The Marionette

Zupp

“We need the money. The solar absorber isn’t gonna last another two months for us to get to Tollyan. And unless you want to be eating nothing but beans and freeze-dried strawberries for the duration of those two months, we need to resupply,” Columinus said. 

Burrock perked up at the mention of the strawberries and turned to Utilitron-Pike. “Why in the name of the sun did you buy all of those freeze-dried strawberries?”

Utilitron-Pike closed their eyes and whirred. “I was directed to purchase quote: as much non-perishable fruit as twenty nuggets can afford end quote. SupplyCo was selling freeze-dried strawberries in bulk at a greatly reduced price.”

“I think we should still perform,” Burrock said. “We need to start saving a nugget per show to purchase this one a new Emergent Thinking processor.”

“I take offense to that,” said Utilitron-Pike.

“At least you don’t need a new Emotions Core.”

“And yet I am not so fragile as one composed of flesh and bone.”

“Both of you stop it,” Columinus said. “My feeling is that if the Gottian authorities have not outlawed either passage or public gatherings, the situation cannot be so bad that our landing here would be a death sentence.”

“But to even risk it-” Zupp began.

Columinus interrupted. “We either risk it here or we risk it with the solar absorber shorting in transit. If you want to talk about death sentences.”

“We’re being callous, and bull-headed. If we land on a planet with an outbreak, we risk bringing the disease with us everywhere we go. I think there’s a third option,” Zupp said. They drummed their fingers against the side of their coffee mug. The hot surface hurt their finger pads, which gave them a minor rush. If you have to hurt yourself, a friend had once told them, do it in a way that won’t cause lasting damage. On the side of the mug was an artist’s rendering of Tiptap, the ship’s cat. Zupp’s partner, a farmer on Hevelspire, had given it to them as a gift during Zupp’s last visit. “What if we cancel this show and the Tollyan show? We could go to D-2, convince someone to let us perform there, buy ourselves a new solar adaptor, and avoid the nastiness all together. We’d have weeks, and plenty of time to make the final string of shows. D-2 is just as close to Urglenth as Tollyan is.”

“Not a bad idea, actually,” Burrock said.

The fluorescent lights buzzed over the circular table, casting a cold glow over the coffee and the oatmeal and the table bowls of freeze-dried strawberries. Utilitron-Pike sipped at an empty mug and raised an empty fork to their facial vent.

Columinus

Columinus had a contact on D-2, and so it was decided with relatively little fuss (considering the earlier fuss) that heading to D-2 would, in fact, be their best option. At worst, Burrock pointed out, they’d be stranded on D-2, where they could easily find temporary work until they could afford a new solar adaptor. Zupp agreed, and walked around the table collecting dirty dishes. Lula Loppet stayed silent, as they had all morning, and Krikko had never left their room for breakfast in the first place, having gone to bed the previous evening complaining of constipation.

It was a truth well-known among planet-hoppers that astral constipation could be incapacitating.

Columinus left the table for the cockpit, stopping at Krikko’s cabin along the way. Columinus had always thought that cabin was a cruel word for the rooms aboard the Marionette. When they’d piloted for the Charisma Hogs they’d slept in a full room with a double bed and a porthole window and a desk and a closet. Here the cabins were themselves the size of closets, big enough for a twin bed and a footlocker and nothing else- barely enough floor space for calisthenics. Columinus had taken to rolling their clothes up into tight cylinders to make space in their footlocker. They rapped their knuckles on Krikko’s door. They heard rustling and a tap on the room’s control panel and the door accordioned open, pressing itself against the frame; Columinus had to turn sideways to get their fat body past it and into the room.

“How are you doing, sweetie?” Columinus asked. Krikko moaned. Columinus crouched down and set a warm mug on top of the footlocker. “I brought you some coffee. Two teaspoons of powdered milk how you like it. Might loosen you up a bit.”

“Thanks.”

In the cockpit, Columinus reoriented the Marionette towards D-2.

Zupp

Zupp was on the hunt for Tiptap. They hadn’t seen the feline for a couple of days, though he must have been eating in the night because his bowl was always empty by morning. Zupp wasn’t particularly concerned that Tiptap was hurt or lost- he often vanished for a day or two before materializing at the dining table as if he’d been around all along- but they had learned that it was better for their anxiety if they got eyes on the cat, visual confirmation that their shipmate was well. They checked in the usual spots: the prop closet, behind the mint green copper pipes in the hallway that led to the airlock, under the dashboard in the cockpit (inspiring a brief but passionate conversation with Columinus about the merits and demerits of traditional Loupollian puppetry), and above the cabinets in the galley. Tiptap was nowhere to be found.

Once Zupp started to look, they could not focus on anything else. Sometimes they were frustrated by the way their brain operated, swinging back and forth from intense distractibility to total fixation, but on the long voyages through open space they relished the moments where they could sink their attention into one task. They went back to the prop closet and opened every box. They checked under all the furniture in the rec room. When they returned to the galley to open every cabinet, they came upon Burrock and Lula Loppet sitting on the linoleum countertop.

“-is all I’m saying, it’s part of what you’re here to learn-” Burrock was whispering at too high a volume before they noticed Zupp coming through the door. Lula Loppet’s jaw clenched and unclenched, and Zupp suspected that they were trying not to cry. Burrock looked back and forth between Zupp and Lula Loppet, biting their lip in concentration. “You really ought to talk to Zupp about this anyway. I mean, uh. I don’t even know how it would work, even if I thought it was a a good idea, which, and I totally get what you’re saying and why you’re upset, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. Personally.”

Zupp didn’t come any closer, which meant that they had to stand fifteen feet across the room with their hands in their pockets while they waited for somebody to speak. Lula Loppet looked down at their hands. Burrock fiddled with the spinning spice rack.

Zupp began to speak: “You don’t have to tell me anything. I’m just looking for the cat. But if you do want to tell me, I’ll do my best to listen without judge-”

“I want to leave the tour and go home,” Lula Loppet said. Their face flushed maroon and their eyes glistened as they looked across at Zupp.

“Oh. Do you- could you explain why?”

Lula Loppet nodded and grasped the shoulder straps of their denim overalls. It was hot on board the Marionette, and most of the crew had taken to wearing only undergarments beneath their overalls, so Zupp could see a fair portion of the vermillion tattoos that crisscrossed most of Lula Loppet’s body. “I wanted to learn the craft. That’s why I joined up. And I have, some, but so much of this is packing and unpacking and flying in the ship and freaking out about the derelicts and even when we do the show its like, always the same show. I’m not learning enough, and I’m homesick and scared and I want to be with my family. I don’t want to die in space. I don’t want to get on a spacecraft ever again,” Lula Loppet said all in one breath. 

Zupp thought, absurdly, that if nothing else at least Lula Loppet must have learned something about breath control and the diaphragm from performing with the crew. “We’ve had apprentices leave before,” Zupp lied gently, blinking at Burrock. “We can pay you for the work you’ve already done. But we can’t afford to book you passage to Allperth from D-2, so you’d be on your own getting back. I know it’s a scary time. None of us were expecting the derelicts, and we’re all worried about them- that situation isn’t going to change if you leave us early. You’ll still have to find a passenger ship home, and then you’ll be with strangers. And Lula Loppet, we want you to stay. You’re an excellent performer, and we care about you.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to say,” Burrock said. “The logistics, the long voyages, the heavy lifting, the monotony. That’s part of the art, y’know? How to find inspiration in the grueling bits. How to keep the same show fresh.”

No decision on the matter came that day, at least to Zupp’s knowledge, there being at least a week before the Marionette would reach D-2. Zupp and Burrock both promised to keep the conversation to themselves. Zupp gave up on finding Tiptap and then discovered him almost immediately, curled up at Krikko’s feet while they slept.

The next day, Zupp woke with the desire to boost morale among the crew. They rose early and went to the cockpit to find Columinus, who always rose before the others to check the ship’s systems. They told their plan to Columinus, who shrugged and grinned and said it sounded like fun.

Lula Loppet

Lula Loppet’s head rang when Zupp came to the table for breakfast carrying a box they’d filled with nail polish from the prop closet, extra towels from the bathroom supply, and a brown goop Zupp said was an exfoliating mask they’d made from galley ingredients.

“I thought we could all do with a spa day,” Zupp said.

Condescending asshole, Lula Loppet thought, and spent the day in their cabin.

Utilitron-Pike

It came to pass that Zupp, Burrock, Columinus, and Utilitron-Pike sat around in the rec room grooming themselves. Utilitron-Pike stayed away from the face masks, instead breaking up a vial of nail polish, pouring it into a bowl, and dipping their entire fingertips into it.

Krikko

Krikko limped to the bathroom and eased their body down onto the toilet. The seat felt icy against their skin. They voided their bowels in a painful, hot stream. The green light on the bottom of the toilet blinked. Krikko flipped the switch on the bidet attachment and felt the soothing water cleanse them. They rose, physically weak but otherwise feeling the best they’d felt in days, and washed their hands. They crouched beside the toilet, ran the vacuum for a moment, and removed the composting bin. They carried the sloshing tray across the ship, passing Columinus (who gave them a thumbs-up), to the Garden.

The Garden light was bright enough to hurt Krikko’s eyes. They fumbled their hand along the wall until they found the row of pegs from which they took a pair of sunglasses. With the spectacles on, they could see Burrock crouching among the vegetables that took up most of the Garden’s floor space. The room had originally been designed as an observatory: from the outside it was a bubble-shaped glass dome on the bottom-front of the ship, a mirror image of the cockpit above. Columinus had managed to reroute a fraction of the solar adaptor’s energy to a fixture on the ceiling, which flooded the space with artificial sunlight.

“I have compost,” Krikko said.

Burrock turned. “You’re alive!”

“It’s gonna take more than a jammed-up colon to bring me down.”

Burrock snatched a handful of leafy greens from one of the plants and stuck it in their basket. “Why don’t you bring me that compost and go eat breakfast? I’ll spread it around.”

Columinus

D-2 hung in space before the Marionette. Most of the planet’s population lived in a single, massive metropolis on its one stable landmass. The amber glow of the city lights gave Columinus the impression of an oozing wound. The rest of the crew watched from the Garden; Columinus always appreciated the time alone to take in a planet and breathe before landing.

A traffic controller patched through to give the Marionette permission to land at Port Helium, the port which Columinus had requested for its proximity to the Hot Air Theatre, which Columinus’ contact had once co-operated. Hopefully still co-operated. The traffic controller also read an official statement from the D-2 Executive Council addressing the derelict crisis. They acknowledged that D-2 had not received any derelicts and that certain preventative measures were being taken: the Marionette would be searched and its crew subject to a full medical examination. Any ships which arrived in D-2 airspace that did not verbally confirm their business would be turned away rather than retrieved, and any non-confirming ships which did not evacuate D-2 airspace within six hours would be destroyed in space. The traffic controller then asked Columinus for verbal confirmation of their intent to land, which Columinus gave.

As the Marionette drew closer to Port Helium, Columinus could see just how dense the city was. In most places it apparently ran three layers deep- they could see the first layer of tall buildings connected by a web of walkways beneath which ran the second layer, a jumble of stacked-up apartments and balconies and shops beneath which, on what Columinus believed was the surface of the planet, was a third layer of city that they could not make out. They felt nostalgic for their birth planet- a wide, biodiverse world with rolling fields and pristine lakes that they had never appreciated as a child, thinking it boring. They landed the ship on the top level of the city, on a circular platform behind the Port Helium hangar, and pulled into a line of four ships.

Burrock

Taxiing had become a far more intensive process in the past months, as most planets were requiring that ships must be inspected and cleared before their crews could disembark. The Marionette sat on Port Helium’s taxi strip for six hours before it was inspected, by which time two more ships had lined up behind it.

