottom-feeders on the block. North Beach was no Castro, not with the families grazing at the restaurants and the straight strip joints, but the neighborhood was still pretty cruisy. "The airport," he said. "One way trip, for the time being at least.""Going to New York or somethin'? You sound like a New Yorker?" the guy said. He scratched at his balls absently through his ruined jeans. "Stawrije wear-haus" he said. "That's Noo Yawk."No, that's not it. Never New York. Never ever. Adam walked around the car, got in, started the ignition, rolled down the window, pulled out of the parking lot, looked at the homeless guy—whose hand was still on his own crotch—and said, "Connecticut, sorry. My mother is getting old. I have to care for her.""You are sorry," the homeless guy said. He smiled, planted his free hand on the car door, and showed off three teeth."I am sorry," Adam said. He thought about swinging the door open hard and getting rid of the guy that way. But he didn't do anything."I know you is," the guy said. "Just remember…" he stopped to chew on his furry bottom lip. "Uh…that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness.""What!"The homeless guy opened his mouth again, his voice loud and strange. "That Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah!"Adam stared at the homeless guy, his eyes wide. The homeless man was as surprised as anyone else. Behind them, someone impatiently honked their car horn, so Adam revved the engine and when the homeless guy lifted his hand Adam slid the car easily into traffic. It didn't even occur to him until an hour later, when he was standing in the security line at Oakland International, that he could have said something to that homeless guy. Something like, I bet you say that to all the boys.END"Eureka!" was originally published in "Where Thy Dark Eye Glances" edited by Steve Berman, and published by Lethe Press in 2013.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 October 13th.[Music plays out]

The Unheard Voices of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror panel from Arisia. Catherine Lundoff moderated this panel, with K. Tempest Bradford (standing in for Nisi Shawl), Julia Rios, Trisha Wooldridge, Andrea Hairston, and Victor Raymond. Listening to this doesn't give you the visual cues that people in the room had, so a note up front: Nisi was in the audience, but wasn't up for sitting on the panel. There was an ongoing joke about Tempest being Nisi, and about Nisi being Nalo Hopkinson, who was not at the convention. Awards season!*Lambda finalists include lots of OA members like Nicola Griffith, Sacchi Green, Mary Ann Mohanraj, Alex Jeffers, Alaya Dawn Johnson, The editors and contributors to Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam Gay City: Volume 5, Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold, Richard Bowes, Lee Thomas, and more. Full list here: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/news/03/06/26th-annual-lambda-literary-award-finalists-announced/*The Nebula nominee list is also out, and lots of OA types are there too, including Sofia Samatar, Nicola Griffith, Ellen Klages and Andy Duncan, Vylar Kaftan, Catherynne Valente, Christopher Barzak, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Sarah Pinsker, Rachel Swirsky, Karen Healey, and Nalo Hopkinson. Full nominee list here: http://www.sfwa.org/2014/02/2013-nebula-nominees-announced/The Galactic Suburbia Award and Honor List is out now, and the joint winners are N.K. Jemisin and Elise Matthesen. Full Honor List here: http://galactisuburbia.podbean.com/2014/03/23/episode-96-19-march-2014/*Carl Brandon Society is a group for fans and writers of color. They give out the Kindred and Parallax Awards for fiction by and/or about people of colors, and also administer scholarships for students of color to attend Clarion.*Broad Universe is a group for women who write and publish science fiction and fantasy. They have a website, a podcast, and many promotional and support networking opportunities for members, including organizing group readings and book sale tables at conventions. *WisCon is a feminist science fiction convention held each year at the end of May in Madison, Wisconsin. The Carl Brandon Society and Broad Universe both have strong presences there. *Con or Bust is an organization that raises money to send fans of color to conventions. The Carl Brandon Society administers the funds. *Gaylaxicon and Outlantacon are conventions specifically for the QUILTBAG SF fandom community. Gaylaxicon is a roving con (like WorldCon), and Outlantacon happens each year in May in Atlanta. This year's Gaylaxicon will be hosted by Outlantacon.Work by people on the panel:*Filter House is Nisi Shawl's Tiptree Award Winning short story collection (Tempest joked that her collection would be called Filter House 2).*Redwood and Wildfire is Andrea Hairston's Tiptree Award Winning novel (for which she had also just received a Carl Brandon Award on the day of this panel).*Silver Moon is Catherine Lundoff's novel about menopausal werewolves*Catherine writes a series about LGBT SFF for SF Signal.*Julia is an editor for Strange Horizons, which is always interested in publishing diverse voices.*Kaleidoscope is an anthology of diverse YA SF and Fantasy stories Julia is co-editing with Alisa Krasnostein, which is scheduled to launch in August of 2014.*In Other Words is an anthology of poetry and flash by writers of color Julia is co-editing with Saira Ali, which is scheduled to launch at WisCon in May, and which will benefit Con or Bust.Other things mentioned: *Lorraine Hansberry was an African American lesbian playwright, best known for Raisin in the Sun, but Andrea pointed out that she also wrote a lot of science fiction plays. *The SFWA Bulletin incited a lot of pushback in 2013. Here is a timeline: http://www.slhuang.com/blog/2013/07/02/a-timeline-of-the-2013-sfwa-controversies/. It has since changed editorial staff and has just put out the first of the new team's issues, which seems to be a lot more favorably received, as evidenced here: http://www.jasonsanford.com/jason/2014/03/the-new-sfwa-bulletin-is-blowing-my-mind.html.*"The Serial Killer's Astronaut Daughter" by Damien Angelica Walters was written partly in response to the SFWA bulletin's sexism. *A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar came up as an example of a novel by a person of color put out through an independent (not one of the big New York houses--Andrea argued for calling these sorts of publishers independent rather than small) publisher, Small Beer Press. Since the panel, A Stranger in Olondria has won the Crawford Award and been nominated for the Nebula. *Crossed Genres, Twelfth Planet Press, and Papaveria Press are independent presses that publish diverse voices.*Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Apex are magazines Tempest sees publishing diverse stories. Tor.com is also publishing more diverse stories now, like "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" by John Chu. *The Tiptree Award celebrates work that expands our notions of gender.*Dark Matter is an anthology exploring a century of SF by black writers. *Blood Children was an anthology put out by the Carl Brandon Society in 213 to benefit the Octavia Butler Scholarship, which sends students of color to Clarion. *Bending the Landscape, Kindred Spirits, and Worlds Apart were brought up as examples of QUILTBAG anthologies from more than just a few years back. All of these were mentioned as early examples, but the panel agreed we need more. *Daughters of Earth is a collection of stories by women from the early 1900s to 2000 with accompanying critical essays. This collection is edited by Justine Larbalestier. Andrea wrote a critical essay about an Octavia Butler story in this book. *The Cascadia Subduction Zone has a feature where an established writer recommends and reviews an older work that might be obscure. Andrea and Nisi have both done this. *Lethe Press publishes best gay SF stories each year in Wilde Stories, and best lesbian SF stories each year in Heiresses of Russ. Nisi and Julia are both in Heiresses of Russ 2013.*From the audience, Saira Ali recommends Goblin Fruit and Stone Telling as diverse poetry magazines, and Aliens: Recent Encounters (edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane) as a good anthology.

