Podcast appearances and mentions of rose lemberg

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

Instar by Carrow Narby       They just broke ground this week on a new high rise. When they cracked into the earth it flooded the neighborhood with the stench of sulfur. There’s a layer of ancient rot beneath the pavement. Centuries worth of life, ground into filth. Or so I imagine. I had to look up the source of the smell and some local news site attributed it to “organic materials” in the soil. I was worried that it might be a gas leak. For the past few mornings the wind has pushed the awful smell in through the screen above my bed. As bad as it is, it isn’t worth shutting the window. Even as late summer beats on, I can’t sleep without the weight and softness of ten thousand blankets. Without the breeze my nest would become unbearably hot, so I tolerate the smell of brimstone and corruption. It’s sort of fitting, I think, given the maggoty turn that my life has taken.   Full episode after the cut.   Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 67 for March 8, 2019. This is your host Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Our story today is "Instar" by Carrow Narby, which is part of the Summer 2018 issue of GlitterShip.   Carrow Narby lives on the north shore of Massachusetts. Their writing has been featured in Bitch, The Toast, The Establishment, and PodCastle. Follow them on Twitter @LocalCreature.       Instar by Carrow Narby       They just broke ground this week on a new high rise. When they cracked into the earth it flooded the neighborhood with the stench of sulfur. There’s a layer of ancient rot beneath the pavement. Centuries worth of life, ground into filth. Or so I imagine. I had to look up the source of the smell and some local news site attributed it to “organic materials” in the soil. I was worried that it might be a gas leak. For the past few mornings the wind has pushed the awful smell in through the screen above my bed. As bad as it is, it isn’t worth shutting the window. Even as late summer beats on, I can’t sleep without the weight and softness of ten thousand blankets. Without the breeze my nest would become unbearably hot, so I tolerate the smell of brimstone and corruption. It’s sort of fitting, I think, given the maggoty turn that my life has taken. There are these long, wonderful moments, in between waking and rising, when I am both sentient and senseless. The light doesn’t resolve yet into images. Sensation doesn’t crystallize into meaning. Best of all, I can’t feel my body or apprehend its shape. You see an awful lot about monsters these days. Just everywhere you look, endless breathless chatter about fucking monsters, turning into monsters, giving birth to monsters. Beautiful and interesting people who just happen to be monsters: some sad grackle-winged boy, a girl with coral antlers. Everyone always looks so slender and sharp. Perfect rows of needle teeth, perfect iridescent scales, perfect gold stiletto claws. It seems downright glamorous, like it would all be neon witches’ sabbaths and subterranean raves or something. For me, monsterhood is mostly just strangers demanding to know what I am. There wasn’t any kind of initiation waiting for me. No coven or cabal. No prophecy or secret past was revealed. It was on my own and by creeping increments that I realized I had become a thing. Kris is a friend of a friend. I saw her around a few parties and we fumbled into each other’s orbits. She called out my name from across the room once, amid the din of disparate conversations. It was so charming, that little gesture of being summoned. I let her ask me out, to sit with her in that park at the edge of the North End. When we meet, she wants to go down Hanover to Mike’s but I point just across the street to a tiny storefront with a blue and yellow sign. “It’s way better,” I insist, and I feel strangely proud as she acquiesces. The leading edge of autumn has brought a welcome break from the suffocating heat, but it also means that the sunlight has shifted. As Kris and I sit together, the late afternoon light lances down at us. It’s relentless, prying. I wonder if she can tell how much I’m trying to hide from it. Despite my anxiety, we talk easily and idly. When she was little, Kris recalls, she heard somewhere about the dangers of zebra mussels. They’re an invasive species around the Great Lakes, she explains. Her mother must have read a sign to her or something, warning boaters to inspect and clean their hulls. Except that Kris was maybe four at the time, and she had no concept yet of what a mussel is. She heard “zebra muscles.” What she pictured, she tells me, was downright nightmarish. Not a muscular zebra or something, but a boat encrusted with disembodied, pulsing zebra flesh. She says that the image came from nowhere except the most literal understanding of what she had heard, and that it became horrible only afterward, in retrospect. “I didn’t understand but I just accepted it,” she laughs. I grin too, and I tell her “I love that.” And I love sitting here, with a friend of a friend that I met at a party. Normality is too distant even to long for, but here is something so conventional, so pleasantly dull. I wonder if there are people who feel like this all the time and I almost ask that out loud. But all at once I realize that she’s looking at me, and I can’t bear it. She can see me in the slanted orange light. The rays reveal the translucency around my edges, the ugly pulse of slime beneath the membrane of my skin. I can feel the buttons of my jacket straining. I can’t eat the pastry that I’ve bought, not in front of her. She must realize that my clothes are holding me into a human shape. She’s imagining the strange organs that shudder and twitch beneath the seams. I can’t force myself to say much more before we part ways. She knows. I’m sure that I won’t hear from her again. I slump back toward Haymarket. I huddle stingless on a crowded E train. My spines are sparse and transient: often I neglect to shave, sometimes my keys poke out through a hole that they’ve worn in the pocket of my coat. It is the fate of monsters, no matter what, to attract would-be monster-slayers. For me, this has never been as straightforward as a jeering mob or as romantic as a lone man with a glittering sword. This time it’s kids. A small group of ninth or tenth graders, maybe, standing on the other side of the train car. They gesture toward me and consult each other in stage whispers, wondering aloud what I could possibly be. There’s this image, a fragment of a story. I don’t remember where I picked it up or what first made me think of it, but it’s there in my brain and it’s this: Once upon a time a baby was found in a beehive. By chance, a passing witch heard a newborn’s squall. Amid a hovering cloud of bees, she cracked apart a hollow log. And there was an infant nestled in the rot, slick with honey, as pale as a grub. I don’t know what happens after that or why any of it happened at all. It had started with sacrificing some of the other larvae to widen her cell. And things just took off from there, I suppose. Things took a turn, as they will do. At home I start to undress as soon as I’ve closed the door. When I finally peel the tight undermost layer away from my torso, my body sags out, shapeless. I slump onto the bed and burrow down into the tangle of blankets. As I curl up tight, I tuck a bit of sheet between every segment and fold, so that I don’t have to feel the awful touch of myself. I can’t say when or how my metamorphosis began. Day by day I watched my face bloat outward, swallowing up my eyes, my jaw. My skin became a pallid casing. It strains to hold in my shuddering mass, as if my body wants to burst and dissolve. I have always been drawn to hollows and nests and to the dirt. Spaces in the dark where a thing might press itself flush against the walls, unseen and safe. As a child I would build a cairn of pillows around myself before falling asleep. I used to turn over the rocks that edged my mother’s garden, to watch the millipedes and woodlice scatter. Eager to recoil from the sight of a grub writhing helplessly against the light. In my tiny apartment there is an alcove that, I think, was meant for a writing desk. But I wedged my bed into it, and closed it off with a heavy curtain. I guess that it has all been a sort of instinctive preparation. Like the bees widening the larval infant’s cell. The thing is, it’s not just shiny little flying things that start their lives as fat, fumbling worms. It isn’t all butterflies and bluebottles. There are things in the world that wriggle freely as larvae and then pupate into sessile blobs. I think about all those mornings when I stretch out shapeless and insensible. I wonder if I’ll turn out to be more of a sea sponge than a sphinx moth. Kris calls. She wants to see me again. We meet at my place. I don’t know what to say about the evening in the park but she doesn’t ask about it. She calls me by my name again. She wants to know if I’m alright. I tell her about that unshakable image of the bee-child. “What must it be like,” I sigh. To wonder why, out of a sea of sisters, you were the one to swell into something wingless and terrible. “What must it be like,” she echoes. She’s sitting beside me, looking down at her hands. She smells like soap and trampled grass. I want to settle in closer to her—to kiss her, I realize—but she has seen me in that searching autumn light. “You know,” I say. She takes my hand. “Is that your bed?” she asks, nodding toward the alcove. “Yes.” “Can I show you something?” I don’t know how to respond. She tugs me gently toward the bed and draws the curtain aside. The final cast-off rays of sunset are glancing in through the window. She turns and looks at me. Her cheek catches the light with a faint damson iridescence. She tilts her head and reveals a weird translucency about her neck and face. I can see the steady pulse of veins and pulpy glands beneath her skin. Her tone isn’t mocking, just forthright, as she asks, “Did you really think that you were special?” I guess that I did. I tell her: “I thought I was alone.” She reaches out to draw me close. We sink down into my nest and curl up tight against each other. In her touch I can feel the hum of twenty thousand sisters, the promise of clover and of wings.   END     “Instar” was originally published in The Fem, and is © Copyright Carrow Narby, 2017. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. You can also pick up a free audio book by going to www.audibletrial.com/glittership or buy your own copy of the Summer 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with "These are the Attributes by Which You Shall Know God" by Rose Lemberg.    