Burrock joked several times that day that, by the time anybody came to inspect the ship for corpses, the whole crew would be dead of old age. The trio of workers who came aboard in envirosuits to search the vessel, scan eyeballs for green streaks, examine the food supply, and interrogate each individual crew member about their business had not appreciated these jokes. One, with a ginger mustache that floated in the foggy atmosphere of their oxygen helmet, told Burrock that they could be fined for “inciting hysteria” for joking about the derelicts. Burrock was fairly certain that this was a bluff, but they stopped making jokes all the same.

The Marionette was parked in a hangar pod accessible only by the crew and Port Helium staff, allowing the crew to continue sleeping in and operating out of the ship during their time on D-2. It was late when the processing was finally finished, and they’d wait until morning to hunt down Columinus’ contact, but Burrock and Krikko and Zupp decided to take a walk around the area. The top level was fairly quiet, and the neighborhood was lined with trees and dotted with fountains and parks. Families and business people and couples and thruples strolled the pathways, some walking leashwolves or house goats. Burrock could hear the faraway din of activity on the lower levels.

“Excuse me,” Zupp said to an elderly person squatting to scoop up a pile of goat scat, “could you point us towards the closest drinking establishment?”

“No public drinking on the top level. About a block that way you’ll find the nearest elevator down to the middle. Pony Time is an excellent bar just on the right after the optical checkpoint,” they said.

The trio thanked the person and patted the goat and headed back to the Marionette. They’d had enough of checkpoints for one day.

Lula Loppet

The Hot Air Theatre housed a simple black proscenium from which twenty rows of ten seats each sloped upwards to the control booth. The stage lights gave the space the warm, intoxicating atmosphere which made the worst venues feel like elevators and the best venues feel like home. This place felt like home to Lula Loppet, despite their misgivings. They wondered if Zupp had told Columinus or if Columinus had a hunch that they were planning to slip away with their cut after they finished performing on D-2, and if bringing them along today was Columinus’ attempt to convince them to stay.

“Consider this a lesson in networking,” Columinus had said on the elevator down to the middle. They’d waited in line for an hour to get through the checkpoint.

Columinus’ contact at the Hot Air Theatre was a short, light-skinned person in an enormous fur coat and thick (and Lula Loppet suspected, fake) spectacles. They’d been thrilled to hear that the Marionettes wanted to perform, and the space had a dark night coming up in two weeks. The Marionettes would receive half of all ticket sales. Columinus tried to negotiate a flat rate, to no avail. They told Lula Loppet that such negotiation was typical, and half of ticket sales would be enough to cover a new solar adaptor and enough food to get them to their next show as long as turnout was decent.

There was one dressing room with two toilets, two working showers, a large space for prop storage, and room for twelve performer stations. It wasn’t the nicest theatre they’d performed in, but it might have been the third nicest. It certainly beat the theatre on Phullmeck that had spiders the size of Lula Loppet’s palms. They’d stuck their hand into the Hatmaker, the other playing with the strings attached to the puppet’s shoulders, only to discover one crawling up their arm a moment later. They’d beat the arachnid to death on the floor with a mop. It took several strikes before the spider stopped trying to get up and scurry away. They were proud that they had not screamed. As Columinus mapped the new space aloud they felt an undercurrent of sadness- over here was where they’d make their first entrance with the Hatmaker (for the last time), from this wing Zupp would control the dancing birds (which Lula Loppet would never get to see again), Krikko could fill their entrance from the control booth to the stage with their monologue about how confusing it was when planets didn’t use the Standard Galactic Calendar (at which Lula Loppet would never have to stifle their giggles again).

After the tour, Columinus and Lula Loppet puttered around on the middle level for the rest of the afternoon, exploring nooks and crannies and popping into the little food markets that seemed to live around every corner to taste fresh vegetables and street foods like fried squirrel and cheese-dough. Lula Loppet couldn’t believe that the city could be this dense for all of its hundreds of miles, and they hadn’t even been to the ground level. They would be glad to return to Allperth, where there was space and time to breathe. They’d been cramped and sore for months.

Burrock

There was not much to do in the two weeks before the performance, so they ended up having a lot of sex with Krikko and Columinus, usually at the same time. Their favorite act as a group was a sort of masturbation circle, where they’d touch themselves all tangled up in one of the tiny cabins, kissing and caressing and writhing against each other. When one of them drew close to orgasm, the other two would sandwich in to bite and kiss and lick their neck and ears and face. It was a good way to pass the time, Burrock thought, and they’d leave the cabin feeling refreshed. They didn’t exclude the others for any particular reason: Utilitron-Pike had no interest (being a robot), nor did Zupp (being asexual), and there had been an early conversation with Lula Loppet about power dynamics, all agreeing together that it would be better for the younger apprentice not to be involved. Sometimes Lula Loppet would bring a local into their cabin, but they hadn’t done so on D-2 as far as Burrock was aware. The walls in the Marionette were thin- it had taken Burrock years to get over their anxiety about being overheard, but they rarely thought about it anymore.

Columinus

The morning of the performance, over breakfast, Columinus finished their traditional speech: “And always remember: we are not merely artists. We…are entertainers!”

Krikko

The worst happened (“as it always does,” Krikko whispered to Lula Loppet as they hastily crammed the puppets back into their boxes) an hour before curtain. A derelict had landed at a D-2 port; according to Columinus’ contact, the ship had landed, begun to taxi, and stopped moving forward an hour in. The pilot had been discovered still warm with their head on the control board, blood trickling from the corners of their mouth. The rest of the crew was long dead. Utilitron-Pike arrived at the theatre to help cart the props back to the Marionette and pulled Krikko aside into one of the dressing room showers.

A tinny voice rang out through the streets: “Attention. The city is on lockdown. All citizens return to your residences and await further instruction. We repeat, the city is on lockdown…”

Krikko slipped out the back door of the theatre. They walked briskly toward the city elevators, taking care not to run; they knew that the second they started running they would not be able to stop. They could feel the heavy, blocky object weighing down the right leg pocket of their overalls. As they’d hoped, the optical checkpoint was suspended- its staff was waving people through and ordering them to make their way home immediately. Krikko crowded into the elevator and felt the machine lurch downward. The middle level rose up past the glass doors, and below them opened up the bustling buzz of the bottom.

The differences between the upper level and the middle level seemed trivial compared to the differences between the middle and the lower. The middle level did not have the well maintained shrubbery and elaborate designs of the upper, but Krikko could see from the descending elevator that the lower level was host to some degree of squalor. They wondered how it was determined on D-2 who lived on what level: whether it was an issue of religious belief or skin tone or political affiliation or some complicated mess of factors; it reminded Krikko of their birth planet, which they’d left as a teenager as more and more of their ethnic group’s foraging lands were sacrificed to make room for a high-speed railway. 

The elevator reached the bottom with a soft thud. The door creaked open, and the smell of sulfur filled Krikko’s nostrils. They took a strip of paper from their pocket: directions from the elevator to a junk shop run by a person named Croak. They headed down the main street, which was lined with brutalist government buildings and factories billowing smoke out their chimneys. They noted that the floor of the middle level served as the ceiling of the bottom- artificial sunlight poured out from various attached fixtures, similar to the one in the Marionette’s Garden. Because the light came in from multiple sources, there were shadows going in every direction. Krikko’s path tessellated frequently between dim shade and cold, bright light, and they found the sensation jarring. They peeled off a side street, passing a warehouse-style marketplace with a line out the door and ending up in a neighborhood of corrugated iron shacks. The announcements continued to blare overhead, urging folks to get to their homes; people rushed about the bottom level carting supplies in wheelbarrows. Krikko felt anxious and irritated.

After several more turns down side streets, Krikko arrived at their destination. It was similar to the rest of the houses in the neighborhood, except that there was a zigzagging antenna atop the sheet metal roof and a little terra-cotta statue of a short bearded person wearing a pointy red hat next to the front door. Krikko checked the slip again. They knocked on the front door twice, paused, knocked three more times, paused, and knocked once more.

“Go away. We’re on lockdown,” came a thin voice from behind the door.

“I have something you want,” Krikko said.

The door swung open. The person standing before Krikko was a patchwork of transhumanist experimentation: which parts, exactly, were organic and which were mechanical was not entirely clear to Krikko, and most of the person’s body was concealed by a heavy cloak, but Krikko could see that the machinery powering them caused their body to vibrate slightly at all times. Little trails of steam puffed out from the bottom of the cloak. Their face and head appeared to be largely human flesh with the exception of their eyes, which held metal sheets that focused and unfocused on Krikko like an aperture. 

“Do not presume to tell me what I want,” Croak said.

Krikko handed them the cube from their pocket, which Croak took with a gloved hand. They examined the cube, turning it over and holding it up to their eyes and making clicking noises in the whirring machinery of their chest.

“How many years?” Croak asked.

“Five,” Krikko said.

“Do you know why they don’t make this model on D-2?”

“Yeah. We haven’t had any problems with it. The user was sometimes stubborn, but never physically combative. And otherwise well-developed.”

“This is in exchange for a Q-system solar adaptor, yes?”

“Yep.”

“One moment.” Croak shut the door and disappeared into the house with the cube. For a moment Krikko wondered if they’d been robbed, but Croak returned several minutes later with a long piece of metal dotted with an array of switches and dials.

“Lightly used. In excellent condition,” Croak said. “Last you ten years give or take, if you’re using it to power a small spacecraft. Deal?”

Krikko took the adaptor and inspected it. They didn’t know exactly what to look for, but it looked just like the one aboard the Marionette, with less wear and tear. They smiled. “Deal.”

Columinus

There was a lot of confusion happening in D-2 airspace in the wake of the derelict leak (apparently the government wanted to keep it under wraps until they could implement a genuine plan of action, but a reporter tossed a wrench into that plan); instructions on whether or not the Marionette would be allowed to leave before travel was completely locked down changed every hour, and by the time Krikko returned with a mysterious backup solar adaptor, the crew had already decided to leave one way or the other if they could manage it. Krikko seemed to have anticipated this, and agreed.

Lula Loppet was the only really agitated member of the crew. Whatever else, they clearly had no desire to stay behind on D-2, so they stuck around.

When the Port Helium employees were focused on more pressing matters than babysitting the Marionette, Columinus stepped into the cockpit and prepared the ship for departure. They wouldn’t make it to the take-off pads with all of the commotion on the tarmac, but as long as the ship was outside the hangar bay, Columinus could get it into the air. The biggest risk was that anti-air would take them out in the atmosphere. The crew assented to absorbing that particular risk, since radar showed there were plenty of other ships in the atmosphere, and nobody had heard the telltale whistling of anti-air rocketry. Columinus wiped the sweat from their brow. They watched as Zupp slipped down the gangplank, snuck across the hangar pod floor, and flicked the switch for the bay door. The door opened with mechanical thunder.

As soon as Zupp stepped back on board, Columinus pulled up the gangplank and rolled the ship forward. Sunlight gradually filled the hangar pod as the wall opened upwards, and Columinus could see employees out on the tarmac begin to run towards them. They cranked the controls forward, brought the Marionette outside, and initiated a launch procedure. The workers would likely have had time to reach the ship before it took off, but the ascension array would have baked them alive if they’d gotten any closer; Columinus saw them gawking as the ship rose into the air, and then the Marionette rushed away from the ground too quickly to make anything out at all.

In twenty minutes they were in unincorporated space, without so much as a message to desist.

“I’d imagine they’re a lot more concerned about incoming traffic,” Columinus said over dinner.

Burrock

Krikko would not say how they managed to end up with a solar adaptor in such good condition. Burrock asked several times, and Krikko would only say they’d made a trade.

Zupp

The final leg of performances were to be on three adjacent planets: Urglenth, Hevelspire, and Jeck. They’d managed to skip right over the issue of recasting Lula Loppet, who privately told Zupp and Burrock that they’d stick around after all, considering they didn’t have much choice. Lula Loppet didn’t seem particularly happy about it; Zupp was relieved, since the only real alternative would have been to cast Utilitron-Pike in the role. They’d tried putting Utilitron-Pike into shows in the past, and the robot had absolutely zero stage presence.

