Stories

Welcome to Issue 20 of Zooscape!

It’s easier to stare trauma in the face when it has the face of a cat. Art Spiegelman knew this when he chose to tell his father’s story, Maus, in the form of a graphic novel featuring mice, cats, pigs, and dogs rather than normal humans. It’s hard to look straight at the horrors and atrocities humans commit. Throwing in a little fur softens the hard edges, making it possible for us to reckon and wrestle with the harshness of reality.

Most of the stories in this issue wrestle with the darkness we have to face in this world, but they’re also beautiful, occasionally funny, and if you stick it out to the end, you’ll find one that’s just outright fun.

* * *

The Unbearable Weight of a Photograph by Jelena Dunato

The Last Life of a Time-Travelling Cat by A.P. Golub

Night in the Garden by Marshall L. Moseley

Proper Pedagogy by Jessica Cho

Rusty by Steve Loiaconi

Honey Harvest by Spencer Orey

The Three-Piece Giant by Gabrielle Steele

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As always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.  Also, you can pick up e-book or paperback volumes of our first ten issues bundled into three anthologies, complete with an illustration for every story.

by Gabrielle Steele

“The top badger was terrible at playing its own game.”

Alana stood one step shy of the quaint stone bridge, gripping her sword as she stared at the furry red leg that stuck out from beneath the frayed edge of the giant’s shirt. The battered clothing suffered an abundance of arrow holes, and its original owner had clearly met a rather gruesome end. A shiny black nose was poking through one hole mid-torso.

“I say, giant, can you hear me all the way up there?”

“We– I can hear you just fine.”

The voice coming from the shadows of a heavy hood was far too high-pitched for a giant. How had the villagers fallen for it? It was bad enough they only had one bridge leading to the spring paddocks. But it wasn’t Alana’s job to point out such foolishness. Her job was simply to remove the so-called giant. Honestly, a real giant would have been easier to deal with. They didn’t have magic. The large red and gold puck badgers of the fae forest did. They were weak when docile but dangerously feral if offended. The safest action was to play along.

“Mighty giant,” Alana said. “This bridge is surely too small for you, and the villagers think it best you find somewhere more suitable.”

“We’re quite happy here, thank you.”

Alana fought the urge to roll her eyes. The top badger was terrible at playing its own game. “The villagers need to reach their paddocks. If you like it here, you can fish just as easily from over there.” She pointed at a rock jutting out from the riverbank like a small pier.

The top badger whispered something down to the middle badger, whose muffled whispers seemed aimed at the bottom badger. With as much grace as possessed by a newborn foal, the pillar of badgers turned towards the rock. Two snouts appeared – one from between shirt buttons, the other above the waistband. Stern whispers passed up and down the column, then the extra snouts disappeared, and the badgers shuffled back to face Alana.

“It looks awfully cold,” the top badger said.

“What if the villagers offer you a blanket?”

“That would be kind,” the giant’s chest said.

“Shut up, Rusty,” the top badger hissed; then he looked at Alana with narrowed eyes. “That shan’t do. We like this bridge. It’s pretty, and the fish don’t notice us so much.”

“Someone as skilled at fishing as you could surely escape the notice of a few fish. Now though, this might interest you. I hear the fish around here can’t resist creeping close to listen in on a good song.”

If there was one thing Alana knew well about puck badgers, besides their extreme dislike of being laughed at, it was that they loved the sound of their own voices, especially in song form. The sound had been deemed so terrible, there were tales of it shocking birds so badly they fell dead from their perches. Listening to an overtired child screeching for hours would seem a joy in comparison.

The giant turned to confer with itself; then it wobbled about, its clothes sagging and bulging as if a huge deathfly larvae were about to burst out. Just the thought made Alana’s hand shift towards her sword. The undulating stopped, and when the giant turned back, a different badger had taken the top position — it had much rounder, friendlier eyes, as well as a large golden hoop hanging from its left ear.

“What songs do the fish like?” the badger said, who sounded like Rusty, previously the middle badger.

“Tales of the open ocean, my friend. They long to swim in it, but alas, the salt shrivels them until they’re nothing but sea slugs.”

“Those poor mites,” Rusty said, looking sidelong at the river. “I’ve the perfect song to soothe their souls.”

As he closed his eyes and opened his mouth, Alana did two things. First, she shoved wax plugs into her ears which, being one of a problem-solver’s most important tools, she kept tethered around her neck. Second, she tossed a piece of stale bread upstream of the bridge, in a place where some scree blocked the swift current. Not a crumb escaped the gluttonous fish, whose dark shadows now filled the calmer channel.

Rusty closed his mouth, and Alana plucked her earplugs free before he opened his eyes. He whispered to the middle badger, who whispered to the bottom badger, and the giant staggered to the bridge’s low wall. It would have been easy to push them in and earn her coin, but Alana wasn’t interested in murdering such harmless creatures — harmless to those with the sense not to insult them, that is.

Leaning forwards, Rusty peered over the wall. “Well, I’ll be a–” But Alana never got to hear what, for Rusty’s foot slipped, and the giant’s head went tumbling into the river. The giant’s chest and legs screamed in horror, and each jumped separately to stand on the wall.

“Brother!” the shirt and trousers shouted together.

The pieces of clothing went flying, and both badgers dived in after their brother. In truth, Rusty would have been better off had they not. He’d already caught hold of a thick root and was busy pulling himself to the bank when his brothers slammed into him. He lost his grip, and the current caught all three of them. They thrashed about, making it painfully clear they didn’t know how to swim.

With a tremendous sigh, Alana unbuckled her sword and leaned it against the bridge wall with her pack. She pulled off her boots and socks, shirked her tunic and trousers, then dove into the frigid water wearing nothing but her smalls and the cloth that bound her breasts. Her chest froze, but she forced herself to breathe through the chill. Cold shock was the danger of rivers, one that had almost cost Alana her life as a child and that now had the badgers flailing as if they felt suffocated. All they did was waste their energy.

A fair swimmer, Alana caught up with the three silly creatures easily enough, but she had no way of hauling them all out together. She looked about and tried to form a plan, but the moment she was within reach, the fools caught hold of her. Two grabbed her arms, while Rusty wrapped his little arms around her neck, his vicious claws sinking into her flesh. Unable to move her arms, the weight of the badgers dragged Alana under.

It didn’t pay to be kind. She should have let them drown, given it was their own stupid fault. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to push them away to save herself. With all her might, she kicked her legs, driving them back to the surface.

Alana sucked in a chest full of air. “Kick your legs, you little weasels.”

Rusty’s claws bit deeper. Full of anger, the badgers would surely find the stubbornness to survive. Alana only hoped they would forgive her once they were safely ashore.

Together, the four of them kicked, churning the water like the flesh-eating fish of Murir. Alana steered them towards the left bank, where a thick root stuck out into the river, and beyond it… By the gods. It wasn’t the river that near deafened Alana. It was a waterfall.

“Make a chain if you want to live, weasels,” Alana shouted over the roar.

In a surprising display of intelligence, the badger holding her left arm shuffled down to her hand, followed by Rusty, who pulled himself around the other badger’s back. When the third badger didn’t move, Alana ducked him beneath the water for a few seconds, then bared her teeth at him. He soon moved across, settling between Rusty and the other badger instead of taking the end position. Coward.

“Grab the root, Rusty,” Alana yelled.

Hearing his name seemed to spur Rusty into action. They all kicked and stretched as they sailed towards the root with terrific speed. Rusty grabbed hold, sinking his claws in, but the speed of the river wrenched his paw away.

Alana searched the bank for anything else they could grab. There was a thin root just before the fall — their last hope. She flipped onto her back and started kicking against the current, hoping to slow them. The badgers did likewise, but their little legs were slowing. Even Alana felt drained, frigid as the river was. She kept kicking, pushing herself even as her chest burned for more air.

Alana wanted to shout at Rusty to grab the root, but she hadn’t the breath. He stretched his arm out anyway; then Alana did what she needed to. One by one, she prised the claws from about her hand, then pushed that badger towards the bank. Exhausted, she gave herself up to the river. Rusty stared at her with wide eyes, his paw wrapped about the root. Then the world tipped, and Alana took a deep breath before she struck the water far below.

Lost in darkness, Alana couldn’t tell up from down, or if she were conscious at all. Numbness had claimed her body. Her head struck something; then she faded into true darkness, the metallic taste of blood sharp in her mouth as she went.

* * *

“Is she dead?”

“Can we eat her?”

“Rats, the pair of you. She saved our lives, and you’re thinking about eating her?”

“I only asked.”

Alana groaned as her eyes slowly opened. Blinding light made her head pound, so she closed them again.

“Did you see that, Peapod?” Rusty said. “You can’t eat something that’s still alive.”

“What do we do with her then?”

“She looks badly hurt,” Rusty said. “I don’t think human legs are supposed to bend that way, and her head’s bleeding an awful lot. Say, Walnut, go fetch Old Willow. He’s not far downstream.”

“Right-o, brother.”

The world went blissfully quiet again, save for the hushed whispers of Rusty and Peapod. It sounded as though they’d moved away, or perhaps it was Alana who was far away. She couldn’t feel her body beneath her neck, and her head hurt so much she wished she’d drowned beneath the falls. A wave of nausea overcame her, and she vomited. With no way to turn her head, she began to choke.

“By the great lord’s fine stripes,” Rusty said.

“What do we do, brother?” Peapod said.

“I don’t–”

“Stand aside, stand aside,” said a deep, commanding voice. “Dear me, I’ve never seen one this injured before. My bag, little one.”

Over her choking, Alana heard the rustle of a jute bag being dragged over stone. Someone turned her head, bringing another wave of dizziness upon her. Her stomach emptied, clearing what had choked her.

“This is beyond my skill, my friends,” Old Willow said. “I fear to give her my pain tonic, for she has no control of her functions. You must call for the White Stag.”

One badger let out a little squeal of fright as another scurried away. Alana couldn’t blame them. The White Stag was infamous. They were both a stag of snowy pelt and a woman with unnaturally white skin, as if no blood ran through their veins. Indeed, that was probably true, because their favourite meal was the blood of men, particularly those who had recently dipped their wicks, be it in man or woman. Being a fair maiden upon a noble stag, it was easy for them to seduce any man. So Alana had heard.

The world seemed to get further away. Alana could guess her injuries. A broken neck and a cracked skull. There was no coming back from that. Old Willow would have been better to kill her himself than call for the White Stag, who was notoriously jealous of beautiful women. Perhaps Alana’s injuries were enough to protect her from a long, agonising life as a snowflake passing through flames and reforming in perpetuity.

Two badgers squeaked, and even Old Willow drew in a sharp breath. Swift hoofbeats sent bolts of agony through Alana’s head, but they quickly faded. Given how wet the ground was beneath her head, she must have finally bled out. It was a good life, but she shouldn’t have saved those damn badgers.

“Saving them is the only reason I’m healing you, human,” a melodic voice said.

As if by magic, which it probably was, feeling spread through Alana’s body. There was no pain, not even the ache in the tooth she’d been planning to have pulled. She opened her eyes and marvelled at the beauty of the stars above. Except they weren’t stars, for the sky hadn’t yet darkened. Laughter like the chiming of a tiny bell made Alana sit up and scoot away. Such a fair voice could only bring trouble.

“Humans are adorable when they’re afraid, don’t you think, Old Willow?” the White Stag said through the woman’s mouth.

Old Willow nodded quickly in reply, eyes averted. Alana couldn’t tear hers away. Both of the White Stag’s forms were beautiful. They glowed with a faint white light, and twinkling sparks of life floated through the air around them. Snowy felt coated the stag’s antlers, and the woman’s hair, even her eyebrows, were the same soft white. Her pupils, though… They were blood red.

Rusty sidled up to Alana and nudged her with an elbow. “You must thank them,” he whispered. Then he let out a whimper and scuttled away as the White Stag’s gaze moved to him.

“Thank you indeed,” Alana said, knowing one must always be polite and honest where fae creatures were concerned.

The woman grinned, and the stag snorted, tossing its antlers up and down. “It makes a pleasant change to find an educated human. There is a condition to your healing, however.”

Alana swallowed the stubborn lump in her throat. “And that condition is?”

“I rule the Araethan Forest here, so I have sensed you creeping within the border. You have always been respectful, which is why I have yet allowed you to live. I am sure you will soon find your healing to be a curse, however. You will live among us, solving our problems now, not those of humans. Stray from this task, and I shall undo your healing in an instant.”

Alana got up and lowered herself onto one knee, suddenly ashamed of her near-nakedness. “Your curse is a blessing, oh graceful one. To walk among magic folk and learn of your ways shall be a delight.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere with us,” they said. “Go with the brothers you have saved. They owe you a life debt, and it will take much work to pay that out.”

The woman climbed onto the stag, and they galloped away, lifting a hand in farewell.

“Well, I’ll be,” Walnut said.

“You’re lucky to have met her and lived,” Rusty said. He took hold of Alana’s hand. “Come now, lass. We’ll find you a place to stay. If we ask the trees nice like, they may give us wood for a cabin.” He tried to pull her along, but Alana tugged her hand free and turned to bow to the tall man-like creature who stood nearby.

“My thanks to you, Old Willow.”

“Off with you, lass,” he said, picking up his bag. “The White Stag will think you’ve rejected their gift if you linger.” He strode towards a willow tree downstream.

Rusty tugged on Alana’s hand. “Come now.”

Peapod took her other hand, and as they led her into the forest, Walnut danced ahead, singing a tale of the White Stag. If only Alana’s hands were free, she would have plugged her ears.

 

* * *

About the Author

Gabrielle Steele lives in Essex, UK with her husband and two mischievous younglings. She writes epic fantasy and speculative shorts, pitting poor souls against dragons, gods, and the occasional squirrel. You can view her ramblings on Twitter @eldris and find more about her writing on https://thellian.com

by Spencer Orey

“Bugs came in looking for a safe haven, then got so hooked that they’d pay anything to keep the honey flowing. I’d been one of them. I just hoped I wouldn’t be one again.”

It was late when she buzzed into my office in the shrub. This time of the year, I expected grasshoppers, maybe someone left behind in a migration. No such luck today. She was a mantis, same species as me, the kind I’d run away from before the cockroach war changed everything. These days, I didn’t see much reason to run. Better to sit still and let her eat.

“I heard you can find anyone,” she said.

Disappointing. But at least a job would give me something to do. “Sure,” I said. “When’s the last you saw him?”

“Her,” she said. “She vanished last night. After…” She ran a front leg up to straighten one of her antennae. “After she tried to eat me. I want her to know it’s okay. That I forgive her.”

Made sense. Some mantises got the hunger something terrible, couldn’t stop themselves from biting the head off of someone they cared about even when they knew they’d regret it later. Back before the war, I never would’ve understood something like that. Now, I knew we all had it in us to do something monstrous.

“Anywhere you think she’d hide?” I asked. But I already knew where to look. There was only one place any of us went when we messed up so bad that we needed to forget everything. The hive. The one place I never wanted to see again. It was always the hive.

* * *

By the time I glided in, it was late enough that even the fireflies were done flirting. They’d settled onto tall grass stalks, giving a final flickering show to some collector spiders in the shadows who were probably hoping for another chance at dinner.

I scuttled to the door, where two cockroaches accepted my entrance fee and waved me through without any questions. Maybe they still recognized me from the old days, or maybe I still looked hopeless enough to belong in a bad place like this.

Even from the doorway, the sweet smell hit me hard. Here I was, back in the trap, after everything I’d done to stay away. And the hive was one hell of a trap. Most bugs didn’t need to sleep, but staying outside at night wasn’t safe, especially when the weather turned cold. That’s where the cockroaches came in. After the war, when there was nobody left to stop them, they’d colonized a beehive and expanded it into a business. Bugs came in looking for a safe haven, then got so hooked that they’d pay anything to keep the honey flowing. I’d been one of them. I just hoped I wouldn’t be one again.

The front parlor was crawling with flies, most of whom wouldn’t see the sky again. I shouldn’t have blamed them for wasting their short time like this, but I did. Drinking sugar water until your legs curled was no way to live. And that’s most of what I tasted in the air, watered-down honey, dripping down the walls and into the troughs. Bigger bugs were in the back. A few locusts crouched around a trough of what was probably alfalfa honey, based on the flowery spice. I even spotted a wasp, slinking away.

“Ah, the private eye returnsss,” a voice hissed to my side. “What’sss bugging’ ya today? Heh heh.”

Roach. He ran the place. We had bad history together from the war.

“I’m looking for a mantis,” I said. “A dame. Seen anyone like that tonight?”

“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t.” Roach’s wings twitched. He knew something alright. He always did. “What’sss it to you? Finally looking to get your head bitten off?”

Right, a bite. Just like in the war, when Roach led my friends into an ambush, and the wasps bit off their heads. Nobody had been able prove he’d led them into trouble on purpose. We all suspected the roaches of being malicious, but they kept getting away. Except, when the war ended, it turned out only the cockroaches had survived without taking heavy losses. The rest of us — wasps and mantises and all the other bugs who just so happened to be the cockroachs’ natural predators — discovered we’d had our numbers thinned out. Sure, we were furious, but we were broken. Nobody could fight anymore. Any talk of revenge died in places like the hive, where we all tried to forget what the cockroaches had put us through while we gave them everything we had left. But not tonight.

“Listen up, you larva.” I lunged forward and grasped Roach’s front leg, ready to snap it free. “How about you tell me where she is, and I’ll forget I saw you here tonight.”

“Maybe I sssaw a mantisss back in framesss,” Roach hissed, legs spindling around as he tried to slip free.

I let him go. “Good. Thanks.” If she was back in the frames, things were even worse than I’d suspected. I might even be too late.

“Wait. It’d be a pity to lose a good cussstomer.” Roach massaged his leg. “Surely it can’t hurt if she ssstays a couple more daysss. How about it, old friend?” He reached out with one of his legs, offering me money, a thick roll of bills.

A bribe. A good one at that, more than I was being paid for the job. More than I’d been paid in a long time. Whoever this dame was, she had to be a real high roller to be worth that kind of cash. That or someone was paying to eat a mantis, maybe a frog on the outside. Money like that could buy me a month of the good life. It’d be easy to do as Roach said, to back off and then come pick up whatever remained of the dame’s corpse. But I didn’t need anything else to keep me up at night.

“Keep your dirty cash, Roach.” I scuttled away, past a table of centipedes, all the way to the back wall, where a rhinoceros beetle guarded the doorway to frames. I paid him and went inside.

Most bugs either couldn’t tell the difference between sugar water and orange blossoms or just didn’t care. But anyone who stayed in the hive long enough developed a hard craving for something stronger. And that’s what you could get from frames.

It was a loud place and darker than the main floor. The far wall was packed with bee drones hard at work making honey for the cockroaches to sell to the rest of us. Below the wall, honey dripped down into a trough before it got piped elsewhere for dilution and distribution. But tonight, it wasn’t just bees buzzing. Something else buzzed too. Something familiar. Something bad.

I twisted away as a stinger darted at me from the side. A wasp. I raised my forelegs in defense, ready to strike back.

