Podcasts about queers destroy science fiction

This week on the cast, we talk with author and activist Deji Bryce Olukotun, whose books "Nigerians in Space" (2014) and "After the Flare" (2017) both enriched science fiction as a whole and the conversation about the immigrant experience in Africa. In 2019——with films like "Black Panther" making a splash and authors like N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and yes! Deji Bryce Olukotun zeroing in on glass ceilings in publishing——new avenues for social, authorial, technological, and civic engagement are opening up, but what is the state of things, really? Olukotun brings us thoughts on the influence of technology on his own writing as well as his work with Access Now and PEN America. He talks about obscure NASA publications about tracking stations, the narrative function of dinosaurs, and advocating for other authors and storytellers. We ask the big questions: What does science fiction allow or make possible or manifest in respect to these topics that other genres might not? Are we really making progress on finding and boosting #OwnVoices stories? Are dinosaurs supposed to be people? Deji and the cast mention a number of works looking up after listening to this episode, including: - Sunny Tsiao's "'Read You Loud and Clear!' The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network" (https://history.nasa.gov/STDN_082508_508%2010-20-2008_part%201.pdf) - Nicola Griffith's "Bending the Landscape" anthologies with Stephen Pagel ("Fantasy" in 1997, "Science Fiction" in 1998, and "Horror" in 2001) - Avery Brooks' 2013 interview with K. Tempest Bradford (http://dailydragon.dragoncon.org/interviews/far-beyond-deep-space-nine-a-conversation-with-avery-brooks/) - The "Queers Destroy Science Fiction!" June 2015 special issue of "Lightspeed" edited by Seanan McGuire (http://www.destroysf.com/queers/) - "A People's Future of the United States" (2019) anthology edited by John Joseph Adams and Victor LaValle (http://www.johnjosephadams.com/projects/peoples-future/) - Deji Bryce Olukotun's "Insights" page on his website (https://returnofthedeji.com/revamp/insights/), which links to his short pieces "We Are the Olfanauts," "How to Create Your Own Jurassic Park," and "Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism" You can look for Deji Bryce Olukotun's books wherever good books are sold, and you can look for his work to appear in upcoming issue of "Lightspeed" this summer. You can find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these earthly coils of their SoundCloud first life. Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at imaginarypod@gmail.com or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can find ALL of our back episodes on YouTube, and listen to our episodes on iTunes or SoundCloud. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

Unstrap Your Feet by Emma Osborne     The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles. I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door. You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage. “Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?” You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.   [Full story after the cut.]     Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 60! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Unstrap Your Feet" by Emma Osborne and a poem, "The Librarian" by Rae White. Both pieces are part of the new GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you're a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49. 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. If you're looking for an excellent book with queer characters, Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts is an amazing listen. The story features a colony ship having power problems and some internal unrest. Our protagonist, Aster, is a brilliant scientist and doctor trapped in an extremely socially and racially segregated society. The book also deals with non-neurotypicality, intersex, and fluid/questioning gender identity. An Unkindness of Ghosts is part mystery, part colony ship drama, and part coming of age story (though it is not YA). Rivers has amazing prose, and the narration in this audio book sets it off wonderfully. To download An Unkindness of Ghosts for free today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership — or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else. There are content warnings on this episode for a very, very sexy poem and descriptions of domestic emotional abuse in "Unstrap Your Feet."     Rae White is a non-binary poet, writer, and zinester living in Brisbane. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Queensland Press. Rae’s poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Rabbit, and others.     The Librarian by Rae White     locked in ∞ nostalgia after dark ∞ thumb throughfavourites: nin-like erotica ∞ with storms simulatinghunger, flirting & fireworks, cruise shipkisses ∞ here, every heel click is echo-church, like the ruckus I make atfunerals ∞ every movement casts my shadow: spellsspilling over bookshelves ∞ I’m not trapped, I havea key ∞ but I stay curled in the wickerchair ∞ waiting for echo-click of ribs and what remains ∞ the flossedfragments of my midnight ghost with her yawn-widekiss & skinless skull ∞ her cartilage grip & gasp & pelvicbone clasped tight to my thigh ∞ her shiver-glitches, eachmore grating & copper-tasting than the last ∞ her brittlepushes as she groans ∞ against my knuckled hand ∞ I tastesoot & swordfish later ∞ I press herbetween folds of wildflower books & singtimidly of the moon as she sleeps       Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Shock Totem, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction and the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and has fiction forthcoming at Nightmare Magazine. A proud member of Team Arsenic, Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Emma is a former first reader at Clarkesworld Magazine, and current first reader at Arsenika. Emma currently lives in Melbourne, drinking all of the coffee and eating all of the food, but has a giant crush on Seattle and turns up under the shadow of the mountain at every opportunity. You can find Emma on Twitter at @redscribe.     Unstrap Your Feet by Emma Osborne     The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles. I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door. You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage. “Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?” You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down. “I want to eat something warm-blooded,” you say, as you divest yourself of your coat, your scarf. “Ribs. A steak. Liver.” You smell of honey and rosemary; honey for sweetness and rosemary for fidelity, remembrance and luck. I wonder how long it’ll take to re-make dinner. Too long. My fingers tangle in my pocket, deep down where you shouldn’t be able to see. Maybe I can talk you around. Your eyes sketch over my shoulder, my elbow. You can see the tension in my muscles, can map my posture and my heart rate and you know that my nails are digging into my palms nearly before I feel the skin split. “We’ll order something,” I say, but it’s risky to have something delivered to the door when you’ve taken off your feet. Once, somebody saw, and then they didn’t ever see anything again. There’s still a stain in the laundry that I can’t scrub away.  You pause for a moment, just for the pulse of a few seconds, but it’s enough for my stomach to plunge and my mind to spin out infinite possibilities. The end of each thread is a broken finger or a pair of shattered wine glasses or just a cool, detached look that I’ll turn over and over in my head at night, knowing that despite our vows, sealed with blood and smoke and iron, you’ve decided that you’re going to have to kill me after all. “Fine,” you say, “anything but pizza.” These are the kinds of conversations that normal people have, every night, every month, with wrinkled brows and hunched shoulders and with a creased blazer hung up for another weary tomorrow. You take your time in the shower while I call for dinner. With any luck you’ll stay there, or in the bedroom, until the delivery comes. I’ve decided on BBQ from the place three streets away. They don’t ask questions if we order mostly meat, although I add a couple of sides—mac and cheese and some fries—for show. When the food arrives, I take care to open the door only a few inches, to take the bags and construct a “Thanks!” and to give a reassuring smile. I can hear you clattering around in the kitchen. I can nearly hear you scowling at the unwanted fish, scraped into a bowl for me to eat tomorrow. I plate up dinner and you join me at the table with your canines glinting. I would have thought you’d have dull herbivore teeth, what with the hooves, but you have your father’s jawline, his bite. Sometimes I run my tongue over my own teeth, fearful that they’re sharpening and wondering what it would mean if they did. The food smells glorious, though I’m the only one who eats the sides. The mac and cheese is chewy and rich and creamy and I savor every bite after a diet so heavy in meat. “Tell me about your day,” I say, nibbling on a forkful of pulled pork. I don’t care, not really, but it’s one of the only ways I can get news of the outside world on an ordinary, everyday level. The news is good for broad strokes, but I don’t get to hear about the lavender blooming in Mrs. Dancy’s yard or the color of the sky in midwinter dusk. You’re in a good mood from the food so you appease me with small stories whilst you tear rich, fatty meat from a rib-bone. You’ve got a smear of sauce on your chin. The scent of hickory smoke has soaked into your skin. When I remember the days I had dared to drag my fingers through your hair, I tamp down a shudder and wonder if your budding horns rasp more like bones or fingernails. Our wedding feast was nothing like this, but I suppose I’d always known you had secrets. Still, the feast was glorious and fine, a celebration for the ages. Oh, that night. We’d hoisted my mother’s crystal and downed the finest champagne after the ceremony under the oak tree. My father was in charge of speeches and keeping cups full. Your mother roasted us a pair of swans. We ate them with silver forks and our fingers. There were charred potatoes and glass jars full of honey and red apples baked into pies. Bowls of cherries as bright as blood dotted the groaning tables and the air was heavy with the scent of roasted figs. I hadn’t known then that your feet came off. I’d only known that your smile made my heart bloom like a blushing rose and that your kisses tasted of jasmine. Your father was in charge of the music, and soon enough everyone was spinning, dancing, stamping to his wild fiddle, all red-faced and heaving, their legs shaking as they gasped for breath. I was happy that night. Sometimes I think I can still smell it, as if happiness is a hint of perfume saved in a handkerchief that I’ve tucked into the pocket of an old coat. You’re finished with your food so I load the dishwasher. I used to like washing the dishes by hand and carefully wiping them clean with my favorite faded red dishtowel, but we both agreed that the dishwasher is better for the environment. It’s curious, the things you care about. I try not to make any unnecessary noise as we wind down the hours before bed. Sometimes I can get away with reading on the couch for a few hours. If I’m almost entirely still, your eyes skip over me when you’re restlessly roaming the house, your hooves clacking on the floorboards. I tried to get out once. I still have the scars on my ribs from your teeth. I try not to care what you are doing, but tonight in the basement it involves knives and the squeal of metal on metal. I can’t help but look up when you walk past the lounge room, your muscled arms popping with excited veins, your face flushed, your hair a mess. Our eyes meet. I’m usually more careful than that, and look away, but this time I smile in my panic. You smile back, delighted. All I can see is your teeth. I used to be so much bigger, so much more. I had dreams and loves and fancies; my heart was spun sugar and grace. That me is dead now, my delicate heart crushed. You have eroded me like a hard rain erodes a mountain: bit by bit; thousands of tiny strikes. You’re cooking something in the kitchen that smells like apples and roasted flesh. It’s rare enough for you to do so, and anxiety tightens my chest as I wonder what it means. I try to tune it out, to hold my breath, but the house is full of the smell. When you finally call me to bed, I slide a marker into my book. The pages are sharp on my fingertips. “Goodnight, darling,” you breathe into my ear after you’ve kissed me. “Goodnight,” I say, my eyes squeezed shut in the dark. You know the catch of my breath when it hitches; you know the sound of my tears as they track down my cheeks. I’ve learned to lie flat and still under the smoke-gray blankets, to move only when necessary, to not roll. When I was young, I’d sleep carelessly, roaming about the bed like a slumbering explorer, one leg out at an angle and with an open palm up to the sky. These days it’s all straight lines and aching bones from a lack of shift. Most nights, I don’t sleep. Not until you’ve gotten up and strapped your feet back on and gone into the world. When the sun peeps through the curtains and I’m sure you’ve gotten clear of the house I collapse onto the couch, tuck a blanket around me. The bed reminds me of nothing but cold misery. Soon you’ll be home again, and we’ll feast again, smile carefully at each other over bone-white plates and French cutlery with scarlet handles. I spend the rest of the day cleaning with vinegar and lemons. I square your sharpened tools away, grant symmetry to the house. I listen to news radio as I tidy, desperate for the sound of another human voice. Sometimes I write on scraps of paper, on anything that will take my mark. I write about me and you, and I am sure that it reads like a fairy tale, or a biblical nightmare, or perhaps something stitched together from their forgotten parts. I can’t risk you finding my words. When I have covered every scrap of surface with truths I place the paper on my tongue, pulp it with my dull human teeth, and devour us. I check my body over in the shower when I make it under the hot water in the sun-bright afternoon. My scars are days old, weeks old, a hundred years old. There’s nothing poking through my scalp yet, and my feet are just feet. You are the one who changed. This evening when you come home you’re carrying something in a leather satchel that smells of blood and beeswax. You hold my eye with a wild smile as you snap it open. Inside is a new pair of feet. I know them because they’re my feet, right down to the cracked heels and the crooked little toes. “These are for you,” you say, measuring my calves with your eyes and squinting at my shoes. “Now that you’re ready.” Your eyes are sharp, loving, sparking like struck flint. What did I do to make you think that this is what I wanted? My face twists into a grimace that you mistake for a smile. I take the feet. You grin like the sun coming up and slip past me into the kitchen. I merely stand, horrified but absently holding the feet that I could use to walk outside. When you return, you’re holding a small plate heavy with warmed-up dark meat and pale apple flesh. “Baked apples, lungs, and liver, with plenty of butter,” you say. The fruit of temptation. Organs of the breath and soul. Milk and meat. So that’s what you were cooking. I know my legends well enough to know that eating from this plate will change me forever. I gently place my new feet near the door next to yours and take up the silver fork. “Let me,” you say. The last time I saw your face this bright was under the light of a thousand fireflies on our wedding day. Refusing you has always been an impossibility. You ease a slice of liver into my mouth. As I chew I feel my calves split like an inseam. I thought it would hurt when my old feet slid off, but you kneel before me and tug my ankles and look, they’re free and loose and bloody. It smells like a slaughterhouse in here. Blood and sharpness. You must hold me upright as I kick out of my old feet. My new hooves haven’t hardened yet; they’re still feathery and glistening from their birth. There’s bile in my throat and I can only hope you put my wild pulse down to excitement. You ease me onto the couch with your strong arms and kiss my forehead. I’m panicking, but I hold myself as still as I can. What have I become? What will I become? I am nauseous but suddenly terribly hungry, for meat and flowers and fresh air. I scuff my hooves on the floor. You trace the rubbery feathers with a loving fingertip. In an hour, maybe two, my hooves will be firm and ready to encase in their disguise of flesh, and the two of us will leave the house, together. “Darling,” you say, “What do you feel like eating?” You clasp my fingers, too tight. “Whatever you want,” I whisper, trying desperately to keep my voice steady. You look so happy. I’ve gotten everything wrong, everything. Yes, I will walk outside, and yes I will lift a neighbor’s rose to my eager inhale, but you will be there beside me every single second. I laugh, unable to contain my tears. Now it’s the whole world. The whole world is my cage. We go.   END   “The Librarian” is copyright Rae White 2018. “Unstrap Your Feet” is copyright Emma Osborne 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. You can also pick up a free audio book by going to www.audibletrial.com/glittership or buying your own copy of the Spring 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of "To Touch the Sun Before it Fades" by Aimee Ogden.