This week the Drabblecast brings you three stories about shipwrecks, murder, and Nazis. It’s a Losses and Sacrifices Trifecta! “Seven Losses of Na Re” by Rose Lemberg This is a brooding look back on things taken, things lost, and things always remembered. Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Their […] The post Drabblecast 396 – Trifecta: Losses & Sacrifices appeared first on The Drabblecast.

Join Victor and Simon today as we discuss Exalted: Graceful Wicked Masques -- how it relates to Changeling: the Dreaming, its strengths as a source of inspiration, its weaknesses in creating something actually playable, and some of the likely real world inspiration that went into the book. Readings How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War by Rose Lemberg, Selected Poems of Saigyo Hoshi, and Family Terrorists by Antoya Nelson. Music LSD by Mon Plaisir, Four by Monplaisir, and Agony of Echoes by Yaka-anima. Sounds Walking on Pavement, Office Ambience, Singing Mountain, Crows Talking, Bell Tolls, Fraser Range Salt Lake Eve   To purchase Changeling: the Dreaming as well as a wide array of other role playing texts go to DriveThruRPG.com. We have a blog now! Come read some of our more fully developed thoughts about playing and playing with the Changeling: the Dreaming rules and setting at Parting the Mists. Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of White Wolf Publishing AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit white-wolf.com.

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.  

Immigrating, changing priorities, and translating, oh my! Sabrina Vourvoulias, Rose Lemberg and Bogi Takács join Julia in this two-part discussion episode about their personal experiences as immigrants to the United States and how that experience has affected their writing. They also discuss the challenges that immigrants face in the publishing industry and speculative fiction community. We […]