“Hey you two! Cool it before you anger the drones,” someone called from inside the trough.

“I recognize you from the war,” the wasp slurred at me. She only had one wing but kept buzzing it like she could still fly if she tried hard enough. Honey clung to the sides of her mandibles and her eyes. She’d eaten so much she couldn’t even see straight. I didn’t recognize her. Chances were, we’d never met. But she could still hate my species.

I raised my forelegs higher, ready to slash. It’d be a good fight, just like the bad old days.

The wasp wove to the side, looking for weakness. And as she moved, I saw the bug who’d called out from the trough. It was a beetle, blue shell resplendent against the thick orange of the honey. Next to the beetle was the mantis dame. She was in bad shape, drooping in place, wide-set eyes too heavy. No way she’d last another few days of this. The cockroaches had set her on a path to her death, same as they’d done to the rest of us. My fighting a wasp would just play into their plans. I had to get her out of here.

I lowered my forelegs. “We all did bad things in the war. Things we regret.” Even talking about the war made little memories flash up at me. Stingers. Broken eggs. Cockroaches hissing with laughter. “Right now, I’m here on a job.”

“What kind of job?” The wasp feinted striking at me a few times.

“I came looking for that dame over there. Someone wants her home safe.” I decided to try getting honest. “Someone who loves her. Someone who wants a fresh start.”

“Love, huh.” The wasp’s wing stopped buzzing. “Not a lot of love around here. Not a lot of fresh starts either.”

“Not enough,” I agreed.

I scuttled closer to the trough. The mantis dame had her head lowered into the honey for a long bite. Her legs were already shaking badly. It wouldn’t be long until the roaches fished her out and fed her to whoever was paying.

When she came back up, I said, “Your gal sent me to find you. She wants you home.”

“Home? I don’t deserve a home,” the mantis dame said, voice heavy and slurred. “I tried to eat her. I lost control.”

“No, you almost lost control,” I said. I looked over at the wasp. The two of us, we’d done bad things we couldn’t take back. But this dame, she hadn’t done anything bad yet, just come close. She’d found out she had limits, same as the rest of us, and it’d scared her. I said, “You almost went over the edge, but you stepped back in time. That makes all the difference.”

The dame slurred something I didn’t quite catch, except, “…safer alone.”

“How I see it is, you want to pass your life alone, that’s your business. You can do that after you get out of here,” I said. “But if you run away from too many good things just because you’re scared, you’ll end up like the rest of us, trying to forget your way through a bad night. And trust me, eventually, they’re all bad nights.”

The mantis swayed a little in place. I could see she was almost convinced. Maybe she’d been telling herself the same thing before the honey got to her.

The wasp buzzed closer to her. “Go while you still can. There’s nothing for anyone here but bad memories.”

I offered a foreleg. “Let’s get you back to someone who cares about you.”

For a moment, I thought she’d tell me to leave again. Nothing I could do about that. Sometimes, my pedantic lectures didn’t work, no matter how honest I let myself get. We all still got to make our choices, no matter how bad they could be.

The mantis took hold and stepped one leg out of the trough. I could smell the honey on her, wildflowers, always something special. I remembered my old sweet stupor and suddenly, all I wanted was to climb into the trough myself. But if I did that, the mantis dame would lose her courage. And I didn’t need any more drinking buddies.

We headed toward the door. The mantis stopped, then turned back to the wasp. “You should come too. We can find you a place to stay.”

“It’s too late for me, kid,” the wasp said. She gave me a quick salute, then buried her mandibles in honey. She’d made her choice, as much as I hated to see it. I saluted back.

I said, “Let’s get you home.”

Roach was waiting for us outside of frames. Then I found myself staring into the eyes of the rhinoceros beetle. Up close, she was ugly, sickly white with spots. Before I could tell her to move out of the way, a second beetle slammed into me from the side. I tumbled to the ground.

“Too bad you couldn’t sssee thingsss our way,” Roach said. “Girlsss, let’s give our friend a good long drink, on the house. I’ll take thisss other one to the collector.”

I twisted and slashed with my forelegs, but the two beetles held me with their horns and pushed me to the nearest trough. I kept fighting even as they shoved my face toward a honey trough. They pushed harder, and then I was sinking in. I twisted my head to the side, but that sweet stickiness seeped onto my face, coated my antennae. It was the cheap stuff, thin and runny. Sugar water. And it smelled wonderful. I tried to lift my mandible away, but the beetles pushed my head fully in, and warm honey seeped over my face and into my mouth, my first taste in far too long. I opened my mandibles and took a full bite. Then another. I stopped fighting, and when the beetles relaxed the pressure on me, I pushed myself the rest of the way into the trough.

I started eating the honey. Then I ate some more. I ate for a long time, letting it all fade, losing track of time, losing everything. I’d forgotten this bliss, how memories could fade into perfect empty sweetness.

Then someone ruined it. They pulled my head out of the trough, then pushed me out, onto the sticky ground. The mantis dame. She said, “Looks like you get a fresh start too.”

“Perhapsss we can come to an underssstanding,” Roach said.

She let go of me. I heard a buzzing of wings, followed by a hissing scream. With my vision still blurred from honey, I saw things in little flashes. The mantis dame bit hard into Roach’s head. Far away, a rhinoceros beetle had lowered horns to charge our way across the floor. I had to help, but I was weak and slow. I wouldn’t reach her in time.

One wing buzzed loud. The wasp leaped through the air and came down hard, stinging the rhinoceros beetle in the side. The beetle screeched in pain and slammed into a trough of honey. Flies scattered into the air. Hatches opened around the floor, and hordes of cockroaches came hissing out to keep the peace. Some of the other bugs poked their heads out of the honey in languid interest.

Roach was flailing in the mantis dame’s grasp. His head was gushing fluid from his bite wound, but he’d live. The mantis must have stopped herself from killing him.

She said, “Let us out of here now, or we’ll kill you all.”

My limbs were still sticky and heavy. I could barely stand.

“Let them go!” Roach hissed. “Get them out of here!”

The mantis dame released Roach and grabbed me, pulling me toward the door. The cockroaches made an aisle for us, hissing in anger. The wasp buzzed close with us, darting forward with her stinger whenever a cockroach came too close.

And then we were out in the night. I still wanted to sink into honey, away from all the memories flooding back. But I knew better than to give in. And this time, maybe not all of those memories would be bad. The night was full of predators, but right now, it was a night full of bugs who could still forgive each other. A mantis had forgiven herself enough to try living again, and somewhere out there, her lover was waiting for her to return. Maybe that was enough to earn me another day.

 

* * *

About the Author

Spencer Orey (he/him) is a writer living in rainy Denmark with his insect-loving family. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and his short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tales from Fiddler’s Green and Flame Tree Press’s Lost Atlantis anthology. He has a PhD in cultural anthropology, with academic interests in magic, mobility, and media dreams that he loves to weave into stories. You can find him online at www.spencerorey.com or @spencerorey on Twitter and Mastodon.

by Steve Loiaconi

“You’d be surprised what people will admit to when a mangy terrier is standing over them with a whirring power drill in his paws.”

Whenever there’s a crisis in Action Cove, the mayor calls in these jamokes.

Sparky is a labradoodle who tools around in a modified fire truck. Siren, the German shepherd, drives an excessively armored police car. Then you got Splash, a collie with a hovercraft; Slate, a boxer in a bulldozer; and Sting, a chow chow in a little yellow helicopter.

They take orders from Cash, an inexplicably wealthy 15-year-old with a good heart and a quaint notion of justice.

I got to hand it to them. Most days, those pups do a decent job of keeping the peace. Saving cats in trees, stopping petty crimes, putting out warehouse fires, and whatnot. Then they sing a little song and take a nap.

But a town whose entire law enforcement and emergency response apparatus is handled by talking dogs makes an attractive target for hardcore criminals. There are cases when they’re out of options, when the clock is ticking and lines need to be crossed.

That’s when they call me.

My name is Rusty, and I don’t mind getting my paws dirty.

I’m mostly Jack Russell with a hint of Doberman and a pinch of pit bull. Cash says he likes me like he likes his coffee: small, fast, and mean.

I don’t think he’s ever had coffee.

Half the time, I don’t even need to touch a guy. You’d be surprised what people will admit to when a mangy terrier is standing over them with a whirring power drill in his paws.

Up in the watchtower, I fill up my dish with black coffee. Slate is running an obstacle course; Sting is watching cartoons; and Siren is filling out some paperwork that she thinks is very important.

“Councilman Calamity is at it again,” Splash says, nudging the pages of the newspaper with his nose. Groans rise up from the rest of the team.

This stooge, Councilman Chatsworth Calamity, keeps looking for ways to shut us down. Whether it’s proposing budget cuts, advocating stifling new regulations, or — as today’s front page reports — signing contracts for some prototype robot dinosaur police force, the dude is a constant thorn in our paws.

“That city councilman is only still breathing because you twerps won’t let me off the leash,” I say, under my breath but loud enough for everyone to hear.

“We can’t just go around assassinating people,” Siren barks.

“Won’t isn’t can’t,” I say, lapping up a mouthful of coffee.

“Cash said no.”

“Yeah, well.” I glance out at the setting sun. “Cash says a lot of things.”

Sparky stumbles into the room.

“Everybody coming to my show tomorrow?” he asks.

There’s a chorus of of-courses and wouldn’t-miss-its.

Sparky is putting on a one-man show at the theater downtown. I’ve seen him rehearse. It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s cute.

They’re always so damn cute.

“Any of you guys read my erotic Kojak novella?” I ask.

The room goes silent.

I emailed them all copies weeks ago, and it’s only 75 pages.

“Who’s Kojak?” Sting says.

It takes every ounce of restraint in my wiry little body not to leap across the room and rip his throat out.

The flashing lights on our collars break the tension.

“Cash needs us,” they howl in unison.

Everyone shimmies into their shiny uniforms and lines up for the briefing. I hang back by the window.

“We’ve got a problem, doggos,” Cash says, standing before a massive computer screen.

He taps his keyboard and brings up a mugshot and a map.

“This guy’s a demolitions expert from out west. The state police nabbed him speeding down Route 27 north of town. When they pulled him over, he couldn’t stop bragging about the bomb he placed somewhere in Action Cove. He said it goes off at seven p.m.”

We all turn to the clock on the wall. Quarter past six.

“Rusty,” Cash says, “I’ve been questioning him for over an hour and time is running out. It’s your turn.”

I nod and push past the other dogs.

“His name is–”

“I don’t want to know his name.”

I pick up my work bag with my teeth and slouch down the hall.

“Zap his nuts!” Slate shouts.

Always with the nuts, this guy. He doesn’t appreciate that there’s an art to this. None of them do. They just turn their heads, eat their yummy treats, and play their silly games.

I slide open the door of the interrogation room. Under a spotlight in the middle of the blood-and-dirt-stained linoleum, the thug sits chained to a metal chair.

He laughs when he sees me, like they always do. I lay my tools out on the floor, making sure he sees the array of knives, saws, and needles. That stops the laughter right quick.

This is the fun part. I spring back on my hind legs and swing my paw across his face. Then I hit him again and again. And again.

I wail away until hitting his jaw feels like punching a bag of kibble.

“Still not talking?” I grunt.

I retreat to the corner, and I relish the panic in his eyes when I return. It ain’t easy to carry a flaming blowtorch between your teeth without singing your fur, but it’s worth it.

“Stop,” he mumbles. “Please stop.”

My tail wags.

I power down the torch and sit attentively.

“It’s under the lighthouse,” he says, coughing a gob of blood and teeth on the floor. He gives me the deactivation code, and he tells me who hired him. I’m not surprised.

I march out of the filthy room, my head held high.

Cash lays out a plan and the rest of the team springs into action. They hurry down the slide to their vehicles. Action Cove is saved again.

“You’re a good dog, Rusty,” Cash says before he launches himself down the slide.

“No, I’m not,” I grumble. “And that’s the way you like it.”

As they race off to complete their mission, I curl up in the dark and weep.

 

* * *

About the Author

Steve Loiaconi is a journalist and a graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program. His fiction previously appeared in Griffel, True Chili, the Good Life Review, Samfiftyfour, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as the anthologies Dracula’s Guests and P is for Poltergeist.

by Jessica Cho

“…they pulled strings from theories, tangled and untangled equations, sliced through Gordian knots with claws as sharp as Occam’s razor.”

When the doors of the Universities across the world first opened to them, the cats, for all their sheddings and shortcomings, took to those academic halls the same way they took to sunbeams and soft places.

They paced through their research with a hunter’s single-minded focus, ears high and alert for any sounds of interest, ferreting out facts like mice from the walls.

The linguistics department welcomed their nimble voices, well versed in a wide range of sounds, but even more their subtlety of jaw and gesture, their ability to communicate across oceans of silence.

From laboratories and lecture halls, they pulled strings from theories, tangled and untangled equations, sliced through Gordian knots with claws as sharp as Occam’s razor.

To all indications, they excelled.

But in the quiet depths of a building of cracked stone and creeping ivy, lies an old tabby, his body curled in proportions the envy of any Renaissance painter, who understands that chasing knowledge is an exercise as futile as chasing dust motes — imagined specks that disappear as soon as they’re grasped.

He sleeps undisturbed, a scholar in perfect repose, for he knows the key to understanding cannot be found in study or debate. The language of the Universe is neither math nor science, but rather the frequency that thrums in perfect resonance, the sound at the centet not a roar, but a purr.

 

* * *

About the Author

Jessica is a Rhysling Award winning writer of SFF short fiction and poetry. Born in Korea, they currently live in New England along with their cat Mushroom, who, as far as anyone knows, has no aspirations of higher learning. Previous works can be found at Fantasy Magazine, khōréō, Fireside Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction and elsewhere. They can be found online at semiwellversed.wordpress.com and on Mastodon @jcho@wandering.shop

by Marshall L. Moseley

““Phoenix!” I said. “Mouse isn’t waking up!””

“Mouse?” I gently reached out and tapped him with my paw, but my little gray friend lay inert. Still.

We had been playing in the grass the way we always play. The game – you know it, I’m sure – was cat and mouse. Our respective species had once played it in deadly earnest, but over time, after the garden’s MedNanites gave us minds and we’d become friends, we played it for fun.

I hadn’t shaken him that hard. I’d shaken him harder before, and he’d always lain still for a moment, and then bounded up with a cheery “Good one, Cat!” and we’d go on with our play, or wander down to the stream to sip some water, or over to the food trees for some kibble.

The Phoenix would know what to do. I left my friend lying on the grass and ran out of the meadow and up the short grassy hill to where the giant bird was always perched on a rock at its top.  As I ran I looked up at the skydome, and its plates were no longer a bright sky blue, but darker, like I remembered dusk being before the escape. And there were cracks in them.

I ran up to the Phoenix and stopped. He no longer stared straight ahead, looking sleek and regal, awaiting questions or requests. His rainbow plumage was ruffled and sticking out everywhere, and his head was down.

“Phoenix!” I said. “Mouse isn’t waking up!”

“Fazzit… fa… failure… system,” the once regal bird said in a voice I didn’t recognize. Instead of his gentle baritone, he spoke in a monotone, almost like he wasn’t alive. “Neutron star… gravity well… MedNanites offline… gravity shear imminent…” He lifted his head and looked at me, and for a moment he was back. “I can’t fix it, Cat. I’m so sorry. It’s–” and then his head dropped.

He was gone.

I turned and ran back down the hill. I looked up; the plates were darker now, and there were more cracks. All around me I heard a faint creaking sound.

Mouse was where I’d left him. I looked up at the skydome one last time. Then I laid down and curled myself around him, and as the sky went dark and the wind howled, I mourned my friend.

 

* * *

About the Author

Marshall L. Moseley has been writing fiction of one kind or another for forty years. His screenplay, WILDCARD, placed in the top three of the third season of Project Greenlight, and he appeared in the show. He subsequently optioned it to Dimension Films, a division of Disney. His stories have appeared in ROAR 6 and Inhuman Acts, and he was nominated for a Cóyotl Award in 2015. He is a member of the Wordos Professional Writers workshop in Eugene, Oregon.

A. P. Golub

“So I wait, flitting in and out of Stjepan’s life like the ghost of what wasn’t — like revolution and socialism and the idea that there won’t always be someone trying to take advantage of someone else.”

Stjepan saved me when I was a kitten 56 years ago (his time, of course). My own time has been spent less… linearly. He recognizes me, I think, when I curl at his side on the hospital bed. He doesn’t say anything, but his hand scratches under my chin like he used to do. His hands are frail. Not like they used to be. I am thinner now, and my fur isn’t thick and soft like it once was.

Soon, he will be gone, and I will go, too.

But for now, I want to pretend that I am just a cat, and he is still a young man.

I can still purr, rumbling my old body as loud as any kitten can.

* * *

He found me in the mud on the riverbank. Stuck fast and exhausted, I was done. Then Stjepan picked me up, cradling me in his big, strong hands muttering about how there were better ways to kill a cat than by drowning. I could tell by how he held me close that he wouldn’t try any of them on me.

I wanted to tell him the truth — that it was my own bad luck that saw me in that mud.

Cats don’t have nine lives, but some of us are born with a gift of time travel, the gift of flitting through the years and lingering where we will. Mother said we were only supposed to use the gift when in danger. Of course, being a kitten, I used it to try to steal cream.

And that’s how I wound up on a muddy riverbank in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the darkening 1930s. Of course, cats can time travel, but we can’t talk, so couldn’t correct Stjepan.

He took me home and gave me a bigger bowl of cream then the one that got me into this mess.

So I stayed.

* * *

Stjepan talked to me like I was a human, telling me of change, labor rights, land rights, and strikes. He told me that once we weren’t a country; then we were a country. One day, he said, the people would build a better country: he honestly believed this, even as members of his party were imprisoned or killed.

Even as he hid his own beliefs to keep work, to stay alive.

One day, we wouldn’t even need countries, he said. The people would abandon such constructs. And what is a country but a construct? What is a movement but seeds, planted by others, that will bloom in time? Stjepan booped my nose as he said it.

I suspected he’d had too much to drink that evening.

Still, I liked that he respected me enough to tell me such things even if I didn’t understand any of it. Cats need no country, and our movements are always our own. Humans put such constraints on themselves. Maybe, maybe I did understand it, in that I understood that Stjepan wanted to be more like a cat.

He said he was going to move to the city.

Purring, I laid on his lap. I ignored the pull of time, wanting me to leave. I imagined it felt much like the pull of the promising future felt to Stjepan.

* * *

We didn’t make it to the city.

War came again to our country that wasn’t/was. And Stjepan wanted to fight.

He cried as he said it. He cried because he would be leaving me with his sister, Marija, and because Stjepan’s future would be born in blood. Could anything beautiful be born from blood, he whispered, as he stroked my whiskers. I pressed my head to his hand.

His fingers ran under my chin (scritch—scritch—scritch).

“You’re beautiful,” he said, “and you were pulled from mud.”

* * *

Marija is kind.

She is kind to me, and she is kind to the people who come to her house.