You Inside Me by Tori Curtis   It'll be fun, he'd said. Everyone's doing it. You don't have to be looking for romance, it's just a good way to meet people. "I don't think it's about romance at all," Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. "I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he'd have to resign." "That's 'cause we've never had a vampire congressman," Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. "Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light."     Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 57 for May 21st, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. GlitterShip is now part of the Audible afflilate program. What this means is that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible to get a free audio book and 30 day trial at Audible to check out the service. If you're looking for more queer science fiction to listen to, there's a full audio book available of the Lightspeed Magazine "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" special issue, featuring stories by a large number of queer authors, including  John Chu, Chaz Brenchley, Rose Lemberg, and many others. To download a free audiobook today, go to http://www.audibletrial.com/GlitterShip and choose an excellent book to listen to, whether that’s "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" or something else entirely. Today I have a story and a poem for you. The poem is "Dionysus in London" by Tristan Beiter. Tristan Beiter is a student at Swarthmore College studying English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He loves reading poetry and speculative fiction, some of his favorite books being The Waste Land, HD’s Trilogy, Mark Doty’s Atlantis, Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. When not reading or writing, he can usually be found crafting absurdities with his boyfriend or yelling about literary theory.   Dionysus in London by Tristan Beiter   The day exploded, you know. Last night a womanwith big bouffant hair toldme, “Show me a storywhere the daughter runs into a stopsign and it literally turns into a white flower.” I fail to describea total eclipse and the throneof petrified wood sankinto the lakebed. James made love to Buckinghamwhile I pulled the honeysuckleto me, made a flower crown forthe leopards flanking mewhile I watched redand white invert themselves, whitepetals pushing from the center of the signas the post wilted until allthat remained was a giant lotuson the storm grate waitingto rot or wash away. I let it stay there while the Scottishking hid behind the Scottish playand walked behind me, one eye outfor the mark left when locked in.You go witchy in there—or at leastyou—or he, or I—learn to be afraidof the big coats and brassbuttons, like the ones in every hallcloset; you never know if they will turn,like yours, into bats and bugs and gianttarantulas made from wire hangers. The woman showed meour reflections in the shop windowwhile one or the otherman in the palace polishedthe silver for his lover’s tableand asked me whoI loved; I decidedon the creamlinen, since the woolwas too close to the pea coatthat hung by your door.I suppose that the catis under the car; that’s probably where it fled toas we walked, knowingwe already found thatthe ivy in your hair was artificialas the bacchanal, or yourevasion, Sire, of the question(and of the serpents who are wellworth the welloffered to them with the wet waxon my crown). I suppose the car is under the cat,in which case it must be a very largecat, or else a very small car.I eat your teeth. I see brilliantine teeth floatingin her thick red lipstick. Jamestears apart the rhododendronchattering (about) his incisorsand remembering the fleshand—nothing so exoticas a Sphinx, maybe a dustmote or lip-marksleft on the large leather chaise.Teeth gleam from the shadowswhere I wait, thyrsusraised with the conealmost touching the roofof the forest, to drown in a peacockas it swallows (chimneyswifts?) the sun—orwas it son—or maybe it wasjust a grape I fed it soit would eat the spiderscrawling from the closet.It struts across the palace greenlike it owns the place, likeit will replace the hunting-grounds with fields of stragglingmint that the kingwould never ask for. The woman teasesup her hair before the mirror, fillingthe restroom with hairsprayand big laughs before walking backinto the restaurant, where wewait to make ourselvesover—the way the throne didwhen the wood crumbled under thepressure of an untold story,leaving nothing but crystals and dust. We argued for an hour overwhether to mix leaves andflowers, plants and gems,before settling on fourcrowns, one for each of us. Her hair mostly covers hers.The cats will love it though,playing with teeththat were knocked into your winein the barfight (why did youorder wine in a placelike that, Buck?) and yougot replaced with gold, like Iwear woven in my braidsas the sun sets on the daughterthat, unsurprisingly, noneof us have. But if we did, she would turn yieldsigns into dahlias andthat would be the signto move on with the leopardsand their flashing teeth andbrass eyes and listen.To the walls and rivers,to the sculpture that is farwhiter than me falling. Andto the peacock which has justeaten another bug so you don’t have tokill it. Get yourself a dresserand cover it with white enamelit’ll hold up, and no insectslive in dressers. Keep the ivy and the pineconein a mother-of-pearl trinket boxwith your plastic volumizing hairinserts and jeweled combs.And put a cat and dolphinon it, to remember.     Next, our short story this episode is "You Inside Me" by Tori Curtis Tori Curtis writes speculative fiction with a focus on LGBT and disability issues. She is the author of one novel, Eelgrass, and a handful of short stories. You can find her at toricurtiswrites.com and on Twitter at @tcurtfish, where she primarily tweets about how perfect her wife is. CW: For descriptions of traumatic surgery.       You Inside Me by Tori Curtis   It'll be fun, he'd said. Everyone's doing it. You don't have to be looking for romance, it's just a good way to meet people. "I don't think it's about romance at all," Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. "I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he'd have to resign." "That's 'cause we've never had a vampire congressman," Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. "Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light." He took fifteen minutes to edit her photos ("they'll expect you to use a filter, so you might as well,") and pop the best ones on her profile. Suckr: the premier dating app for vampires and their fanciers. "It's like we're cats," she said. "I heard you like cats," he agreed, and she sighed.     Hi, I'm Sabella. I've been a vampire since I was six years old, and I do not want to see or be seen by humans. I'm excited to meet men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. "That's way too big of an age range," Dedrick said. "You want to be compatible with these people." "Yeah, compatible. Like my tissue type." "You don't want to end up flirting with a grandpa." I'm excited to meet men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. I'm most proud of my master's degree. You should message me if you're brave and crazy.     It took days, not to mention Dedrick’s exasperated return, before she went back on Suckr. She paced up the beautiful wood floors of her apartment, turning on heel at the sole window on the long end and the painted-over cast-iron radiator on the short. When she felt too sick to take care of herself, her mom came over and put Rumors on, wrapped her in scarves that were more pretty than functional, warmed some blood and gave it to her in a sippy cup. Sabella remembered nothing so much as the big Slurpees her mom had bought her, just this bright red, when she’d had strep the last year she was human. She wore the necklace Dedrick had given her every day. It was a gold slice of pepperoni pizza with “best” emblazoned on the back (his matched, but read “friends,”), and she fondled it like a hangnail. She rubbed the bruises on her arms, where the skin had once been clear and she'd once thought herself pretty in a plain way, like Elinor Dashwood, as though she might be able to brush off the dirt. She called her daysleeper friends, texted acquaintances, and slowly stopped responding to their messages as she realized how bored she was of presenting hope day after day.     2:19:08 bkissedrose: I'm so sorry. 2:19:21 bkissedrose: I feel like such a douche 2:19:24 sabellasay: ??? 2:20:04 sabellasay: what r u talkin about 2:25:56 bkissedrose: u talked me down all those times I would've just died 2:26:08 sabellasay: it was rly nbd 2:26:27 bkissedrose: I've never been half as good as you are 2:26:48 bkissedrose: and now you're so sick 2:29:12 sabellasay: dude stop acting like i'm dying 2:29:45 sabellasay: I can't stand it 2:30:13 bkissedrose: god you're so brave   (sabellasay has become inactive)     "Everyone keeps calling me saying you stopped talking to them," Dedrick said when he made it back to her place, shoes up on the couch now that he'd finally wiped them of mud. "Should I feel lucky you let me in?" "I'm tired," she said. "It's supposed to be a symptom. I like this one, I think she has potential." He took her phone and considered it with the weight of a father researching a car seat. "A perfect date: I take you for a ride around the lake on my bike, then we stop home for an evening snack." "She means her motorcycle," Sabella clarified. He rolled his eyes and continued reading. "My worst fear: commitment." "At least she's honest." "That's not really a good thing. You're not looking for someone to skip out halfway through the movie." "No, I'm looking for someone who's not going to be heartbroken when I die anyway." Dedrick sighed, all the air going out of his chest as it might escape from dough kneaded too firmly, and held her close to him. "You're stupid," he told her, "but so sweet." "I think I'm going to send her a nip."     The girl was named Ash but she spelled it A-I-S-L-I-N-G, and she seemed pleased that Sabella knew enough not to ask lots of stupid questions. They met in a park by the lakeside, far enough from the playground that none of the parents would notice the fanged flirtation going on below. If Aisling had been a boy, she would have been a teen heartthrob. She wore her hair long where it was slicked back and short (touchable, but hard to grab in a fight) everywhere else. She wore a leather jacket that spoke of a once-in-a-lifetime thrift store find, and over the warmth of her blood and her breath she smelled like bag balm. Sabella wanted to hide in her arms from a fire. She wanted to watch her drown trying to save her. Aisling parked her motorcycle and stowed her helmet before coming over to say hi—gentlemanly, Sabella thought, to give her a chance to prepare herself. “What kind of scoundrel left you to wait all alone?” Aisling asked, with the sort of effortlessly cool smile that might have broken a lesser woman’s heart. “I don’t know,” Sabella said, “but I’m glad you’re here now.” Aisling stepped just inside her personal space and frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but are you—" “I’m trans, yes,” Sabella interrupted, and smiled so wide she could feel the tension at her temples. Like doing sit-ups the wrong way for years, having this conversation so many times hadn’t made it comfortable, only routine. “We don’t need to be awkward about it.” “Okay,” Aisling agreed, and sat on the bench, helping Sabella down with a hand on her elbow. “I meant that you seem sick.” She looked uneasy, and Sabella sensed that she had never been human. Vampires didn’t get sick—she had probably never had more than a headache, and that only from hunger. “Yes,” Sabella said. “I am sick. I’m not actually—I mentioned this on my profile—I’m not actually looking for love.” “I hope you won’t be too disappointed when it finds you,” Aisling said, and Sabella blushed, reoriented herself with a force like setting a bone, like if she tried hard enough to move in one direction she’d stop feeling like a spinning top. “I’m looking for a donor,” she said. “Yeah, all right,” Aisling said. She threw her arm over the back of the bench so that Sabella felt folded into her embrace. “I’m always willing to help a pretty girl out.” “I don’t just mean your blood,” she said, and felt herself dizzy.     