Zupp had a new concern. According to the weekly newspaper that they received via light telegram, many planets were adopting extreme preventative measures to control the derelict problem, including turning away any and all vessels traveling from planets with a confirmed derelict. Krikko had solved the solar adaptor concern, but the Garden could not provide the crew with an indefinite amount of food. They’d have to be able to land somewhere in the next couple of months, or they’d go hungry. And Zupp wanted to perform The Marionettes Present: Puppet Trouble Interstellar at least a couple more times. They hadn’t had a chance to bid the show farewell. They also desperately wanted to see their partner on Hevelspire.

Utilitron-Pike

Burrock ordered an inventory check just prior to the Marionette’s arrival at Urglenth. After the ship was turned away, Utilitron-Pike asked if Burrock had expected to be denied entry. Burrock said yes.

Lula Loppet

Being turned away from Urglenth was certainly a blow, but it was when the Marionette was refused entry into Hevelspire that morale went into a tailspin. Zupp had practically begged the traffic controller to let the Marionette land, and had been shut up in their cabin ever since. Burrock kept writing up ration plans and passing them out to everyone for “feedback”. Utilitron-Pike was distant. Columinus and Krikko were fucking constantly. Lula Loppet could no longer sleep: they spent many of their nights on the journey to Jeck with the puppets in the rec room, devising performances while Utilitron-Pike took notes.

It was in the rec room working with the puppets, the Hatmaker in the armchair and the other puppets face-down on the floor like groveling servants, that Lula Loppet had a realization.

“Pike, how are you doing?” They asked.

“All systems functional,” Utilitron-Pike said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“How are you feeling?”

“I have nothing to report,” Utilitron-Pike said.

Lula packed up the puppets, wished Utilitron-Pike a good night, returned the boxes to the prop room, and spent the rest of the night masturbating in their cabin. In the morning, after breakfast, they followed Burrock to the Garden.

Burrock

Burrock’s voice rose. “You’re right. I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all.”

Krikko’s back stiffened. “What would we have done otherwise, Burrock? If I’d asked, you would all have said no, and then we’d be stranded in unincorporated space with no backup adaptor-”

“If you hadn’t stolen a valuable piece of equipment without consulting the rest of your crew, we might have stayed on D-2 instead of floating around in space doing fuck-all until we run out of food.”

“Don’t. You had all decided to leave by the time I got back,” Krikko said.

“You’re right. Sorry. I’m angry, Krikko. We bought that Emotions Core for a reason,” Burrock said.

“It was their idea,” Krikko said. “Utilitron-Pike asked me to do it. They had already removed it, Burrock. They said they didn’t need their emotions in order to operate at full capacity. They said that for them emotions were purely aesthetic.”

Burrock fell silent, imagining that conversation, imagining Utilitron-Pike painstakingly removing the Emotions Core on their own without damaging any other machinery. They sunk to their knees, rested their head on Krikko’s cot, and let Krikko scratch them on the back of their skull. “How did they feel when they asked you?”

The hum of the Marionette filled Krikko’s silence.

Columinus

“Any planet that would let us land is not a planet we want to be on right now,” they said.

Zupp

The Marionette was turned away at Jeck.

The first remote supply stations began popping up a few weeks after the Great Closure, right around the same time that the solar adaptor broke down and Zupp swapped in the new one. The stations were launched into unincorporated space and supplied by host planets on stipends from the newly formed Planetary Unity Group. According to PUG’s guidelines, the stations were run entirely by robots, only one crew could dock at a time, and the stations underwent hour-long mandatory sanitation procedures in between every pickup.

One and a half galactic years after the Great Closure, PUG still had not lifted their restrictions on planetary borders; the derelict plague was still raging on several planets, and the Marionette and its crew continued to drift through space, waiting to be let back in.

Zupp had taken to cooking dinners for the crew; they were just placing the dishes on the table (with Utilitron-Pike’s help) when Columinus and Burrock and Krikko emerged from the cabin they were now sharing, where they’d taken out the bed frame and crammed all three of their mattresses together on the floor. The crew sat down together (minus Lula Loppet, who’d eaten an hour before) and ate, debating exactly how they wanted to repaint the interior of the Marionette with the cans they’d gotten on their last supply run. Columinus wanted to paint the bathroom red, which Krikko was vehemently opposed to. They landed on a compromise: one wall would be red, and the others tan. The rec room would be painted slate gray and, at Utilitron-Pike’s request, the dining room and galley would be light blue. Tiptap hopped into Zupp’s lap, purring, and Zupp fed the cat a morsel of fish.

“Shall we? I’m rather excited,” Burrock said.

The crew rose, leaving for once all the dishes on the table. Zupp kept ahold of Tiptap, pressing him to their chest. They walked in single file to the Garden. Inside, the greenery filled the space like a miniature forest and the overhead light was dimmed and Lula Loppet sat before a red curtain cascading dramatically from the ceiling, the Hatmaker propped up on their lap, their right hand grasping the strings above the puppet’s head, the rec room chairs arranged in a semicircle before them.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

Whack-a-Duck

The Whack-a-Duck machine was broken again. This may have been an inconvenience to the pimpled teenaged boys trying to beat each other’s scores at bashing plastic waterfowl on the head (one of them still clutched the mallet in both of his hands like a conscripted medieval peasant), but it made Aggie’s day. Whenever the Whack-a-Duck machine broke, the futchy maintenance girl with her royal purple eyebrow piercing passed right by the caricature booth with her toolkit and worked on the machine directly in Aggie’s line of vision for twenty to thirty minutes. The machine broke nearly every week. The previous Tuesday, Aggie drummed up the courage to lean over from the caricature booth as the girl passed by, both of them visibly sweating through the armpits of their uniforms.

“That thing sure breaks a lot, huh?”

“Yup,” the girl said, grinning. “Keeps me employed,” and wandered off.

This time Aggie intended to ask for her name. The girl was wearing her usual getup, ashy gray coveralls with the words MOOSE LAKE AMUSEMENTS PARK MAINTENANCE scrawled across the back in white script, with the top two buttons undone and a red bandana tied around her neck and stuffed into the gap. Aggie had five minutes left on a caricature when the girl appeared in her periphery. Five minutes should have been plenty of time, but the family she was drawing was absolutely miserable. They were a white family, as far as Aggie could tell, which was perfectly normal. Aggie was white. Many of her clients were white, although Somali families also contributed to a significant portion of the caricature booth’s business. It was an ongoing challenge for Aggie to balance the nature of caricature, which by design required exaggerating and riffing off of somebody’s physical appearance, with her own biases, implicit and otherwise. It did not help that the caricature world had not caught up to the most contemporary discussions of gender, class, and race. 

Aggie’s problem with this family was that they seemed to wield their whiteness like a weapon. The subjects were twin boys in matching camouflage, about ten years old, neither of whom was able to sit still. The father wore cargo shorts and a mustard colored t-shirt printed with the words “Forty Percent Man…Sixty Percent Beer!” and a picture of a beer can with legs, and he commented on Aggie’s tattoos three separate times as if he’d never seen a person with tattoos before. The mother kept shooting dirty looks at a group of black kids laughing in the long line for the rollercoaster fifty feet off from Aggie’s kiosk and muttering into her husband’s ear. The parents made no attempt to get their own children to sit still, so Aggie had to continuously stop drawing to corral them amidst her distraction over the maintenance girl and her hot pangs of white guilt that she wasn’t speaking up about the casual racism she was almost sure she was witnessing but told herself she could not prove.

Aggie really needed to keep her job, and she was pretty sure that her boss wouldn’t take her side if she pissed these people off. She couldn’t focus on anything besides drawing or painting or molding clay for long enough to keep a job waiting tables or cleaning houses, and her only other gig was teaching a figure drawing 101 class at a community center twice weekly in St. Paul for $12/hr.

“What do you keep looking at?” Aggie asked the mother.

The mother paused. Her bare shoulders were dotted with big, gingery freckles. The freckles shrugged up and down. “Those kids in line are just being so damn loud.”

“They’re being awfully dark-skinned too, aren’t they?” Aggie said.

The Whack-a-Duck machine loosed the chorus of piercing quacks it made whenever it was restarted. Aggie halfassedly finished the drawing in the tense silence that followed, charged the family $10 for a $20 caricature mumbling something about twins, slid the cash into the pouch in her apron, and walked over to the awning shaped like an open yellow beak. The maintenance girl was crouched behind the long aquamarine table with its two dozen or so “lakes” which the ducks were meant to leap out of when the machine was operational. Aggie could never quite follow the logic of the game; was the player intended to be a giant who smashed ducks with a lake-sized mallet? From here, she could see the girl’s earrings, shaped like a pair of dangling leather boots. The air smelled like funnel cake and sunscreen. Aggie waited, and a flurry of quacking mallards came popping out from their holes. The maintenance girl sprang up from behind the table. Up close, she had clear, wide brown eyes that glistened with the rotating fire engine light of the carnival game.

 Aggie extended a hand. “Aggie.”

(Aggie did lose her job. It wasn’t over anything she said to a customer or due to any poor performance on her part; she lost her job to the virus.)

The maintenance girl’s name was Jaqueline, no nicknames, please, and she and Aggie started hanging out a week before the virus hit. In fact the virus had “hit” a month prior, but it wasn’t until the hospitals began to overfill that the theme parks and the restaurants and the gyms and the tattoo parlors and the museums and the coffee shops began to close their doors. It wasn’t until people started losing their jobs that they realized the public health officials weren’t kidding about isolating themselves from friends and family.

Jaqueline was married. Aggie had never thought to look for a ring on a crush’s finger before, considering she was queer and twenty five and nobody she knew who was queer and twenty five was married before she met Jacqueline, who was in conversation with her spouse about how to approach opening their marriage and wanted to take things slow.

So they took things slow. They first met outside work at a coffee shop which two weeks later would attempt to transition to selling their sandwiches and drinks online and leaving them on a pickup table under the patio awning for their customers to come and retrieve, which would end up closing permanently several days later because nobody was ordering anything. They walked around the neighborhood drinking tea, stopping to inspect free yard libraries and once at an oak tree so that Jacqueline could chirp back and forth with a chickadee. They did not kiss. Aggie would have (Aggie would have done more than kiss- Aggie would have pushed Jacqueline up against a wall and pressed her finger pads into Jacqueline’s hips and leaned in until she could feel Jacqueline’s soft, half-filled cock against her stomach), but Aggie didn’t even ask to kiss because she was committed to the pace, the taking slowly of things, the simmer, the slow burn, the respect she’d been asked for and was willing in spite or because of her desire to give.

A week later the burn got slower when Jacqueline decided to stop leaving her house for anything but essential trips, since her spouse was immunocompromised.

The day after Moose Lake Amusements shut down, Aggie applied for unemployment. She lit a stick of incense, sat cross-legged on the floor beside Waffles with her back against the sofa, and opened her laptop. The unemployment website looked like it hadn’t been updated since the early 2000s, with its blocky tables and text box entry fields, except that there was already a button to click if you’d lost your job to the virus. A strong handful of her peers had lost their jobs to the virus. She’d written out an itinerary for that first day (and many subsequent days), because she’d learned during a particularly bad suicidal episode several months prior that if she was going to be cooped up alone in her apartment for days or weeks or months on end she’d better build a structure for herself. Applying for unemployment was the third item on the itinerary after waking up and walking Waffles. She knew that “waking up” was a silly item for the list, but she wanted to set herself up for success with an easy one. Following the application, the agenda listed: “paint (one hour)”, “lunch and call Mudge”, “jigsaw puzzle”, “paint or draw (ninety minutes)”, and “free time”. 