They come at night, exchanging whispers and letters. There is fighting in the hills, but it spills over to these late-night meetings. It spills over to our life, in the way people disappear.

The enemy is the invader/the enemy are those we drank with/the enemy is—

Eventually they come for Marija.

I run.

* * *

I am not proud of this.

When the door slams open and men rush in yelling, I dart right through their stomping feet and out into the cold, lonely night.

Marijia is shouting back. Something crashes. Screaming.

Then silence.

I wish there was gunfire. I wish there was some certain ending.

She is gone, and she will not come back.

* * *

The future Stjepan saw had Marija in it. The future I try to run to has Marija in it.

But as I run through time, that future slips out from under me, like an unstable shelf or book laid half-off the counter. I cannot find the future. I am lost in the dark. At first, I think I am cursed for running. As if a cat could have stopped those men. As if a cat should die making a stand. That’s something Stjepan would do, not me.

Then I think that humanity is cursed, for killing so many infinite futures. This is closer to the truth, but it does not help me, lost in time.

I want to find Stjepan.

But the future twists away from me as more lives are extinguished. Each one was a path, a connection, a possibility gone. I run on through the darkness, unable to find the future I believed in, that Stjepan told me about.

We are always one step behind the future that will be.

* * *

One step behind means abandoned houses and empty camps. It means smoldering fires, put out just in the nick of time. It’s cold and everyone’s suspicious, even of a cat.

It’s the way blood drips off the wall.

There’s a body there — not Stjepan’s.

* * *

After the war I learned that Stjepan got a job in a factory, that he left the party, that he was a mechanic.

But curse or bad luck, I never see him.

There is the scent of oil and a swinging door.

I find a note — half-drafted, to Marija. Stjepan believes she escaped. He thinks she must have eventually made her way to the US. He tells himself that she thinks he is dead, and that’s why she didn’t come back. He knows for a fact that she took me with her.

This is how he protects himself from the reality that his sister is gone. He can’t see me because in his mind I am safe with Marija. Sometimes I think I could push through these futures, walk into the room and demand cream, meowing as loudly as ever. He’d pick me up, scratch my chin, and then his heart would break. I can’t bring myself to do it.

At the end of the letter, he says he hopes I am getting enough cream.

* * *

One step ahead, one step behind.

I do not have it in me to destroy the future Stjepan imagines for Marija and me.

So I wait, flitting in and out of Stjepan’s life like the ghost of what wasn’t — like revolution and socialism and the idea that there won’t always be someone trying to take advantage of someone else. Slowly, I gather my own years, live my own lives. I know there will come a time for Stjepan when his reality and the life he’s imagined for Marija will blur and fade together.

He’ll be waiting for me at the end. I will take him to the future.

* * *

The monitors at Stjepan’s side beep slower than I think they should, not that I’m well-versed in matters of the human heart. But the sound feels wrong. Stjepan isn’t mechanical beeping, fading away, he’s hope and strong hands. A hammer coming down steadily — like the heart should. The scent of iron and grease and the gift of cream.

“Mačkica…” His breath is reedy. He doesn’t finish his sentence.

I curl against his side, rolling into his hand and purring harder. Here is my past, and the future we should have had.

We will leave together soon, in the way dreams flee upon waking.

—in the way things are until they aren’t.

 

* * *

About the Author

A.P. Golub is a speculative fiction writer residing in central Virginia with their partner, dog, and four cats in varying states of domestication. They’re a graduate of Viable Paradise writers’ workshop. Online, they can be found at apgolub.com or lurking on Twitter and Instagram as @andtatcat.

by Jelena Dunato

““According to the Shifter Control Act, you’re required to wear these.” The officer hands them silver pins in the shape of a wolf’s head.”

Roza runs down the corridor towards the bursar’s office, unladylike, her freckled cheeks red with exertion, auburn ponytail trailing behind her. Leather soles of her new oxfords slip on the polished floor and she skids past the door, flailing, gripping the doorknob in the last moment. Locked. She checks the clock above the notice board. Two minutes past four.

She sighs, ready to try again tomorrow, when a leaflet pinned to the board catches her eye. Secret Society of Shifters and Their Nefarious Protocols it proclaims in thick, greasy hectograph ink.

“Roza!” Lena’s footsteps echo in the empty corridor behind her. “What are you doing? We’re all waiting for you!”

“Reading,” Roza says softly, catching her breath as a slow, viscous shudder travels down her spine like a fat slug.

Lena, in a man’s shirt, her flaxen hair shorn by some mad artist, twists the corners of her mouth downwards as she glances at the leaflet. “Not that rubbish again. Why are people so obsessed with shifters?”

“They’re afraid of things they don’t understand,” Roza says.

“They’re everywhere around you, hiding in plain sight,” Lena reads from the leaflet and laughs. “Nonsense. I don’t think I’ve ever met one. Have you?”

“I don’t think so,” Roza lies in a smooth, well-practised manner. Her identity card is a fake, the genetic test that got her a place at the university a forgery. Can’t be too careful, her Papa always said, and she’s glad she listened.

“C’mon, don’t waste my time.” Lena grabs her hand and pulls her down the corridor. A minute later, they’re outside, running down the gravel path leading to the immense lawn. Hundreds of students sit on colourful blankets, enjoying the June afternoon.

“Lena! Over here!” somebody calls, and the two of them find themselves among Lena’s usual motley group of painters and actors and architects.

“I think you know everyone,” Lena says, “except maybe…”

A dark-haired young man is sitting on a yellow blanket, peeling a hard-boiled egg, his white shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. He’s broad-shouldered and lithe in an attractive sort of way.

“Franz, this is Roza,” Lena says. “Roza, Franz.”

“Sit down.” He pats the empty spot beside him. Roza takes her oxfords off and kneels down awkwardly, her pencil skirt too tight for lounging. “Egg?”

“No, thank you,” she laughs. Somebody pushes a paper cup filled with spritzer into her hand.

“Smile!” Georg, Lena’s photographer boyfriend aims a bulky instant camera at them and clicks. The camera whirrs, producing a slightly blurry image of Roza and Franz. She tucks it absentmindedly into her purse.

“So what are you studying?” Franz asks. His dark eyes gleam, focused on her face.

“Biology.” She pulls a carrot from a bag of vegetables and takes a bite. “You?”

“Mechanical engineering.” Still holding the egg in his fingers, he flicks his wrist, waves his other hand, and the perfect white ovoid suddenly appears on his neighbour’s plate. “And magic, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

The conversation between them flows without hindrance. They chat about their plans for the future the whole afternoon, impervious to sunburn and strange looks from Lena’s crew.

“It’s time to go,” Lena pronounces when the sun slips behind the Arts building. “We must get ready for the play tonight.”

“Ah, sure.” Roza brushes the crumbs off her skirt. She’s not really into the avant-garde art of Lena’s circle, but she likes the relaxed crowd. As the others turn and leave, Franz touches her hand.

“A quick drink?” he asks.

She’s had enough to drink, but still she follows him, feeling like a naughty child. They amble through the winding, cobbled streets of the town till they reach a small cafe with live music. It’s packed, but she doesn’t mind standing close to him. His hips attract hers like a magnet, and half a dozen cigarettes and two glasses of wine later, she finds herself glued to him, dancing to a slow tune. He bows his head, she lifts hers, and their lips meet in a long kiss.

She should go home, it would be the proper thing to do, but there’s something strange in the air that night. The sky above their heads is shiny and brittle like a glass bauble, the laughter is too loud and nervous and everybody is drinking as if the world is going to run out of alcohol. Beneath the glare and din, Roza senses a deep, slow thrumming; the fate marching towards them. So when Franz says, “Come with me,” she follows once again, light-headed and giggling.

He has an attic room in the old town, five creaky flights of stairs leading up to a lopsided door. A single bed, a sink, an ancient armoire and a desk — good enough for students, poets and rats.

His slim fingers unbutton her blouse and slide under her bra straps. She pulls his shirt out of his trousers and over his head and inhales his scent, entirely human, yet intoxicating. His lips slide down her hot skin, the tip of his tongue writes passionate verses. Her flesh is light and supple under his gentle hands, and she lets him touch her, feel every inch of her, slide inside her.

For one dizzy, blinding moment, she wonders if he can see what she is, if her skin is transparent like a parchment before a candle, revealing the foul secret of her shifter genes. She shudders, and he pauses immediately.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks.

But no, humans have a poor sense of smell, and they have no way of telling a shifter from a human without genealogy or a blood test. It’s a ridiculous fear fuelled by those cursed leaflets appearing all over the campus. She banishes the thought and pulls Franz closer, skin on skin, mouth on mouth as their bodies merge, sailing the waves of pleasure together.

Afterwards, they share a cigarette, and she briefly considers shocking him with the story of her childhood, of running on four legs through the ancient green forests, of cuddling with her sister beneath the earth, safe in their den. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind. But she doesn’t know him, not really, and is unwilling to break the gossamer bridge of affection between them. There’ll be time enough for awkward revelations.

They remain bunked in that room for a week, darting out to get bread and strawberries and cheap wine. Running up the rickety stairs to fall on the narrow bed, breathless, and make love again and again.

While he sleeps, she searches his desk. Engineering, math, some history and poetry. No incendiary pamphlets, no tractates on the treacherous nature of shifters. No hate. When she slips back under the sheets, she feels guilty and mad. Franz sleeps; silver moonlight plays with the sharp shadows on his face. He is gentle and funny and talks about machines as if they were live creatures. He’s a great dancer and an even greater kisser. In a kinder, more normal world, she’d be wondering if he were The One.

Humans cannot marry shifters; it was outlawed a year ago.

As dawn pours its golden light over the rooftops on the eighth day, someone knocks on the shabby door. “Roza? Roza are you here?”

Franz groans in his sleep, but Roza recognizes the voice. She rushes to unlock the door.

“I travelled for two days and turned half the town upside down to find you,” Hana says, flushed from the climb. She looks leaner than before, and fiercer, her red hair in two perfect plaits, her eyes burning. “Papa wants you home immediately.”

“What? Why?” Roza bristles.

“Haven’t you heard the news? We need to report to the census office by Sunday.” Hana peers over her shoulder, curiosity softening her features. “Oooh, I see. Handsome. Does he know?”

“Shut up,” Roza hisses, pushing her sister out. “Wait here.”

She gathers her things quickly as Franz yawns and rubs his eyes. “Family emergency,” she says.

“I’ll call you.”

She kisses him quickly and manoeuvres out of his arms trying to pull her back to bed. One last glance at his unshaven face and she’s out, running down the stairs with her sister.

* * *

Things sour quicker than Roza can follow. The peaceful, happy village she left to go to university is grey and quiet now; the villagers’ eyes cautious and hard. The school is turned into a temporary census office, but instead of the kind old headmaster, a young uniformed officer sits at the desk. As Roza enters with Hana and her parents, she sees the local genealogy register opened on their family page, their real identities written down in a meticulous hand.

“According to the Shifter Control Act, you’re required to wear these.” The officer hands them silver pins in the shape of a wolf’s head. “Don’t leave the village, or you’ll be arrested.”

At first, Roza remains shut in her room, refusing to accept this new reality where people stare at her from afar but cross to the other side of the street when she comes near. The other shifter families sometimes visit furtively, and she hears her father talking to the men late at night. She refuses to socialize with their daughters; they have nothing in common but the cursed blood.

Hana is laid off from her teaching job. Roza knows how hard she worked for it and how much she loved it, but faced with her sister’s furious eyes, she doesn’t know what to say.

“They can’t do this to us,” Hana fumes, as she reads the smuggled newspapers aloud to Roza. “The Government now says they want to intern us for our own safety.”

Roza wonders if she should write to Franz, explain the situation, but words fail her. What could she say? I’m sorry I forgot to mention that I’m an animal. She could only get him in trouble.

The Government starts taking shifters away to an unknown location and the first bloody uprising breaks out – and is brutally put down – in the capital. All shifter families receive Government-issued pills “to restrain their dark nature.” A girl in the village bleeds to death, but the rest of them are forced to report every Sunday to the hard-eyed officer and swallow the pill before him. No one can shift anymore.

A young man Roza went to school with spits the pill before the soldiers. They drag him into the yard unceremoniously and shoot him.

The shot echoes in Roza’s ears for hours afterwards, rendering her numb.

“They’re coming for us,” her father says one evening. “It’s time to move.”

Roza fills her backpack. Warm clothes, a toothbrush, soap, some food. Leafing through her notebooks, she finds the photograph. The two of them, sitting on the yellow picnic blanket. A long-lost version of Roza, laughing into the camera, a paper cup in her hand, her hair a flaming halo. And Franz in half-profile, holding a hard-boiled egg, looking at her. It weighs almost nothing, so she pushes it into the secret pocket in her backpack.

Two days later, their father wakes them up in the middle of the night, and the whole family trudges across the fields, into the woods, to the old forest track. A van with its headlights off waits there. Hana and Roza enter and squeeze themselves between the silent people sitting inside.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” Roza asks her parents, her voice suddenly very small.

“We only had enough money for two,” her father replies. “Don’t worry, we’ll stay here in the woods.”

“No, you mustn’t—” Roza tries to contradict him, but the driver shuts the door and cuts her off.

She cries holding Hana’s hand as they move through the night forest. When the pills wear off – if they wear off – their parents will be able to shift again. But they can only stay in their shifter bodies for a day or two. A shifter who stays longer risks forgetting their human self and turning into a real animal.

Looking at the indifferent moon through the dirty window of the van, Roza thinks that’s not such a bad fate.

* * *

They get new identity cards and jobs at an ammunition factory in a drab industrial town where nobody cares who they are, and new machine fodder is always welcome. Hana joins the resistance immediately, slipping off in the night to attend secret meetings, whispering about propaganda and diversions and shifter troops in the mountains.

Roza pretends she’s normal and ignores Hana’s rage. She stubbornly treats this life as a nightmare that will pass soon, if only she remains small and silent and keeps her head down.

While Hana disseminates illegal pamphlets that attack the Government, Roza wears her one tight dress and goes out with other factory girls. She lets men with greasy hands feel her up in filthy bars that reek of stale cigarette smoke and piss. She thinks of Franz as they shove their tongues down her throat. Soon those men are replaced with boys in badly fitting uniforms, and then they disappear as well. What began as a cleanse turns into a war that spreads across the borders. A general draft spares only those too old or too crippled to fight.

Her beauty fades and so does Hana’s. Their glossy hair becomes brittle and dull. Hana hacks it off, Roza brushes it every night, crying, and hides it under a scarf during the day. Their bodies turn gaunt and tired, their bones creak in protest as they move. Their faces are hard and unfamiliar. Roza struggles to recognize her own reflection.

She sometimes wonders what happened to Lena and her artistic crew. Are they still at university, protesting this madness, producing sharp, furious art? Or have the boys been mobilized and girls sent to factories, so now they look just as harrowed and hopeless as Roza?

One night, the factory explodes and when Hana comes home, her face is bruised and her clothes torn and dirty.

“Close call,” she says, grinning. “They don’t know who I am, but they soon will. Time to move.”

As Hana packs her bag, Roza feels rage flaring in her chest. “Why do you always have to go and do something dangerous?” she says. “We could have stayed here, safe.”

“You want to stay here?” Hana asks, incredulous.

Their tiny room at the boarding house has mold growing in the corners and perennially smells of cabbage. A prison cell would be more cheerful.

Roza hisses, refusing to answer, and grabs her backpack. It’s winter outside, she dresses for the cold and tucks the photo in her breast pocket.

“Why do you keep dragging that stupid thing around?” Hana asks.

Roza wants to hurl back something sharp and hurtful, but in the end, she just says, “Because I liked him. Because it was real.”

The pity in her sister’s eyes cuts her deep. “That world is gone,” Hana says. “And everyone who inhabited it. Those people are dead.”

“No. I’m not dead. And neither is he, I know it.”

Hana shrugs and pulls on her boots.

“Where are we going?” Roza asks.

“There is a base in the woods,” Hana says. “For those who have nothing left to lose.”

* * *

They meet a group of desperate men and women before dawn. Roza keeps her head down, avoiding their eyes. She doesn’t know who they are, she doesn’t want to know. They leave the town and head straight for the woods. It’s freezing cold. The untouched snow reaches up to their knees and there is no path, but Hana leads them with grim determination.

When the sun rises above the mountains, they hear barking in the distance and know they’re being followed.

They trudge on stubbornly, hungry and exposed.

“We should shift,” Roza says. “We’ll move faster on four legs.”

“No,” Hana retorts. “We leave no one behind.”

Roza looks around and makes a quick tally: the ragged fugitives look half-dead in the morning light. Perhaps not all of them are purebloods, and some of them might be too old, too exhausted, or too poisoned by the pills the Government fed them to shift. So they continue slogging beneath the snow-laden pines, armed soldiers hot on their trail.

This deadly landscape in the sharp claws of winter terrifies Roza. Her toes are numb and every muscle in her body screams at her to stop. In order to keep moving, she slips away. The blurry photograph in her breast pocket, tucked under five layers of clothing, pokes at her ribs. She thinks of Franz’s kisses.

The photo is the only vision of the future she can muster. An unfinished business of the two people who fell in love one summer night. Perhaps she’ll find him again, in the next town, next rebels’ base. And then it will be easier to live through this evil, and fight it together.

She doesn’t realize she’s sobbing until Hana’s hand finds hers and squeezes it hard.

“Almost there,” Hana says, her breath a white, frozen cloud. “Up this hill and across the old railway bridge. The rebels should wait for us on the other side.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I have my sources.”

Roza bites her lip and pushes on. While she wasted her time torn between daydreaming and despair, hundreds of grim, stubborn people fought the Government.

“This base in the mountains has a new leader,” Hana says. “A hero, determined to take back what is ours. It’s time to turn around and bare our fangs.”

“I’m scared of fighting.”

“They need other skills too. Nursing. Cooking. Teaching.”

The idea sounds more optimistic than anything Roza has heard in months. There are people like them, organized, led by someone who has a plan.

A shot pierces the silence and Hana falls with a gasp, pulling Roza down, a bloody rose blooming in the snow beneath her.

“Run!” someone screams, as the soldiers pour out of the woods, with their dogs and their guns.

Roza still holds Hana’s hand, though her sister’s eyes are empty, the side of her head blown up. She forces herself to let go and bolts behind the pines, running for her life. She expects a bullet any moment. It doesn’t come. Five seconds pass, then ten, then twenty.

She almost dares to hope she escaped, when a voice says, “Stop.”

He stands before her, a soldier with a raised gun. She closes her eyes and says a quick prayer. Time trickles away.

“Roza?”

She opens her eyes. The soldier removes the scarf that covers his mouth.

“Franz.” She gasps.

The gun shakes in his hands. “I always hoped I’d find you, but…” His eyes study her face as if there’s something crucial written on it. “Tell me you’re not one of them.”

The anguish in his voice breaks her heart and she finally manages to tap into Hana’s rage. She wants to tell him he’s an idiot poisoned by the Government’s lies. A brainwashed fool. A murderer.