It was easier for Sabella to convince someone to do something than it was for her to ask for it. Her therapist had told her that, and even said it was common, but he hadn’t said how to fix it. “Please, may I have your liver” was too much to ask, and “Please, I don’t want to die” was a poor argument. “So, you would take my liver—" “It would actually only be part of your liver,” Sabella said, stopping to catch her breath. She hadn’t been able to go hiking since she’d gotten so sick—she needed company, and easy trails, and her friends either didn’t want to go or, like her mom, thought it was depressing to watch her climb a hill and have to stop to spit up bile. “So we would each have half my liver, in the end.” Sabella shrugged and looked into the dark underbrush. If she couldn’t be ethical about this, she wouldn’t deserve a liver. She wouldn’t try to convince Aisling until she understood the facts. “In humans, livers will regenerate once you cut them in half and transplant them. Like how kids think if you cut an earthworm in half, you get two. Or like bulbs. Ideally, it would go like that.” “And if it didn’t go ideally?” (“Turn me,” Dedrick said one day, impulsively, when she’d been up all night with a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, holding her in his lap with his shirt growing polka-dotted. “I’ll be a vampire in a few days, we can have the surgery—you’ll be cured in a week.”) “If it doesn’t go ideally,” Sabella said, “one or both of us dies. If it goes poorly, I don’t even know what happens.” She stepped off the tree and set her next target, a curve in the trail where a tree had fallen and the light shone down on the path. Normally these days she didn’t wear shoes but flip-flops, but this was a date, and she’d pulled her old rainbow chucks out of the closet. Aisling walked with her silently, keeping pace, and put an arm around her waist. Sabella looked up and down the trail. Green Lake was normally populated enough that people kept to their own business, and these days she felt pretty safe going about, even with a girl. But she checked anyway before she leaned into Ais’s strength, letting her guide them so that she could use all her energy to keep moving. “But if it doesn’t happen at all, you die no matter what?” Sabella took a breath. “If you don’t want to, I look for someone else.”     Her mom was waiting for her when Sabella got home the next morning. Sabella’s mother was naturally blonde, tough when she needed to be, the sort of woman who could get into hours-long conversations with state fair tchotchke vendors. She’d gotten Sabella through high school and into college through a careful application of stamping and yelling. When Sabella had started calling herself Ravynn, she’d brought a stack of baby name books home and said, “All right, let’s find you something you can put on a resume.” “Mom,” she said, but smiling, “I gave you a key in case I couldn’t get out of bed, not so you could check if I spent the night with a date.” “How’d it go? Was this the girl Dedrick helped you find?” “Aisling, yeah,” Sabella said. She sat on the recliner, a mountain of accent pillows cushioning her tender body. “It was good. I like her a lot.” “Did she decide to get the surgery?” “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her to choose.” “Then what did you two do all night?” Sabella frowned. “I like her a lot. We had a good time.” Her mom stood and put the kettle on, and Sabella couldn’t help thinking what an inconvenience she was, that her mother couldn’t fret over her by making toast and a cup of tea. “Christ, what decent person would want to do that with you?” “We have chemistry! She’s very charming!” She examined Sabella with the dissatisfied air of an artist. “You’re a mess, honey. You’re so orange you could be a jack-o-lantern, and swollen all over. You look like you barely survived a dogfight. I don’t even see my daughter when I look at you anymore.” Sabella tried to pull herself together, to look more dignified, but instead she slouched further into the recliner and crossed her arms over her chest. “Maybe she thinks I’m funny, or smart.” “Maybe she’s taking advantage. Anyone who really cared about you wouldn’t be turned on, they’d be worried about your health.” Sabella remembered the look on Aisling’s face when she’d first come close enough to smell her, and shuddered. “I’m not going to ask her to cut out part of her body for me without thinking about it first,” she said. “Without giving her something in return?" her mom asked. "It's less than two pounds." “But it’s still her choice,” Sabella said. “I’m starting to wonder if you even want to live,” her mom said, and left. Sabella found the energy to go turn off the stovetop before she fell asleep. (Her mother had raised her responsible.)     12:48:51 bkissedrose: what happens to a dream bestowed 12:49:03 bkissedrose: upon a girl too weak to fight for it? 12:53:15 sabellasay: haha you can’t sleep either? 12:53:38 sabellasay: babe idk 12:55:43 sabellasay: is it better to have loved and lost 12:56:29 sabellasay: than to die a virgin? 1:00:18 bkissedrose: I guess I don’t know 1:01:24 bkissedrose: maybe it depends if they're good     “It’s nice here,” Aisling confessed the third time they visited the lake. Sabella and her mom weren’t talking, but she couldn’t imagine it would last more than a few days longer, so she wasn’t worried. “I’d never even heard of it.” “I grew up around here,” Sabella said, “and I used to take my students a few times a year." “You teach?” “I used to teach,” she said, and stepped off the trail—the shores were made up of a gritty white sand like broken shells—to watch the sinking sun glint off the water. “Seventh grade science.” Aisling laughed. “That sounds like a nightmare.” “I like that they’re old enough you can do real projects with them, but before it breaks off into—you know, are we doing geology or biology or physics. When you’re in seventh grade, everything is science.” She smiled and closed her eyes so that she could feel the wind and the sand under her shoes. She could hear birds settling and starting to wake, but she couldn’t place them. “They’ve got a long-term sub now. Theoretically, if I manage to not die, I get my job back.” Aisling came up behind her and put her arms around her. Sabella knew she hadn’t really been weaving—she knew her limits well enough now, she hoped—but she felt steadier that way. “You don’t sound convinced.” “I don’t think they expect to have to follow through,” Sabella admitted. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who ever thinks I’m going to survive this. My mom’s so scared all the time, I know she doesn’t.” Aisling held her not tight but close, like being tucked into a bright clean comforter on a cool summer afternoon. “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, her face up against Sabella’s neck so that every part of Sabella wanted her to bite. “Maybe,” she said, then thought better of it. “Yes.” “How’d you get sick? I didn’t think we could catch things like that. Or was it while you were human?” “Um, no, but I’m not contagious, just nasty.” Aisling laughed, and she continued, encouraged. “Mom would, you know, once I came out I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, but she wouldn’t let me get any kind of reconstructive surgery until I was eighteen. She thought it was creepy, some doc getting his hands all over her teenage kid.” “Probably fair.” “So I’m eighteen, and she says okay, you’re right, you got good grades in school and you’re going to college like I asked, I'll pay for whatever surgery you want. And you have to imagine, I just scheduled my freshman orientation, I have priorities." "Which are?" "Getting laid, mostly." “Yeah, I remember that.” “So I’m eighteen and hardly ever been kissed, I’m not worried about the details. I don’t let my mom come with me, it doesn’t even occur to me to see a doctor who’s worked with vampires before, I just want to look like Audrey Hepburn's voluptuous sister.” “Oh no,” Ash said. It hung there for a moment, the dread and Sabella’s not being able to regret that she’d been so stupid. “It must have come up.” “Sure. He said he was pretty sure it would be possible to do the surgery on a vampire, he knew other surgeries had been done. I was just so excited he didn’t say no.” Ash held her tight then, like she might be dragged away otherwise, and Sabella knew that it had nothing to do with her in particular, that it was only the protective instinct of one person watching another live out her most plausible nightmare. “What did he do to you?” “It wasn’t his fault,” she said, and then—grimacing, she knew her mother would have been so angry with her—“at least, he didn’t mean anything by it. He never read anything about how to adapt the procedure to meet my needs.” She sounded so clinical, like she’d imbibed so many doctors’ explanations of what had happened that she was drunk on it. “But neither did I. We both found out you can’t give vampires a blood transfusion.” "Why would you need to?" She shrugged. "You don't, usually, in plastic surgery." "No," Aisling interrupted, "I mean, why wouldn't you drink it?" Sabella tried to remember, or tried not to be able to, and tucked her cold hands into her pockets. "You're human, I guess. Anyway, I puked all over him and the incision sites, had to be hospitalized. My doctor says I'm lucky I'm such a good healer, or I'd need new boobs and a new liver." They were both quiet, and Sabella thought, this is it. You either decide it's too much or you kiss me again. She thought, I miss getting stoned with friends and telling shitty surgery stories and listening to them laugh. I hate that when I meet girls their getting-to-know-you involves their Youtube make-up tutorials and mine involves "and then, after they took the catheter out..." "Did you sue for malpractice, at least?" Ash asked, and Sabella couldn't tell without looking if her tone was teasing or wistful. "My mom did, yeah. When they still wanted her to pay for the damn surgery."     Aisling pulled up to the front of Sabella's building and stopped just in front of her driveway. She kicked her bike into park and stepped onto the sidewalk, helping Sabella off and over the curbside puddle. Sabella couldn't find words for what she was thinking, she was so afraid that her feelings would shatter as they crystallized. She wanted Ais to brush her hair back from her face and comb out the knots with her fingers. She wanted Ais to stop by to shovel the drive when there was lake effect snow. She wanted to find 'how to minimize jaundice' in the search history of Aisling's phone. “You’re beautiful in the sunlight,” Ais said, breaking her thoughts, maybe on purpose. “Like you were made to be outside.” Sabella ducked her head and leaned up against her. The date was supposed to be over, go inside and let this poor woman get on with her life, but she didn’t want to leave. “It’s nice to have someone to go with me,” she said. “Especially with a frost in the air. Sometimes people act like I’m so fragile.” “Ridiculous. You’re a vampire.” Her ears were cold, and she pressed them against Aisling’s jawbone. She wondered what the people driving past thought when they saw them. She thought that maybe the only thing better than surviving would be to die a tragic death, loved and loyally attended. “I was born human.” “Even God makes mistakes.” Sabella smiled. “Is that what I am? A mistake?” “Nah,” she said. “Just a happy accident.” Sabella laughed, thought you're such a stoner and I feel so safe when you look at me like that. "I'll do it," Ais said.  "What do I have to do to set up the surgery?" Sabella hugged her tight, hid against her and counted the seconds—one, two, three, four, five—while Ais didn't change her mind and Sabella wondered if she would.     "I have to stress how potentially dangerous this is," Dr. Young said. "I can't guarantee that it will work, that either of you will survive the procedure or the recovery, or that you won't ultimately regret it." Aisling was holding it together remarkably well, Sabella thought, but she still felt like she could catch her avoiding eye contact. Sabella had taken the seat in the doctor's office between her mother and girlfriend, and felt uncomfortable and strange no matter which of their hands she held. "Um," Ais said, and Sabella could feel her mother's judgment at her incoherence, "you said you wouldn't be able to do anything for the pain?" To her credit, the doctor didn't fidget or look away. Sabella, having been on the verge of death long enough to become something of a content expert, believed that it was important to have a doctor who was upfront about how terrible her life was. "I wouldn't describe it as 'nothing,' exactly," she said. "There aren't any anesthetics known to work on vampires, but we'll make you as comfortable as possible. You can feed immediately before and as soon as you're done, and that will probably help snow you over." "Being a little blood high," Ais clarified. "While you cut out my liver." "Yes." Sabella wanted to apologize. She couldn't find the words. Aisling said, "Well, while we're trying to make me comfortable, can I smoke up, too?" Dr. Young laughed. It wasn't cruel, but it wasn't promising, either. "That's not a terrible idea," she said, "but marijuana increases bleeding, and there are so many unknown variables here that I'd like to stick to best practices if we can." "I can just—" Sabella said, and choked. She wasn't sure when she'd started crying. "Find someone else. Dedrick will do it, I know." Aisling considered this. The room was quiet, soft echoes on the peeling tile floor. Sabella's mother put an arm around her, and she felt tiny, but in the way that made her feel ashamed and not protected. Aisling said, "Why are you asking me? Is there something you know that I don't?" Dr. Young shook her head. "I promise we're not misrepresenting the procedure," she said. "And theoretically, it might be possible with any vampire. But there aren't a lot of organ transplants in the literature—harvesting, sure, but not living transplants—and I want to get it right the first time. If we have a choice, I told Sabella I'd rather use a liver from a donor who was born a vampire. I think it'll increase our chance of success." "A baby'd be too weak," Aisling agreed. Her voice was going hard and theoretical. "Well, tell me something encouraging." "One of the first things we'll do is to cut through almost all of your abdominal nerves, so that will help. And there's a possibility that the experience will be so intense that you don't remember it clearly, or at all." Sabella's mother took a shaky breath, and Sabella wished, hating herself for it, that she hadn't come. Ais said, "Painful. You mean, the experience will be so painful." "If you choose to go forward with it," Dr. Young said, "we'll do everything we can to mitigate that."     Sabella had expected that Aisling would want space and patience while she decided not to die a horrible, painful death to save her. It was hard to tell how instead they ended up in her bed with the lights out, their legs wound together and their faces swollen with sleep. Sabella was shaking, and couldn’t have said why. Ais grabbed her by her seat and pulled her up close. “You said you couldn’t get me sick?” she asked. “No,” Sabella agreed. “Although my blood is probably pretty toxic.” Ais kissed her, the smell of car exhaust still stuck in her hair. “What a metaphor,” she murmured, and lifted her chin. “You look exhausted.” Sabella thought, Are you saying what I think you’re saying? and, That’s a terrible idea, and said, “God, I want to taste you.” “Well, baby,” Ais said, and her hands were on Sabella so she curled her lips and blew her hair out of her eyes, “that’s what I’m here for.” Sabella had been human once, and she remembered what food was like. The standard lie, that drinking blood was like eating a well-cooked steak, was wrong but close enough to staunch the flow of an interrogation. (She’d had friends and exes, turned as adults, who said it was like a good stout on tap, hefty and refreshing, but she thought they might just be trying to scandalize her.) Ais could have been a stalk of rhubarb or August raspberries. She moved under Sabella and held her so that their knees pressed together. She could have been the thrill of catching a fat thorny toad in among the lettuce at dusk, or a paper wasp in a butterfly net. She felt like getting tossed in the lake in January; she tasted like being wrapped in fleece and gently dried before the fire; her scent was what Sabella remembered of collapsing, limbs aquiver, on the exposed bedrock of a mountaintop, nothing but crushed pine and the warmth of a moss-bed. She woke on top of Ais, licking her wounds lazily—she wanted more, but she was too tired to do anything about it. “That’s better,” Ais whispered, and if she was disappointed that this wasn’t turning into a frenzy, she didn’t show it. They were quiet for long enough that the haze started to fade, and then Aisling said, “I couldn’t ask in front of your mother, but was it like that with your surgery? They couldn’t do anything for the pain?” Sabella shifted uncomfortably, rolled over next to Ais. “I was conscious, yes.” “Do you remember it?” It was a hard question. She wanted to say it wasn’t her place to ask. She tried to remember, and got caught up in the layers of exhaustion, the spaces between the body she’d had, the body she’d wanted, and what they had been doing to her. “Sounds and sensations and thoughts, mostly,” she said. Ais choked, and said, “So, everything,” and Sabella realized—she didn’t know how she hadn’t—how scared she must be. “No, it’s blurry,” she said instead. “I remember, um, the tugging at my chest. I kept thinking there was no way my skin wasn’t just going to split open. And the scraping sounds. They’ve got all these tools, and they’re touching you on the inside and the outside at the same time, and that’s very unsettling. And this man, I think he was the PA, standing over me saying, ‘You’ve got to calm down, honey.’” “Were you completely freaking out?” Ais asked. Sabella shook her head. Her throat hurt. “No. I mean—I cried a little. Not as much as you’d think. They said if I wasn’t careful, you know, with swallowing at the right times and breathing steady, they might mess up reshaping my larynx and I could lose my voice.” Ais swore, and Sabella wondered if she would feel angry. (Sometimes she would scream and cry, say, can you imagine doing that to an eighteen-year-old?) Right now she was just tired. “How did you manage?” “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think just, it was worth more to me to have it done than anything else. So I didn’t ever tell them to stop.”     “Please don’t go around telling people I think this is an acceptable surgical set-up,” Dr. Young said, looking around the exam room. It reminded Sabella of a public hearing, the way the stakeholders sat at opposing angles and frowned at each other. Dr. Young sat next to Dr. Park, who would be the second doctor performing the procedure. Sabella had never met Dr. Park before, and her appearance—young, mostly—didn’t inspire confidence. Sabella sat next to her mother, who held her hand and a clipboard full of potential complications. Ais crossed her fingers in her lap, sat with a nervous child’s version of polite interest. Time seemed not to blur, but to stutter, everything happening whenever. “Dr. Park,” Sabella’s mother said, “do you have any experience operating on vampires?” Dr. Park grinned and her whole mouth seemed to open up in her face, her gums pale pink as a Jolly Rancher and her left fang chipped. “Usually trauma or obstetrics,” she admitted. “Although this is nearly the same thing.” “I’m serious,” Sabella’s mom said, and Sabella interrupted. “I like her,” she said. And then—it wasn’t really a question except in the sense that there was no way anyone could be sure—“You’re not going to realize halfway through the surgery that it’s too much for you?” Dr. Park laughed. “I turned my husband when we were both eighteen,” she said as testament to her cruelty. Sabella’s mom jumped. “Jesus Christ, why?” She shrugged, languid. Ais and Dr. Young were completely calm; Ais might have had no frame of reference for what it was like to watch someone turn, and Dr. Young had probably heard this story before. “His parents didn’t like that he was dating a vampire. You’ll do crazy things for love.” Sabella could see her mother blanch even as she steadied. It wasn’t unheard of for a vampire to turn their spouse—less common now that it was easier to live as a vampire, and humans were able to date freely but not really commit. But she could remember being turned, young as she had been: the gnawing ache, the hallucinations, the thirst that had only sometimes eclipsed the pain. It was still the worst thing that she’d ever experienced, and she was sure her mother couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to do it to someone they loved. “Good,” she said. “You won’t turn back if we scream.” Dr. Young frowned. “I want you to know you have a choice,” she said. She was speaking to Ais; Sabella had a choice, too, but it was only between one death and another. “There will be a point when you can’t change your mind, but by then it’ll be almost over.” Ais swore. It made Dr. Park smile and Sabella’s mom frown. Sabella wondered if she was in love with her, or if it was impossible to be in love with someone who was growing a body for them to share. “Don’t say that,” Ais said. “I don’t want to have that choice.”     The morning of the surgery, Aisling gave Sabella a rosary to wear with her pizza necklace, and when they kicked Sabella’s mom out to the waiting room, she kissed them both as she went. “I like your mom,” Ais said shyly. They lay in cots beside each other, just close enough that they could reach out and hold hands across the gap. “I bet she’d get along with mine.” Sabella laughed, her eyes stinging, threw herself across the space between them and kissed each of Ais’s knuckles while Ais said, “Aw, c’mon, save it ‘til we get home.” “Isn’t that a lot of commitment for you?” Sabella asked. “Yeah, well,” Ais said, caught, and gave her a cheesy smile. “You’re already taking my liver, at least my heart won’t hurt so much.” They drank themselves to gorging while nurses wrapped and padded them in warm blankets. Ais was first, for whatever measure of mercy that was, and while they were wheeled down the dizzying white hallway, she grinned at Sabella, wild, some stranger’s blood staining her throat to her nose. “You’re a real looker,” she said, and Sabella laughed over her tears. “Thank you,” Sabella said. “I mean, really, for everything.” Ais winked at her; Sabella wanted to run away from all of this and drink her in until they died. “It’s all in a day’s work, ma’am,” she said. It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, and Sabella loved her for pretending. Ais hissed, she cried, she asked intervention of every saint learned in K-12 at a Catholic school. A horrible gelatinous noise came as Dr. Young’s gloves touched her innards, and Ais moaned and Sabella said, “You have to stop, this is awful,” and the woman assigned to supervise her held her down and said hush, honey, you need to be quiet. And the doctors’ voices, neither gentle nor unkind: We’re almost done now, Aisling, you’re being so brave. And: It’s a pity she’s too strong to pass out. Sabella went easier, hands she couldn’t see wiping her down and slicing her open while Dr. Park pulled Ais’s insides back together. She’d been scared for so long that the pain didn’t frighten her; she kept asking “Is she okay? What’s happening?” until the woman at her head brushed back her hair and said shh, she’s in the recovery room, you can worry about yourself now. It felt right, fixing her missteps with pieces of Ais, and when Dr. Young said, “There we go, just another minute and you can go take care of her yourself,” Sabella thought about meromictic lakes, about stepping into a body so deep its past never touched its present. END     "Dionysus in London" is copyright Tristan Beiter 2018. "You Inside Me" is copyright Tori Curtis 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 "The City of Kites and Crows" by Megan Arkenberg.  