The more optimistic of Aggie’s friends expressed their hopes that the changes which the virus had demanded would wake the country up to that which must be changed- the vast income inequality which separated the people who actually kept the world turning from the wealthy, the inhumanities of the prison industry and the war industry, the ceaseless abuse of the planet. The less optimistic saw the gaps getting wider, the black and brown and Asian people who had already been denied care and blamed for the spread, the nonbinary friends who were already being forced to delay surgeries they’d fought for months to get their insurance providers to cover, the virus which would spread like wildfire in the overcrowded prisons and the communities where the poor still had to work. 

“Take this seriously,” the health experts insisted, and still barely anybody could get tested, and the billionaires weren’t lifting a finger to help, and still there was so much else to take seriously. Aggie deleted her Instagram app and started writing “phone in drawer” beside entries on her itineraries. 

Jacqueline texted her: “hey cutie.” Aggie’s favorite kind of text- the kind where someone clearly wanted her attention and didn’t bother to hide it. She wondered how Jacqueline was holding up in relative isolation. Aggie had established what Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton might have called a sort of loose fluid bonding arrangement, where she was only seeing three people in person until social distance was no longer necessary or until measures became even more extreme: her two best friends in the Twin Cities and a very sweet fuckbuddy. Each of those people was only socializing with one or two additional people, and so a sort of containment was built: not airtight by any means, but not nothing, either. Aggie wondered if she should be even more careful, but her mental health and the mental health of her community felt like a real enough consideration. When it came to Jacqueline she texted and facetimed and flirted and daydreamed about the half minute they had spent holding hands in the car when she dropped Jacquline off in front of her squat brick apartment building after the chickadee, frozen solid in each other’s eyes.

How many of the shuttered restaurants would reopen when the world washed its hands of the virus? In how many theme parks would the rats take up residence and refuse to leave? How many cruise ships would be converted into hospitals?

Aggie put a cigarette out on her thigh at three in the morning in the harsh cloud of her bathroom’s grow light, her shadow hovering over the sprawling vines behind her. It felt like really good sex and it sent tingling shockwaves rolling across her flesh, converting her body into a savannah of goosebumps. She hooted and bounced around on the balls of her feet and dropped the cigarette in the toilet before she could do it again. She didn’t have any other cigarettes- she’d nabbed this one from an abandoned turquoise box of American Spirits she’d found on a bench a block from her apartment by the lake. She’d considered taking the whole box, but she hated the logo. Her bathroom smelled like ash and sour yogurt.

She’d never purchase her own carton of cigarettes, so she hoped she’d be safe from doing it again. To be extra careful, she told everybody she knew what she had done. Mudge cried on video chat and swore to Aggie that when all of this was over they would be together, that one or the other of them would move across the country and they would find a cottage and fuck whoever they wanted and, more to the point, love whoever they wanted and sleep sometimes in the same bed and sometimes in separate beds and be a family.

That sounded good to Aggie: when all of this was over. She could hear the Whack-a-Ducks screeching in her ears. She wondered if the camouflage family had lost anyone to the virus. She wondered if the black kids laughing in the queue had lost anyone to the virus. Waffles put his fuzzy head in her lap, and Mudge said “awww” and “thank god you have Waffles” and “please promise that you won’t do it again no matter how bad it gets, that you’ll call me or Ash or Emmett or even your mother” and Aggie promised and they both cried over how much they loved each other and missed each other and Aggie ran her fingers through Waffles’ espresso fur and a question for Mudge dribbled out of her mouth: “hey, how are you drinking your coffee now if all of the shops are closed?”

Would Aggie learn to focus on what really mattered now that there was nothing else to focus on? Would she drink too much in isolation? 

The next time Aggie wanted to hurt herself, only a couple of days later, she instead painted a self portrait where in place of her breasts were two gaping bloody holes. How would Aggie and Mudge afford a cottage if neither of them could work, if nobody who worked with their hands or on their feet or in front of a crowd could work again for months or longer, if the job market was broken for years? How must the preachers and the rabbis and the imams be feeling? She often thought of Mudge’s brother, who’d just had a baby. Would that baby live on, never knowing what world they’d been born into? Or would they learn what world they’d been born into when some harsher catastrophe collided with their young adulthood and scattered their plans to the winds? Or would they catch the virus tomorrow and be dead in a week?

The ducks raised their new hatchlings around the lake by Aggie’s apartment, swimming in formation across the surface and splashing about in congregation at the shallow edges. Waffles wanted to play with them, sitting still at Aggie’s command but twitching forwards towards the flock and softly whining. She took a picture of the birds, which she sent to Jacqueline along with the text: “Please Come Help Me Fix These Ducks” along with an emoji of a duck. Jacqueline did not respond. 

Did Aggie have the virus already? Was she carrying it around in her body and showing no symptoms? Was she unwittingly passing it on to every person she came near?

Aggie logged onto Instagram via web browser, a decision that made her feel like dog crap because everyone else seemed to be thriving in isolation, learning new hobbies and baking successfully (Aggie tried to bake biscuits and they came out like stones) and writing music and building systems of mutual aid outside capitalism and crying gracefully on video and finding new uses for pasta water and all Aggie was doing was self-mutilating and being resentful of ducks. Somebody spray-painted in hot pink on the side of the expensive coffee shop in Aggie’s neighborhood: FUND VIRUS TESTING NOW! Even the vandals would be builders of the new world, and Aggie would be left behind.

Would the disasters keep happening over and over, faster and faster?

They walked around Moose Lake Amusements for half an hour together before either of them went back to work. Since Aggie was paid on commission, she didn’t make any money for any time that she spent at Moose Lake not drawing caricatures (which meant that on slow days she made well under minimum wage, which was $10.25 an hour in Minneapolis where you could no longer rent a room in a shared apartment for less than $550 a month), but she didn’t care. She felt light in Jacqueline’s presence. Everything made Jacqueline laugh, which made Aggie laugh even amidst the roaring of the old rollercoasters which usually triggered her body’s panic response. She asked Jacqueline if she ever worked on the rollercoasters.

“No,” Jacqueline said. “Just the games and the kiosks and the vending machines.”

Two days after the duck picture, she texted Jacqueline again: “When all of this is over, I’m going to kiss you until you’re dizzy.” Jacqueline responded with an emoji of a blushing face and three words: “I’d like that.”

I’d like that.

When all of this is over. 

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

One Dozen Little Bits

#1: Ghost Poem

a ghost is no one’s favorite guest

at the party down on Golden Crest;

the boy i love is getting drunk

on cheap rosé and flirting hard

with anyone who drives a car

i bet he wants to get it on

in the parking lot behind the church

which by happenstance is where we last

(one could say we had a blast

doing)- hey what the fuck?

i was sure no one could see this ghostly frame

(though they clearly feel my shivery shame)

yet i swear someone just said my name!

and now she’s looking at my plasm stain.

there’s a genderqueer o’er by the chips

dipping them into the dips

while the boy i love is getting laid

in the backseat of a chevrolet

and this tattooed bookworm after me

can see me under armchair three

she’s waiting for the crowd to move

and when it does she’ll bother me:

“a ghost like you is wasting time!

you could be doing anything:

climbing mountains, scaring goats.

why are you here?

why aren’t you there?

you could be almost anywhere.”

she’s gone away.

where did she go?

and can you really blame me if

my un-fini-shèd busyness

is far less grand than poison, war

vengeance, secrets, saving lives?

what if what i wanted most 

was not to feel like such a ghost?

#2: Two Questions 

Can You Eat Too Many Grapes?

Can You “Kill” a “Vibe”?

#3: Eva Mae

Eva Mae stood at the helm eating a banana. There was a small fruit fly infestation in the pantry, which prompted her to eat her way through the rest of the bananas as quickly as possible. She brought the bananas as an early voyage treat, which she now regretted. There were other, more highly nutritious sources of potassium in the pantry that would keep for much longer. Sweet potatoes, for example. That evening she planned on wrapping a couple of sweet potatoes in foil, roasting them in the small galley oven, whisking together a greek yogurt dill sauce, and eating them straight up with the skins on.

It had been three days since she had last seen a bird of any sort.

The waves lapping against the hull were tipped with yellow-ish foam. Eva Mae watched, her eyelids still ringed with a crust of deep sleep in the same shade as the ocean foam. Later, she would make one of her speeches standing in the same spot. Her speeches were improvised and usually involved rallying her crew to survive a monstrous storm or charge aboard a rival’s frigate. Occasionally they were about political issues: primarily nuclear disarmament and, less frequently, civil rights. She spoke clearly and solidly from her gut center, which was sturdy from years of sailing and three square meals a day, the frequent snack, and the periodical dessert. 

Eva Mae appreciated her alone time.

The Atlantic was easier than the Pacific. She had already done California to Hawaii, and it was going to be another eight or nine years in her estimate before she’d have the time, skills, and money to circumnavigate the globe, but this would be excellent practice. And it was always a mistake to rush. 

She had seen something that she had not appreciated the previous evening. There was an iridescent green light floating in the water some yards off the port side of The Sunflower, which she spotted twenty minutes after sundown. Closer to shore, she would have ignored it. Out in the open ocean, it was strange. Stranger still was the cluster of seven dead fish floating a few yards off when she came topside in the morning. 

In preschool, Eva Mae had once pushed another child. They had been standing on a chair, and Eva Mae wanted them to learn that there were consequences associated with choosing to stand on a chair. The other child fell hard and, red-faced and in tears, ran off to find the teacher in another room. The teacher could not understand the child through their sobbing, and Eva Mae chose not to take responsibility. Even the next day, when the other child was able to articulate what had happened, the teacher brushed the incident off.

This was the first that Eva Mae could remember in a history of episodes wherein authority figures let her off the hook, likely because she was a charismatic white girl with straight teeth.

The noise started buzzing in her ears around 3pm EST. It disoriented her, forcing her to climb below deck and cover her eyes with a warm wet cloth. It stopped a half an hour later.

…wxx anything rrrrrung?

That was the message she heard on the radio at midnight EST. The radio flickered on by itself while Eva Mae was asleep, emitting first static and then a garbled drowning kind of distant unintelligible talking. The minute she sat down at the radio, the speaking focused itself just long enough to say again, more clearly:

…wxx anything rrrrung?

The first sound, she was sure was a “w”. This was followed by a brief hit of static followed by, spoken in a clean flat deep voice, the word “anything”. What sounded like an attempt to speak a second full word came out only as a drawn-out half-word with an upwards inflection at the end: “rrrung?”

The radio turned itself back off. 

The “anything” was clear. She knew without question that she had heard the word “anything”. But the “rrrung?” struck her as painful, laborious. It was that sound that stuck around, echoing in her ears all night; Eva Mae spent the next hour sweating in her cabin, which felt as though it had shrunk in half, trying every frequency between 156.0 and 174 MHz. For the remaining hours until sunrise, she sat in bed massaging out her tense jaw muscles and reminding herself that the only enemy she had on the open water was panic.

pigeons woke up

walked into public parks

and had their necks snapped by a raging wind

in the dream that woke her, startled, far too late in the morning. The Sunflower had drifted south. 

“This is not a problem,” Eva Mae muttered. “To panic would be the problem.”

Though, when she considered the situation honestly, Eva Mae really was beginning to panic. She had had problems sailing before, of course. A sail would tear or she’d be thrown about by waves and wind, but never had she felt as though she were going mad. And she wasn’t going mad, she knew that, but she also couldn’t explain the radio or the dot in the water or the fish carcasses.

After resetting her course (and with only a few hours of time lost; she was still days within her margin of error, she reminded herself) Eva Mae decided to eat breakfast. On a full stomach she might be able to relax.

She ate a breakfast sandwich. She kept english muffins in the freezer that she would defrost and toast, sandwiching them with two eggs over-hard, a little grated cheddar, a smeared avocado half, and a drizzle of hot sauce. A cup of coffee with a splash of cream, no sugar. Good, solid energy. 