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

Cooking with Closed Mouths by Kerry Truong A gumiho could run faster than shadows spread, but since Ha Neul doubted that Americans would take kindly to a nine-tailed fox streaking down Los Angeles’ busy streets, they opted to walk to the bus stop in the falling darkness after work. The cool night air was a relief after the hot confines of Mrs. Chang’s restaurant, where Ha Neul had spent the day carrying heavy dishes and enduring customers’ complaints. Mrs. Chang’s mediocre food attracted few customers, and her refusal to use air conditioning made those who did come disinclined to be generous. Ha Neul never told her this, of course, because what was the point of trying to change people’s ways? For this silence they were rewarded with meager wages and leftovers that turned to ashes in their mouth.   Full transcript after the cut. ----more---- [Intro music plays] Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 35 for March 22, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story this week is a GlitterShip original: “Cooking with Closed Mouths" by Kerry Truong. Kerry Truong writes about many things, including folktale and horror. Their hobbies are futilely trying to train their dogs; tearing their hair out while reading comics; and eating good food. They like their meat rare, and if a story doesn’t mention food at least once, it wasn’t written by them. You can follow their queer firebreathing on Twitter @springbamboos. We also have a guest reader! R Chang hails from a small valley on the West coast, where they moonlight as an artist. Their dearest wish in life is to quit their day job and establish a farm for dogs.   Cooking with Closed Mouths by Kerry Truong   A gumiho could run faster than shadows spread, but since Ha Neul doubted that Americans would take kindly to a nine-tailed fox streaking down Los Angeles’ busy streets, they opted to walk to the bus stop in the falling darkness after work. The cool night air was a relief after the hot confines of Mrs. Chang’s restaurant, where Ha Neul had spent the day carrying heavy dishes and enduring customers’ complaints. Mrs. Chang’s mediocre food attracted few customers, and her refusal to use air conditioning made those who did come disinclined to be generous. Ha Neul never told her this, of course, because what was the point of trying to change people’s ways? For this silence they were rewarded with meager wages and leftovers that turned to ashes in their mouth. Today was no different. After mediating between Mrs. Chang and angry customers, Ha Neul was finally left in peace, a bag of banchan the only payment for their troubles. They stood at the bus stop in a crowd of other commuters, careful to remain at the edges where they could go unnoticed but still hear the conversations around them. There was chatter about everything from peace in Viet Nam to some boxing championship or another. Ha Neul didn’t understand the voracious interest humans showed in things that would only fade from memory or repeat themselves in a matter of years. Still, they liked listening. There was something comforting about the way humans kept going, as full of energy as if they were the first to experience these things. When the bus arrived, Ha Neul boarded in a stream of other passengers, shouldering their way through until they could find a place to stand. Proximity filled their nose with the tang of everyone around them and made their stomach clench. They ignored it, used to the hunger. Instead of thinking about it, they studied the people closest to them. An older woman stood next to them in the aisle, her eyes drifting closed as if the lurch and stop of the bus were a lullaby. A pair of students on their other side consulted each other in urgent voices about what songs to put on a mixtape for a crush. Ha Neul listened with amusement. It must be nice, they thought, to be caught up in the rhythm of falling in and out of love; to hope over and over that warmth could be found in the clasp of another person’s hand.   At home, Hana was waiting for them, her homework fanned out on the kitchen table. Their one-bedroom apartment was too small for a proper desk, and neither of them had much use for the kitchen’s traditional function, so Hana had claimed it as her study room. The table was often strewn with books and papers and half-chewed pens. Ha Neul had given up on putting the mess into any kind of order. No matter how hard they tried, the table would be cluttered again within the day. Hana waved when they came in. “Took you long enough to get home! Did Mrs. Chang give you food again?” Ha Neul nodded, searching for an empty spot to set the bag down. After a moment they gave up and simply handed it to Hana. “All mine, and none for oppa,” she sang. Ha Neul sat down next to her as she searched through the bag, their body heavy from exhaustion. They relaxed in the warmth of the kitchen, watching as Hana tasted each banchan in turn. She was eager to try them all, which was why Ha Neul always accepted Mrs. Chang’s leftovers. It didn’t matter if the food couldn’t make her full. It reminded her of home, of a life where she’d had family and people to belong to. Ha Neul’s stomach clenched again. They went to the refrigerator and opened it. It was nearly empty, except for the large plastic bag dominating the center shelf and several plastic cartons arranged in neat rows beside it. Ha Neul brought the bag to the table. “Oppa, don’t you dare get blood on my homework,” Hana said as they stacked books and papers to clear a space on the table. “I would never sully the homework of a top student.” Ha Neul took a package wrapped in butcher paper out of the bag and set it on the table. The paper was damp in spots, its white color stained pink by the blood that seeped through it. The tang that Ha Neul had smelled on the bus filled their nose again, this time richer and deeper. Hana stopped eating to watch, her eyes intent. She could smell the blood, too. They unwrapped the paper to reveal hearts, kidneys, slices of liver, and other organ meats, raw and glistening. Ha Neul ate a heart, ripping the muscle with their sharp teeth. It was savory, satisfying them in a way Mrs. Chang’s food never could, making them crave for more. They reached for a piece of liver as soon as they’d finished the heart. It was good to be home. Hana was still watching them. They thought they could see the hint of a fang beginning to protrude in the corner of her mouth, but when they offered her a kidney she waved it away. “I’m not into solid food.” Ha Neul raised an eyebrow, looking at the banchan. “That’s different. I