Sarah’s Child Susan Jane Bigelow Once, I dreamed that I had a son named Sheldon, and my grief tore a hole in the fabric of the world. In my dream I walked through the halls of an elementary school, and I went into the office. Everything was gray and blocky, but somehow not oppressive. I was certain, then, that it was the elementary school in my old hometown, and that I was both myself and also not myself. Full transcript after the cut ----more---- Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 28 for May 24, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story this week is "Sarah's Child" by Susan Jane Bigelow, read by Amanda Ching. Susan Jane Bigelow is a fiction writer, political columnist, and librarian. She mainly writes science fiction and fantasy novels, most notably the Extrahuman Union series from Book Smugglers Publishing. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine’s “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” issue, and the Lamba Award-winning “The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard,” among others. She lives with her wife in northern Connecticut, and can be found at the bottom of a pile of cats. Amanda Ching is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Storm Moon Press, Candlemark & Gleam's Alice: (re)Visions, and every bathroom stall on I-80 from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. She tweets @cerebralcutlass and blogs at http://amandaching.wordpress.com. Sarah’s Child Susan Jane Bigelow Once, I dreamed that I had a son named Sheldon, and my grief tore a hole in the fabric of the world. In my dream I walked through the halls of an elementary school, and I went into the office. Everything was gray and blocky, but somehow not oppressive. I was certain, then, that it was the elementary school in my old hometown, and that I was both myself and also not myself. I asked for Sheldon. “Ms. Harp is here,” someone said, and then there he was. He was blond, maybe five or six, with a round face like my sister’s. He smiled toothily up at me. I took his hand. “Come on, honey,” I said. “Let’s go.” And then I woke up. Janet snored softly next to me. I touched the space on my body where my womb would have been, if I’d been born with one, and ached. It was a mistake to tell Janet. “So you had a dream,” she said, crunching her toast. She ate it plain, no butter. “So what?” She was wearing that muscle shirt that made me melt, and her short hair was a mess from sleep. Janet was athletic, butch and pint-sized, and she wore her queerness like a pair of brass knuckles. I was lucky to have her. “I don’t know,” I said. “It just seemed so real.” “I dreamed I was a hockey player,” Janet said, popping the last piece of toast into her mouth. “But I ain’t one.” “I know.” I stabbed at my breakfast, not feeling all that hungry. “Never mind.” She came over and kissed the top of my head. “Sorry, babe. I know it bugs you sometimes.” She put her dishes in the sink. “You aren’t gonna start asking about sperm donors or anything, right? Did you freeze yours?” “No,” I said. “And no. I didn’t.” There’d really been no point. When I had my surgery I’d been in the middle of the divorce with Liz. Kids were out of the question. “Cool. You gonna be okay?” I nodded. “All right. I gotta hit the shower. See you at the game tonight!” She headed off to the shower, humming happily to herself. She usually took half an hour in there, so I’d be long gone by the time she came out. I poked at my scrambled eggs again, then tossed them out. I couldn’t shake the dream, though, so I went through my day in a fog. People at work asked me if I was all right, and I just shook my head mutely. Sure. Fine, just a little haunted. I didn’t go directly home that night. Instead, I drove the half hour north to Elm Hill, and parked outside the elementary school. School was long over, though a few kids played on the ball fields and ran around the swings. I shut the car off and got out. There was a hint of fall in the air, though the leaves hadn’t turned yet. I walked through the playground, passing by my own ghosts on the steps, by the wall, on the baseball field, and up to the fence. There was a little rock there, smaller than I remembered. I sat on it, and thought about Sheldon. This was silly. It was just a dream. I’d had dreams about motherhood before. Pregnancy, babies, those dreams came with the hormones. Everybody had them, or said they did. So why wouldn’t this one let me go? I sighed. Somewhere across the playground, a father with two daughters was watching me. I waved at him, and he turned quickly around again. Dads don’t like me. Impulsively, I rummaged in my purse and found the little reporter’s notebook I kept handy. I’m not a reporter, I work in layout and design for the magazine, but somewhere along the line I’d picked up a few of their habits. I pulled a pen out of my purse and started to write.   Hi Sheldon My hand shook. What was I doing? This was stupid. There was no Sheldon. But my traitor hand kept writing.   I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you had a nice day. I used to play on this rock when I was little, like you. I hope you have a lot of friends, and that you’re happy.   Your friend, Sarah I couldn’t bring myself to sign it ‘Mom.’ My phone chimed, and I pulled it out. There were two texts there. One was from Janet, wondering where I was. Guilty—I’d forgotten her game—I texted her back that I’d be there in about half an hour. The other was from a number I’d never seen before. It was a weird combination of letters and numbers, and there was no name. From: AC67843V-D Hey I can take Sheldon Friday txt me back –D Angry, I texted back—   Not funny, Janet —and put the phone away. I folded the paper up and thought about chucking it away. Then I folded it again and stuck it in a little crack in the rock. Maybe somehow it would find its way to him, wherever he was, and he’d leave me alone. Janet was a little peeved that I’d missed the start of the game. She took softball seriously, and the fall league was special in some way that I’d tried my best not to understand. But I got there in time for the fourth inning, which meant I got to see her steal third base, so it wasn’t a total loss. “Where were you?” she asked as we were downing beer and pizza with the team after. “Just got held up,” I said. “At work. You know how it is.” “They exploit you,” she said, pointing at me with the business end of a slice of pizza. “You shouldn’t let them do that. It’s cause you’re trans—” I winced. Tell the whole pizza joint, why don’t you? “—that they think they can take advantage, cause you’re desperate for work. You shouldn’t take it.” “No,” I said. “It’s fine.” “Damn it, Sarah,” said Janet. “You gotta stick up for yourself! You never do. You just let Liz roll away with your house and car and money, and you let your boss get all kinds of unpaid labor out of you. You need to grow a spine.” And I let you boss me around, too, I thought, eating a slice of pizza. So what? “You didn’t have to send me that text,” I said. “What, I just wanted to know where you were!” she said. “No, the other one. The Sheldon one? That was mean.” She blinked. “I never sent you anything about Sheldon. Who’s Sheldon?” That night I dreamed about driving around the streets of my hometown. The town was different in that way familiar things change in dreams, but I still knew it was Elm Hill. I took a turn and pulled into the parking lot of a condo complex. “Home, home,” sang a little voice in the seat next to me. I looked over and there was Sheldon, smiling up at me. I got out of the car and walked around to his side, my heels clicking on the pavement. I opened the door and helped him out. I glanced in the window, and saw reflected back a face that was and wasn’t mine. I woke up, the feel of Sheldon’s cold little hand in mine burned into my memory. My mother was no help at all. “Your sister’s pregnant,” she announced when I called her over lunch. “Again?” I asked. Patty seemed to get pregnant with alarming regularity. This would be her fourth. “So she says. I hope it’s a summer baby. They could name her June. Such a pretty name. I wanted to name you June, if you’d been a girl.” I’m a girl now, I thought, but didn’t say. “The baby would be born earlier than that, right? It’s only September.” “Well, you never know. And think what an interesting story that would be! ‘This is my daughter June, she was born in May!’ Wouldn’t that be an interesting story?” “Sure. How’s Dad?” I asked, quickly changing the subject. “Same as ever,” she grumped, launching into a long story about how he was out with his golf buddies all the time and never home. Not that she wanted him home, of course. I almost told her about Sheldon. He was still haunting me. But what would I have said? Instead, I listened as she told me about Dad, passed judgment on the sorry state of my career, and questioned whether Janet was right for me. I made the appropriate noises at the appropriate times, and excused myself to go back to work when the time came. That evening I found myself pulled back to the parking lot of the elementary school in Elm Hill, looking out over the playground and thinking wistfully of what might have been. Maybe I should find a therapist, I thought. Maybe I should get help. I got out of the car and strolled across the field, trying not to look guilty. I didn’t see the dad from yesterday. I sat myself back down on the rock, and sighed. The piece of paper was still wedged into that crack. This is ridiculous, I thought. Why was I even here? I was lucky. I knew I was. I had a home, a cute girlfriend, and a job. I didn’t get abuse on the streets. I wasn’t young anymore and I was never pretty, but so what? So what. Why did I want what I could never, ever have so badly? Suddenly furious, I ripped the paper out of the wedge in the rock. I was about to tear it to shreds when I noticed that the paper was a soft blue color. My notebook only had white lined. Curious, I opened it up. There, in a child’s blocky script, was written: HELLO I like beinG on the Rock. I make Believe its a SPACE SHIP. My mommy is nice and a DIKe and is coming to pick me up soon. Do you like Dinosars?   SHELDON My hands began to shake. This had to be some trick. I turned the paper over, looking for signs, but there was only the name of the paper company on the back. “Bloomfield Paper - Made in the R.N.E.” was stamped next to a little pine tree flag. There was no other mark, nothing to indicate where this had come from. I got out my pen and paper again, and wrote another note.   Hi Sheldon   I like space ships, and I like dinosaurs. I’m very glad your mommy is nice. I hope you had a nice day today, too.   Sarah I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Before I lost my nerve I wedged the note back into the rock, and left quickly. I went back to the rock the next day, and sure enough, there was another blue paper stuck in the crack. This time it was a crude picture of a dinosaur, signed by Sheldon. For Sara, it read, spelling my name wrong. I smiled, touched, and tried not to think about what a creep I was being to somebody’s poor kid. I tucked the drawing into my purse. Just then my phone rang, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I checked my phone; it was that same combination of letters and numbers as the text from yesterday had been. AC67843V-D. Hesitantly, I answered it. “H...hello?” “Hey, June,” a man’s bored-sounding voice said. “I can’t take Sheldon on Friday after all. Sorry.” Sheldon. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying and failing to keep the quavering out of my voice. “I’m not June.” “What?” The voice on the other end sounded very confused. “Oh. Huh. Wrong number, I guess. You sure you’re… you sound just like her. Weird.” “I’m Sarah,” I said. “And you’re on your own phone?” “Yes.” “Huh. Well, if you see June tell her David can’t pick up Sheldon Friday.” The line went dead, leaving me shivering in the bright sunny afternoon. That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to Janet snore, turning it all over in my mind. At last I got up and paced, restless and weary at the same time. I fixed myself a cup of tea and sat in the living room, surrounded by books, stacks of DVDs, my old board games and framed prints of the brassy 40s pin-up girls Janet was obsessed with. The place felt like us, and calmed me down a little. I took the picture and the note Sheldon had sent me out of my purse, unfolded them, and smoothed them out on the coffee table in front of me. “Hey,” Janet said. I jumped, knocking my tea onto the floor. “I’m sorry!” I said, leaping up. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, smiling sleepily. “I’ll get some paper towels.” I sat back down, trembling. Janet returned and mopped up the tea on the floor. “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say. “Eh, that floor’s tough. I’ve spilled way worse on it.” Janet sat next to me and noticed the drawing and the note. She picked them up and looked them over. “What’re these?” “Nothing,” I said too quickly. “Just some old things I found.” Janet looked like she wanted to say something, but swallowed it. “Come back to bed,” she said eventually, and padded off back toward the bedroom. I put the picture and the note away, and followed. I finally fell asleep about 3 AM. This time I dreamed I was at a café, talking with my mother. Except she wasn’t exactly my mother: she had longer, grayer hair, and was thinner and better dressed than my mother usually was. “And I found it in his backpack,” I was saying, in a voice that wasn’t quite mine. “I thought he had a girlfriend or something. But doesn’t this look like an adult’s writing?” She pushed a piece of paper across the table at my mother. I was somehow not surprised to see the note I’d written to Sheldon sitting there. My mother picked it up and frowned that distinctive thoughtfully disapproving frown. “There’s no teacher there named Sarah?” “None,” I confirmed. “He says he just finds it in the rock.” “You should ask the principal to look into it,” my mother said. “Or tell your deadbeat ex. Wasn’t he supposed to take Sheldon today?” “He was,” I sighed. “Then he backed out without telling me. He swears now that he did tell me, but I don’t know.” “Does this have to do with that Janet woman?” Janet? “Ma, I told you, I don’t know any Janets.” “She seemed awfully friendly. Little Xs and Os in her text.” My mother narrowed her eyes in that way she had when she knew something was up. “June, you’re hiding something. Is it true, what David said? That you’re a… you know?” My mommy is nice and a DIKe, Sheldon had written. What had this David person been telling him? I drummed my fingers on the counter, stalling, but just then Sheldon came back from wherever he’d been, and we talked about nothing else besides him until I woke up. “Didn’t sleep at all?” said Janet, taking in my bleary expression that morning.   “Some,” I said, cradling my cup of coffee with my trembling hands. Thank goodness it was Saturday. “I had more dreams.” Janet sat, not looking at me. “Sarah? If you were in some kind of trouble, or if something was really wrong, you’d tell me, right?” “I’m not in trouble,” I said quickly. “At least, I don’t think so.” “But you can’t sleep,” she pressed, still not looking at me. “You’ve been home late. You had those notes from a kid last night. And… you look like you got hit by a truck this morning.” She visibly braced herself, then gave me one of her very serious looks. “What’s going on?” I thought about coming up with some half-assed excuse. I thought about saying “nothing” again and pretending it was all fine. I thought about being reassuring and hiding my pain like I always did. But I was so tired and heartsick that I told her everything. When I was done, Janet just sat there for a few minutes. “Wow,” she said at last. “I know.” “What do you think this all means?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said, feeling utterly helpless. “I’d say it’s just bad dreams, but, what? You think the drawing and the note mean it’s real somehow? Sarah…” “I know, I know,” I said, miserable. I felt more exposed sitting there at the table than I ever did when I took off my clothes. “I’m sure there’s explanations. But the phone calls, the way June had my letters to Sheldon in my dream…” “June?” Suddenly Janet was alert. “Who’s June?” “Sheldon’s mother.” I shook my head, reaching for an explanation that made sense. “I… I think she’s me, or who I could have been. June is what my mother would have named me, if I’d been born a girl.” Janet pulled out her phone and paged through it, brow creased. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to hold back the tears. “I know this is weird! I just want to have a quiet morning. I shouldn’t have said anything.” She handed me the phone. “I sent you a text the other day,” she said. “I got this back.” From: AC88534J-J I’m not Sarah, who is this? My name is June. I just stared at it for a moment, shocked. Then I pulled out my own phone and showed her the text from “D,” who I now suspected was David. “I’ve never seen phone numbers like that,” said Janet. “But they’re similar to one another.” I started piecing it together in my mind. “Where were you when you got that text, Janet?” “A contract up in Elm Hill,” said Janet slowly. “Why?” “That’s where I was when I got the text, and the call,” I said excitedly. “That’s where the school is!” “But look, it gets even better,” said Janet, taking back the phone and poking the screen. “I got another one a few minutes later.” From: AC88534J-J Please don’t tell, but I think I’m gay. I have to tell someone. “Oh my God,” I said. “I thought it was someone pranking me at that point,” said Janet as I digested the text, agog. “Like Lisa. She does shit like this, and she knows how to do stuff with phones.” She tapped the phone thoughtfully. “But now… Jesus. Sarah, is this real?” “It is,” I said firmly. “It has to be.” “What’s going on?” Janet asked. “Why do you have such a connection with this Sheldon? I mean, he’s not your kid, right?” “No, not exactly. But June… She’s got my mother, the name I would have had.” “She’s you,” said Janet. “Or who you would have been, if…” “Yeah. If.” I said, and an entire world was contained in that world. “So what do we do about it?” Janet asked. It was a good question. Our parallel lives were crashing together, I was driving myself nuts from lack of sleep, and all I wanted was everything she had. This couldn’t go on. “I want to try to talk to them,” I said. I spent the whole weekend a wreck, trying not to think about the plan . I had more disjointed dreams about Sheldon and June, enough to know that June was talking with a therapist but couldn’t bring herself to say what she needed to say, and Sheldon was going through a serious dinosaur phase. I stayed far away from Elm Hill until Monday, though, when I drove up in the early morning to deliver a final note. I got the answer Monday afternoon. They’d be there. That night I dreamed about June, who was sitting up alone, looking at the notes I’d sent Sheldon, drinking. Tuesday afternoon came at last. Janet drove us up to Elm Hill; we didn’t say anything the whole way. When we got to the school, I had to sit for long moment, just staring out at the playground. A light rain had begun to fall, and there were no other children that day. Probably for the best. At last I steeled myself and got out of the car. “You’re sure they’ll show?” Janet asked dubiously. I nodded, clutching Sheldon’s note in my pocket. He’d said they would come. I believed him. “This is a bad idea,” said Janet, staring dubiously out at the damp playground. “You want to go home? We should go home. I can make dinner. You like my dinners.” “No,” I said firmly. “I’m going. You can stay here if you want.” Janet was speechless for a moment. I never stood up to her. But then she got out of the car. “Right behind you,” she said, giving me a little smile. Together, we marched across the damp grass to the rock. “So what happens now?” Janet said, crossing her arms and shifting from side to side. I was about to answer that I didn’t know when sunlight streamed in from somewhere just to my left. I jumped back, and shielded my eyes. The first form I saw was Sheldon’s. He stood there, holding his grandmother’s hand. She looked shocked as she saw us. She was so like my mother that the lack of recognition in her eyes was awful. And there… holding Sheldon’s other hand. She was shorter than me by a good six inches, and she had the narrow shoulders and face of my sisters. But she looked a little like me, too. We had the same eyes, the same mouth, the same hair. “June,” I whispered. “Are you Sarah?” June said. I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak. “Sarah!” said Sheldon. He waved. “Hi Sheldon,” I said, voice catching. June hesitantly reached out a hand toward me, then drew it away again. “Are you… me?” I nodded again. “How? I don’t understand. You don’t look like me.” “No. I was born a boy.” “Oh?” Her eyes widened. “Oh!” Her eyes fell on Janet. “And you…?” “Janet,” my girlfriend said. “Hey.” “And you’re with… her?” Janet took my hand. I squeezed it, grateful “Awful,” said June’s mother. “Hush,” said June shakily. “Now what?” Janet asked softly. “Now we resolve things,” I said firmly. I understood it now, the way that June looked at Janet. The text she’d sent: I have to tell someone. We both had something the other one wanted. June had Sheldon, and everything he represented. And I… I had Janet. I looked, really looked, at Sheldon, and I felt an ache so bad that I began to cry. Janet put an arm around me, and pulled me close. I straightened. “June?” June looked at me, fear plain on her face. “She’ll be okay,” I said, nodding at her glowering mother. “You can tell her. I told her about me, a few years ago, and she wasn’t thrilled. But… we dealt with it and moved on. You have to, to be happy.” June shook her head furiously. “You don’t understand.” “I do,” I insisted, amazed at how calm I suddenly felt. “Better than anyone. You and me… everybody pushes us around. But we’re made of iron underneath. There’s a part of us that won’t bend.” June looked at me and I saw how helpless she must have felt. I remembered feeling like that… just before I changed my life forever. “I did it,” I said. Behind June and Sheldon was blue sky and bright sun. “You can, too.” June turned to her mother. “I’m gay, Mom,” she said softly. “I am. I am.” June’s mother huffed miserably. “I figured that out, genius. So what? See if I care. You’re still my daughter.” Chills ran down my spine. So what? my mother had said, all those years ago. See if I care. You’re still my child. June gave her mother a long, hard hug, then turned to me. She seemed to be standing straighter. “Iron,” I said. “Nice job,” said Janet, trying to be charitable. June laughed. She had this perfect voice; she was so beautiful in all the ways I wasn’t. And she had Sheldon. My heart cracked a little more. “I don’t suppose there’s one of you in my world?” she said to Janet. “Can’t hurt to check around,” said Janet. She pulled me close, possessive. “But I’m taken.” The sunlight began to dim, and June, Sheldon and June’s mother started fading. “Sarah,” said June. She looked more ghostly now. “If you want a baby… have one.” “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t even know if that’s what I want.” “It is,” said June, her voice the whisper of wind through the trees. “If you’re anything like me.” And then they vanished completely, leaving us alone in the rain. Janet rubbed my back as we drove home. “You okay?” she asked. I nodded. “I think so.” “Is it over?” “Yes,” I said, and I was certain. “She got what she wanted.” “You didn’t, though,” said Janet nervously. “I… think I did, though,” I said. “Somewhere in there I stopped wanting to be her. She has Sheldon, she’s short and pretty, but she doesn’t have you. And I like having you.” We drove on as the rain started coming down harder. I turned the wipers up to maximum. “We can talk it over, if you want?” Janet said hesitantly. “The, uh, baby thing.” I couldn’t say anything for a moment. “Really?” “Really,” said Janet. “I mean, I don’t hate the idea. I just hated the idea of having to, you know? And being pregnant…” She made a face. “I guess I can do it.” “You don’t have to,” I said quickly. “Yeah, but we can’t exactly adopt,” she said. “We’re a weird couple on a number of fronts.” “I know. But I’d rather have you than a baby.” Janet laughed, eyes bright. “That kind of talk makes me wish you had banked sperm. I’d bear your children right now.” “Maybe I can scrape out an old gym sock,” I said. She laughed again. I loved that sound. I loved how easy we were with one another. Janet snuggled against my arm. I was shocked; she almost never did that, even when I wasn’t driving through a rainstorm. “I’m glad you’re you, too, you know,” said Janet. “I didn’t like June. Too many lingering straight girl hang-ups, you know?” “Thanks, I think,” I said. “What I’m saying is… let’s just take it a little at a time. We’ve got time, right? We can have time.” She groaned in frustration. “I’m saying that wrong.” I slipped an arm around her. “I know what you mean,” I said as we drove south through the rain and back to our lives. “I know just what you mean.” One time I dreamed I had a son named Sheldon. I could never any sons of my own, or daughters. But I did have Janet, and better, I had myself. I wasn’t like June. I was like me. It was enough, and then some. END "Sarah's Child" was originally published in Strange Horizons in May 2014 and was reprinted in Heiresses of Russ 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. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on June 7th with a GlitterShip original. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy,  making a donation at paypal.me/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. [Music Plays Out] Support GlitterShip!

HOW TO BECOME A ROBOT IN 12 EASY STEPSby A. Merc RustadHow to tell your boyfriend you are in love with a robot:Tell him, “I may possibly be in love with a robot,” because absolutes are difficult for biological brains to process. He won’t be jealous.Ask him what he thinks of a hypothetical situation in which you found someone who might not be human, but is still valuable and right for you. (Your so-called romantic relationship is as fake as you are.)Don’t tell him anything. It’s not that he’ll tell you you’re wrong; he’s not like his parents, or yours. But there’s still a statistical possibility he might not be okay with you being in love with a robot.A full transcript appears under the cut:----more----[Intro music]Intro:Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode one for April 2nd, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you!Before we start, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported GlitterShip so far. Our Kickstarter campaign will be finishing up on April 8th, so if you're just hearing about GlitterShip for the first time, you can still check it out. If you're listening to this episode after the 8th, well, hello future person! I hope we have space travel whenever you're listening to this.Very briefly, here's some publishing news. Our talented cover artist has a queer poem that's going to be coming out in Uncanny Magazine on the 7th of April. That will be called "The Eaters" by M. Sereno.I'd also like to draw your attention to two other Kickstarter campaigns. There's the Beyond Anthology, which is a queer science fiction and fantasy comics anthology, and there's also Vitality Magazine, which is a queer science fiction and fantasy literary magazine that is seeking to fund its second issue.This has really been a huge couple of months for queer science fiction and fantasy. The special Lightspeed Magazine issue "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" has recently announced its table of contents, so that'll be out later this year. And if you're a writer, the submissions are currently open for "Queers Destroy Horror."All of these links are going to be in the transcript on our website at glittership.com. You can check us out there and we also have a Twitter feed @GlitterShipSF.If you have news or publication notices that may be of interest to the GlitterShip listeners, get in touch with me at publine at GlitterShip dot com.Our story today is "How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps" by A. Merc Rustad.Merc is a queer non-binary writer and filmmaker who lives in the Midwest United States. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. When not buried in the homework mines or dayjobbery, Merc likes to play video games, read comics, and wear awesome hats.Merc has several other things published recently: a science fiction short with gay protagonists at Escape Pod, which is available both as text and audio; a longer fantasy story about monsters and dancing and fairy tale tropes that features lesbian protagonists (cis and trans) with a happy ending at Inscription Magazine; and a quieter fantasy short about undersea adventures and multiple trans protagonists forthcoming in Scigentasy in May.You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or visit their website for a complete bibliography (and links to short films) at http://amercrustad.com.Alright. I hope you enjoy the story.    