Eva Mae was not going to panic.

Still, she couldn’t get rid of the image of that little green bead of light floating around in the blue. Her heart was pounding, but she wasn’t experiencing any of the other physiological signs of clinical panic. For Eva Mae, these signs usually included trembling, sweating, loss of appetite, nausea, light-headedness, and a tingling sensation in her toes. Her heart rate was up, certainly, but the fact that she still had a healthy appetite was proof enough that she wasn’t falling apart just yet.

After her first breakfast sandwich she did forty push-ups on the deck.

Eva Mae ate a second breakfast sandwich as she scanned the water for any irregularities. Nothing. She burped, cracked her knuckles, and tugged on the bandana around her neck. The palpitations were subsiding. She was reminded of her relationship with air travel. 

Her relationship with air travel was this: when the flight attendants made their snack rounds, when they would come by with their carts full of pretzels or shrink-wrapped stroopwafels or whatever, when they would ask the passengers about their desires regarding liquid intake, when the people to her left and right would order coffees and ginger ales and sensible glasses of wine, Eva Mae would ask for a Bloody Mary, and when the flight attendants asked her if she wanted one shot of vodka or two, she would always ask for two.

When the flight attendants came back around, Eva Mae would order a second. Two shots, please.

On the other hand, when Eva Mae was sailing, she did not keep any alcohol on board whatsoever.

“I am going to be one hundred percent fine,” Eva Mae spoke aloud.

The green dot appeared on the deck of The Sunflower, and Eva Mae felt the whole vessel lurch upwards beneath her feet.

Buzz buzz.

A little insect buzzed about, lit dimly in hard fluorescent red, its shell-thick exoskeleton causing it to slowly descend as it flew. With each landing on the chromium walls, it shook its wings together for a minute or two before launching itself back into the air. The woman bleeding from her nose in the corner of the room watched. In the red light her blood looked like ink.

She played a game that went like this:

Watch the bug. 

Clock the bug’s position on the walls.

Close eyes.

Listen.

With a bandana compressed against her nostrils, she listened to the sounds of her newest companion. She heard the way its wings flapped together at a hundred beats per second in flight, the tiny click that it made when it landed, and the muted chirp that came from the scraping of its wings. Right before she opened her eyes, she would try to guess the insect’s new location. After a couple dozen rounds, she was able to locate the creature with relative accuracy and precision. Now, after several thousand guesses more, her senses were beginning to fail her.

This was how Eva Mae began to measure time. She did not know for how long she’d been trapped in terms of minutes or hours or days. She did know that she was hungry. She believed she remembered that at least twice she had been removed from the room, but she had no memory of anything that happened to her before she was returned. She wondered where her sailboat was, whether it was floating around in the Atlantic without her or whether it might be nearer by.

“Listen up. You’re going to land. You don’t have the most aerodynamic frame. You are not the most graceful creature in the animal kingdom. But there’s a job that needs to be done, and you’re the only one in this room who can do it. You’re…” Eva Mae trailed off, staring down at the floor and rubbing her eyes.

There was only one other sound that Eva Mae could hear in her cold red confines: the deep and distant zoom zoom zoom of a powerful engine. 

The entrance to Eva Mae’s red cell slid open with a jagged shhhhhunk. The doorway filled with a mass of slimy, writhing tentacles. Eva Mae scuttled back to the far corner of the room and wrapped her elbows around her knees, whimpering. A dark object came forward through the slippery tubes and fell limp onto the floor. The door slid closed. Eva Mae sat motionless, watching the shape of what appeared to be another human being breathing on the floor.

They stayed this way for a long time, and Eva Mae drifted off to sleep.

She was awoken by a new sound. Bang! She looked up. The new prisoner, a short man with a long beard, was staring intently at the wall.

The bug buzzed. With three more sharp bang!’s the man pounded his fist into it. He stepped back, satisfied.

“What did you do that for?”

The man grunted.

“That was its life,” said Eva Mae, looking at the smear on the wall where the insect had been.

The man prostrated himself on the ground and turned around so that his face pressed directly into the floor, facing away from Eva Mae. He cradled his head in his forearms and meshed his ten fingers together. He began to pray aloud in a scratchy baritone:

We are servants to your tongue,

your heart,

your mind.

Whenever madness grabs us in our soul

whenever heartache prods us where we already hurt

you will come to us.

You will whisper in our ears:

“All is Well.

For You Are Mine

and Around Every Corner

Where There is Pain

and Suffering

You Will Feel Them Deeply.

As Will You Happiness and Love.

This is My Gift to You.”

We remember always that lesson.

You give us happiness and love

suffering and pain.

All.

There is no badness that will go on forever

just as there is no goodness that will not end.

We are not and were not ever meant to keep anything for long

for you are the Lord of Change

and every shift we go about

we go about for you

in sight of you

our trials staying on occasion longer than we expect

our happinesses slipping from our grasp

our broken hearts healing in an instant

our joys spanning years and parting as old friends.

We change because you change us

and you change us because we change

and we change because we cannot stay the same.

This is the cycle that you have imagined.

You, changing us and we, unable to resist

changing you

by showing you how we can change

adapt

when you least expect us to survive.

When our worlds cave in around us

that is when you give us hope to stay alive,

and in turn our hope makes us fear that we will die.

Every thing is every color

and every color

has every thing inside it.

You remind us to tell each other stories.

The story of Appleface,

for example,

the doctor who wanted to walk so far north

that they could walk all the way past the topmost point

and wind up right back where they began.

So they began to walk

and walk

and they walked past all creatures

deer

rabbits

snakes

humankind

tusked mammoths

owls

termites

doggies

naked mole rats.

Appleface walked for many many months

past everything 

and ice

and rock

and snow

and just when Appleface reached the very top of the world

from which point they could see their own feet dangling from the clouds above

a polar bear roared from the cave behind them.

The bear attacked, 

and left Appleface lying in a bloodied heap

all by themself

on a mountain at the topmost point of planet Earth.

You tell us that their blood sank into the Earth,

and now Appleface feels every step we make in the snow

every evergreen tree we cut

every living being that we hurt.

They feel every tear we shed

every laugh we laugh

every tickle of pleasure running up our legs

They taste every taste we taste

hear each sound as it lands in each

and every ear.

They smell all our perfume and all our body’s odors.

Forever, and so they achieved their goal

of winding up right back where they began.

You remind us of Nastrofodo

who,

when the Imperial Guard came to her village carrying war torches

and spears

chose to drown her only child in the Wandering River

in the pink light of dawn

so that the child would not be captured and reconditioned,

forced to join an army tasked with performing such cruelties.

How, when she returned to the village

to die at the hands of the Imperial Guard

she learned that the soldiers had lain their weapons down

and offered fruit and honey to the people of the village

as reparations for their past crimes.

How Nastrofodo wandered aimlessly along the banks of the river

for the next three hundred years

while the fish and bacteria and fungus consumed

the body of the child she drowned.

You remind us of the day you gave us tongues to speak your words.

How our mouths once contained only teeth

with which we chewed but did not taste.

How we saw you standing on a nearby hill but

without words to describe your shimmering form

could not share with other people

who saw you in your other forms

walking through the desert

rising up from the snow

soaking into the soil with the rain.

We could not recognize that you were everywhere

in everything

because we could not speak it

and so we wandered, uselessly,

without purpose

living only to survive.

That day you blessed us with our tongues

that day that Fel and Fulp

sitting on the rocky beach

watched you ride on every crest 

of every wave

when Fel tried to say aloud:

“Look there!

that is our reason for life

that which makes us sing and makes us dance

that is the reason we bleed

that is what made this beach

churned these waters

and all beaches

and all waters

and all else

how lucky we are to see,”

but could not make the words for lack of tongue,

you heard his voice trapped in that throat

begging to come free.

You rose up from the sands

reached your hand into his mouth

and forth from stomach lining

forth from throat

you pulled a fleshy tongue and let him speak.

you did the same for Fulp

and you said

“Henceforth The Two of You Will Walk

To Every Place Where Bipeds Shelter Up

You’ll Do The Same For Them As I Have Done For You

and Once You Have You’ll Tell Them

Who and What You Met Here On This Beach.”

You walked into the ocean.

you sunk beneath the waves

and disappeared.

uh. um. uh.

you remind us that all beauty is yours

and all monstrosities are yours

and

Here, the man’s voice broke. Eva Mae shivered. The engine sputtered and creaked and resumed its constant hum.

How vain are we to call them evil,

the darkest sights that you see fit to show?

How vain are we to second-guess

the tender parts of us?

How vain are we to lament

the passing joys that come

and go

away?

How vain are we to fight at every turn

the roughest patches of our lives?

We speak your book aloud

because we wish to remember

that you are not just our happy thoughts.

You are all thoughts.

You make us compassionate

because you make us humble

because you make us hurt.

Here the man with his face pressed against the ground fell silent. Eva Mae waited.

“What’s your name?” She asked. “Do you want to talk about your religion?”

The man did not respond.

“I was raised as a Lutheran but I stopped going to church when my…” Eva Mae fell silent when the man drew in a sharp breath. Rising above the din of the humming engine, she heard the sloppy sound of tentacles sliding across the floor outside. The pair waited, tense. The slithering went quiet and disappeared.

#4: Description of the Antler Room

There is a room where the walls are covered, covered, in antlers. There are antlers of all kinds mounted to this wall including but not limited to deer antlers, moose antlers, caribou antlers, and pudú antlers. The antlers take all shapes, sizes, colors, kinds. All kinds, all kinds of antlers. Good antlers, great ones. They are mounted on the walls such that, at certain heights, a person standing at a specific location in the room could conceivably appear to be equipped with a set of antlers befitting their stature and character. For example, mounted at exactly six feet two inches from the floor and located six paces to the right of a large desk built out of old ship parts and Moroccan leather are an enormous set of antlers, huge, the biggest in the whole collection, antlers, that used to belong to a member of a long extinct species known as the Irish Elk. Totally dead now. Great beasts. Dead. A person with a height of exactly six feet two inches would look rather impressive standing in front of these antlers or rather foolish depending on your opinion of that person.

#5: Boston, Massachusetts

(Lights up on a living room in Quincy, Massachusetts. STEVE THE CRUSHER sits in an oversized burgundy armchair held together with various checkered patches. There are ten potted plants scattered about the room, all of them wilted and dry. PATRICK, a stocky white woman with reddish undertones, enters. Her hair is wet.)

PATRICK

hey, you fuckin’ moron!

don’t sit in my fuckin’ chair!

moron.

yo, babe?

we goin’ to the Sox game tomorrow or what?

hold on for a sec.

gonna make these plants grow with my fuckin’ mind.

(PATRICK closes her eyes and presses her forefingers to her temples. Healthy, vibrant greenery comes spilling out of all ten pots.)

PATRICK

so I was walking around in the Boston Common

and I saw

I swear to you, babe.

I saw this man

he was feeding bread to pigeons

STEVE THE CRUSHER

that’s not unusual

PATRICK

there must’a been twenty or thirty pigeons around him

four or five on his shoulders and arms

and

I saw this

shut up

I saw this

he very casually reached down

picked up a pigeon by the neck

twisted

stuffed it into a grocery bag

dropped the bread on the ground

and vanished into the Boylston T station.

#6: Lover Poem

lazy,

the leftover hour of afternoon

whispers a secret to me in your room.

the secret is yellow and smells like a leaf

has little to do with leggings

or sheets

or latex that’s lying in dazzling heaps

leaving your lovely extremity weak.

the last time i saw you

your letter released

a lone lonely secret that smelled like a leaf.

#7: Wolf Poem

my calves are kinda sore today

i left them in a field to play

and when a wolf came by their way

he ate one like a french soufflé.