eat that for fun, not to get full.” “Can you really taste it?” “A little. It’s really faint though, like when you have a cold and can only get an aftertaste.” Ha Neul didn’t understand, having never had a cold. They nodded anyway. “Do you remember what human food tastes like?” Hana looked wistful. “I think I’m forgetting. I know that hotteok are sweet and kimchi jjigae is spicy, but even though I know the words I don’t remember the taste.” She must be nearing forty, but time hadn’t changed the smoothness of her skin or the roundness of her face. If there was one thing that aged her, it was her eyes. They were too knowing. It was only now, with her longing so apparent, that she seemed exactly the high school student that she pretended to be. Ha Neul had known that longing. It had been food that first drew them to humans, after all. So many colors and textures: thick, greasy noodles coated in black bean sauce, kimbap dotted with yellow, green, and orange vegetables, cream-colored crab meat marinated in soy sauce. They supposed it was harder for Hana, though, having actually known what human food tasted like. Reaching over, they squeezed her hand. Hana squeezed their hand back and smiled at them. “How’s your food, oppa?” “Delicious.” “It’s still weird to me how you eat cows and not humans. Isn’t it unsatisfying?” “It’s a good enough substitute.” When reduced to their innards, humans and cows weren’t very different, Ha Neul thought, and offal was easy to get from the butcher for no more than a few cents. Hana trailed a finger through the blood that had congealed on the paper, then licked it off. “You know you’re welcome to come find dinner with me any night.” The food soured in Ha Neul’s mouth. Being hungry around humans was one thing, eating them was another. Thinking about it made them feel ill. “I don’t eat humans anymore,” they said, allowing their voice to get sharp. Hana bit her lip, looking chastised. Ha Neul felt guilty, but they’d told her often enough that they didn’t want to be goaded about their eating habits. They’d tried living as a human long ago, hoping to discover the taste of other food. But a gumiho is a fox at heart, its human appearance a mere illusion, and Ha Neul’s hunger had only grown with each dish they’d eaten. It was all ash. In the end, they’d given into their hunger, only to be horrified by the uniform redness. They’d stopped eating humans by the time they met Hana. She should have known better than to tease them about it. Ha Neul worried that she would sulk, but instead she rummaged through her backpack and brought out a flyer. “Here,” she said, sliding it across to Ha Neul. Her voice was light, the previous subject waved away. “Talking about food reminded me of this. I don’t think I can wiggle my way out of it.” Ha Neul chewed on a piece of liver and read the flyer. It was printed on daffodil yellow paper, the words on it thick, black, and followed by multiple exclamation points. Cartoonish pictures of rice bowls and tacos surrounded the text. “A cultural diversity lunch? What exactly are the students supposed to learn from that?” “How to appreciate other people’s cultures, I guess. Mr. Hanson says we should start learning about diversity in high school.” “I understand that, but why food?” “Because people like food, obviously. We’re all supposed to bring in one dish from our culture.” “What do you want to bring in?” They stared at the pictures of rice bowls. Did her teacher expect her to bring in rice? Even Ha Neul knew that plain rice didn’t make a meal. Hana answered without hesitation. “Kimchi fried rice.” They couldn’t help laughing at her confidence. “And where in the world are we going to get that?” Hana smiled. She was prettiest like that, which was exactly why she smiled widest if she needed a favor. “I was going to ask if Mrs. Chang could make it.” Ha Neul’s answer was as ready as hers had been. “Mrs. Chang is busy and has no money to make kimchi fried rice for free.” “She doesn’t even have to make that much. There are only twenty students in my class.” “Isn’t that still a lot?” Hana pouted. “Please, oppa? I don’t want to be embarrassed. What if everyone else brings something fancy and I don’t have anything?” There was that longing again, not as obscured by the pout as she thought it was. Ha Neul didn’t understand. Food was food, so what did it matter if she brought banchan or kimchi fried rice? But they could see how happy this simple thing would make her, and that mattered. She was their sister by choice, the only person who wanted to share the partial life they led. “All right, I’ll ask Mrs. Chang. Even if she says no, we’ll figure something out. Does that sound good?” “Oh, oppa, I knew I could count on you!” She threw her arms around Ha Neul, startling them. After a beat, they remembered to lift their own arms and hug her back. They held her close, taking comfort in the gesture that was at once strange and warm.   Many years ago, on a warm spring night in Korea, Ha Neul had heard a cry of despair. If they had ignored that cry, they might still be living in Korea, trying to find a way to fit into the jumbled new pattern that the war had created. But they had listened, and that was how they’d found Hana, blood on her shirt and two bite marks on her neck. They couldn’t abandon her to that despair. Instead, they had held their hand out and said come, there is still a way to live. So the two of them had lived, as best as they could, side by side for more than twenty years. When they had decided to go to America, it made the most sense to claim that they were siblings. They’d argued about who should be the elder. Ha Neul had won her over by pointing out that if they were her older brother, they could support her while she went to school. The papers had been made, and the two of them had moved to Los Angeles to join the number of Korean immigrants building a new life along Olympic Boulevard. While Hana finished her last year in high school and dreamed about college admissions, Ha Neul waited tables and lifted boxes, letting Mrs. Chang speak to them as if they were a child. It didn’t matter to them whether Mrs. Chang’s food was good or not. They couldn’t taste any of it, after all. They were content seeing the variety of colors in her kitchen. She, in turn, was grateful for someone who stayed in spite of her temper and the customers’ insults. Ha Neul hoped that her gratefulness would soften her to their request. They made sure to be of extra help in the restaurant the day after Hana showed them the flyer, lifting heavy pots off the stove and chatting with customers until the bad food was forgotten. The restaurant