HOW TO BECOME A ROBOT IN 12 EASY STEPSby A. Merc RustadRead by Keffy R. M. KehrliHow to tell your boyfriend you are in love with a robot:Tell him, “I may possibly be in love with a robot,” because absolutes are difficult for biological brains to process. He won’t be jealous.Ask him what he thinks of a hypothetical situation in which you found someone who might not be human, but is still valuable and right for you. (Your so-called romantic relationship is as fake as you are.)Don’t tell him anything. It’s not that he’ll tell you you’re wrong; he’s not like his parents, or yours. But there’s still a statistical possibility he might not be okay with you being in love with a robot. On my to-do list today: Ask the robot out on a date. Pick up salad ingredients for dinner. Buy Melinda and Kimberly a wedding gift.The robot is a J-90 SRM, considered “blocky” and “old-school,” probably refurbished from a scrapper, painted bright purple with the coffee shop logo on the chassis.  The robot’s square head has an LED screen that greets customers with unfailing politeness and reflects their orders back to them. The bright blue smiley face never changes in the top corner of the screen.Everyone knows the J-90 SRMs aren’t upgradable AI. They have basic customer service programming and equipment maintenance protocols.Everyone knows robots in the service industry are there as cheap labor investments and to improve customer satisfaction scores, which they never do, because customers are never happy.Everyone knows you can’t be in love with a robot.I drop my plate into the automatic disposal, which thanks me for recycling. No one else waits to deposit trash, so I focus on it as I brace myself to walk back to the counter. The J-90 SRM smiles blankly at the empty front counter, waiting for the next customer.The lunch rush is over. The air reeks of espresso and burned milk. I don’t come here because the food is good or the coffee any better. The neon violet décor is best ignored.I practiced this in front of a wall a sixteen times over the last week. I have my script. It’s simple. “Hello, I’m Tesla. What may I call you?”And the robot will reply:I will say, “It’s nice to meet you.”And the robot will reply:I will say, “I would like to know if you’d like to go out with me when you’re off-duty, at a time of both our convenience. I’d like to get to know you better, if that’s acceptable to you.”And the robot will reply:“Hey, Tesla.”The imagined conversation shuts down. I blink at the trash receptacle and look up.My boyfriend smiles hello, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, his shoulders hunched to make himself look smaller. At six foot five and three hundred pounds, it never helps. He’s as cuddly and mellow as a black bear in hibernation. Today he’s wearing a gray turtleneck and loafers, his windbreaker unzipped.“Hi, Jonathan.”I can’t ask the robot out now.The empty feeling reappears in my chest, where it always sits when I can’t see or hear the robot.“You still coming to Esteban’s party tonight?” Jonathan asks.“Yeah.”Jonathan smiles again. “I’ll pick you up after work, then.”“Sounds good,” I say. “We’d better go, or I’ll be late.”He works as an accountant. He wanted to study robotic engineering but his parents would only pay for college if he got a practical degree (his grandfather disapproves of robots). Computers crunched the numbers and he handled the people.He always staggers his lunch break so he can walk back with me. It’s nice. Jonathan can act as an impenetrable weather shield if it rains and I forget my umbrella.But Jonathan isn’t the robot.He offers me his arm, like the gentleman he always is, and we leave the coffee shop. The door wishes us a good day.I don’t look back at the robot. A beginner’s guide on how to fake your way through biological social constructs:Pretend you are not a robot. This is hard, and you have been working at it for twenty-three years. You are like Data, except in reverse.(There are missing protocols in your head. You don’t know why you were born biologically or why there are pieces missing and you do not really understand how human interaction functions. Sometimes you can fake it. Sometimes people even believe you when you do. You never believe yourself.)Memorize enough data about social cues and run facial muscle pattern recognition so you know what to say and when to say it.This is not always successful.Example: a woman approximately your biological age approaches you and proceeds to explain in detail how mad she is at her boyfriend. Example boyfriend is guilty of using her toiletries like toothbrush and comb when he comes over, and leaving towels on the bathroom floor. “Such a slob,” she says, gripping her beer like a club. “How do you manage men?” You ask if she has told him to bring his own toothbrush and comb and to hang up the towels. It seems the first logical step: factual communication. “He should figure it out!” she says. You are confused. You say that maybe he is unaware of the protocols she has in place. She gives you a strange look, huffs her breath out, and walks off.Now the woman’s friends ignore you and you notice their stares and awkward pauses when you are within their proximity. You have no escape because you didn’t drive separately.Ask your boyfriend not to take you to any more parties. Jonathan and I lounge on the plush leather couch in his apartment. He takes up most of it, and I curl against his side. We have a bowl of popcorn and we’re watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.“I have something to tell you,” he says. His shoulders tense.I keep watching the TV.  He knows I pay attention when he tells me things, even if I don’t look at him. “Okay.”“I’m...” He hesitates. The Borg fire on the Enterprise again. “I’m seeing someone else.”“Another guy?” I ask, hopeful.“Yeah. I met him at the gym. His name’s Bernardo.”I sigh in relief. Secrets are heavy and hurt when you have to carry them around all your life. (I have to make lists to keep track of mine.) “I’m glad. Are you going to tell anyone?”He relaxes and squeezes my hand. “Just you right now. But from what he’s told me, his family’s pretty accepting.”“Lucky,” I say.We scrape extra butter off the bowl with the last kernels of popcorn.We’ve been pretend-dating for two years now. We’ve never slept together. That’s okay. I like cuddling with him and he likes telling me about crazy customers at his firm, and everyone thinks we’re a perfectly adorable straight couple on the outside.The empty spot in my chest grows bigger as I watch Data on screen. Data has the entire crew of the Enterprise. Jonathan has Bernardo now. I don’t know if the robot will be interested in me in return. (What if the robot isn’t?)The room shrinks in on me, the umber-painted walls and football memorabilia suffocating. I jerk to my feet.Jonathan mutes the TV. “Something wrong?”“I have to go.”“Want me to drive you home?”“It’s four blocks away.” But I appreciate his offer, so I add, “But thanks.”I find my coat piled by the door while he takes the popcorn bowl into the kitchen.Jonathan leans against the wall as I carefully lace each boot to the proper tightness. “If you want to talk, Tesla, I’ll listen.”I know that. He came out to me before we started dating. I told him I wasn’t interested in socially acceptable relationships, either, and he laughed and looked so relieved he almost cried. We made an elaborate plan, a public persona our families wouldn’t hate.I’m not ready to trust him as much as he trusts me.“Night, Jonathan.”“Goodnight, Tesla.” How to tell your fake boyfriend you would like to become a robot:Tell him, “I would like to be a robot.” You can also say, “I am really a robot, not a female-bodied biological machine,” because that is closer to the truth.Do not tell him anything. If you do, you will also have to admit that you think about ways to hurt yourself so you have an excuse to replace body parts with machine parts.Besides, insurance is unlikely to cover your transition into a robot. I have this nightmare more and more often.I’m surrounded by robots. Some of them look like the J-90 SRM, some are the newer androids, some are computer cores floating in the air. I’m the only human.I try to speak, but I have no voice. I try to touch them, but I can’t lift my hands. I try to follow them as they walk over a hill and through two huge doors, like glowing LED screens, but I can’t move.Soon, all the robots are gone and I’m all alone in the empty landscape. 11 Reasons you want to become a robot:Robots are logical and know their purpose.Robots have programming they understand.Robots are not held to unattainable standards and then criticized when they fail.Robots are not crippled by emotions they don’t know how to process.Robots are not judged based on what sex organs they were born with.Robots have mechanical bodies that are strong and durable. They are not required to have sex.Robots do not feel guilt (about existing, about failing, about being something other than expected).Robots can multitask.Robots do not feel unsafe all the time.Robots are perfect machines that are capable and functional and can be fixed if something breaks.Robots are happy. It’s Saturday, so I head to the Purple Bean early.The robot isn’t there.I stare at the polished chrome and plastic K-100, which has a molded face that smiles with humanistic features.“Welcome to the Purple Bean,” the new robot says in a chirpy voice that has inflection and none of the mechanical monotone I like about the old robot. “I’m Janey. How can I serve you today?”“Where’s the J-90 SRM?”Robbie, the barista who works weekends, leans around the espresso machine and sighs. She must have gotten this question a lot. The panic in my chest is winching so tight it might crack my ribs into little pieces. Why did they retire the robot?“Manager finally got the company to upgrade,” Robbie says. “Like it?”“Where’s the J-90 SRM?”“Eh, recycled, I guess.” Robbie shrugs. “You want the usual?”I can’t look at the new K-100. It isn’t right. It doesn’t belong in the robot’s place, and neither do I. “I have to go.”“Have a wonderful day,” the door says. How to rescue a robot from being scrapped: [skill level: intermediate]Call your boyfriend, who owns an SUV, and ask him to drive you to the Gates-MacDowell recycle plant.Argue with the technician, who refuses to sell you the decommissioned robot. It’s company protocol, he says, and service industry robots are required to have processors and cores wiped before being recycled.Lie and say you only want to purchase the J-90 SRM because you’re starting a collection. Under the law, historical preservation collections are exempt from standardized recycling procedures.Do not commit physical violence on the tech when he hesitates. It’s rude, and he’s only doing his job.Do not admit you asked your boyfriend along because his size is intimidating, and he knows how to look grouchy at eight a.m.The technician will finally agree and give you a claim ticket.Drive around and find the robot in the docking yard.Do not break down when you see how badly the robot has been damaged: the robot’s LED screen cracked, the robot’s chassis has been crunched inwards, the robot’s missing arm.Try not to believe it is your fault. (That is illogical, even if you still have biological processing units.) Two techs wheel the robot out and load it into Jonathan’s car. The gut-punched feeling doesn’t go away. The robot looks so helpless, shut down and blank in the back seat. I flip open the robot’s chassis, but the power core is gone, along with the programming module.The robot is just a shell of what the robot once was.I feel like crying. I don’t want to. It’s uncomfortable and doesn’t solve problems.“What’s wrong, Tesla?” Jonathan asks.I shut the chassis. My hands tremble. “They broke the robot.”“It’ll be okay,” Jonathan says. As if anything can be okay right now. As if there is nothing wrong with me. “You can fix it.”I squirm back into the passenger seat and grip the dash. He’s right. We were friends because we both liked robots and I spent my social studies classes in school researching robotics and programming.“I’ve never done anything this complex,” I say. I’ve only dismantled, reverse-engineered, and rebuilt the small household appliances and computers. No one has ever let me build a robot.“You’ll do fine,” he says. “And if you need help, I know just the guy to ask.”“Who?”“Want to meet my boyfriend?” Necessary questions to ask your boyfriend’s new boyfriend (a former Army engineer of robotics):You’ve been following the development of cyborg bodies, so you ask him if he agrees with the estimates that replacement of all organic tissue sans brain and spinal cord with inorganic machinery is still ten years out, at best. Some scientists predict longer. Some predict never, but you don’t believe them. (He’ll answer that the best the field can offer right now are limbs and some artificial organs.)Ask him how to upload human consciousness into a robot body. (He’ll tell you there is no feasible way to do this yet, and the technology is still twenty years out.)Do not tell him you cannot wait that long. (You cannot last forever.)Instead, ask him if he can get you parts you need to fix the robot. Bernardo—six inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than Jonathan, tattooed neck to ankles, always smelling of cigarettes—is part robot. He lost his right arm at the shoulder socket in an accident, and now wears the cybernetic prosthetic. It has limited sensory perception, but he says it’s not as good as his old hand.I like him. I tell Jonathan this, and my boyfriend beams.“They really gut these things,” Bernardo says when he drops off the power cell.(I want to ask him how much I owe him. But when he says nothing about repayment, I stay quiet. I can’t afford it. Maybe he knows that.)We put the robot in the spare bedroom in my apartment, which Jonathan wanted to turn into an office, but never organized himself enough to do so. I liked the empty room, but now it’s the robot’s home. I hid the late payment notices and overdue bills in a drawer before Jonathan saw them.“Getting a new arm might be tricky, but I have a buddy who works a scrap yard out in Maine,” Bernardo says. “Bet she could dig up the right model parts.”“Thank you.”I’m going to reconstruct the old personality and programming pathways. There are subsystems, “nerve clusters,” that serve as redundant processing. Personality modules get routed through functionality programs, and vestiges of the robot’s personality build up in subsystems. Newer models are completely wiped, but they usually don’t bother with old ones.Bernardo rubs his shaved head. “You realize this won’t be a quick and easy fix, right? Might take weeks. Hell, it might not even work.”I trace a finger through the air in front of the robot’s dark LED screen. I have not been able to ask the robot if I have permission to touch the robot. It bothers me that I have to handle parts and repairs without the robot’s consent. Does that make it wrong? To fix the robot without knowing if the robot wishes to be fixed?Will the robot hate me if I succeed?