#8: Isaac’s Party

The pink urns on Isaac Fukada’s white linoleum kitchen table sat like sunburnt penguins protecting their eggs. The urns would, in a few hours time, be filled with cookies. There were various sorts of cookies purportedly on the way, including but not limited to: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, peanut butter crunch, Tamaru’s Surprise, and gingersnap.

The evening’s party was programmed exactly two weeks before the scheduled end. It would be easiest this way, because Isaac would be able to tell everybody that he would see them again. In truth, he intended to spend the last two weeks alone.

He had dealt with travel, having visited a number of places in the last two years that he had always wanted to see. He had told the last of his deepest secrets. He had sat down for heart-to-hearts with anybody who wanted to, and even a few people who didn’t want to but who put up with it anyway because they cared about Isaac. He had dealt with all of the legal documentation. Now, with his arrangements made and no deadlines left to meet, he wanted to spend the next two weeks drinking coffee and staring at the trees in his backyard.

The dress that Isaac had chosen to wear to his party had a zipper down the back that he could not quite reach on his own. It was a close-textured, sheer, almost-black brown dress with mauve polka dots and a tight turtleneck. It cinched at the waist, giving his hairy torso the appearance of curves. His day nurse would be arriving for the party early to help him get dressed and, as she was a casual alcoholic with a fondness for dancing, she would stay for the party. Isaac was hoping that she and his nephew, the owner of a failing pet store, might hit it off. They both needed a little help, and Isaac believed in the redemptive powers of love.

There was little else that Isaac needed to do to prepare. His brother Leftie had already arrived and was at the moment rearranging all of the furniture to better allow for dancing and traffic concerns, and his brother Tamaru would be showing up soon with six dozen or so cookies to distribute among the five pink urns. The urns would then be placed strategically around the house.

Marina entered the front door without knocking at six o’clock pm. It was her custom not to knock, for she had a key and she liked to use it. Leftie looked up from the kitchen table which, despite being on the opposite side of the first floor, had a direct view of the front door by means of a very long hallway. She walked from the doorway into the hall, taking careful stock of the vast network of Christmas lights that had been tacked to the walls on either side of her. Leftie grunted.

“Not a knocker?”

“I have a key and I like to use it.” She stuck out her hand. “Marina.”

“Howdy. I’m Leftie. I’d shake but-“ Leftie showed off his hands, which were wet and glistening from the contents of the bowl that he was hunched over. “Birthday boy is in his room.”

“It’s not his birthday.”

Leftie shrugged. “It’s not anything else either.”

Upstairs, Isaac was putting on his makeup. He was naked except for a crisp white pair of boxer briefs. His legs were smooth and tight from decades of bike riding, muscles sliding along bone. His makeup was simple: foundation, mascara, eyeliner, an easy lip stain the color of the tide at dusk, and a little bit of orange color corrector to downplay his beard shadow. He drank a large gulp of seltzer through a straw. This would be his last opportunity to (moderately) overindulge, and he believed that a victorious battle against a hangover always starts before the drinking begins.

Marina appeared in the doorway. With a nod from Isaac, she moved into action, her hands powdering makeup, administering medicine, zipping zippers, messaging shoulders, brushing hairs, and suddenly Isaac found himself face to face with his face in the mirror.

“Ready?” Marina asked.

“Hell yes.”

And the party began.

The moons were in full that night, cutting a bright rift in the dark sky with their three yellow-orange facades. The littlest flickered faintly, nightly dust storms kicking up a fuss. Down below, illuminated in the moonlight, were all the boys.

There were many people of all different genders at Isaac’s party, but the boys were impossible to ignore. They were separate from the men not in age but in attitude; the boys were fun, they were flirty, and they wore their sensitivities as a badge of honor. There were white boys, black boys, brown boys, Asian boys, Latino boys, Middle Eastern boys, French boys, Haitian boys, all kinds of boys, librarian boys, gay boys, straight boys, bisexual boys, pansexual boys, zookeeper boys, baker boys, biker boys, lover boys, hiker boys, Jewish boys, tall boys, short boys, nonbinary boys, boys with hair, muscular boys, Lutheran boys, boys with their beautiful tummies hanging over their belt lines, Halloween boys, boys with teeth, boys without, one boy with sharpened canines, vegetarian boys, vegan boys, boys with cerebral palsy, omnivore boys, locally sourced boys, boys from the next town over, party boys, wallflower boys, trans boys, boys with cats, boys with hats, boys a-swinging their baseball bats, boys on boys, boys with toys, boys who made a lot of noise, boys who could hear and boys who were deaf, and even a couple with deep chin clefts, a boy named Frankie, a boy named Tyshon, boys who were there and boys who were gone, boys in dresses, boys in suits, boys in steel-toed combat boots.

Isaac’s nephew was a boy named Eido Fukada. Eido wore a fitted tuxedo with a bubblegum pink tie. His leg braces and forearm crutches were the same bubblegum color. He was smoking marijuana out of a vape pen and eating roasted chickpeas from a fanny pack lazily slung around his waist. He was experiencing an elevated heart rate, having just returned to the kitchen after tongue-kissing a bearded man near the a/c unit in the side yard.

Tamaru stood nearby, methodically eating cookies one-by-one out of an urn.

Eido rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets until his hand collided with the handle of a mug. He removed the mug from the cabinet. The face of the mug read FUND MALE BIRTH CONTROL! Eido poured himself a mugful of water from the kitchen sink. He considered the firm, dense tongue that he had just consumed, enjoyed, and returned. His penis tingled pleasantly.

Marina tugged at her septum ring. She was having a strong feeling of uneasy joy, as if something could go right at any moment. She was half-listening to a conversation about butternut squash between two people whose names she had almost tried to remember before deciding that the experience would be equally valuable without her knowing their names. She was nursing a lager and keeping no real track of her patient, who would presumably be fine. The worst that could happen would be that he would die, which was whatever, considering. All she had to do was have fun. Fun-having was a skill that she was attempting to sharpen.

The party was going about as well as she had hoped for. After all, there were all of these boys. Good ones, bad ones, sleepy ones. They were fun to look at. Was Isaac caught up in their amorphous clump, moving from boy to boy, asking them to bless his body with their hands? Was he seated somewhere, swapping stories with a wet-eyed family member? Was he riding a man in the basement sex dungeon? Was he outside, staring at the moons?

Marina could not see past two weeks from that night, as if the needle that she was going to press into Isaac’s right forearm would freeze the whole planet still on its axis. All of these boisterous boys would slip from her fingers into rivers, lakes, and oceans. One moon after the other would fail in their orbits and come barreling home to Earth, catching fire in the atmosphere and crashing down: one in the South Pacific, one in Normandy, and the littlest moon somewhere in Appalachia. What didn’t melt would burn, and all that remained would be carried off by the wind. What was once Earth would become a planet of ash and an ocean of boys.

In the garden out front there were six sunflowers. They were each about five feet tall, with deep orange petals and two or three heads apiece. A left hand with a birthmark the size of a stuffed olive sifted through the flowers, tickling their pistils and rubbing their petals between a thumb and a forefinger. A nose, attached to the fingers through a series of connective bones and tissues, brought itself down to the sunflowers and breathed deeply in. A billion particles of scent leapt from the flowers to the nose, carrying with them whole worlds with their own boys, their own moons, and their own snickerdoodle cookies.

It was just as a muscular boy with a face tattoo of a street map of Eureka, California began juggling three full bottles of pinot noir on top of the kitchen table that Eido and Marina locked eyes from across the expanses of the kitchen and living room. Marina had been watching the juggler intently, fruitlessly willing him to drop the wine bottles with the powers of her mind. Eido was staring at nothing and thinking about french toast. Their eyes met. Eido turned and walked towards the front door, and Marina followed. Though Marina could move faster, her only viable path required navigating around the juggler, who by that point had amassed a supportive crowd of spectators.

By the time the nurse was able to travel from the living room to the front hallway, the front door to the house was just closing. To get from one end of the hallway to the other was no real challenge; a few “excuse me”s and one or two gentle shoves and she was standing outside on the front porch, her ears suddenly full with the new pressure of relatively noiselessness. Eido was sitting in the bed of a dark red pickup truck parked in between two other vehicles in the driveway, watching her.

“What gives?” Marina asked from the porch.

Eido looked up. “Huh?”

“I said what-“

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

“What-“

“Huh?”

“-gives?”

“My ears are ringing, I honestly can’t hear you.”

Marina stepped down from the porch and marched over to the truck. She took one enormous step up and heaved herself into the truck bed. She placed herself next to Eido with about half a foot of space between them, their four legs dangling over the edge. The littlest moon twinkled.

“Why did you run from me?”

“Why did you follow me?”

“I don’t like it when people run from me,” Marina said.

“You’re gonna pull the trigger on Uncle Isaac,” Eido said.

“Yes. An injection, but yes.”

“Have you done it before?”

Marina stared down at her feet for a minute. She breathed in. “Yeah. It doesn’t exactly get easier, but most of them want to be friends with whoever puts them in the sailboat. I get to see people at their best.”

Eido nodded. He thought about how small a person could possibly shrink, and at what point all other particles would fade from view and the tiny human become the only force in their universe. He imagined that he was holding the needle himself, poised over his bedridden Uncle Isaac. He imagined that he was in a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean being abducted by aliens.

Several yards away, Leftie took another whiff of the sunflowers.

In the morning Marina awoke in the truck bed, her left leg nestled into the crook of Eido Fukada’s right leg, her skin cold against the metal brace. Her body vibrated at the memory of Eido’s fist inside her; the latex glove he’d used sat clumped near her right foot. She yawned. The sun was just beginning to rise.

The juggling boy woke up with an awesome hangover in a county jail, his night having gone downhill from the moment he left the Fukada residence and the police having been particularly hard on him because of his facial tattoo.

Eido Fukada woke up in the truck bed, Marina’s left leg nestled into the crook of his right. He heard her yawn. He craved caffeine and sex. The sun was just beginning to rise, and he could hear a robin chirping nearby.

Isaac Fukada woke up wrapped in a blanket on the sofa in his living room, his dress neatly folded on the coffee table alongside three bottles of pinot noir, one of which had been opened and nearly finished and the other two of which were still tightly sealed. Nearby, his brother Leftie slept on the floor in a pile of pillows and sheets. 

Isaac rose from the couch feeling, to his surprise, sprightly and refreshed. He took a quick tour of the ground floor of his house, which confirmed his assumption that there were several party guests who still remained in the building. As far as he could tell, all were asleep. He made his way to the kitchen, started the coffee pot and the tea kettle, and opened the refrigerator door. From the refrigerator, he took several salmon fillets, a carton of eggs, and a bowl of pancake batter he’d made the previous day.

He had successfully completed hosting his final party, and now he intended to host his final brunch.

#9: Kitchen Poem

the quiet humming of the fridge

the musings of a ceiling midge

the pepper shaker pops a squat

atop the granite marble top

and no one says that no one knows

who stole your neighbor’s garden hose

so in the basement keep it hid

beneath the bones of one dead kid

#10: Barista Poem

a lavender latte

a layer of foam

the line of a leaf

the lilt of her tone

she’s calling “drink up!” on the living room phone

she’s leaving the light in the lamp all alone.

#11: Statue of Liberty Poem

toss me a cigarette,

Lady Liberty.

#12: The Costume Party

Look around you.

Yep.

You’re at the costume party.

Over there is the Nosferatu who invited you standing next to the Black Panther you met on your way in.

It’s not that you’re worried that the chandelier above your head is going to fall and brain you dead, but you’ve been surprised before and by lighter fare.

Speaking of, the hors d’oeuvres you could have done without. Cream cheese and crab is not a combination you’ve ever understood. And fois gras? Fois gras is barbaric. In your opinion.

So this is the costume party. It must be New Year’s Eve.

The latex covering your entire face but for your eyes, nostrils, and mouth is beginning to itch. You’re not happy about the itch, but so far at least this costume party is going better for you than it is for the Mary Poppins who shat his pants forty or so minutes back. Though, actually, he got cleaned up and seems to be having a good time by now. So really you’re having the worst time out of anybody.