But the snow and the blood and the gunshots echoing in the distance wipe away all reasonable arguments. Her sister is gone and Roza is too furious and desperate to care what he thinks when she says, “I’m not a monster, you are.”

And then, keeping her eyes on the barrel of his gun, Roza wills her body to shift. As her clothes fall to the ground, the photograph slips out. It lies on the snow, a perfect rectangle of fiery colours.

She stands lightly on her four feet now, a sleek young fox. Thick red fur protects her from the cold. She waits for the bullet.

Instead, Franz lowers his gun and picks up the photograph. He presses it to his chest.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I never—”

Shots thunder among the trees. Eyes locked on each other, they both know no words are powerful enough to carve a future for the two of them.

His gaze follows her as she turns away and dashes into the woods.

 

* * *

About the Author

Jelena Dunato is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer, and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts.

Jelena’s stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, and Mermaids Monthly, among others. She is a member of SFWA and Codex. Her novel Dark Woods, Deep Water is coming out from Ghost Orchid Press in September 2023. Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter and cat. You can find her at jelenadunato.com and on Twitter @jelenawrites.

by Deborah L. Davitt

“So it was that she found herself ten thousand feet above the sea, racing through clouds heavy with rain, chasing a trio of galleons laden with treasure that were running before the wind — but the seabound vessels couldn’t match her airborne craft for speed.”

The gibbet creaked under her weight as she shifted in place, coiling her tail up, out of reach of the crowd here in Port Royale — most of whom wanted bits of her fur as keep-sakes, it appeared. They’d probably fight over her earrings and jewelry when it came time for her corpse to be removed from her tiny prison.

Not that they’d have a hope of making her earring’s luck work for them, of course.

But that’s what she got for being famous — the Dread Pirate Grace Morraine, scourge of the skies. Her great flying ship, the Elektra, couldn’t save her now.

She licked a paw and straightened her whiskers. There was no point in going to her death untidy.

Guardsmen pushed their way through the crowd, leveling their halberds to do it. The raucous noise of the Parrot and Monkey voices in this tropical port of call faded as those good citizens sidled away from the guards and their sharp-edged weapons. “Oh, good. There’s to be a trial after all,” Grace said, rising to her feet. The gibbet swayed around her. “I thought you were just going to let me raisin away in the sun for the fun of it.”

The guardsmen — Dogs to a man — winced. “Come along,” their leader said, producing a key and unlocking the door of the swaying gibbet. “The Magistrate wants to see you.”

“Do I want to see him?” Grace wondered out loud.

The Dog closest to her grinned crookedly. “Oh, yes. He’s about to make you an offer you shouldn’t refuse.”

The Magistrate was, of course, a Poodle. Long of nose, disdainful of expression, with curls of hair piled atop his head. (Grace was sure it was a wig, well-powdered.) “Grace Morraine?” he said, regarding her through his pince-nez glasses. “There are two ways this meeting can go.”

She stared at the pitcher of water at his elbow. She hadn’t had so much as a sip in two days. “I’m listening.”

“One, you can say no, and you can go back to your gibbet.”

“Let’s say that I say yes.” She flicked her tail insouciantly, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Do I get to live?”

“Aye. You’d take this letter of marque,” he held up a piece of paper, “and you’d agree to continue your depredations on the shipping lines, leaving, of course, the ships of your countrymen strictly alone.”

She felt her eyes widen. “And the catch is?”

“You sell the cargos you capture to us. For a price we set. You pay your taxes. You become–” The magistrate barked out a laugh. “–an honest citizen.”

Grace considered this. With the only other alternative being the gibbet — a gibbet she didn’t see herself getting out of anytime soon, and the Elektra someplace distant, waiting for signs that her captain lived or died — she didn’t see that she had much choice. And yet, could she trust the magistrate?

All signs pointed to no. He’d find some way to swindle her out of her freedom, soon enough. There might be political pressure on him to show results against the podencos soon, and he might not have the manpower to do it without pirates on his side.

Still, trust him or not, she didn’t have much of a choice. “Where do I sign?”

“You can make your X right here — oh, aren’t you clever, you can sign your name.” The condescension made her twitch, but Grace soothed herself to expressionlessness. Her hackles didn’t even rise.

Well, hardly rose, anyway.

“Congratulations. You’re no longer a pirate, Grace Morraine. You’re a privateer.”

Within a week, Grace found herself back aboard the Elektra, her second-in-command yielding the tiller back to her hand with surprising grace — she’d always had Eason marked out as an ambitious sod who’d take control of the ship and not cede it back without putting it to a vote among the crew. “Privateering’s not a bad move, for the moment,” she told her crew, half Cats, the rest Parrots, Monkeys, and the occasional Badger. “Anyone who signs the marque lifts the death sentence against them. So we chase the podencos and take their cargo. Same as we would have done anyway.”

The crew accepted her word, to her great relief. She hadn’t wanted to have to recruit new sailors if the crew as a whole had been too disgruntled at the change of their fortune’s winds.

So it was that she found herself ten thousand feet above the sea, racing through clouds heavy with rain, chasing a trio of galleons laden with treasure that were running before the wind — but the seabound vessels couldn’t match her airborne craft for speed. “Bring the lightning cannons to bear!” Grace shouted, touching the pearl hanging from her ear for good luck.

The Elektra began her dive-bombing routine, letting hot air out of the balloon, reefing her sails, and plummeting towards the galleons. Grace plunged the tiller forward, adjusting pitch and yaw, as her sailors clung to the rigging and belted themselves to the cannons. Lightning sparked in her cannons, and then shot out, blue-white, across the dark indigo of the sea below…

And then the thunder of the cannons hit her, and Grace whooped in joy, ears ringing. This was life. This is what made life worth living, the glory of the hunt, the thrill of the chase. She didn’t play with her kills — oh no. But she circled the galleons, strafing their decks, sending crewmen — all Dogs, all podencos, leaping overboard to avoid the blue-white lightning that sizzled fractals into the wooden decks, and set the sails on fire.

A ragged volley of answering fire came from the galleons — their lightning was red, and shorter-ranged, so Grace danced the Elektra just outside the reach of their cannons. “Just surrender, you daft buggers!” she shouted in a gap between thunderclaps. “Heave to, and prepare to be boarded!” Her fur bristled from the electricity ambient in the air, making her look twice her normal size.

The three galleons slowly surrendered, lowering their flags. She could see sailors throwing buckets of sand on the flames, buckets of seawater. Trying, desperately, to save their own lives by putting out the fires.

Eason, a pure white Cat with a black eyepatch that concealed a missing eye, came to stand at her side at the tiller. “You want to go down yourself?”

“No, I trust you to handle it. The terms are that they turn over all their gold and gems, their wine and liquor.” The first would make the Magistrate happy; the latter would keep her crew happy. “They can keep their tobacco and cotton. We don’t have the hold space for that, anyway.”

“We should get a second ship, so that we do have the hold space.”

She shot him a sidelong look. “And you’d captain her?”

“I’ve proven my loyalty, haven’t I?” Eason countered.

“With the spoils from these three lovelies, we might be able to afford a second ship,” she agreed after a moment. “And yes, you have.” For the moment, Grace thought, but she kept her misgivings tucked behind her eyeballs. Give him command of his own ship, and he might depart on the next fresh breeze, and all her hard-won spoils with him.

Of course, the reason she was letting her executive officer lead the boarding party was because she had a niggling feeling that once the goods were hauled aboard, he’d just up and leave her on the galleon below.

On the other other hand, he could have just left her in port, without a ship to turn towards privateering.

To trust, or not to trust. The eternal conundrum.

Grace hovered the Elektra over the lead galleon, and the descend ropes dropped, sailors from her ship swarming down with Eason, while still more sailors with muskets stood at the railing of the Elektra, giving them cover in case the podencos decided to get frisky.

Then box after box of gold bullion began winching their way to the Elektra’s cargo hold. Barrel after barrel of Madeira wine — to the cheers of her crew. Each galleon was scavenged completely of its wealth, and then the Elektra, groaning a little under the weight, headed for the clouds once more.

“It’s a good life,” Grace told Eason as he came back aboard. Her tone was nearly a purr.

“If you can survive it,” he agreed, and for a moment, that knife’s edge was back. To trust, or not to trust.

But she put out her paw, and he took it in his, and she hauled him over the rail and back aboard. “Set course for Port Royale!” she called to her crew, and their cheers drifted down from the sky, touching even the waves below.

Tomorrow, she’d have to deal with the Magistrate. The sure-to-be-rigged ‘legitimate’ markets of Port Royale, which would surely try to shortchange her on the price of gold, the value of the gems, and the cost to repair the Elektra where the galleons’ crews had pockmarked her underbelly with musket balls. Tomorrow, she’d have to deal with taxes and credits and debits, the lack of honor in her fellow creatures, and more.

But today? Today she was sailing into a sunset, and a glass of rum waited for her in her quarters. Tomorrow could take care of itself for a few hours, while she basked in the glow of the present.

 

* * *

About the Author

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-nominated poetry collections, The Gates of Never and Bounded by Eternity, and her chapbook, From Voyages Unending, see www.edda-earth.com.

by CB Droege

“These were the monsters I had been sent to kill? It was clear that these two were anything but monsters.”

The plan was that we would drop onto the airstrip, clear the LZ of lizards, then the plane could land, and we’d off-load the heavy artillery. It didn’t quite go down like that, though. During the drop my chute got tangled, and I was steered off course, dropping me just off the beach outside the fence. I was sandy and dripping, much of my equipment waterlogged and useless, including my radio and gun, but I was the lucky one. After coming ashore, I watched the plane circle for another ten minutes, then it flew off north, back toward the mainland. It was clear that the rest of the team was not able to clear the LZ as planned, and they were likely dead.

“Some kind of big dumb lizards with big dumb teeth,” Harris had told us during the mission briefing on the plane twenty minutes earlier. “Apparently, some rogue scientist opened a portal to an alternate earth populated by giant carnivores, and some of them got through.” It was always some idiotic scientist. Those people are dangerous: opening portals, doing genetic experiments, or signaling alien spacecraft. Science should be outlawed if you ask me. “The scientist and his crew are dead,” Harris continued, “but a construction worker and his family are trapped in the event zone. We’re being sent in to take the beasts down and rescue any survivors we can find. Luckily, the whole place is closed up with fences, and it’s an island anyway, so containment shouldn’t be complicated.”

I was the only survivor, other than the pilot, and he would be home and safe soon. I was wet and cold, and night was coming. I needed shelter, and in the distance, I saw a small cabin up against the fence, so I set out. I was half a kilometer away when I spotted movement. I was happy at first to see another person, but the movement was strange, alien, so I ducked behind a nearby tree, and took out my spyglass, which was luckily waterproof. From my cover, I spied the cabin, and saw Talon for the first time, though I wasn’t calling him that yet.

He was in front of the cabin, standing where the grass turned to sand. He looked like a raptor with a nearly horizontal spine, supported on two thick legs. His trunk was balanced by a thick tail that nearly brushed the ground. His body was covered in heavy wrappings, including what looked a bit like a turban on his head. His forelimbs ended in three-fingered hands, and he was bending over a firepit, with a flint and steel, attempting to start a fire.

The door of the cabin opened, and another came out, the one that I would eventually call Lizzy, once we were amicable.  She was dressed in similar wrappings as Talon, making it clear that these were intentional; not just dressings, but clothing. She took a few steps down toward the beach and made some growling sounds. After a few weeks, I would come to understand some rudimentary phrases in their language, and they in mine, but at this point, I only really noticed her teeth, which were mostly flat. I remembered enough from biology class to know those were the teeth of an herbivore, though I later discovered that, while they never ate the flesh of the rodents I caught around the cabin, they would sometimes catch and grill fish.

Lizzy spoke with Talon for a moment, and he spoke back, and then she returned to the cabin, and he to his fire-building attempt.

These were the monsters I had been sent to kill? It was clear that these two were anything but monsters. They were people. Cold people trapped in a strange land. Of course, I would learn about the real monsters later, the terror lizards who had also come through the portal, and the three of us would have to work together to survive once they eventually broke through the fence, but this first day the only challenge was diplomacy. I wasn’t really thinking about things like ‘first contact protocol’. I was mostly just wet and cold.

I set my waterlogged gun aside, in case they would know what it was, and I approached their camp slowly and with hands raised, not understanding then that this was a sign of aggression in their culture. Lizzy came out, and we three faced off for a few minutes, not understanding each other at all. The misunderstanding didn’t last though.

My first bit of real diplomacy was showing Talon how to use my lighter.

 

* * *

About the Author

CB Droege is an author and voice actor from the Queen City living in the Millionendorf. He loves wizards and time-travel, but has an irrational distaste for time-traveling wizards. His latest books are Ichabod Crane and the Magic Lamp and Other Stories and Quantum Age Adventures. Short fiction publications include work in Nature Futures, Science Fiction Daily and dozens of other magazines and anthologies.  He also produces a weekly podcast, in which he reads other people’s stories: Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast.  Learn more at cbdroege.com

by Val E Ford

“He had taken it as his job over their several lifetimes, the killing of them both, so they could be together again. But Katy never remembered it being like this. Never such a choice.”

“Come with me…” Liam’s voice was scratchy from the tubes that had been sustaining him during the last bout of pneumonia and worsening health. He fumbled to unzip his fleece jacket with the hand that wasn’t holding hers.

An image burned itself into Katy’s being. She knew truth when she saw it; it was one of her gifts, to see the in-between spaces, and this was one, this was for her a liminal moment. She had to walk off this bridge alive today.

“Not this time, Love.” Katy stared wide-eyed down at the roiling floodwaters, hooked her knees through the space between the metal railings and moved her grip on him from a hand hold to a wrist hold. “You come back home and do it the hard way.”

“Katy… I can’t… I’m burning. It’s time. We have to go.” His voice extended into the realms beyond her ear’s ability to hear, and the essence of his elemental fire gift burned through their connection as he sent the command she’d been dreading ever since they’d realized he’d be living disabled for the rest of his life after the car accident. “I can’t live this way.” He sat on the balustrade, and his free hand pulled up on the orthopedic brace to lift his leg over the rail as she tugged at him to prevent the move. Even ill he was a great beast of a man and beyond her physical control.

He had taken it as his job over their several lifetimes, the killing of them both, so they could be together again. But Katy never remembered it being like this. Never such a choice. But maybe it had been; memories of other lives came on slowly, mostly after they found each other again. This time was different, maybe it was just that her attitude was different.

“I love you, Katy. We have to go.” His elemental fire was licking along his outline, breaking through into the air around him.

She fought his blazing command, bringing up the blessed coolness of the earth and binding the heat, sending it through her body and out her pores to meld with the wind and let it be carried away. “I’m not going. I’m not ready. You get back down here before you pull my arm off.” She started fighting his fire for him too.

“Katy! We. Are. Doing. This.” He swung his other long leg over the railing. “It’s just a step, Love.” He smiled and took it.

Katy tried to pull him back over the edge, but his mass only took a second to lift her off her heels; her knees around the rails were the only thing keeping her out of the air.  And by the moment she stopped trying to save him and instead save herself, his grip on her arm was winning. So, she breathed in the power of her connection with the spaces between and sent it flowing down the shining fluid pathway that anchored their souls together, down into the spaces between the cells of his heart muscle, and by the time she was done, so was he.

“Goodbye, Love,” she told her soulmate as his dying fingers slipped from their grip on her arm. He finished his long falling step into the flooded river alone. “We’ll find each other again,” she whispered as her tears followed him into the encompassing water below. She braced herself against the moment when their connection blazed and disappeared, and then she sat on the cold concrete for a long time taking in what it meant to be alone.

Over the next few weeks, Katy took to wandering the streets at odd hours on foot and in her car. She was unsettled, lonely, not sleeping, going long stretches between eating until a smell awoke her hunger and then she couldn’t stop. At first, she cried at silly things, sometimes everything, but after a while numbness crawled out of the crater inside her soul, and she started a new routine. She’d walk at first light to the bridge and cross, following the path along the shore until her feet didn’t want to go any further, and then she’d stop for a while, breathing in the sea air before walking back.

And then one day, like sun through a break in the clouds, she felt the moment he returned. And she cried because they were off kilter. A soulmate in diapers wasn’t an easy thought. But the crater inside her eased, and she slept well again.

And so, she started living again too. She started seeing clients once more, telling them the truths she saw in the spaces between their current selves and the ones they would become. She sketched for them their liminal scene, the one that might change them, the image that burned in her mind as she sat with them. And before they left, she gave them the picture along with whatever words seemed right. Often no words were needed; sometimes it was just a hug.

She was finishing a session with a client who had come because she was feeling upset with her marriage, and yes, she needed a hug. The picture had been of the client’s next-door neighbor opening the door to a motel room, and familiar shoes were sitting beside the bed. That hug went on a while, and when the woman steadied enough to step into her new life, Katy opened the door.

A squeal sounded under the woman’s foot as she walked out. A fluffy black and white Mountain Dog puppy cried on Katy’s doorstep, and when she picked it up, she knew.

“Hello, Liam.” A vision of herself and the slightly older puppy at obedience school with a chain collar and a leash filled her head. And she smiled, perhaps a little too long.

And so, Katy had a dozen years of friends and gardening and working and good doggie companionship, until the day Liam the dog started flaming and his wide muzzle and sharp teeth gripped deep into her lower leg, piercing the skin as he tried to pull her over the edge of the riverbank.

As she fought him, a vision filled her mind, she saw a huge set of balancing scales in a spotlight on a table. On one side a mess of her long hair and longer skirts showed the pile of bodies to be herself as she had been the five times Liam had drowned her. On the other side of the scales, she saw Liam lying pale and sprawled in his unzipped fleece jacket, seaweed in his dark hair as a spotted dog was lowered beside him. The scale barely righted.

“Fuck you, Liam! I am not dying today!” Her leg was on fire, and anger churned through her as she fell over the bank. They both rolled through the dried grass and blackberry vines and into the water. She hugged the big beloved dog, and with a practiced breath, she stopped his heart and watched him flop into the shallows.

When she got back home alone that night with stiches and burns on her calf, her tears were back, and she swore off pets.

When she woke up on Saturday morning, Katy took her graying head to the hairdresser and her sore knees to the gym, and she opened all the windows and burned sage in their house and pounded on her drum and let her towels and sheets dry in the sunshine.  Then she vacuumed dog hair off the couch and out of the corners and smiled as she made lasagna and savored their favorite meal alone.

Three months later a fuzzy black and white kitten crawled out of a stroller that a couple little girls were pushing toward her down the sidewalk. His littermates cried, their faces popping over the edge to see where he had gone. Katy picked him up, kissed him and ran to catch back up with the girls. “Enjoy this one, Love,” she whispered to the kitten. Katy scratched his ears and gave him to the youngest child. Liam the kitten yowled and bit the child. The little girl dropped him looking heartbroken.

Katy grabbed the kitten as he dashed around her legs, thumped his nose with her fingernail, and swaddled him tightly in a dolly blanket before handing him back to the child. “He’ll be better now I bet,” she told her. “He told me his name is Liam, and he loves tuna.”