“I know,” I whisper. “But I need to save the robot.” How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:The biological term is “depression” but you don’t have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it’s a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset.Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don’t have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.)Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you’re sick with a generic bug.You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon.The literal translation of the word “depression”: you are broken and devalued and have no further use.No one refurbishes broken robots.Please self-terminate. I work on the robot during my spare time. I have lots of it now. Working on the robot is the only reason I have to wake up.I need to repair the robot’s destroyed servos and piece together the robot’s memory and function programming from what the computer recovered.There are subroutine lists in my head that are getting bigger and bigger: You will not be able to fix the robot. You do not have enough money to fix the robot. You do not have the skill to fix the robot. The robot will hate you. You are not a robot.Bernardo and Jonathan are in the kitchen. They laugh and joke while making stir fry. I’m not hungry.I haven’t been hungry for a few days now.“You should just buy a new core, Tesla,” Bernardo says. “Would save you a lot of headaches.”I don’t need a blank, programmable core. What I want is the robot who worked in the Purple Bean. The robot who asked for my order, like the robot did every customer. But the moment I knew I could love this robot was when the robot asked what I would like to be called. “Tesla,” I said, and the blue LED smiley face in the upper corner of the robot’s screen flickered in a shy smile.Everyone knows robots are not people.There’s silence in the kitchen. Then Jonathan says, quietly, “Tesla, what’s this?”I assume he’s found the eviction notice. Reasons why you want to self-terminate (a partial list):Your weekly visit to your parents’ house in the suburbs brings the inevitable question about when you will marry your boyfriend, settle down (so you can pop out babies), and raise a family.You don’t tell them you just lost your job.You make the mistake of mentioning that you’re going to your best friend Melinda’s wedding next weekend. You’re happy for her: she’s finally marrying her longtime girlfriend, Kimberly.That sets your dad off on another rant about the evils of gay people and how they all deserve to die.(You’ve heard this all your life. You thought you escaped it when you were eighteen and moved out. But you never do escape, do you? There is no escape.)You make a second mistake and talk back. You’ve never done that; it’s safer to say nothing. But you’re too stressed to play safe, so you tell him he’s wrong and that it’s hurting you when he says that.That makes him paranoid and he demands that you tell him you aren’t one of those fags too.You don’t tell your parents you’re probably asexual and you really want to be a robot, because robots are never condemned because of who they love.You stop listening as he gets louder and louder, angrier and angrier, until you’re afraid he will reach for the rifle in the gun cabinet.You run from the house and are almost hit by a truck. Horns blare and slushy snow sprays your face as you reach the safety of the opposite sidewalk.You wish you were three seconds slower so the bumper wouldn’t have missed you. It was a big truck.You start making another list. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Jonathan asks, more concerned than angry. “I would’ve helped out.”I shrug.The subroutine list boots up: You are not an adult if you cannot exist independently at all times. Therefore, logically, you are a non-operational drone. You will be a burden on everyone. You already are. Self-terminate.“I thought I could manage,” I say. The robot’s LED screen is still cracked and dark. I wonder what the robot dreams about.Bernardo is quiet in the kitchen, giving us privacy.Jonathan rubs his eyes. “Okay. Look. You’re always welcome to stay with me and Bern. We’ll figure it out, Tesla. Don’t we always?”I know how small his apartment is. Bernardo has just moved in with him; there’s no space left.“What about the robot?” I ask. How to self-destruct: a robot’s guide.Water damage. Large bodies of water will short-circuit internal machinery. In biological entities, this is referred to as “drowning.” There are several bridges nearby, and the rivers are deep.Overload. Tapping into a power source far beyond what your circuits can handle, such as an industrial grade electric fence. There is one at the Gates-MacDowell recycle plant.Complete power drain. Biologically this is known as blood-loss. There are plenty of shaving razors in the bathroom.Substantial physical damage. Explosives or crushing via industrial recycling machines will be sufficient. Option: stand in front of a train.Impact from substantial height; a fall. You live in a very high apartment complex.Corrupt your internal systems by ingesting industrial grade chemicals. Acid is known to damage organic and inorganic tissue alike.Fill in the blank. (Tip: use the internet.) Bernardo’s family owns a rental garage, and he uses one of the units for rebuilding his custom motorcycle. He says I can store the robot there, until another unit opens up.Jonathan has moved his Budweiser memorabilia collection into storage so the small room he kept it in is now an unofficial bedroom. He shows it to me and says I can move in anytime I want. He and Bernardo are sharing his bedroom.I don’t know what to do.I have no operating procedures for accepting help.I should self-destruct and spare them all. That would be easier, wouldn’t it? Better for them?But the robot isn’t finished.I don’t know what to do. How to have awkward conversations about your relationship with your boyfriend and your boyfriend’s boyfriend:Agree to move in with them. Temporarily. (You feel like you are intruding. Try not to notice that they both are genuinely happy to have you live with them.)Order pizza and watch the Futurama marathon on TV.Your boyfriend says, “I’m going to come out to my family. I’ve written a FB update and I just have to hit send.”Your boyfriend’s boyfriend kisses him and you fistbump them both in celebration.You tell him you’re proud of him. You will be the first to like his status.He posts the message to his wall. You immediately like the update.(You don’t know what this means for your façade of boyfriend/girlfriend.)Your boyfriend says, “Tesla, we need to talk. About us. About all three of us.” You know what he means. Where do you fit in now?You say, “Okay.”“I’m entirely cool with you being part of this relationship, Tesla,” your boyfriend’s boyfriend says. “Who gives a fuck what other people think? But it’s up to you, totally.”“What he said,” your boyfriend says. “Hell, you can bring the robot in too. It’s not like any of us object to robots as part of the family.” He pats his boyfriend’s cybernetic arm. “We’ll make it work.”You don’t say, “I can be a robot and that’s okay?” Instead, you tell them you’ll think about it. I write another list.I write down all the lists.  In order. In detail.Then I print them out and give them to Jonathan and Bernardo.The cover page has four letters on it: H-E-L-P. Reasons why you should avoid self-termination (right now):Jonathan says, “If you ever need to talk, I’ll listen.”Bernardo says, “It’ll get better. I promise it does. I’ve been there, where you’re at, thinking there’s nothing more than the world fucking with you. I was in hell my whole childhood and through high school.” He’ll show you the scars on his wrists and throat, his tattoos never covering them up. “I know it fucking hurts. But there’s people who love you and we’re willing to help you survive. You’re strong enough to make it.”Your best friend Melinda says, “Who else is going to write me snarky texts while I’m at work or go to horror movies with me (you know my wife hates them) or come camping with us every summer like we’ve done since we were ten?” And she’ll hold her hands out and say, “You deserve to be happy. Please don’t leave.”You will get another job.You will function again, if you give yourself time and let your friends help. And they will. They already do.The robot needs you.Because if you self-terminate, you won’t have a chance to become a robot in the future. “Hey, Tesla,” Jonathan says, poking his head around the garage-workshop door. “Bern and I are going over to his parents for dinner. Want to come?”“Hey, I’ll come for you anytime,” Bernardo calls from the parking lot.Jonathan rolls his eyes, his goofy smile wider than ever.I shake my head. The robot is almost finished. “You guys have fun. Say hi for me.”“You bet.”The garage is silent. Ready.I sit by the power grid. I’ve unplugged all the other devices, powered down the phone and the data hub. I carefully hid Bernardo’s bike behind a plastic privacy wall he used to divide the garage so we each have a workspace.We’re alone, the robot and I.I rig up a secondary external power core and keep the dedicated computer running the diagnostic.The robot stands motionless, the LED screen blank. It’s still cracked, but it will function.“Can you hear me?” I ask. “Are you there?”The robot:I power up the robot and key the download sequence, re-installing the rescued memory core.The robot’s screen flickers. The blue smiley face appears in the center, split with spiderweb cracks.“Hello,” I say.“Hello, Tesla,” the robot says.“How do you feel?”“I am well,” the robot says. “I believe you saved my life.”The hole closes in my chest, just a little.The robot’s clean, symmetrical lines and tarnished purple surface glow. The robot is perfect. I stand up.“How may I thank you for your help, Tesla?”“Is there a way I can become a robot too?”The robot’s pixelated face shifts; now the robot’s expression frowns. “I do not know, Tesla. I am not programmed with such knowledge. I am sorry.”I think about the speculative technical papers I read, articles Bernardo forwarded to me.“I have a hypothesis,” I tell the robot. “If I could power myself with enough electricity, my electromagnetic thought patterns might be able to travel into a mechanical apparatus such as the computer hub.”(Consciousness uploads aren’t feasible yet.)“I believe such a procedure would be damaging to your current organic shell,” the robot says.Yes, I understand electrocution’s effects on biological tissue. I have thought about it before. (Many times. All the time.)The robot says, “May I suggest that you consider the matter before doing anything regrettable, Tesla?”And I reply:The robot says: “I should not like to see you deprogrammed and consigned to the scrapping plant for organic tissue.”And I reply:The robot says: “I will be sad if you die.”I look up at the frowning blue pixel face. And I think of Jonathan and Bernardo returning and finding my body stiff and blackened, my fingers plugged into the power grid.The robot extends one blocky hand. “Perhaps I would be allowed to devise a more reliable solution? I would like to understand you better, if that is acceptable.” The blue lines curve up into a hopeful smile.The robot is still here. Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Melinda and Kimberly are here. I’m not a robot (yet), but I’m not alone.“Is this an acceptable solution, Tesla?” the robot asks.I take the robot’s hand, and the robot’s blocky fingers slowly curl around mine. “Yes. I would like that very much.” Then I ask the robot, “What would you like me to call you?” How to become a robot:You don’t.Not yet.But you will.END Outro:"How to Become A Robot in 12 Easy Steps" was first published in Scigentasy in March 2014. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you'd like, but please don't change or sell it. Our theme is "Aurora Borealis" by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you again on April 9th with a selection of three flash fiction stories.[Music plays out]This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Queers Destroy Science Fiction edition of Lightspeed Magazine is currently open on Kickstarter for financial contributions. Contributions’ terms and conditions are also listed on the kickstarter ... The post “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” with Seanan McGuire and Mark Oshiro appeared first on Dark Matter Zine.

It’s the Butt Panel from Readercon! Moderated by Amal El-Mohtar with Mikki Kendall, Julia Sparkymonster, Emily Wagner, and Vinnie Tesla. Here’s the official description:The Booty Don’t Lie: A Cheeky Discussion of Butts in Literature.This panel is about butts. Fundamentally divisive, throughout history the humble buttocks has often found itself at the intersection of concerns about gender, sexuality, race, and truly terrible puns. This gameshow-style discussion of butts in literature and popular culture promises to be deep, probing, and entertaining in equal measure; join us in reasoning a posteriori. Picture of the panelists twerkingThings mentioned in the panel:Saartjie Baartman,the “Hottentot Venus”“Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix A Lot (“She’s so … black.” and “LA face with Oakland Booty” and "An itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face.")  “Bootylicious” by Destiny’s Child  (“I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly. My body’s too bootylicious for ya babe.”)“Q.U.E.E.N.” by Janelle Monae, featuring Erykah Badu (“The booty don’t lie.”) “Poison” by Bell Biv Devoe (“Never trust a big butt and a smile.”) Insults of note:Bundle of ass twigs (Amal’s gift to the world)Ass bucketAss hat (as a gateway to ass haberdashery — “What is this ass haberdashery?”)Fashion:Alexander McQueen’s Bumster trousers Chaps (Should they be worn with or without trousers? The panelists say yes.)Prince’s buttless pants at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards Visual Art:Vegetable art by Guiseppe Arcimboldo Amal passed around a similar piece of art depicting a face made of butts. Possible it was by André Martins de Barros? Avengers Booty Ass-emble by Kevin Bolk The Hieronymus Bosch butt song Misc pop culture:Hellboy: The Soul of Venice (about Cloacina, the Etruscan sewer goddess) Le Pétomane Literature:“The Miller’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Finally a note that the Queers Destroy Science Fiction special issue of Lightspeed is now open to submissions!