Inheritance (Lethe Press) A launch party for the latest poetry collection by this acclaimed local poet! "Steven Reigns explores the inexhaustible power of family to affect our lives and loves, and does so in a candid yet passionate manner remarkable for its evocative and wounding moments." --Wanda Coleman, author of Heavy Daughter Blues and Mercurochrome: New Poems "This is such a naked book. It falls neatly into no school of poetry, nor does 'gay poetry' sum it up. I turned the pages of Inheritance pretty hungrily, glad to encounter such honesty about a gay life lived with pleasure and bitterness and companionability." --Eileen Myles, author of Sorry, Tree and Skies Steven Reigns is a Los Angeles-based poet and educator. His newest collection, Inheritance, came out in 2010 by Lethe Press. After earning a degree in Creative Writing at the University of South Florida, he published his début poetry collection, Your Dead Body is My Welcome Mat, in 2001. Since then, Reigns has published four chapbooks: Ignited, Cartography, In the Room, and As if Memories Were Not Enough.  A two-time recipient of The Los Angeles County's Department of Cultural Affairs' Artist in Residency Grant, Reigns organized and taught the first-ever autobiography poetry workshop for GLBT seniors and edited an anthology of their writings, My Life is Poetry. He has taught writing workshop around the country to GLBT youth and people living with HIV and recently received his Masters in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University. Currently he is involved with S(t)even Years, a 7-year endurance performance under the mentorship of performance artist Linda Montano. Visit him at www.stevenreigns.com. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS MAY 23, 2010.

In this episode, accomplished author and editor Catherine Lundoff, whose collection, Night's Kiss: Lesbian Erotica, has just been released by Lethe Press, talks with me about her vampire stories. Catherine's anthology, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (also from Lethe Press, 2008) is a nominee in the Lambda Literary Award, Science Fiction/Fantasy/and Horror category. Visit Catherine's MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/clundoff