was never busy, and once the lunch hour had passed it was empty. Mrs. Chang used the time to eat her own late lunch. Ha Neul joined her, choking down the rice and drinking cup after cup of tea. They waited until most of the food was gone before saying, “Mrs. Chang, can I ask you a favor?” Her eyes narrowed. Perhaps she thought they would ask for money. Still, her voice was not unkind when she answered. “What is it?” “My sister’s teacher asked her to bring in a dish from her culture for a class project. I was wondering if you could make the food.” “What kind of food?” “Kimchi fried rice.” Mrs. Chang sighed and shook her head. “I don’t think I have the time for that, Ha Neul.” It was the answer they’d expected, but they were still disappointed. “It’s not too difficult to make, is it? I’ll even work extra hours in the restaurant in exchange for it.” “After a whole day of cooking, do you think I’d have the energy to make more food for a bunch of children? I have my own family to take care of once I’m done here.” She stood up and stacked the empty dishes to take back into the kitchen. “Mrs. Chang, please.” “I already said no!” Ha Neul stood up as she started walking back to the kitchen. “Then at least teach me how to make it.” She turned around. “What was that?” Food is food, Ha Neul thought, and food was only ash in their mouth. But they’d promised Hana that they would help her. “Teach me how to cook, Mrs. Chang. If I learn, then I can help you in the kitchen, too.” She studied them for a moment. They wondered if they looked desperate, if it was that or the promise of help that made her say, “All right then. But I don’t want to hear any complaints because it’s too hard, understand?” “Oh, perfectly,” Ha Neul said, and followed her into the kitchen, already questioning the wisdom of learning how to cook without taste.   Hana’s luncheon was in a week, and in that week Ha Neul dedicated themself to learning how to cook. The radio in the kitchen played Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder songs as Mrs. Chang showed Ha Neul how to make galbi and gamjatang, kimbap and gyeranjjim. Although she wasn’t an unkind teacher, she was also not gentle. Ha Neul disliked the way she grabbed their hand to show them how to chop vegetables, or how she would take the ladle from them to taste soup. They learned quickly, however, and their dishes soon looked the same as Mrs. Chang’s. They began to take their own pleasure with food, relishing in the clean crack that split an egg and the feel of rice grains slipping through their fingers. Taste was lost to them, but they could still see, and hear, and feel. The first dish they brought out to customers, however, fared no better than any of Mrs. Chang’s. “Do you call this samgyetang?” asked a middle-aged woman with tightly permed hair. Ha Neul had known she would be trouble the moment she’d walked in. Something about her pinched mouth had foreshadowed grief. Putting on a practiced smile, they said, “I’m sorry if the soup isn’t good. Should I bring you something else?” “Nothing you brought is any good. The banchan isn’t even seasoned well!” Ha Neul bit their tongue, even though their hands ached from chopping meat and mixing seasoning. Before they could regain the patience to smile, however, the woman sighed. “Forget it. I’m sorry. It’s just been a long time since I had a good meal, and I thought I’d find it here.” Ha Neul studied how deep the wrinkles on her face ran, how calloused her hands were. They wondered how long she had been in America, and what kind of dishes she had the energy to make after a long day of work. Did she have family to care for? When was the last time she’d eaten something someone else made for her? The woman got her wallet and began counting out bills. Before she could set them on the table, Ha Neul said, “I’m sorry, but could you tell me how you’d like the food to be seasoned?” Later, Mrs. Chang told them that they had too little pride. “You listen too much to other people’s complaining.” Ha Neul just laughed, and she looked at them as she often did, like something strange and half unwanted. Still, they kept listening to the complaints. They memorized how much sesame oil to add and how long meat should stay in the pan. They noted the exact shade of orange that carrots turned when they were tender but not limp, and the translucence of onions that would be just sweet enough. The complaints lessened and more customers began to come to the restaurant, brought in by word of mouth. Mrs. Chang talked of giving Ha Neul a raise. They heard the hesitance in her voice and declined. It was enough to spend time in the kitchen while Mrs. Chang served the customers, her temper improved by their praises. Soon, Ha Neul became the kitchen’s only occupant. They preferred it that way, with only the radio to keep them company. This much of human food they had mastered, and they were content to stay in the confines of the kitchen for a long time, basking in its vivid colors.   The day before Hana’s potluck, Ha Neul stopped by a supermarket on the way home. They returned to the apartment laden with plastic bags. The kitchen table was as messy as ever, but there was no sign of Hana. No doubt she was out getting food. They cleared the kitchen table, making room for the ingredients they’d bought from the supermarket. The stove, which had been untouched since they moved in, flared to life without protest. They made rice, and while the water bubbled and spit, they sliced kimchi and diced Spam. They didn’t like Spam. Its sickly pink color reminded them of red watered down, and it slid out of the can with a slither that made them shudder. But it was cheap and Hana liked it, so they tipped the diced ham into the pan without looking at it. Steam filled the air. Ha Neul made more than enough kimchi fried rice for Hana’s classmates, then set aside a little extra for her when she came back. It was dark when Hana returned home. She was wearing a green polka dot dress, her hair in a ponytail. There was blood on her. Ha Neul could smell it as soon as she walked through the door, and their stomach clenched. “I’m in the kitchen,” they called out to her. She walked in, the scent of blood following her. It pervaded the kitchen, making Ha Neul forget, for a moment, the food on the stove. Their stomach growled and their mouth ran dry. They hadn’t eaten all day. “Oppa, you’re cooking!” Hana said, coming up next to them. They focused on the rice in the pan, stirring it to mix the kimchi and Spam evenly. The Spam had darkened to a deep pink.  “Of course I am. Unless I’m mistaken, your potluck is tomorrow.” “You look like a professional chef.” They smiled in spite of the smell of blood in their nose. “Your compliment is appreciated. Now go wash your hands. I made some for you to eat tonight.” Hana clapped her hands and ran to do as they said. By the time she came back, the scent of blood had eased, and Ha Neul could hand her the bowl of kimchi fried rice without their hand trembling. “How is it?” they asked as she began to eat. She closed her eyes and chewed. Ha Neul knew she could barely taste it, but there was happiness on her face. “It’s delicious, oppa. I know it is.” They couldn’t smell the blood anymore. Ha Neul felt the warmth of the kitchen again, the steam in the air. They watched Hana eat, a little longing mixed with their pleasure in her enjoyment. The two of them would have made a proper family if only Ha Neul could sit down and eat with her. But if Hana was content with only the hint of flavor, then they were content with only this, its reflection. They turned back to the stove, and shut it off.   On the morning of Hana’s potluck, Ha Neul carried a tin foil tray of kimchi fried rice to her bus stop, handing it to her carefully before running to catch their own bus. A disheveled man with a hoarse voice harangued passengers about sinning as the bus crawled its way down Wilshire, and the couple in front of Ha Neul argued in whispers, almost hissing as each accused the other of infidelity. Ha Neul listened with half an ear, looking out the window at the Ford Pintos inching past and the dusty haze that made everything outside glow. The restaurant was dark and cool, not yet overheated by the stoves. Ha Neul put the chairs in place and wiped the tabletops while Mrs. Chang chatted with her sister, who had joined them for the day. The sister had arrived in America only the week before, and Mrs. Chang was eager to have someone who knew the same people she did and shared the same hopes for this new life. Ha Neul didn’t interrupt their conversation, dreaming instead about the food they would make that day: the chill of the soy sauce on their skin, the true red of gochujang dark against the silver of the spoon, the steam beading their face in sweat whenever they lifted the lid off a pot. No customers complained that day, and Mrs. Chang sent Ha Neul home with more galbi and banchan than usual. Ha Neul had made the food, but they chose to feel kindly towards Mrs. Chang for her generosity. At home, Hana was waiting for them. The tin foil tray sat next to her on the table, still burdened with its food. It was bent slightly out of shape. Bits of rice flecked the tabletop around it. Hana’s mouth was pursed tightly, but it quivered when Ha Neul asked her, “What’s wrong?” “They said it smelled bad and made fun of me for eating Spam. What do they know? I could eat them instead!” Ha Neul knew she would have cried, if she could. They sat down next to her, some vice grip squeezing their chest. For Hana’s sake, they smiled. “I’d advise against it. They probably don’t taste good.” “They’re ungrateful punks. You worked so hard to make this and they wouldn’t even eat it.” “I am hardly insulted by the bad taste of children a fraction my age.” Hana wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a habit she still hadn’t unlearned. Whenever she was angry or upset, her hand went to her eyes as if there were still tears to stem. Ha Neul took her hand and squeezed it. Her skin was dry and smooth, eroded by neither time nor care. In that respect, she was different from her classmates and everyone else around her. It was hard to remember that difference, however, when she was squeezing Ha Neul’s hand so tightly, looking for comfort after a hurt that should have been slight. After a moment she said, “I wanted to eat this fried rice.” Ha Neul squeezed her hand again. “You can eat all of it now, if you want.” “No, I wanted to really eat it. I wanted it to taste like kimchi fried rice should, to make me full.” Hana stomped to the drawers and came back with a plastic spoon. “Even though those little ingrates can eat, they won’t make use of it.” She dug into the rice hard enough to bend the flimsy plastic and began eating. Another layer of sadness settled over Ha Neul, heavy and thick as the smog that pervaded Los Angeles. They should have listened to their own advice from the beginning: food was food. How could it teach people anything? Perhaps for Hana’s classmates, the kimchi fried rice was not a sign of comfort and family, but of something else entirely. Perhaps some of their fox’s nature made its way into the dish, marking it as something fearful. “I’m sorry.” They felt useless with only those words for comfort. “It’s not your fault, oppa.” The two of them sat in silence as Hana ate. Ha Neul knew she could finish the whole tray. It wouldn’t make her full, after all. They sat and watched her, trying to imagine what it tasted like and only remembering the crunch of the kimchi under their knife, the splash of red over white rice, the Spam glistening pinkly before they’d thrown it in the pan. Things which were only parts of the whole, not enough to fill the quiet of this kitchen. Ha Neul wanted, as they hadn’t in years, to take a spoonful of food and taste it. But they knew, even before they finished the thought, that it would be nothing but ash. All they could do was say, “I’ll make you as much food as you want.” Hana smiled, and though the corners of her mouth lifted, her expression didn’t brighten. She looked her age. “Even if I’ll never be able to tell how good it is?” “Of course.” They thought about the colors of different ingredients, the textures under their hands. No matter what other people thought, they didn’t want to forget any of that. As long as Hana wanted food they would cook, and the two of them would keep trying, again and again, to discover taste in the warmth of this kitchen.   END   “Cooking with Closed Mouths” is copyright Kerry Truong, 2017. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back soon with a reprint of "How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War” by Rose Lemberg.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents poetry from the October issues of Strange Horizons."Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas Lost at Sea, 1527" by Lisa M. Bradley read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Lisa here. "The Ash Manifesto" by Rose Lemberg read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here. "Their Song" by E. P. Beaumont read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about E. P. here. "My Heart Is Set on Wandering" by Lev Mirov read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Lev here.