You’re not sure why you keep saying ‘yes’ to these gatherings. You hate crowds. You’re not even drinking tonight, since you have to drive home and you’re getting worse at stopping yourself after just one drink.

You’re planning to leave right after midnight, and you’re not going to say goodbye to anybody except for Nosferatu.

Maybe not even Nosferatu.

So that’s the plan. You’re going to avoid having any fun because that might result in a change of plans. And you cannot change your plans once you’ve made them. 

Still, if this chandelier were to crush you in the middle of this insufferable conversation with Frank from Donnie Darko and Frank from Frank, something exciting would have happened to you for once without requiring you to change any of your behaviors.

You receive a disturbing text message from your mother, which is less exciting than a falling chandelier. You turn off your phone so that you can, as you tell the Frank with the bunny ears, “live in the moment.” You cannot read his expression. You also cannot read the expression of the other Frank. They’re both wearing masks.

You may have to find another conversation.

You tell the Franks that you’re going to look for the bathroom which is, as all private bathrooms are, gender neutral. The truth is that you’re going to find another chandelier to stand under. This mansion has many chandeliers and, on a long enough timeline, every single one of them will fall. 

You ascend a marble staircase. You’re aware that you could really fuck this night up for Nosferatu, but you don’t intend to. You know that he’s watching you out of the corners of his eyes and that’s all the power you need.

Blackbeard the Pirate appears at the end of the hall once you reach the second floor landing. She walks quickly towards you.

“You,” she says, pointing to you. She’s taken off her beard and carries it in her tightly clenched left fist. “I’ve been looking all over.”

Nothing is ever simple for you, is it? You look to your left. You look to your right. Nope.

You’ll be having this conversation with Blackbeard. It’s not that you have any specific issue with Blackbeard, but she’s always made you a little uncomfortable, like you both weren’t saying something essential even though you barely know each other.

You find her strangely attractive. You’re afraid to say her name. Blackbeard. Your scalp is beginning to itch beneath the latex. You see all of the lights around you dim and then snap back into focus. Again, and again. You feel dizzy. Nosferatu’s costume party is not the place you want to faint, so you take a deep breath and you steady your gaze on Blackbeard the Pirate.

“Yarr,” she says. Goddamn it, you think.

“Hello, Blackbeard,” you reluct.

“When are we going to stop beating around this bush, landlubber?”

You do not respond. To respond would be to give Blackbeard the Pirate something to react to.

She points at you again. “You. Me. Tonight.”

You almost say yes. You’ve never been with a pirate before. Why are your nipples beginning to tingle? Your feet are baking in your knee-highs. Your knees themselves feel like paperweights. Why did you come to this party if you weren’t going to fully take on the experience? Did you really think that either a chandelier would not fall and you would go home after an hour, or that a chandelier would fall and you would never have to go home again, your brains relocated to a mason jar propped up on a mantle somewhere in this fancy place?

Why are you beginning to think about beating around a bush of a different kind?

You wish Blackbeard the Pirate would put her beard back on and walk back down the hallway.

“If ye want,” Blackbeard smiles.

You can see Nosferatu flitting around the atrium below. You wonder if Blackbeard is wearing a bralette. The thought is enough to make you wet or hard or something, and is it just your imagination or is the chandelier above your head beginning to sway?

You take a step forward. The chandelier creaks. Blackbeard the Pirate tosses her beard down the hallway and cocks her right hip up and back.

“Kiss me,” you hear yourself say.

The chandelier explodes and showers of glass rain down, each and every piece missing you and the pirate in your messy embrace, glass raining down onto the floor in a thirty foot radius with your collective four heels at the center, keeping you safe from the interruptions of Nosferatu’s New Year’s costume party.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

Underground in Vaults

Cast

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR…any pronouns.

KNIGHT…she/her/hers.

HUNGER DEMON…they/them/theirs.

SOLDIER and GENERAL…she/her/hers and he/him/his. played by one actor.

Curtain:

(A DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR sits in a recording studio.)

(A tree stump.)

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

a tree stump.

distant shouting.

a light snow.

the sound of heavy breathing, soft

at first

then louder,

as a knight stumbles through the woods

carrying a bloodied broadsword

out of breath.

(The KNIGHT enters.)

KNIGHT

woof.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

she sits upon the stump.

she takes a rag from the leather bag strapped to her waist.

she wipes the blade of her sword.

KNIGHT

little

flakes of guts.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

she looks around her, 

breathes.

she can see her breath in the cold air.

an observer might hear:

her heavy breathing

the sound of crinkling leaves

distant shouting.

the sound of crinkling leaves ceases,

and the knight’s shoulders tense.

she murmurs to herself:

KNIGHT

I will protect the light

I will kindle the light

I will be courageous in the face of adversity

I will fight only when the light is under threat

or when the Sisterhood is under threat.

(The HUNGER DEMON enters, gnawing on a human arm.)

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the hunger demon stalks the outskirts of the battlefield,

hungry.

for food.

KNIGHT

that’s a battle out there.

have some respect.

HUNGER DEMON

you said no living humans.

this was not a living human.

KNIGHT 

Sisters give me strength.

HUNGER DEMON

I could eat you right now.

KNIGHT

I’ll give you a finger.

if you promise to leave and never come back.

HUNGER DEMON

no you won’t.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the knight holds out her left hand.

KNIGHT

any but the first two.

HUNGER DEMON

you’re not so clever.

not so noble either.

KNIGHT

I just want you to leave.

HUNGER DEMON

I won’t.

I know what I am permitted

and what I am not.

consumption is not the same as murder.

and on that subject, may I say,

that you are one to fucking talk.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the knight wipes her blade again.

the hunger demon takes a bite from the arm.

HUNGER DEMON

running away?

KNIGHT

I grew faint.

HUNGER DEMON

convenient.

KNIGHT

I’m going right back.

HUNGER DEMON

certainly.

KNIGHT

shut your mouth.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the hunger demon takes another bite and spits.

HUNGER DEMON

bit of gristle.

KNIGHT

maladjusted rat.

HUNGER DEMON

I had a difficult youth.

do you think it’s easy to be a hunger demon?

do you hear that?

KNIGHT

hear what?

HUNGER DEMON

the shouting.

it has ceased.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the knight stands.

KNIGHT

it cannot be finished.

HUNGER DEMON

who was winning?

KNIGHT

we were.

HUNGER DEMON

perhaps you’ve won.

(A SOLDIER enters.)

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the sound of crinkling leaves returns,

and a soldier from the knight’s army sprints through the glade.

the knight grabs her.

KNIGHT

where are you going?

SOLDIER

we have to run

we have to

KNIGHT

why?

SOLDIER

I don’t know.

we were pushing towards the bridge

and suddenly there was smoke everywhere.

somebody shouted ‘dragon’, but

I did not see a dragon.

HUNGER DEMON

it was not a dragon.

I’d know if there was a dragon in these parts.

SOLDIER

foul beast!

HUNGER DEMON

do not tempt me.

KNIGHT

smoke?

SOLIDER

we began dropping like flies.

I could not breathe at all.

we need to run.

KNIGHT

there is no smoke here.

SOLDIER

it doesn’t matter.

they’ve won.

KNIGHT

we’re still here.

I am sure there are others.

SOLDIER

I will not stay.

there were needles in my lungs.

I saw my companion’s eyes melt out of his face.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the eyes,

sadly,

were the hunger demon’s favorite part.

KNIGHT

don’t stay then.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the soldier makes to leave.

KNIGHT

but don’t ever come back, either.

(The SOLIDER exits.)

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the soldier leaves.

the knight picks up her sword

and begins to head back towards the battlefield.

the hunger demon follows.

KNIGHT

no.

HUNGER DEMON

I have to see for myself.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

they cast aside the arm.

HUNGER DEMON

no eating.

(The KNIGHT and the HUNGER DEMON exit.)

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the hunger demon and the knight leave together.

wind.

a light snow.

the sun sinks low and spreads a pinkish glow across the sky.

a general from the opposing army enters

wearing a rudimentary gas mask,

which he removes.

GENERAL

oooooooha.

woah.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

he sits upon the stump.

he takes a rag from his pocket.

he wipes the blade of his sword.

GENERAL

always

little flakes of guts.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR 

an observer might hear:

his heavy breathing

the sound of crinkling leaves

the general murmuring to himself:

(The HUNKER DEMON enters, lurking in shadow.)

GENERAL

the right thing to do

we did

the right thing to do:

they dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima for the same reason:

to finish a war,

which is the most humane thing to do,

in the end,

no matter what the cost or repercussion.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the hunger demon lurks at the edge of the glade

eating a human brain

startling the general.

GENERAL

maladjusted rat!

HUNGER DEMON

how did you do that?

GENERAL

do what?

HUNGER DEMON

I have just seen the battlefield.

GENERAL

this is how battles go:

many die, and the aftermath is grisly.

HUNGER DEMON

not like that.

you did something to them.

GENERAL

I didn’t do anything.

HUNGER DEMON

you don’t have a dragon.

GENERAL

it’s not a dragon.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the hunger demon sighs with relief.

HUNGER DEMON

I didn’t think there were any warlocks left.

GENERAL

not a warlock either.

HUNGER DEMON

then what?

GENERAL

I don’t owe you an explanation.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the hunger demon takes a juicy bite of brain.

GENERAL

a powder.

I don’t know where they got it.

when it burns

the

the smoke curdles the organs.

is that brain from-

HUNGER DEMON

no, no.

GENERAL

because I wouldn’t eat from their corpses if I were you.

that powder is

HUNGER DEMON

this is a fresh one right here.

I made sure of it.

GENERAL

the Sisterhood would have your head.

HUNGER DEMON

all of you humans are the same.

“The Sisterhood” on every side,

and yet you slaughter each other and your Sisterhood does nothing.

GENERAL

I should not be speaking to you.

HUNGER DEMON

then leave.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the general does not move.

HUNGER DEMON

could it kill me?

GENERAL

what?

HUNGER DEMON

the powder.

you said not to eat…

could it kill me?

GENERAL

I do not know.

it melts the organs of human beings,

but you are no such thing.

HUNGER DEMON

I would like to die someday.

not today.

but I’d like to have the option.

GENERAL

you wouldn’t want to die like this.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the sound of crinkling leaves.

HUNGER DEMON

she’s coming back.

GENERAL

who?

HUNGER DEMON

she’ll want your head.

she’ll want you dead.

I will eat your pancreas when she’s through.

(The KNIGHT enters.)

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the knight enters the glade and draws her sword.

GENERAL

I don’t want to fight you.

KNIGHT

how did you do it?

GENERAL

a powder.

you burn it,

and the smoke curdles organs, melts the lungs and the brain and the heart and the eyes.

I will not fight you.

KNIGHT

pray, then.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the general gets to his knees.

he puts one hand to his forehead

one in the snow.

his lips fly

his tongue dances

his eyes flutter

he looks to the sky

he looks to the earth.

a moment, and:

GENERAL

Sisters have mercy.

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

the knight removes his head.

a moment, and:

she sits upon the stump.

she picks up the general’s rag and wipes the blade of her sword.

KNIGHT

little flakes of neck.

HUNGER DEMON

take me to the Temple of the Sisterhood.

KNIGHT

you do not want to go to the Temple of the Sisterhood.

they’ll

HUNGER DEMON

what?

KNIGHT

they would have your kind eradicated from the face of the

HUNGER DEMON

but what

actually

would they do?

they cannot kill me.

nobody can kill me.

nothing.

what would they do to me

for walking in their sacred place?

the same which they did to Klephmut the Blood Leech?

nobody has seen her for two hundred years.

the same which they did to Lovinnitha, Queen of the Deadly Fungal Infection?