Liam the cat was her constant companion as she worked in the garden and sat on the porch. But she never let him inside their house, and she never fed him. He attacked everyone who came to the house, even the UPS deliverywoman. At midnight every night for a month, he scratched and yowled until the screens were shredded.

When summer was heating up and Katy couldn’t take the hot air anymore, she took down all the screens to have them remade with scratch proof materials and reinforced with grating. She was opening the back of her car, parked on the busy street in front of the screen shop, when she was struck in the shoulder by a flying twenty-pound black and white and burning fuzzball.

She stumbled and flung the cat away and nearly fell in front of a bus that slammed on its brakes. “That is IT, Liam! You want war?” she said, looking around and patting out the places where her shirt was scorched.

Then she felt the connection snap, and she was alone again in this world as the bus rolled away from a squished black, white, and red form.

The next morning, Katy woke up with mosquito bites layered over yesterday’s burns and scratches, so she made a special trip to the store for bug spray and let off a great blast before going to work.

Her first client of the day was Doris, who really just wanted to know somebody loved her. Katy’s talents failed her. The only image in her head was of Liam choking and burning, so she put Doris’s plate of cookies into a sandwich bag and reassured her that children leaving home for college was a good thing as she walked her to her car. Then Katy quickly drove back home and opened all the doors and windows.

She found Liam hiding under the couch and let him spend the next day on her arm, drinking and dying as mosquitos do. And when he was gone, slow salty paths traced her cheeks as the drops of her tears fell beside him and upon him. She buried his tiny insect body beneath their favorite rose bush and sat on her knees remembering when they had planted it.

She longed for solace, for a full life with him, the children they had never had and the feel of his arms around her. She reached her essence deep into the soil and let the energy that lives between flow upward into her being. She brought the power up into her heart and let the imbalance of betweenness affect her, let the spaces between cells and molecules disrupt, and felt her death nearing as the gentle rhythm broke.

And then the earth beneath her feet became hot and heavy, and a drop of fire fell from the thorn of a rose and broke her concentration.

“Thank you, Liam,” she whispered and cried a while, but didn’t attempt it again. She sat out in the cold night air feeling the beauty of being alive fill and restore her.

At midwinter, their connection renewed as he entered the world again. And when the image came, she could barely believe the beauty of it. Liam had chosen a new way. He was a preemie whose head was misshapen, and his heart was barely clinging to life. So, she moved 100 miles and went to the hospital and volunteered to do some cuddling.

272 long days after Liam came into the world as a teenage addict’s infant son, Katy held him as he took his last painfilled natural breath. And then she held the now sober mother, their once great, great, grandchild and helped wield the shovels and sing the prayers as the baby, Liam, met with the earth.  And a few days later, she brought the girl home with her.

When she felt Liam enter the world again at midwinter, she felt expectation as the days grew longer and spring once more filled her garden. And then one afternoon at the end of a nap as she rocked on her porch, a vision of the scales appeared again, nearly evenly balanced.

She started walking again, saying her goodbyes to everything she loved, wandering pets, laughing children, the woman girl who was growing in her own ways.  She walked often over the bridge and down nearly to the ocean, and eventually she started seeing a great sight, a black and white seal swimming along with her as she walked. And one day when Katy was ready, she took off her shoes, her knobby tender old feet exposed to the rocks as she waded into the cold water, and they went diving. And with her last breath she also took his.

 

* * *

Originally published in ROAR 9

 

 

About the Author

Val E Ford loves life and all the messy complications of being temporarily embodied.

by Kai Delmas

““Naughty, naughty wolf.” She wags her red-stained finger at me.”

I skulk among the roots and fallen branches of ancient trees. My hackles rise at the scent of fungal growth and decay. This is my dark forest and I am its wicked wolf.

The mice and rabbits scurry from my presence. They know their fate if they dare linger when I’m hunting. But such tiny rodents would only satisfy the hunger I feel for a short time. I seek larger prey, for the pit of my stomach is deep and hollow.

My ears prick up and I raise my snout. The birds’ chirping falls silent and a different song fills the forest. And with it a current flows through the air. Sweet. Red. I can taste it.

Strawberries.

My prey is near. My tongue lolls from between my teeth, my paws quicken, drawing me closer to that luring scent. Saliva drip, drip, drips as I make my way.

I find her path, follow the footsteps she’s left in the muddy track. I listen to her soft song and take in the rich smell of strawberries that linger where she treads. Her red cloak billows up ahead.

I rush down the path and prepare to pounce, to swallow her whole, to fill that hollow belly of mine and end the gnawing hunger within.

But something isn’t right.

She turns, freezing me in my tracks. Clear blue eyes and rosy cheeks greet me. She pops a strawberry into her mouth, chews and smiles, red dripping from her chin.

“Naughty, naughty wolf.” She wags her red-stained finger at me.

My jaw is ready to snap. Bite those little fingers right off. But all that I can muster is a guttural growl.

“This isn’t how our story goes.” She pulls another strawberry from her basket and bites down on its soft, red flesh.

My hunger grows and I want to lash out but I cannot. The clear blue sky above the treetops ripples and shimmers. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I…

I shake off the wrongness that comes over me and watch the girl place a large rock into her basket.

I try to open my mouth, to question the girl, but my throat tightens. My teeth clench as I stare at the girl.

Her lips stretch into a wide grin, more wicked than mine ever could.

“It’s simple, really. Off to grandmother’s house I go.” She lifts another rock into her basket. “We meet and you go on ahead. Then we meet again. That’s what happens every time. Forever and ever.”

A shiver runs down my spine; my fur bristles and I’m overcome with cold. A rushing sensation is all around me; everything I see is blue and I cannot move beneath the rushing stream.

I drag in deep lungfuls of air and look back at the girl, her fingers red and sticky. The endless pit that is my stomach growls in protest and dread. But there’s nothing I can do.

This isn’t how our story goes.

I turn to leave and bound into the woods.

Her voice trails behind me, “See you soon.”

* * *

I find grandmother’s house. My very own footprints lead me there. They always do.

The hollowness of my stomach has grown, yet I feel heavy and sluggish. I creep up to the open door, my belly dragging on the forest ground.

Before I can announce my presence to trick the old woman, the scent of strawberries rushes over me.

“There you are.” The girl sits at the kitchen table, her smile wide and full of teeth.

“We’ve been waiting for you.” Her grandmother’s mouth stretches dark and terrible, mirroring her granddaughter’s.

My legs quiver and I drop to the wooden floor. They grab my heavy body and lift me onto the bed, belly up.

Too overcome with wrongness to speak, I whimper.

They cackle as the girl heaves her basket onto the nightstand and her grandmother pulls large shears from beneath the bed.

The girl opens her basket to reveal dozens of stones. “This isn’t how our story went the first time.”

She takes the shears from her grandmother and jams them in my gut. She cuts — snip, snip, snip — as if my skin were nothing but cloth. I can only watch in shock as pain washes over me.

She digs around and removes her hands, red and sticky. The scent of strawberries becomes too much to bear. I retch to no avail.

“You see, this story of ours has long been over.” The girl begins lifting the stones from her basket to place them inside my stomach. “But it will never be over for you. You’re wicked and you must pay for your wicked ways.”

I squirm but cannot get off the bed.

Cold envelopes me and the stones in my belly drag me down, keeping me at the bottom of the stream. I cannot move. I can never leave my sins behind.

“You’ve done this to yourself.” Grandmother dons her glasses and sews my belly up with tight stitches made of red thread.

“You deserve every second of it.” The girl pulls me out of the bed. My limbs stiff, my belly heavy with stones.

She leads me outside to the stream behind the house. Brings me to the edge.

I don’t resist.

I know she’s right. It’s too late for me to change.

She shoves me into the rushing water.

I sink down, unable to swim or move at all.

I’m cold. The sky ripples above me through the rushing stream.

All I can do is dream.

Of my dark forest. Of my paws thudding along the damp earth. Of the sun setting through endless trees.

Of the girl’s footprints in the mud and how I follow her scent of strawberries.

 

* * *

 

About the Author

Kai Delmas loves creating worlds and magic systems and is a slush reader for Apex Magazine. He is a winner of the monthly Apex Microfiction Contest and his fiction can be found in Martian, Etherea, Tree And Stone, Wyldblood, and several Shacklebound anthologies. Find him on Twitter @KaiDelmas.

by David Penny

“She accepted Death’s courtship. Afterwards, darkness was clear to her as water to a fish, and she knew no fear from unseen things.”

“Listen well, my precious ones, and I will tell you of our Mother, the Goddess of Secrets.”

The alley cat nosed more newspaper around her kittens. Cruel wind chilled all their bones. She licked stray whiskers, soothed hungry cries. They clamoured for her story.

* * *

In the beginning, the world was light. Many Gods, bright and cruel, roamed the land. People were of all shapes and cowered from the God’s self-important wrath. The God of Death was born from necessity and laboured eternally. You see, Death was smaller, less important in those times. He was just, and fair, and implacable in his kindness. Death did not know all then, and some survived when they should not, but that is another story.

One bright moment among many, a woman fled from the unkind Gods. She was beautiful, with graceful limbs and curving tail, proud as an arched whisker, and sharp of wit as a well-groomed claw. The Gods chased and laughed and fought amongst themselves for the right to claim the spark of joy in her heart. She was afraid.  The world was light with no dark places to hide. Death knew her and waited by her side. She begged Death, not for life, but for spite, to keep her joy away from the cruel Gods.

Death obliged, and hid her inside himself, the single unlit place in all creation. He gave her a choice — stay with him in darkness forever and be safe or leave into the light and meet her end with the other Gods. If she left, her spark would die with her, because Death had no power over other Gods at that time.

She stayed, and wept, alone. Death was also lonely, for no one whispered love to him in those times. He came to her softly in her first night, and she was blind, afraid.

Yes, my darlings, Gods can visit inside themselves. They drink paradoxes like we drink cream.

Death whispered kind words and gave her a gift, not of light, for that was beyond him, but of shades and shadows. He stole the black behind the moon, wrapped it with tender words and presented it on bent knee. She accepted Death’s courtship. Afterwards, darkness was clear to her as water to a fish, and she knew no fear from unseen things.

A joy shared is a joy doubled, so she shared herself with him, and Death claimed part of her spark, freely given. This was her plan. Death was a kind prison, but prisons chafed. She resented the freedom Gods gave themselves. She whispered her anger in Death’s ear and made up a secret that Gods could die. In love, Death believed her.  No more were Gods immortal in the world.

Death summoned himself for the first time. He slew a cruel, brilliant God in her name. The divine corpse-void brought the first proper darkness into the world. Death hid the dark in him to conceal his deed. Death grew, and the woman could stretch out once more. She murmured soft praise to her lover. The Gods did not see, for they could not conceive of their own destruction.

Again, she drew Death into her to share her spark of joy. Again Death slew in her name. Death grew once more. Three, and three, and three again were slain for her. She danced through the halls of Death and sang her joy through the echoing chambers of Death’s love for her.

The Gods knew treachery now, and came to kill Death, but Death would not come for himself. With the strength of her song inside him, Death threw back all who tried. The Gods discovered fear and withdrew from the darkness of his touch. Light flickered in the world, dangerous to all the people, for the void claimed any place where the divine light did not fall.

Death came to her once more for wisdom. She whispered into his ear. The Gods, so fearful of his touch, were herded outside the world, locked behind the void corpses of the nine, plucked from the body of Death, left where their Godly light touched the people but could not harm them. The woman filled to bursting with the nine-fold doubling of joy now returned to them. She bore Death’s shadowy children, every night, for many nights, each with a sliver of their shared joy. These shadows became night and filled the corners of the world where the light did not touch. People became safe in the darkness for the first time.

At last, she lay exhausted, curled inside a Death too small to contain her. Their last child and only daughter, with eyes that saw all, and ears that heard all, nestled in her arms. Death whispered all his secrets for there was no other way to express the fullness of his love. He shared his divinity as she shared joy. Unconfined at last, the Goddess of Secrets padded away from the safety of Death for the dark patches and secret ways of night. Her daughter followed, soft and sharp, kind and vicious.

All shadows whispered to her, and she knew all, from love found in the shade of a tree to the shadow of evil inside a twisted heart. She whispered all these secrets to Death, and none could ever hide from him again.

Her daughter’s children, and children’s children bore the co-mingled spark of joy from nine divine deaths. Death honoured each one, in memory of his undying love.

* * *

“And that, my kittens, is why you must watch everything, and peer into all spaces, so your Mother of Secrets can whisper to her love. Do this, and you can greet father Death as a friend until the ninth, when you will go with him forever.”

The alley cat licked her kitten’s foreheads once more and whispered her love into their ears. The wind blew colder. The kittens slept, for now. She looked up to see her friend, Death, waiting at her side, the fourth time for her. He stroked her kindly, once, and stroked the cheek of her youngest, and weakest, who blinked awake, eyes wide but unafraid. Death took only his due and the kitten tumbled back to sleep. They all slept soundly. Tomorrow was another day, and there were kittens to feed.

 

* * *

About the Author

David Penny lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, where he also plays host to their perpetual house guest and cat Louis.  When not writing, David likes to fiddle around with a violin and spend far too many hours prepping and running various TTRPGs.  He works in the civil engineering field, but would rather read stories of all kinds than more technical documentation.

by Penndry Dragonsworth

“Only Contrary could run away from home with nothing but the fur on her back, and end up in the lair of the single magical creature able to thrive in this horrible, magic-twisted place.”

The lioness had misplaced her sister. Not her pack-sister, pride-sister, or blood-sister; not her hunt-sister, heart-sister, or sister-in-the-mysteries: her sister, full stop. The fact that the lioness had been away at University studying sorcery for the last three years made no difference at all to the matron-mothers when they contacted her through crystal — at great expense and inconvenience they were sure to mention. They told the lioness: “The only tie Contrary claims is yours, therefore you must bring her home.” The divinatory-aunts had named her sister Contrary and either through fate or parental expectations, she lived up to that name with verve and enthusiasm — at least until she vanished.  The lioness wondered why they would want such an adept provocateur returned to the pride-castle, but the matron-mothers were adamant: “She is ours, and we did not give her leave to go.”

The lioness wished (not for the first time) that her beloved Contrary had claimed allegiance to anyone else. There was no way she was going to convince any of her hunt-sisters or travel-sisters to leave the familiarity of home territory and the safety of the pride-castle for one who took no place in the family. The lioness sighed, begged forbearance from her advisors, and hied herself home to look for clues.

If there was anyone who could provide a counteragent to the whims of her mothers, it was her divinitory-aunts, but they shut the chapel on her arrival so quickly she very nearly lost a whisker to the doors.

Her father just said, “Then don’t. It’s one less mouth to feed, innit,” when she asked as a last resort.

Easy for him to say, but it was her hide the matron-mothers would shred to ribbons if Contrary wasn’t found.

* * *

Contrary had gone to the Stormlands but left the lioness a clue in the form of a small carved figurine. The bird with thunder in its wings smelled like dolphins, lightning, flooded dreams, and wet bird. It rattled when the lioness shook it. It could only have come from one place. How she hated the Stormlands! Any sane person avoided the wet, violent, chaotic, wet, dripping, wet place. But. Always but.  “She is ours, and she had no leave to go.”

The lioness sighed again. Even plain-sisters-full-stop were family, and family belonged to the matron-mothers. She informed the matron-mothers of her destination and thought longingly of her sorcery research as she pulled her heavy-weather gear out of storage.

* * *

Finding Contrary in the Stormlands was a slog. The rocs and thunderbirds who ruled the Stormlands disrupted the aether with their very existence and the lioness’ waterproofing spell failed within the first week. By the time she finally tracked down her sister, her shoes squelched, she’d been through two hurricanes, fifteen major thunderstorms (apparently they only counted as major if you were struck by lightning and oh! How she hated this place!), had muddy hail thrown in her face by a waterspout-surfing dolphin man, and was pretty sure her fur was growing algae.

Only Contrary could run away from home with nothing but the fur on her back, and end up in the lair of the single magical creature able to thrive in this horrible, magic-twisted place. That this so-called “lair” was a mansion and the magical creature was a famous ice-dragon and an artist just added to the unfairness of it all.

The lioness sighed as she looked up at the mansion’s decorative pillars, green with algae; she sighed again as she looked higher at the extensive gutters with corner statues, fanciful grotesqueries spewing water like fountains; she looked at the long winding pathway to the door, overhung with picturesque mossy trees dripping yet more water. But. Always but. “She is ours, and she had no leave to go.”

The lioness sighed a third time and started walking. A piece of wet moss fell on her head.

* * *

“You,” she said to Contrary, and that small word spoke pages on how she felt about this situation, “are coming home.”

“No,” said Contrary, twirling her ice wine by its stem and dangling a paw off the opulent chaise lounge. She looked at her sister’s sodden, drooping whiskers, took in her squelching shoes. The lioness really had tried to do right by her, but was too enmeshed in the family to understand why she couldn’t stay. “Sister, tell the matron-mothers I am muse to an ice dragon. Surely that will be enough status to satisfy them.”

The lioness shook her head. “That’s not how it works.”

“You left for Uni,” the ice dragon pointed out. She was smudged with paint and magical reagents. The lioness sniffed. Artists.

“The castle had need for a wizard.”

What actually happened was this: first the lioness had confessed her sorcery to her heart-sister; then they both petitioned their hunt-sisters with charts and maths; then they and the hunt-sisters begged blessings from a divinatory-aunt who eyed them skeptically but cast the auguries anyhow; and by the time the lioness, her heart-sister, her hunt-sisters, and the divinatory-aunt took her cause to the matron-mothers, the sisters-of-the-mysteries had already whispered in the matron-mothers’ ears and it was a good thing the lioness was here because the matron-mothers had just decided the north tower needed a wizard.

The lioness looked at the ice dragon. The lioness looked at Contrary. Was it fate or expectations that brought them to this. She thought of her time at University. She thought of the matron-mothers and their proud, noble lineage (she thought of the matron-mothers and their sharp, strong claws). She thought she was dry enough for at least one containment spell.

“Sister, you had no leave to go.”

 

* * *

About the Author

Penndry Dragonsworth lives in the Midwest with two cats and collects small vintage cameras. In the summers, Penndry does low-key urban foraging to make jam.

by Amitha Jagannath Knight

“I returned to the village and ate every single person who had ever wronged me, starting with my family, and then the boy I was supposed to impress and the woman who hoped to be my mother-in-law…”

Once, I was a human girl.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but long ago, when devas and demons roamed the earth, I was a human girl who dreamed of being a dancer.

The rains had finished, and the Kaveri River swelled threateningly close to the outskirts of the village. In no rush to return home, I sat idling by the riverbank in the marshy reeds, my toes in the water, dreaming of dancing. I wanted to feel the rhythm of the drums in my body, of the high flute winding around my skin. More than that, I wanted to be free of my family.

But instead, that was the day I would meet my future husband. My family was eager to marry me off. I had heard them say as much that morning. My father had been out working the fields, but Amma and Paati had sat just outside our dung hut preparing for the meal while I was inside sweeping.