Brenna joins us to talk about the phenomenon that is Pokémon Go, as well as discuss Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds by Rose Lemberg for our shared experience! Discussion of Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds begins at 38:29. You can support Rose Lemberg on Patreon, which can be found here. Our break music this episode is "Pokémon" by Neil Cicierega. Our podcast theme is "April Elsewhere" by The Orchestral Movement of 1932 found via Opsound.org.

This is the podcast for the poetry released as part of the Strange Horizons 2014 Fund Drive special issue.  It includes: "Salamander Song" written by Rose Lemberg and Emily Jiang.  The spoken portions are read by Clare McBride.  The musical portions were sung by Emily Jiang with Mary Tusa on the piano.  You can see the original text of the poem and read more about Rose and Emily here. "Cloud Wall" by Arkady Martine, read by Julia Rios.  You can read the original text of the poem and more about Arkady here.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the November issues of Strange Horizons. "Mary Shelley Makes a Monster" by Octavia Cade read by Chris Galford. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Octavia here. "I Am Alive" by Lev Mirov read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Lev here. "Actaeon" by Alice Fanchiang read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Alice here. "Ranra's Unbalancing" by Rose Lemberg read by Rose Lemberg. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the Fund Drive issues of Strange Horizons. "The Truth of Briars" by Jane Yolen read by Yolen. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jane here. "B'resheet" by Julia Liberman read by Julia Liberman. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Julia here. "The Changeling's Gambit" by Sasha Kim read by A.J. Odasso. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Sasha here. "Saturn Devouring His Young" by Carlos Hernandez  read by Carlos Hernandez . You can read the full text of the poem and more about Carlos here. "Three Principles of Strong Building" by Rose  Lemberg read by Rose Lemberg. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here. "Nettle-stung" by Shweta Narayan and read by Shweta Narayan.  You can read the full text of the poem and more about Shweta here. body,div,table,thead,tbody,tfoot,tr,th,td,p { font-family:"Liberation Sans"; font-size:x-small }