“If this boy doesn’t marry her, there is no one left to take her. Useless girl.” Amma’s stone pestle ground forcefully into the idli rice and even from inside I could hear it sloshing.

“Don’t give them a choice this time,” Paati advised. “Just pay them off and be done with it.”

My face burned with fury and embarrassment. No matter how clean this room was, they would never be satisfied. I was done with this place. I was done with my family. Tossing my hand broom aside, I rushed outside.

“If no one wants me, then offer me to the temple dancers!” Temple dancers were married to the temple. They only took a spouse if they chose. Their role was to tell the stories of the gods and pass them down to the common folk so that we could understand our history. I wasn’t keen on the idea of performing for anyone, not even the gods, but if that was my only choice, so be it.

“Chee!” Amma said. “Don’t be ridiculous. I will not sell my daughter to that life.” With a thud, the pestle dropped as she rose to face me. “Those women performing for some dance master under the same roof as those priests. What do you think happens? How do you think that looks for us?”

“Shameful,” Paati said. She took up the pestle and continued the grinding.

I crossed my arms. “How could that be any different from being sent with a dowry to live under another family’s roof, betrothed to some village boy who has rights to my body?”

The slap came so fast I didn’t even have time to blink.

“Go collect water and don’t spill half of it like you always do.” She sat back down, muttering, “Girl wants to be a dancer. She can’t even walk without tripping over her own feet!”

“Shameful,” Paati repeated.

And so I sat, with a hand on my still-stinging cheek, with only the Kaveri River to comfort me. If I wasn’t wanted at home, I would go somewhere else. I would leave this place. Sighing, I slipped my feet into the cold water and wiggled my toes beneath the rippling surface. A beam of reflected sunlight struck my eyes, and I suddenly felt a sharp bite of understanding, that my toes were wrong somehow. There shouldn’t be ten toes. No. Ten was the right number, but not for toes. My legs were wrong too, my whole entire body was wrong. I could feel it deep into the marrow of my bones. I wasn’t meant to look like this. I wasn’t meant to be this. I slipped my whole body into the water until I stood shoulder high in the pulsing waves of the Kaveri River, the rushing water closing in around me like a mother-in-law winding a sari too tightly around a bride. My limbs pressed in close.

“No!” I cried as my limbs fused together to my body. “This was a mistake!” I thought I would be squeezed to death, but then my muscles pushed back, thick and strong. I was expanding, growing. My warm brown skin itched as it changed to green gray scales. Painfully, my whole body stretched and stretched until I was longer than the tallest trees in our village. My dark hair fell out, but then — my head split ten ways. I could hear, smell, and taste things I had never even dreamed of before. The human inside me was confused and frightened, but I soon realized that I had ten times the intelligence, ten times the keen eyesight, and ten tongues to talk back to anyone who would insult me.

I was a glorious serpent such as the world had never seen.

A voice came from the river, deep and low, but sweet. “A new body needs a new name. What shall yours be?”

Kaliya, I thought, the name pushing its way to the forefront of my mind. My name is Kaliya.

As though in rebuke, I heard my father calling my old name. He had come to fetch me. With a smile, I ducked beneath the water.

“Where are you? Stupid girl. The boy will be here soon, and you haven’t started the lunch!”

Spotting my clothes along the river bank, he gasped. “Aiyo!” He assumed the worst. “Swimming naked so close to the village?” he cried. “Anyone could see! Your reputation will be ruined! Come out of there now and cover yourself!”

At the sound of his voice, my insides quaked. I could feel my frightened human form threatening to reemerge and split my tail in two. I am no longer human. I reminded myself. I am a snake. I am sleek and strong, and I dance for no one.

Especially not my father.

I reared up my body to its full and glorious height. At fifty feet tall, my luscious serpentine scales glittered with water that rained down into my father’s eyes.

“Yessss, Appa,” I hissed. “I am naked. Naked and FREE!”

He screamed in horror. And then… well. Let’s just say a girl gets hungry after a good shape shifting.

I returned to the village and ate every single person who had ever wronged me, starting with my family, and then the boy I was supposed to impress and the woman who hoped to be my mother-in-law, until finally I had devoured my entire village. As I swallowed them all down, ten at a time, my esophagi squeezing their bodies, I felt their poisons leeching out into my veins.

Understand now?

I wasn’t originally a venomous snake — it was them. It was their bitter poisons that ran through my body.

From there I traveled downstream, from village to village, seeking out fresh victims: people who poisoned girls and tried to keep them in their place. People who wanted girls like I had once been to be nothing but snakes in a basket — kept and called out on command, dancing and swaying to someone else’s music. I devoured an old man whose three daughters he kept chained to the house, and I snapped their bonds as they whimpered with fright. An auntie who taunted young women and goaded them into marriage twisted her way down my throat. I even ate a priest or two. Or ten. And anyone who dared ask who was I to swallow entire villages, I told them:

I am Defender of Women. Nightmare of the Patriarchy.

I am Kaliya. Queen of Snakes.

My old name, the weak human one chosen by my parents, was long forgotten, shed like a dried-up old skin. I swam up and down the Kaveri and people fled from the sight of me. I understood that perhaps it could be frightening for a giant snake to appear and swallow down your tormentors, but I expected a little more delight. Gratitude even. Stories of my exploits spread far and wide. I was feared and reviled though I saw myself as a liberator of the weak and defenseless.

Discouraged and frustrated, I soon tired of revenge. The waters I swam were no longer clear and fresh, but putrid and roiling with the poisons of my kills. Not only that, but… well… I grew bored. Lonely, even. I almost missed my family. Almost.

I invited those I rescued to join and follow me, but each and every one of them refused. I was too frightening, too powerful. They ran away with horror. What I wanted were people who understood me, a life with joy and music and freedom.

It is lonely being one-of-a-kind.

I had once heard stories about a land for snakes — a place where they lived free of humankind. I slithered my way there, eager to meet those who would understand me. Understand my need for freedom and community. Was it possible to have both?

For months, I swam, traveling from river to sea to river again until finally I found my way to the end of the world, to the churning ocean of milk. And there was Ramanaka-dvipa. The haven for snakes, created by the gods.

The island was filled with groves of fruit trees, branches heavy with ripe mangoes, guavas, and colorful birds with sweet voices. Large mansions dotted the landscape, each with a tank of lotus flowers at the front. Truly I had found a serpentine paradise.

Eager to meet a like mind, I slithered to the first door I found, and pushed. But the door was locked.

What kind of paradise had locked doors?

“What is this?” I called out. I slammed my heavy tail against the door. “Who is inside? Where are the snakes?”

A harried voice whispered from the other side of the door. “Take cover! Garuda will be here soon!”

“Garuda?”

“Yessss!” he hissed. “Put out an offering so you may be spared.”

“Offering? What offering?”

An emerald snake peered out of a window. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“I haven’t been here before,” I said.

“Then you won’t remember Garuda’s voracious appetite. Every month we give him offerings in exchange for him promising not to terrorize us again. If you have children, offer them now, or else you may be eaten yourself!”

With that, the snake disappeared inside, banging the window shutters behind him.

Seeking more clarity, I went to the next mansion, and the next and the next. And then, I saw it: A large golden statue of an eagle in the center of the village. An idol of the one who had subjugated them. And on the stone steps before it, a basket, filled with baby snakes. Most of them girls.

Even here, the kingdom of snakes, girls were nothing but bodies to be given up, given away. Discarded. Just as my parents had wanted to do with me. Before fury could wrap its hot fingers around my cold-blooded veins, I heard it — a great rush of wind that shook all the fruit from the trees.

Screech!

Peering up at the sky with all ten of my heads, I saw a large bird with a wingspan as long as my body circling the cloudless azure skies. Instinctively, I hid behind a wall before Garuda could see me. His golden feathers shone majestically, his beak as sharp as my fangs. Like all birds, his eyes were beady, but keen, and he swooped down, alighting on the idol.

Before me was Garuda, King of Birds.

As a human, I knew Garuda only as Lord Vishnu’s courageous vahana. He was someone to be revered and worshipped. To the snakes of Ramanaka-dvipa, he was someone to be feared and obeyed. But I was Kaliya. I was sleek and strong, and I danced for no one.

Not my father.

And certainly not Garuda.

Flicking out my tongue, I could taste his scent — molting feathers and bird droppings. Not scents of courage, but of flawed mortality. He said nothing, he simply lunged for the offerings, ready to devour the baby snakes.

But I got there first.

With my ten gaping maws, I swallowed every last one of them, sending their little bodies wriggling down my throat. Then, I swam hard for the ocean while Garuda was left frozen with shock.

I coughed up the babies, releasing them to the waters. “Swim!” I hissed. “I’ve rescued you.” But they only gaped at my gigantic ten-headed form with confusion and terror on their faces, mirrors of all the human girls I had saved.

By now, Garuda had recovered, and his strong wingbeats blew powerful waves through the water. “Who dares steal the offerings intended for the great and mighty Garuda?” He flew down, setting his powerful claws before me on the sand.

“It is I, Kaliya, Queen of Snakes! Begone from here! You will no longer terrorize this place.” With that I struck, sinking my venomous teeth into his breast.

“Fool!” he screeched. “You are no match for Garuda!” Quicker and fiercer than my mother’s stinging palm, he had wrapped his talons around my throat. He sailed into the heavens, carrying me in his tight grip until he suddenly let go, and I plunged towards tall mountains.

I was certain I would die as soon as I hit the rocks.

But when it happened, and my body struck stone, only my breath was knocked out of me. That was all. I still lived. My glorious scales were even tougher than I had imagined.

“Let this be a lesson to you!” he announced, as he saw me move, his voice resounding on the hills. “Tell the serpents—”

Before he could finish whatever insipid pronouncement he had prepared, I reared up and with all my might, I leaped for him, wrapping my body around his. We hurtled to the ground, but this time when we fell, I was prepared. As he let out a cry of shock, I squeezed tight, so the breath could not return to his lungs. I sprayed venom into his eyes. He screeched weakly in protest. I squeezed harder, eking his very last breath from his lungs. Writhing in agony, he snapped his beak this way and that, and in doing so he managed to grab hold of one of my tongues and bite it clean off.

Blood spurting from my mouth, I released him and hissed with pain. With a great inhale, the air rushed into his lungs, and he shot back up into the sky. There he screeched, circled around once, and then suddenly dove back down. I will not lie; I trembled seeing that great beak like a deadly arrow from the heavens aimed straight for me. As fast as I could, I slithered away, heading back to the beach, using all my strength to try to escape and reaching — just barely reaching — the waters when I felt his beak close down on the tip of my tail.

Like a fisherman, I reeled him in towards me, into the ocean where I now had the advantage. I lunged, ready to wrap myself around him again, but he let go and flapped his great golden wings, sailing away overhead again.

“There is one who will find you yet!” he cried. “Vishnu has been reborn!”

Vishnu?

His words echoed in my ears like a prophecy, but I failed to grasp the significance.

What did Lord Vishnu have to do with me?

I returned to Ramanaka-dvipa, ready to be welcomed as a heroine, a savior of serpents. But instead, I faced an angry mob prepared for revenge, behind them the children I had rescued.

“YOU!” They screamed and charged at me, but I was bigger than all of them, the height of ten of them combined and even battle-weary I knew I could take them. As they slithered towards me, I separated my heads to increase my size, looming even higher above them. Frightened, they stopped in their tracks.

“Garuda will be angry!” one spluttered.

“He will exact his revenge!” someone else said.

I hissed. “I have defeated him, and he has flown away in disgrace. He’ll not dare return so long as Kaliya, Queen of Snakes, is around.”

But the serpents continued to argue. “You are no queen of ours!” they said.

I spat venom at their feet, and then with one mighty swipe of my tail, I toppled the Garuda statue they worshipped. Then I slithered away, heads held high.

If they did not appreciate my help, then I would leave them to their fates.

I returned to my itinerant life of devouring cruel people who deserved it, while being reviled by every woman and child I helped. It was a satisfying, yet incredibly lonely, life. I reassured myself that at least I was with the one person who knew and recognized my worth.

Myself.

That was better than marrying some village boy my parents chose for me, wasn’t it? Was it?

* * *

One day in the Yamuna River, as I was dozing beneath the waves after a large kill, I heard fishermen gossiping above me in their raft.

“Krishna sucked the life right out of her as she fed him milk. Apparently, she had meant to poison him, just as she’d poisoned all the other babies. But this time, she was the one who died.”

“No!” the other fisherman gasped. “Is it true?”

“And he charms everyone he meets. The gopis in his town forget their cows and dance with him all day as he plays his flute. They go home filled with stories of Krishna.”

I listened as the tales of this Krishna continued. Who was this young man who both killed and dazzled women? Was he the next man who deserved a lesson from Kaliya?

“They say he is Vishnu incarnate.”

Thrusting out of the water, I asked, “Where is he?”

The fishermen nearly fell out of their boats from fear and the force of my wake. They cowered, whimpering.

“Answer me!” I demanded, leaning in closer. “Where is he? Where is this… this… Krishna?” His name came out a hiss, and I flicked my tongues in their faces. They cowered and whimpered until one of them finally spoke.

“Go- Gokul,” he stuttered.

I dove back into the water, not even looking to see if the fishermen had been flung out of their boats. There was no time to waste. Gokul was less than half a day’s swim upstream. If I was going to be killed by Vishnu, so be it.

Once in Gokul, I decided to take things slowly. I bided my time in the water, letting him come to me. I grew hungry waiting, feeding only on fish, not wanting to alarm anyone and thus alert them to my presence. The next day, though, I heard it: his flute, high and fluttering. The notes winding around my heads, finding the way to that human heart that still beat inside of me, nearly forgotten. The music resounded through my body, and I could feel the warm blood of the young woman beneath my scales responding.

I dove back into the water. This was dangerous. His flute was hypnotic, and I refused to succumb to its wily powers. When the music stopped, I cautiously sent only one of my heads to peer above the surface of the water. There sat a group of young people, all about my age, talking and laughing. Flirting. What was this? I had never seen people like this before with such ease around each other and such freedom. Didn’t they have chores to do? Duties to perform? Families to answer to? My village had been nothing like this. Nor had the many villages I had visited since. To live with such ease and laughter and music was almost incomprehensible. What kind of magic did this Krishna have?

At first, I didn’t see him, because he was at the center of the group, but when he took up his instrument again, everyone sat down to listen. And suddenly there he was.

Gracefully he held the flute to his lips. His skin was an unusual color, so dark it was almost black, though with a dark blue hue when the sunlight hit — like the dark beauty of the ocean spreading beneath a night sky. When his eyes met mine, I saw that he knew me, just as he knew everything, and then, I knew everything. This was no mere boy. This was a divine being who could see that my life was as divine as his. And I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could not kill him. An odd sense of peace and finality overcame me then, knowing, deep in my soul that this was a powerful being worthy of my presence. Limitless in his powers, unencumbered by the fragility of his human frame.

Seeing that something in the water had caught Krishna’s attention, the others soon began to look as well. There was no point hiding now. As I expected, everyone screamed at the sight of me as I reared up my body. They all shouted their warnings.

“It’s Kaliya!”

“A demon!”

“She has poisoned the waters!”

“She fought Garuda and won!”

Krishna didn’t speak. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dove into the water. He floated there before me, and wordlessly we looked into each other’s eyes.

One of my brains told me that I should run away. Now. For this was Vishnu incarnate, and as Vishnu incarnate, he could not be killed. Not by me, not by a woman with poison smeared on her breasts, not by anyone.

He held out a hand, indicating that he meant no harm. Slowly, he made his way towards me, and I stayed still, unsure what to do or what he wanted. He wrapped his arm around me, pulling me gently beneath the surface. Music filled me then, the rhythm of the river, the rhythm of all the rivers, the oceans, the universe, all surged through my body.

Skin to scales we danced. We glided in the water. Without words we reached an epic union of souls that I still cannot explain.

Underwater, where none but us and the voiceless waves could hear, he whispered to me. I too am a shapeshifter, he said. And he told me of his life as Matsya the fish, of his life as Kurma the half-tortoise. He said he understood what it was to be both human and animal and yet also divinity itself.

The people are scared of powerful women, but I will teach them, he said. He released me from his hold. Before we part, I need you to do something for me.

“Assssk and I shall follow,” I said, the words rushing from me so fast they came as a shock when I heard them.

Dance for me above the waters. Show the humans they have nothing more to fear from Kaliya, the Queen of Snakes.

This made me stop. Had his honeyed words been nothing but music meant to hypnotize a serpent? To convince me to come out of my basket?

I was Kaliya, Queen of Snakes. I was sleek and strong. I danced for no one. Not my father, not Garuda, and not even Krishna, avatar of Vishnu.

“No,” I said forcefully, not caring that I was talking back to a god.

Krishna took my refusal in stride. I am currently human, and thus I have been reborn, but—

I twisted away from him. While I could not hurt him, that didn’t mean that I was forced to listen to him either.

He was a fast swimmer and easily caught up to me.

But, he continued, as Lord Vishnu, I can grant you that which you desire most.

“And what is that?” I spat back.

Freedom—

“I HAVE freedom,” I retorted.

Let me finish, glorious girl. I will find you freedom AND companionship.

I glared at him. He came towards me, putting his arms around me again. Skin to scales. I listened to the sweet words coming from his lips. Even I couldn’t stay angry with this divine being. I could feel all the venom, all the hatred I had swallowed begin to dispel. The waters around me began to clear as his music played in my soul. Part of me was skeptical, part of me wanted to run, and hide, and ignore his slippery words, and his slippery promises.

“Where will I go?” I asked, voice hushed.

Return to Ramanaka-dvipa, the promised home of the serpents. You will be their Queen.

“They threw me out!” I said.

I have heard what happened, but I promise they will have you now. Garuda follows my command and thanks to you, the serpents will live in peace so long as you reside there.

“No,” I said. “I cannot be their queen if they do not accept me as such. I will not force my rule on anyone, or I’ll be no better than those I have swallowed.”

Then I will grant you a new home, a place worthy of you, my queen. You will be Krishna’s first wife.

“Wife?” Did I want that?

I will not live with you. I will not rule over you. I will visit when you call me. I will stay when you like. No one need know but us. Kaliya will be the queen of Krishna’s heart. I am yours.

His promises were tempting, but I wanted more.

A voice came from the river, deep and low, but sweet. Kaliya, you deserve the community you seek.

I looked around, but I saw no one.

“Who was that? Who are you?”

I have been with you since the beginning, said the voice. In a way, you could say I am your real amma.

“Show yourself,” I demanded.

You know me, the voice said. I made you what you are.

I thought back to that day on the riverbank… who had made me? Then it came to me — “Goddess Kaveri!”

As I spoke her name, the waters around me began to coalesce into a womanly form who bowed before me, her eyes sparkling in the sunlight. Her blue green hair flowed all around her, enveloping Krishna and me into her bubble.

“Kaveri Amma! Thank you,” I said, putting my hands together reverently and bowing. For she was my true mother, she had created me, and allowed me to thrive in her waters.

I have followed you these past months, and I have seen how you thanklessly defend women. While I do not always approve of your methods, your purpose is true, but you must remember what you are.

“And what is that?”

You are Kaliya, a snake with a human soul. A human soul who deserves the community she seeks.

“Yes, but what community?” I asked. “How can I find them?” The Goddess’s form dispersed into the waters of her sister river. “Wait!” I shouted. “Kaveri Amma! How can I find them?” I groaned with frustration. Had she told me anything I didn’t already know? I felt like I was right back at the beginning of this journey — a serpent with no friends, no family, only vengeance to fuel her, but I was tired now. Too tired to continue on that lonely life. I needed love and had found it, but I also needed friends, I needed a family. I needed a community.

But how could I convince anyone to join me if they were too scared to even look me in the faces? And then a pair of eyes met mine. Krishna, avatar of Vishnu faced me. And suddenly, I understood.

Krishna had offered himself to me.

“Help me,” I said. “Your flute draws people towards you. Use your music to tell my story. We’ll find others like myself, women and people seeking a community. Let us lead them to this new land you promised where I will watch over and protect them as my parents never did for me.”

Krishna smiled and bowed. Taking that as his acceptance, I gripped his tiny body with my tail and like a toy, I placed him atop my head. Then, I lifted him up into the sky, where all could see him. His human friends, the cowherds and gopis gaped as I rose up out of the water with his small form.

Before everyone, he performed for me, playing his flute and dancing. The music and the rhythm of his life thrummed though my entire being. My soul danced with him, feeling the song that is the deepest sound of the universe play through both of us, connecting us. My body bent and bobbed in time to the music.

Through our dance we told the story of me. Of how I had been mistreated, of how I had become a snake, of how I had fought for others, of how I had battled Garuda.

All along the banks of the Yamuna River, people flocked to watch, and soon they followed. At first, it was only a trickle of people, girls I had saved who now understood what I had done for them. Then came more — people who needed a savior, who like me, had longed for a different life. Eventually they came in streams and rivers and oceans. Even the snakes found us, intermingling with humanity. Krishna granted us a new land, even bigger and more abundant that Ramanaka-dvipa.

There we lived in harmony, and I finally became who I was meant to be:

Kaliya, Queen of Peace.

I am sleek and strong, and when I dance…

…I dance for me.

* * *

About the Author

Dr. Amitha Jagannath Knight is an award-winning children’s author and a writer of poems and stories for people of all ages. She is a graduate of MIT and Tufts University School of Medicine and was also a former social media manager for We Need Diverse Books. Her previous publications include: Usha and the Big Digger, a picture book which won the 2023 Mathical Honor Award and “Locked In,” a flash fiction piece published in Luna Station Quarterly. While her parents were originally from South India, Dr. Knight grew up in Texas and Arkansas, and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband, kids, and cats. Find out more about her writing on her website at www.amithaknight.com.

Welcome to Issue 19 of Zooscape!

There is a profound connection between furry fiction and rebirth.  We read stories about characters with scales or fur, and we’re reborn into new, imaginary bodies.  Through fiction, we can be born and reborn, again and again.

But what about the self that follows us?

What if we carry our crimes — or imagined crimes — from one imaginary life to the next, always remaining ourselves on the inside?  Can we ever really escape the cycle and become someone new?

Can the act of reading fiction rewrite who we are on the inside?

Read these stories, and find out…

* * *

Kaliya, Queen of Snakes by Amitha Jagannath Knight

Stormlands by Penndry Dragonsworth

The Goddess of Secrets by David Penny

Stones, Sins, and the Scent of Strawberries by Kai Delmas

The Hard Way by Val E Ford

Terror Lizards by CB Droege

The Cat with the Pearl Earring by Deborah L. Davitt

* * *

Now for a couple of announcements…

First, unfortunately, we’ve had to postpone our next reading period until sometime next year.  We’ll share more information as we can.

Secondly and much more happily, the first two volumes of our anthology series are out (Volume 1 and Volume 2)  and you can pre-order Volume Three! The Next two volumes are underway.  And they’re all fully illustrated and really beautiful.

As always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.

Welcome to Issue 18 of Zooscape!

Sometimes it’s easier to stare danger in the face, unflinching, if you tell yourself the darkness wears fur and paws; or maybe hooves, horns, fins, or feathery wings.

Visit the nightmares and apocalypses in these stories, and come out the other side stronger for having faced humanity’s collective fears… and possibly even made friends with them.

* * *

Susurrus by Azure Arther

How Pepper Learned Magic by Renee Carter Hall

A Strange and Terrible Wonder by Katie McIvor

What Dark Plutonian Horror Beckons from the Shadows? by Christopher Blake

The Four Sharks of the Apocalypse by Tessa Yang

What Little Remains by Mercy Morbid

Hope for the Harbingers by Allison Thai

* * *

Now for a couple of announcements…

First, unlike some other speculative fiction markets, Zooscape will not be instituting any sort of policy banning AI or asking writers to disclose whether they used AI in writing their stories.  We don’t discriminate against writers based on what tools they use.  If an author can sign our contract, then it’s no business of ours how they wrote their story.

Secondly — and this one is exciting! — we are finally going to begin releasing anthologies bundling our previous issues into volumes.  We’ve partnered with the new small publisher, Deep Sky Anchor Press, and the first volume will be released on September 8th at Furvana.  You can learn more from their press announcement here.

And as always, if you want to support Zooscape, check out our Patreon.

by Allison Thai

“He, like time, never stopped for anyone, but somehow he could not find it in his heart to go against the rabbit’s wish.”

“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful, you say. Yes, to be sure, but what he does is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.” ~Søren Kierkegaard

 

The tethers binding his soul were warm yet firm, pulling him up from the bowels of Hell. Impossible. Nothing could escape the downward pull of a fiery eternity, just as nothing in the physical world could defy the power of gravity. Still, somehow, he felt lighter than he ever had before, buoyed by a force that took him past the fire and muck filled with screaming, cursing sinners. Shadows of the damned wallowed in never-ending rounds of punishment, dealt out according to their vices. To be freed from such torment made him gasp in relief. What could he have done to gain this sweet release? Was he being saved?

Suddenly he found himself on water, standing on it, as the ocean heaved and bucked all around him. A storm brewed overhead, gathering, rumbling, and tumbling in swells of dark clouds. A beam of sunlight peeked through. He shuddered from the warmth, frightened at first, then quickly found it pleasant on his skin. He looked down, caught sight of his reflection, and gasped.

A horse stared back, one with a withered build, bones jutting out to form odd tents and hills of skin here and there, with off-white hair to match an off-white coat.

“Where am I? What am I?”

“You are Death, one of the Four Horsemen.” A little lamb, riding down the beam of light, had hailed him.

Though the reply was no more than a whisper, hardly heard amid the waves, the one called Death felt his knees buckle and heart race. The lamb exuded a blinding white halo, stronger than even the sun, and Death had to lower his eyes and muzzle lest he go blind. His voice dipped low with awe. “The Lamb of God.”

The animal he had been, the name he once bore—he could not remember, but nothing in his past life mattered now. Death looked around. “You say four. Where are the other three?”

“They will join you soon.”

True to the Lamb’s word, more horses burst through the ocean’s surface—one in red, one in black, and one in white. Blinking, gasping, and stumbling on the waves, they along with Death formed the quartet the Lamb had expected.

The Lamb of God addressed them in order of appearance, giving each a cordial nod. “War, Famine, and Pestilence, welcome.”

These horses too ducked their heads, more out of fear than rudeness, and quailed at the face of overwhelming power.

The one called War, blood-red and rippling in muscles, was the first to muster a response. “You called us, Lord?”

“Indeed.”

The water bore a reflection distilling some of the Lamb’s light, and from this Death took notice of the Lamb’s somber face.

“The Last Judgment is at hand. I have broken the four seals, as it was foretold, and hereby bestow upon you the task of destroying the world.”

Death exchanged looks with the other horses, and they mirrored his disbelief.

“Why us?” Famine asked. “Why appoint souls of the damned? Why not trust your own angels to do it?”

“You have been in Hell for some time,” the Lamb replied, “and because of that, memory does not serve you well. In your past lives you have made names for yourselves from the deaths and suffering of others. This world remembers you as warlords and monsters. You had been punished accordingly.” The Lamb’s voice did not ring with accusation, like a judge sentencing criminals, but was soft and sad, more like a father pining for his prodigal sons. “I chose you four out of many because you have the experience. Now I’ve raised you to be agents of calamity once more, this time in my name.”

The Lamb of God lifted an arm, summoning an array of tools from the water. “Take these before you go. War, you will bear a sword to sow the seeds of violence and discord. Pestilence, spread disease far and wide with the bow and arrow. Famine, with the weighing scale you shall run the world’s food thin. And Death, use this scythe to reap the harvest of souls.”

Death closed his hooves over the staff of the scythe, and its weight made veins stand out on his skin. He felt honored to earn the privilege of this task, grim as it may be. Anything was better than going back to Hell. He bowed even lower, till his muzzle almost brushed the water. “By your grace you brought us out of eternal flame. For that we shall carry out your will.”

Despite including the rest in his declaration, reactions among the other Horsemen varied. From the corner of his eye Death saw Famine rendered still with reluctance, Pestilence struggling to comprehend, and War squinting against the light.

“What will we get in return for completing this task?” Famine asked.

Death cringed at this bold inquiry, but the Lamb of God’s reflection rippled as he shook with gentle laughter.

“Hungry for more now as you were in your past life—I should have expected as much, Famine. I will say this: you are in no position to make any bargains. But I do everything for a reason. Just do your duty, Horsemen.” With that the Lamb departed from them, his coat of white wool one with the light.

Death nodded at his newfound equine brethren. “After you.”

The Four Horsemen shot off, surging with power that bore them before the wind, over land and sea, through the four corners of the world. Entire nations buckled under the tide of the Apocalypse. Even before the Four Horsemen were called, world leaders had their teeth bared and hackles raised at one another, unable to reach any kind of agreement or settle for peace. The air crackled with tension. All War had to do was strike a match with his sword. For all his bulk and redness, War cavorted across continents unseen, jabbing his blade here and sweeping it there to ignite the flames in people’s hearts. Animosity among species spiked. Even the meek and gentle, those less inclined to start fights, flew at each other like rabid beasts. War, always holding his sword aloft, saw to it that no alliances were formed. Not even among those of the same species. Camaraderie be damned — it was everyone for him or herself.

Famine played a part in fostering these schisms. Rivers ran dry, meat spoiled, and greens withered under his influence. What was scarce became sacred. People groveled and scrabbled for these necessities, and quickly resorted to looting and killing just to fill their bellies and live to see another day. Famine soon found himself in good company, surrounded by gaunt, stick-thin victims whose meat and fat wasted away from lack of nutrients. Famine viciously dismantled the Interspecies Protection From Consumption Act, as carnivores were driven to break the law by sinking their teeth into herbivores — fellow citizens, sometimes their own friends. The number of bodies climbed, but no one thought to keep track. The weak became meat, snatched up and swallowed down to feed the strong.

Such disregard for morals and sanitation gave way to disease courtesy of Pestilence. The Horseman slung his arrows far and wide, each riddled with every kind of poison and plague to send people by the hundreds and thousands to their graves. For a horse weighed down in boils, hair broiling with flies, and limbs weakened with rot, as arguably the slowest Horseman of the four, he did not have to run very fast or far at all. His joints, knobbly and frail as they were, could still bend the bow and that was enough. His arrows did much of the terrible work. They worked best on herds and packs, striking through many victims at once. Coughs and moans from the sick thickened the air. Contagion spread like fire, with no way to be extinguished except for the utter annihilation of those it consumed.

The Lamb of God had chosen well to bring them back as horses, for no other animal was more hardy and swift of foot to carry out the Apocalypse. Wherever War, Famine, and Pestilence went, Death was never too far behind, almost always on their tails. What else could follow such calamity but the end of one’s life? The harvest of souls was plentiful, ever growing. Death thought he would have found this somewhat enjoyable, if his past life held any indication. Instead, the sheer magnitude of souls to collect overwhelmed him. If he had an earthly body that breathed and bled, the work would have easily killed him. He had already died once, so no need to fear a second death.

Fear — the Fifth Horseman, Death liked to call it — proved even swifter and more terrible than his comrades as it drove hordes of people to take their own lives. Mass suicide became a common sight for Death, the most common source for his harvest of souls. Death watched how disaster and doom brought out the worst in people, with many cursing the end times and even more still resigned to forfeiting their lives in order to forego the slow agony of disease, starvation, and bloodshed.

Many met their deaths with despair. Only a few faced theirs with dignity. One such fellow was a young rabbit named Viktor, one of many brothers and sisters constituting a poor warren in Russia.

Death took great interest in this little rabbit, constantly looming over him, for Viktor teetered on the edge of life and death with his weak heart. Viktor was the smallest and weakest of his siblings, a classic case of the runt of the litter. Often short of breath, he was red-faced under his thin fur as the borscht his family was so fond of eating. He could hardly venture out of his home, and his family sheltered him for good reason — he’d be torn apart in a blink of an eye. Death drifted closer and closer; never before had he been so intrigued by the life of any mortal. For all his frailty and bleak future, Viktor held onto life stronger than even the fiercest lion or tiger. Out loud and in his heart, he gave thanks for every breath he took, every moment he could spend with his parents and siblings, who fretted over him and saw to it that he always had his needs met. He gave thanks for the food he was given, grown and salvaged though carrots would never be as crisp and fresh as before. He was grateful for the blankets and toys his siblings gave up to keep him comfortable and entertained. Death could not help admiring this young rabbit, who seemed to live in defiance of the depravity around him.

One night, alone in his bedroom, Viktor craned his head up to meet Death’s eyes.

“Hello there.”

That took the Horseman aback. “You can see me?”

“I’ve always known you were watching.” The rabbit did not scream or bolt out of his room. Instead he climbed onto his bed and wiggled into the blankets, like he would for any uneventful night. This amused and baffled Death.

“Do you know who I am?”

Viktor frowned, studying Death from head to toe. “You don’t look like a guardian angel. You don’t have wings.”

“You’re right. My name is Death.”

“Hello, Death,” he said, as if making a new friend. “I’m Viktor. Call me Vitya, if you want.”

“Are you afraid?”

Viktor shook his head. “I know you’ll come for me. I’ve known since I was very little, when I realized I could never run as fast or jump as high as my brothers and sisters. Everyone will find you at the end of the road sooner or later. I don’t have long, but I’d like to be with my family for a bit more, please.”

Death nodded, impressed with Viktor’s courage and touched by a politeness that he had never before received in all his time as a Horseman. Most people feared him and hated him. He, like time, never stopped for anyone, but somehow he could not find it in his heart to go against the rabbit’s wish. After all, Viktor’s soul was not for the taking just yet. For someone terminally ill and on the verge of death, Viktor still had some life in him.

“I’ll leave you alone, then,” Death said, “and come back for you when you’re ready.”

“You’re welcome to come back before that,” Viktor replied, “just to relax, if that’s possible. You look tired and lonely. I don’t think the rest of my family can see you, and for most of the day they’re out foraging, anyway. I’d like a friend to keep me company.”

Death tipped his muzzle at him. “I appreciate the offer.” And he took it whenever he could, for his duty proved very taxing and draining, indeed. After rounds of collecting souls and witnessing all manners of terrible deaths, the Horseman liked to visit Viktor and take his mind off the strain, if even for a moment. They spent most of their time together over open storybooks, fairy tales with happy endings, or silly stories that would make Death whinny and snort and break free of the somber frown that seemed to have set in his muzzle permanently.

“I love to read,” Viktor said. “It’s my escape. It takes me to faraway places and lets me be the hero I’ve always dreamed of being.”

“You’re already a hero.”

“How? I don’t swing a sword.” Viktor tilted back to behold the scythe that loomed over him. “And I’m very sure that thing would crush me if I tried to lift it.”

Death let out a rueful chuckle, hefting the weapon for a moment. “You don’t need anything like this to be a hero.” He rested a big, worn hoof over Viktor’s head, dwarfing it. “I mean that you are strong and brave in ways you can’t imagine. Believe me, I’ve killed — er, met many, many people around the world, and no one’s quite like you.”

The rabbit’s ears stood rigid and fluttered a little. His cheeks flushed, making his face even redder, and bunched up below his eyes in a wide smile. “You may not look it, but you’re very nice.”

Time was not so kind. Viktor grew more sick and frail with each passing day. He was confined to the bed and could not even risk a venture to other burrows in the warren.

Death knelt over the little rabbit’s bedside. “It’s almost time,” he murmured.

Viktor closed his eyes. “I understand.”

After supper, he asked for the attention of the entire family. Of course they were all ears, wide-eyed and curious, wondering what he had to say. Death also listened in, invisible to the rest, wondering how they would take the news.

“Everyone…” Viktor paused. His nose twitched and eyes blinked rapidly as he struggled to collect himself. With great effort he sucked in a deep breath, and went on, “Please don’t be upset, but I think now is a good time for me to say good-bye.” Stunned silence all around met him.

Finally, his father asked, “What do you mean?”

“Vitya, don’t say that,” his mother cried. She reached out to take his paw into hers. “We’re doing everything we can to care for you—”

“I know, and thank you.” Tears welled in Viktor’s eyes. “I feel I can never thank you enough. But you’ve seen the world around us, outside our warren. Even the world’s coming to an end. I am going to die, and I know you’re just trying to protect me, but you will have to let me go.” Viktor offered them a wide smile. “Don’t worry. I will see you all on the other side someday.” He bid his family good night, for the last time. He gave each sibling a long, earnest hug, while they restrained the urge to pile up on him all at once. Finally he was enveloped in arms and tears by his parents.

The lights went out. Viktor’s body went still and slack, his voice no more than a whisper. “I’m ready, Death. Take me away.”

His passing was a painless, peaceful one — the only one Death carried out alone. He had insisted on acting without the aid of his fellow Horsemen. With a pull of Death’s scythe Viktor’s soul slipped free, and without a weak earthly body to bind him, he sprinted out of the warren and floated well above the Muscovite landscape. Death followed him up, and Viktor turned to him with wide, searching eyes.

“Are you coming with me, Death?”

The Horseman gestured to the desolation below them. “I’m afraid not. I still have work to do down here.”

“Will we see each other again?”

Death had to be honest. “I can’t promise anything, but I hope so.”

“I hope so, too.” Viktor waved a little white paw. “Good-bye, for now.”

Death watched the rabbit’s soul drift — up, up, up — along a stairway to Heaven the Horseman could not see.

Parting ways with Viktor weighed down his heart. At the same time Death rejoiced that the young rabbit could leave this crumbling world after a proper farewell to his family and end up in a better place. If anyone deserved that, it was Viktor.

Death tore his eyes from the sky, a glimpse of Heaven, and turned back to search for more worthy souls to send into God’s kingdom. Unfortunately, the Apocalypse produced few instances of enlightenment and mental fortitude. Death grew weary of his work again, wondering if there would be an end to it all. In the constant accompaniment and teamwork with his fellow Horsemen, Death took it as a reprieve to strike up conversations with them.