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

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

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the March issues of Strange Horizons. "Four" by John W. Sexton read by W. Sexton. You can read the full text of the poem and more about John here. "Long Shadow" by Rose Lemberg read by Rose Lemberg. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here. "Laying Claim" by Liz Bourke read by Liz Bourke. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Liz here. "Endurance Is Not Bravery/Do Not Declare Love by Staring" by Elizabeth R. McClellan read by Elizabeth R. McClellan. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Elizabeth here.

Editors’ Intro: Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas   Short Fiction: "Pockets" by Amal El-Mohtar, as read by Amal El-Mohtar   Poetry: "archival testimony fragments / minersong" by Rose Lemberg, as read by C.S.E. Cooney   Interview: Amal El-Mohtar interviewed by Deborah Stanish       Want to join the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps? You can find new science fiction and fantasy stories, poetry, and nonfiction every month in Uncanny Magazine. Go to uncannymagazine.com or subscribe to the eBook version at weightlessbooks.com.       This podcast was produced by Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky. Music created by Null Device and used with permission.       Copyright © 2015 by Uncanny Magazine

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the November issues of Strange Horizons."Incendiaries" by Jane Crowley read by Crowley. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jane here. "Brass" by Erik Amundsen read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Erik here. "The rivers, the birchgroves, all the receding earth" by Rose Lemberg read by Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here. "The Mermaid of Lincoln Park Lagoon" by Valya Dudycz Lupescu read by Valya Dudycz Lupescu. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Valya Dudycz here. "You Are Here" by Bogi Takács read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Bogi here.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents poetry from the February issues of Strange Horizons."Ekphrastic 22/The Drowning Girl" by Jenn Grunigen read by Jenn Grunigen. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jenn here. "The Paper Boy" by Mike Allen read by Mike Allen. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Mike here. "Food Diary of Gark the Troll" by Jessy Randall read by Tina Connolly. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Jessy here. "Una Canción de Keys" by Lisa M. Bradley read by Lisa M. Bradley, and Ciro Faienza. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Lisa here. "Rehearsal for When He Wakes" by Anne Carly Abad read by Julia Rios. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Anne here. "The Rotten Leaf Cantata" by Rose Lemberg read by Rose Lemberg. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Rose here. "Rebel" by Danielle Higgins read by Clare McBride. You can read the full text of the poem and more about Danielle here.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Rose Lemberg's "Teffeu: a Book from the Library at Taarona" You can read the full text of the story, and more about Rose, here. This podcast has been published as part of our 2013 fund drive bonus issue! Read more about Strange Horizons' funding model, or donate, here. Help us get to $4,000 to read our next piece of bonus content: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay's essay on "Recentering Science Fiction and the Fantastic: What Would a Non-Anglocentric Understanding of SF and Fantasy Look Like?"