“What is God’s plan for us after this?” Death had to raise his voice, on account of howls and screams from the mobs of starving, disease-ridden people fighting over scraps. Such an event called for a group effort, the presence of the other three Horsemen.

“You mean what’s after the Last Judgment?” War folded his arms over his huge chest. “A foolish question, Death.”

Famine’s dark eyes glittered. “On my way here I caught a glimpse of Heaven, maybe even Empyrean. I’ve never wanted anything so badly before.”

Pestilence’s ears, riddled with holes, perked. “You’ve actually seen it?”

War’s muzzle stretched from a frown. “We’re damned, anyway. God’s sending us back to Hell after we do our part.”

“Why would he do that if we are following his orders?” Death asked. “Surely he will reward us.” He paused to scoop up souls who had lost their bodies to bloodshed.

“What reward? After what we’ve done?” War snorted. “God said so himself: we’d been punished accordingly. Hell is final.”

Death shook his head. “Christ went down and came back up for the third day. He broke open the bolts binding the gates of Hell. Bolts that even Satan could not pry out. Even now the gates are left open.”

War waved a hoof in dismissal. “The Harrowing of Hell. It happened, yes, but everyone down there just takes it as hope, a chance, for a way out. Well, false hope and fat chance. Christ descended into Hell only for the righteous, anyway. We are sinners. There’s no freedom for the likes of us.” He reached down to thrust his blade into the hearts of those too tired to fight, making them spring back to their feet and rejoin the mob.

Death knew better than to fuel War’s ire, but he felt inclined to disagree. God had already done the impossible: bring up the damned from Hell. Not up to Heaven, of course (a ridiculous stretch), but onto the physical plane. That was a miracle in itself. God made use of even sinners to do his good work. Deep in Death’s unbeating heart, he felt that God would not toss them away like trash. At the same time he felt he did not deserve redemption.

“The Lamb is too detached for my taste,” War went on. “Maybe he’s making us do his dirty work. He wouldn’t soil his wool for this. And he’s hiding things from us. He gave me this sword but not my memories. I’d very much like to know who I was and what I did.”

Famine cracked a grin — a rare act, considering their line of work. “Well, I’m quite sure that even at your prime, you hadn’t started up this many wars.” Then he craned his narrow muzzle back as he pondered, as if weighing the scales in his head. “I must have wanted a lot of things in my past life. Even if I remembered them all, they don’t matter anymore.”

Death followed Famine’s gaze upward, searching for an inkling of light amidst the storm. “If God isn’t telling us everything, I believe it’s better that way. I don’t want to know what I’ve done to earn a place in Hell. I think God made us Horsemen to give us a second chance.” His grip tightened over the scythe. “Forget the past. Trust in God to lead us to a better future.”

War doubled over guffawing. “You should hear yourself. Have you gone mad?”

Pestilence did not respond with scorn as War did. Sunken eyes peeked through a matted forelock, making him look like a lost child. “Do you really think there’s hope?”

“Yes. Hope for the harbingers.” Death wanted his comrades to believe that, too.

“Whatever put that idea in your head?” Famine asked. “That little rabbit, am I right?”

Death conceded with a smile.

War chuckled. “You must have taken a real liking to him. You wouldn’t let the three of us get anywhere close to that warren.”

“I do not like giving children terrible ends,” Death admitted. He remembered the fairy tales Viktor would read to him. “I like happy endings.”

“I doubt it will end well for us.” Pestilence heaved a sigh, the huge boils sagging with his shoulders.

“That’s fear talking,” Death said. “You have to believe with all your might that God will forgive you. Forgive us.” He did not believe he deserved such a thing, but yearned for it all the same. He began to take inspiration in how Viktor led his short life on Earth, making it a habit to thank every moment he spent out of Hell, even if he stood far from Heaven. Fear of going back down there fueled his gratitude. He encouraged his comrades to do the same. As they gathered together and shared stories, Death found that War, Famine, and Pestilence had found their own Viktors in the midst of strife and suffering.

“I have found peacemakers,” War told them. “My sword can’t cut them.”

“I met givers,” Famine said, “who gave all they had when they could have helped themselves.”

“I might have produced the finest physicians the world has ever seen,” Pestilence said.

These stories pleased Death greatly. This cemented his belief that he and his fellow Horsemen were doing good work, after all. There was something to be learned here.

Finally, after what seemed like ages, the Last Judgment drew to an end. Every soul was sent up, or down, and accounted for. The Four Horsemen joined forces, combining their strength, to deliver the blow that would send the world into oblivion. Death lifted his scythe, adding to the steeple formed by War’s sword, Famine’s weighing scale, and Pestilence’s bow. They swung down together, and remnants of a sinful, imperfect world gave way before their very eyes. A huge wave of light blinded them. Death expected the downward tug, the return of his soul to Hell, now that his work here was done.

He felt no such thing. He dared to blink his eyes open, and the other Horsemen followed suit, their stances tense and unsure. What Death saw next took his breath away. Before him stood the Lamb of God, heading a multitude of angels and souls, innumerable beyond measure and compare. Death’s legs buckled and he sank to his knees.

The Lamb smiled. “Please rise. You are in good company.”

Death obeyed, exchanging wide-eyed confusion with his comrades. He certainly did not remember Hell looking like this.

“You have done as I have asked, and you did well. My tests are never easy, and I must commend you for passing the one I imposed on you. For that you will be rewarded.”

Pestilence’s mouth hung open, then worked like a fish out of water, and finally he shut it and lowered his head out of embarrassment over looking ridiculous before the Lord of all creation.

Famine managed to spring out the question. “This…this is Heaven? We made it?”

The Lamb nodded. “I’m afraid I must save a proper warm welcome for another time.” He turned his muzzle downward, and amid the light a spot of darkness remained, where an ugly serpent writhed and hissed below the heavenly host. “There is still the Enemy to vanquish once and for all. Only in his defeat can we rejoice in the founding of New Jerusalem.”

“We will help,” War said. With his ears tucked back and head bowed, he looked sorry to have doubted and spoken against God at all. Clearly he sought to make up for it.

Famine, Death, and Pestilence nodded in agreement.

“Thank you,” the Lamb replied. “Now, I can’t have you go into battle unprepared.” With a sweep of his arm, he sent up a great wind that peeled away every blight on the Horsemen’s bodies, granting them pure white coats and builds that brimmed with health and vigor. Then with another wave of his arm, he substituted their Apocalyptic instruments for blades forged in the brightest holy steel. Death embraced this new identity with open arms, thrilling in the divine power that coursed through him.

Then something else hit him — something white and soft. Death drew back and gasped. “Viktor!”

The rabbit, who had tackled the former Horseman with a fierce hug, pulled away and grinned. “I knew you’d come.”

Death drew him back for another hug. “I didn’t think I would, but here I am.”

The Lamb of God gave them a warm smile. “It seems I have given you two the happy ending you’ve wanted.”

“I would not have it any other way, Lord.” Hell seemed nothing more than a bad memory now. Death felt he could burst, overjoyed to know that he was given another chance, that his hope and faith bore fruit. Fruit he had shared with his fellow Horsemen.

Viktor clasped his friend’s hoof with both paws. “Come on, let’s go slay a dragon together.”

 

* * *

Originally published in ROAR, Volume 8

About the Author

Allison Thai is a specialist in pediatric anesthesia. When she isn’t taking care of kids during surgeries, she eats up books and video games, always hungry for the next good one. Her critter-centric fiction has been published in Podcastle, Anathema, Zooscape, and ROAR, and was featured on Tor and Locus recommended lists.

by Mercy Morbid

“It’s like I’m using my limbs for something they weren’t designed for, and while it isn’t at all painful, the urge to swim remains in my body like a dull ache.”

The ruins rose out of the water, a line of steel and concrete skeletons piercing the horizon. I sat on the front deck, listening to the whir of the hovercraft engine, my goggles around my neck. The wind stirred my hair into a frenzy and sprayed me with drops of ocean water. As they slid down my gray skin and hit my gills, I felt a rush of excitement. I wanted to swim, needed to swim. I was made for it, a shark chimera with a body designed for hydrodynamics.

Patience, I told myself. You’ll get in the water very soon.

As the ruins grew closer, my patience wore down little by little. The anticipation that comes before swimming is a drive I can’t really explain to terrestrials. Although I can live on land as easily as in the water, walking doesn’t feel as natural to me. It’s like I’m using my limbs for something they weren’t designed for, and while it isn’t at all painful, the urge to swim remains in my body like a dull ache.

Soon the hovercraft had entered the sunken ruins, the remnants of an old Terran metropolis called Boston. It slowed to a halt just above the target area. I had gone salvage diving in this area once before, and I felt certain there was still more to find under the waves. Sera, my dive assistant, came out from the back of the craft. The purple-haired squirrel held a tablet and a stylus. She had just finished checking off the pre-dive requirements.

“Ready for another run?” she asked.

I grinned, showing off my sharp teeth. “You have no idea,” I said.

“Are you sure you wanna do this dive unarmed?” she asked. “There could still be some pre-collapse security measures we don’t know about.”

“This was a tourist district,” I retorted.

“Marina,” Sera admonished.

I sighed.  “Fine,” I grumbled, relenting. “Hand me that harpoon pistol.” She did, and I clipped it to my dive belt. “I still think you’re mothering me too much – ah!” I gasped as she gave my snout a gentle stroke.

“I just want you to be safe, babe,” she cooed.

I put my hand on top of hers. “I know,” I said, “And I will be.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” She smiled, and I smiled back, releasing her hand and letting it fall.

“Good luck down there,” said Sera.

I grinned. “Luck? Pfft,” I said, putting my goggles on. “I was born to do this.” And with that, I turned around and did a running dive off the side of the hovercraft. The cool saltwater enveloped me like the arms of an old lover. I took a couple of warmup strokes as my gills opened up and my eyes adjusted to the low light of the depths. I was home. Time to get to work.

I swam to the building I had marked as my target at the briefing. Recon had identified it as an old hotel. There was an open window on the fifth floor that looked like a possible entry point. I swam down to it and surveyed the area. No external security devices present. Sticking my head in the window, I looked back and forth around the floor. Moldy carpets, warped wooden doors and barnacle-encrusted walls filled my field of vision, but again I found no signs of any security countermeasures. The coast, for lack of a better term, was clear.

I swam into the hallway and began to try the various doors to see which ones opened. As it turned out, the locks on a good number of them had rusted shut, but one door had been left slightly ajar. I swam up to it and peered through the tiny opening. There was a red light inside the room, pointed directly at the door. Without warning, it blinked.

“Is someone there?” asked a waterlogged, hissing, electronic voice.

My mind instantly went to my training, facing down submersible drones in target practice, and to Sera’s face as she begged me to be careful before my dive. I drew my harpoon pistol from its holster and waited, my finger on the trigger. When the light blinked again, I kicked open the door, took aim, and fired the harpoon straight into the eye of a moldy, animatronic teddy bear.

The poor toy that I ruthlessly murdered whirred as its motors ground to a halt before turning off for good. Bubbles escaped my mouth as I sighed in relief, mentally admonishing myself for being so trigger-happy and glad that the teddy bear was neither a security drone nor another diver. With the imaginary threat neutralized, I swam into the room and took a look around.

The furniture was waterlogged and encrusted with barnacles, much like the rest of the building. The television was rusted, the screen warped and clouded by its long submergence in the briny depths. The drawers of the dresser were open and empty, and one had even fallen out of its enclosure. It appeared as though whomever had last stayed in this room had left in a hurry.

As I scanned the orphaned dresser drawers, a metallic glint caught my eye. Swimming over, I saw a rusted, heart-shaped locket tucked in a corner of one drawer. I picked it up, and was astonished to find that the latch seemed to be in good condition. I opened it and gasped at the contents. Inside was a picture of three humans. Two of them, both adults, were hugging a young child. The child held a teddy bear, which appeared to be waving at the camera. The photo must have been waterproofed quite well, as it was neither warped nor faded.

I floated there with the locket in hand, staring at the photo in shock. Humans had only ever been theoretical to me, a snapshot of the history that predated the collapse of the Terran ecosystem. My own DNA was descended from theirs, the result of a centuries old bioengineering project that produced the chimeras. We had inherited the works of our human ancestors, but no one yet lived who had seen a human outside of history class.

I wondered what had become of the family. What were their lives like? Did they come here on vacation? Did they escape the collapse? Did they die screaming in a climate catastrophe? Possible answers swirled in my mind as I stared at the locket.

I surfaced sometime later with a pack full of old tech, which I handed off to Sera before climbing aboard the hovercraft. Sera took a brief look inside the bag.

“Why do you have a teddy bear in here?” she asked.

“It’s animatronic and still functions. I bet it has a fusion battery inside. Might still be good for a few centuries.”

“Why does it have a harpoon in its eye?”

“It snuck up on me.”

“Uh huh.” Sera shot me a quizzical look. “What have you got on your neck?”

I touched the locket gingerly with a free hand. “A memento,” I said.

Sera opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, and simply shrugged.

Sera went back into the cabin, placing the salvage on a table inside. I followed behind her. Sera took the pilot seat and began prepping for the ride back to the salvage platform. Soon we were on our way, and there was nothing left for me to do but catalog the salvage and see what, if anything, was usable. That is our job, and the reason I dive. We have lost so much to the waves of time and history. We must salvage what little remains if we want to build a future.

 

* * *

About the Author

Mercy Morbid is a pixel artist, speculative fiction writer, and Vtuber from Northeast Ohio. She enjoys tabletop roleplaying games, books with queer characters, and the blood of the living. When she is not writing, she is often found posting her thoughts and ideas on Twitter (@MercyMorbid). She would be very happy if you read them.

by Tessa Yang

“My unsightly and unlovable brethren, hide your shame no longer. Let us engage in a glorious contest to determine who will be crowned the Greatest Freak of All Time!”

Revelation 6:17: “The great day of their anger has come, and who can survive it?”

 

Bull

All hail your new lord and conqueror: Bull Shark rises from the ocean with a crown of barnacles on its head, ready to haul you landlubbers back to the steaming seas whence all things good and evil were born.

If you’d had to name your fishy overlord, this would not have been your first guess, but keep that thought to yourself. To mouth the words Great White Shark is to hasten your own demise. Bull Shark can be a little testy when it comes to mentions of its bigger, show-offy cousin with its stupid aerial displays.Master of saltwater and freshwater, it was only a matter of time before Bull Shark was promoted to other realms. See it tear through the skies like a pterodactyl. Feel the reverberations as it bombs sinkholes into the earth. Trees whisper of its coming through their mycelia networks. They say no harpoon or bullet or net can destroy it, for Bull Shark is invincible with righteous purpose. It’s armored in the rage of a hundred million sharks caught in a hundred million fishing nets, finned and flung overboard to die of suffocation.

Bull Shark balloons. It beats its tail and tsunamis swell in answer. Creatures bow or flee before its indisputable might. Its presence has the feel of an ending, the ending. Not even the trees are asking what comes next.

 

Goblin

Goblin Shark tires of appearing on your listicles.

14 Ocean Freaks You Didn’t Know Existed

Top 10 Sea Monsters to Haunt Your Dreams

Weirdest Fish

Creepiest Fish

There’s only so much any of us can take before we snap.

The ocean is the world’s biggest empath. She spreads her feelers inland beyond the brackish mouths of estuaries, into rivers and streams, the backyard creeks where crayfish wander. Goblin Shark is tuned into these frequencies. The electroreceptors on its toothy snout reach out. From the lightless seafloor, it broadcasts a message in a voice that is like the belching of a thousand undersea volcanoes:

“Come, my naked mole rats! Come, Goliath bird-eaters and vampire squids, giant hornets and leaf-nosed bats! My unsightly and unlovable brethren, hide your shame no longer. Let us engage in a glorious contest to determine who will be crowned the Greatest Freak of All Time!”

And so Earth’s ugliest creatures haul themselves from nests and burrows. Scaly bodies unwind. Furry legs flex and scuttle. Cautious at first, half-blinded by the sun, their limitations soon evaporate thanks to the wizardry of Goblin Shark — part fairy godmother, part referee. The battle that follows spans biomes. From the tallest mountains to the deepest grottos, the planet seethes with the frenzy of wrestling tentacles and slashing fangs.

Goblin Shark surveys the carnage with satisfaction. It has never seen anything so beautiful.

 

Tiger

Tiger Shark’s appetite precedes it. Famous devourer of squids, turtles, birds, porpoises, nails, tires, cans, boots, cameras, license plates, a fur coat that one time — but what becomes of the ocean’s garbage can when the ocean is a garbage can?Has it ever occurred to you that Tiger Shark doesn’t want to eat all that trash?You can have it back. It was yours to begin with. Tiger Shark was only borrowing. Thus commences the great purge, centuries of refuse boiling up the ocean’s throat, a maelstrom collecting junk from the bottom of the sea and spewing it back on land where it belongs. Bang. A refrigerator door. Crash. A sunken oil rig. Wham. An Ohio-sized web of nylon fishing nets.

A soundless rain of cigarette butts, dancing prettily on the wind.

Transport halts. Crops wilt and languish under the toxic barrage. What was already happening in some places is now happening everyplace, because above all, Tiger Shark is committed to fairness. No more looking away. No more sending your trash to the other side of the world where for all you know, a benign sorceress waves her wand and poofs it out of existence.

Seek shelter, ideally underground. This could take a while. Tiger Shark has been swallowing your shit for a long time.

 

Greenland

Even by arctic standards, Greenland Shark moves slowly, dragging its ponderous body through the whipping currents of space-time. Its solemn duty is to review the labors of its younger kin — even if it would much rather be drifting beneath the ice contemplating the universe’s greatest questions, or snacking on snoozing cephalopods. You’ve seen one apocalypse, you’ve seen them all.

The party’s nearly over by the time Greenland Shark arrives. Bull Shark belly-flops onto an archipelago, flattening it into the sea. Goblin Shark eggs on an army of elephant seals. Tiger Shark, finally depleted, naps contentedly in tropical shallows, reduced to a speckled pup beneath red-lit skies.

Greenland Shark takes in all of this with one left-to-right sweep of its milky eyes. Its memory soars back through the centuries, through the millennia, to the moment when water vapor condensed and plummeted earthward, and bacteria gushed forth oxygen, and hard-shelled organisms filled the infant seas, and fish came, and shed fins for limbs, and inched timidly onto land. The stars were old even then, but they seemed new, so new, spearing the sky with barbs of blistering brightness.

Now the lights of heaven shudder and sift downward like a shower of marine snow, stirred by shifting currents. The universe searches for its new form. To know what this might be is beyond the pay grade of Bull Shark, Goblin Shark, and Tiger Shark, and if the oldest and wisest among them has any inkling, it does not yet speak on the matter.

“It is good,” declares Greenland Shark, and descends back into the frigid depths to digest a polar bear carcass.

 

* * *

About the Author

Tessa Yang is a fiction writer and shark enthusiast from upstate New York. She is the author of the speculative short story collection The Runaway Restaurant (7.13 Books, 2022). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, CRAFT, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.tessayang.com, or on Twitter: @ThePtessadactyl.