I remember when they hunted her down and dragged her off.

how do they do it?

how do they kill us?

how? 

KNGIHT

I don’t know.

HUNGER DEMON

you do know.

you were present for the Trial of the Lavender Hills

when my very brother was sentenced to Final Punishment

for eating the wrong horse.

what would they do to me for crossing the sacred threshold of the temple?

KNIGHT

not killed.

they are locked underground.

in vaults.

HUNGER DEMON

are they fed?

KNIGHT

no.

HUNGER DEMON

you

utter

fools.

underground vaults! 

unbelievable.

Klephmut the Blood Leech,

unfed

for two hundred years, in an underground vault?

this whole planet will pay.

you think this battlefield is a horror?

do you know what Klephmut the Blood Leech is capable of when she is hungry?

vaults.

your Sisterhood is cruel and stupid.

KNIGHT

it is not my place to question the Sisterhood.

HUNGER DEMON

you ought to consider it.

KNIGHT

after what they’ve done to Klephmut the Blood Leech?

HUNGER DEMON

then bring me to them.

is that not what they would want?

bring me to them.

I will cross their precious threshold.

let them do to me as they will.

no longer will you have to ward me off from your kills.

let them put me in a vault.

let them dare.

KNIGHT

they will dare.

and you will waste away for centuries.

you are making a mistake.

HUNGER DEMON

you will take me?

KNIGHT

you will dress in a monk’s habit and you will speak to nobody.

you will follow my every command.

you will not consume human flesh

but animal, as I do.

you will not disparage the Sisterhood.

you will not besmirch the names of those who died here today

on either side.

you will not kill or steal. 

you will not lie to me.

you will stay within my sight.

you will do all of this

or I will leave you to your wandering

to your life of picking at the bones of the dead.

do you understand?

DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR

so began the undertaking we now refer to as:

The Opening of the Vaults

and what followed, 

the Civil War of the Sisterhood,

fought as it was by demigods and demons and humankind

a family of dragons and a cult of mysterious warlocks

with swords and spells and prisons and fires and floods, 

and a chemical weapon:

a powder

that melted the organs of humans

and

as this knight discovered when,

for the first time in all of recorded history,

she managed to kill one of the Sisterhood:

those of demigods, too.

this

is The Powder Which Rocked The World.

HUNGER DEMON

I understand completely.

Blackout.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

Bird-King Tower

A skyscraper looms over the lush verdant muggy rainforest canopy the din of insects the flapping of wings among the leaves and the skyscraper above, its many tall windows revealing floor after floor of empty office space and fluorescent light, casts its shadow on the treetops. In the penthouse lives the Bird-King. His head is a toucan’s head, his torso a human’s torso covered in inky black feathers, and his legs end in hooves. He sits at a mahogany desk. He stares at a television, the twenty-four-hour news cycle going and going and going, murders and presidents and economists and elections and climate change and bailing out corporate interests, bailing out the airlines, and the misdeeds of an online retailer in desperate need of trust busting and going and going. He has not moved from this spot for three hundred hours and twenty minutes and twenty one seconds and going and going and so forth, and suchly and so on it goes and he watches. He watches, it goes. Occasionally a commercial, the only commercial, about how “mommy can’t play with me because she has bipolar depression” sells a drug to him (the consumer), a toucan-headed birdman satyr at the top of a skyscraper inside of his rainforest kingdom, his living stockpile of organic food, going and going and journalism, and following the trail of money, and the Bird-King can’t remember who really controls the media. It might be him.

He raises his head from his papers and blinks his bird-eyes. He has a lime-green bill three times the size of the rest of his face, and his eyes are positioned just behind it, small and hard like marbles. There is a scream that echoes up from the elevator shaft, the door to which is always open. There is no elevator car anywhere in the building, except for the smashed-up one in the all-gender restroom on the third floor.

He knows whose screams he hears: another of the Forest Spirits was ensnared in one of his ground-traps, and the creature is now chained to the wall in the torture chamber. The Bird-King hopes that his torturers will remember not to kill this one. He would like to know from where the Forest Spirits have attained their powers, because he certainly did not grant them.

He stands and walks to the penthouse windows. Below, the canopy looks like an expanse of rolling green hills. His bill hangs slightly ajar. Behind him, he can hear the news anchor talking to a pundit:

“yes, but if the stock markets fail the corporations will not stay afloat, which means that their workers will not have jobs-” 

“what I’m talking about is an actual restructuring of the economy, so that workers will not have to depend on businesses that cannot keep afloat to stay afloat themselves…you’re asking Americans to have six months of rent saved up in the case of a crisis, but what about the airlines? The airlines can’t make a profit off of any flight that isn’t fully booked. That’s not good business, and that’s why we keep having to bail them out and bail them out and bail them out and bail them out and you catch my drift, yeah? Because…”

The Bird-King is no longer listening. Seven days pass as he gazes out the window. The television’s whine fades as his ears attune to the natural sounds of the canopy. The sky goes pink, purple, black, pink, blue. Four birds crash into the glass and tumble freely earthward, one after the other. Four little blood splatters remain on the surface. The moon comes and the moon goes away. The Bird-King hums a tuneless song for seven hours straight.

The first lobby of the skyscraper catches fire. Four hundred miles north, two of the human nations go to war over a mountain range recently discovered to contain enormous deposits of some resource or another.

A Messenger arrives. Across her shoulder is a bag, inside of which is a flat rectangular parcel sealed at the top with a warlock’s saliva. On the lower half of her face is a mask fashioned from a dark green handkerchief, which she has attached to her ears using rubber bands. She opens the door and smoke billows out into the sculpture garden at the base of the tower. The only sculptures in the garden are porcelain roosters of various colors and sizes. She enters the building.

The lobby is in flames. The Messenger hums and floats into the air. She glides through the reception area. The smoke makes it difficult for her to breathe, but the fire flickers safely below her feet. She inspects the empty elevator shaft. She scratches her beard beneath the kerchief and drifts towards the center of the lobby again.

She hears a wretched scream echoing from the elevator shaft. She flicks her wrist, and a gladiator’s spear tears through the empty space in her open palm. She wraps her fingers around the wood and feels the weapon’s weight. She whispers a command to the handle and drops the spear. When the spear hits the ground, it grows fur and transforms into a mouse. The mouse scurries off, dodging burning leather sofas and bizarrely low coffee tables. 

The Messenger floats over to the spiral staircase in the center of the lobby and sets her feet on its first step. The fire seems to steer entirely clear of the staircase, a circle of untouched lobby around the landing with a foot-or-so radius. The Messenger ascends.

Just beyond the fourth floor’s landing, a trio of steps peel themselves back to reveal a gaping mouth layered with sharp yellow teeth. As the Messenger rises, the jaws prepare- and when she approaches them, they lunge and snap in her direction. She folds herself once, twice, a dozen times in a single instant until she is impossibly small, and the jaws snap shut around the spot where her full body hovered a moment before.

The Messenger unfolds herself several steps further up and runs.

The Bird-King sleeps for the first time in decades. His quilt hangs from his bed, stretching endlessly into the pitch-black silent chasm of his sleeping chamber, where his bed is stationed on an isolated cliff connected only to the rest of his apartment by a long, narrow rope bridge. He dreams of Clipperiastime, the diseased star whose sickness rendered so many worlds unlivable. He dreams of exodus, of radiation poisoning, of one thousand years of war and two thousand more of imprisonment on a desolate planet cursed by a vengeful sorcerer. He dreams of Chicago. He dreams of a lover, an 18th century French aristocrat who tenderly touches him who rides him with desperate fury who leaves him alone in his bed and takes with her each time another piece of his body: an eye, an ear, a wing, his beak, until he can no longer see until he can no longer hear until he can no longer fly and when he cannot move in response to her caresses she leaves him and never returns. 

The Forest Spirit steps into the labyrinthine corridors of the tower’s thirty-third floor. They relax their tentacles and drop the two strangled dog-beasts who acted as their torturers for many weeks. A little chirp bounces from the back of their throat into the network of hallways and returns several minutes later. They follow the sound path.

The Bird-King wakes, thrashing in confusion. He has forgotten what it means to sleep, and the return to consciousness feels like a sudden drop. He feels afraid- his heart pounds and his stomach quivers.

The mouse scurries through a ventilator duct above the Forest Spirit.

All movement inside the skyscraper slows to a near stop: each little atomic particle of the Bird-King, of the Messenger, of the mouse, of the Forest Spirit trembles in one direction or another. Shafts of light cut across the floors of the skyscraper and out through the leafy branches of the forest. Monkeys and honeyeaters sing. Time passes. No time passes at all. When the world inside the skyscraper catches back up to the world outside the skyscraper, one hundred years have gone by; the Messenger has ascended only a step, the Forest Spirit turned only one corner, the Bird-King only just begun to rise from his mattress.

The Messenger’s resolve falters as she ascends. With every tap of the leather pouch against her hip she remembers another of her failures: her family’s farm that she mismanaged into bankruptcy, tap, the three month period where she was too depressed to get out of bed, tap, her unsuccessful attempt to open her veins in the public single occupancy toilet in Harvard Square, tap, the arrangement she made with a demigod to move from her original universe to this one, tap, the night she’d tried to go back and lost her hand in the process, tap tap tap. Her short arm itches beneath its chainmail semigauntlet. Somewhere between the fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth floors, the Messenger begins to sing:

I am the one true

lonely soul

I drift around this

spinning globe

I go where no one

dares to go

because I know

the planet spins 

on goes the show

the planet turns in outer space

my life could take me any place

but history I can’t erase

I am the one true

drifting wood

I’m nothing bad

I’m nothing good.

The Bird-King hears this song and walks across his rope bridge over his chasm, through his sleek chromium kitchen, through his foyer with his many antique suits of armor, and leans against the bannister at the top of the stairs. 

The Messenger sees him standing there from a dozen steps below, and stops.

“I come bearing a message,” the Messenger says.

The Bird-King nods and reaches out his hand. The Messenger bounds up the stairs, retrieves the envelope from her pouch, coughs on it, and places it in his hand. He opens it with a long, sharp talon and reads:

This Messenger is host to a deadly pathogen, and now you have it too. The Bird-King looks up. The paper trembles in his hands. 

The Messenger makes finger guns at the Bird-King: “Cha-ching, bitch,” she says.

The Bird-King screeches at such a frequency that every window in the skyscraper squeezes and shatters. The Forest Spirit is just crossing the threshold of the lobby’s main entrance when the glass doors shower down, coating their shoulders in dust and shards of glass. They continue to walk. The soles of their feet suffer no harm as little bits of the ruined door crunch into the dirt below. The soles of their feet are made of intertwined tree roots, gnarled and stiff. The porcelain roosters glare.

The pieces of glass look much larger to the mouse.

The rainforest goes two-dimensional, as in a pop-out children’s book, and the trees smash in on each other, leaving only the skyscraper erect where there had been a full canopy a moment before. Grass and wheat sprout up, and the land warps to form undulating green hills. A herd of deer gallops past the skyscraper. Crickets creak and a crow calls out. Dandelions sprout fuzzy white heads.

“Would you like to see my inter-dimensional library?” The Bird-King asks on the staircase. The Messenger agrees, and they spend weeks among the books, reading at times silently in opposite corners and at other times together, out loud, performing the characters in the books with dramatic voices and theatrical flair. As the days pass, the Bird-King develops a sore throat, a dry cough, a fever, and the occasional bout of diarrhea. The Messenger remains perfectly healthy.

“Why isn’t it affecting you like it is affecting me?” The Bird King asks.

“The warlocks tell me I’m going to be asymptomatic right up until the instant it kills me,” the Messenger answers.

The Forest Spirit stands on the crest of a hill in the fields. Quiet tears roll down their cheeks. The wild grasses tremble in the breeze. One single tree stands at the edge of the pasture just in front of a cobblestone fence. Beyond the tree is a massive wall of green hedges. The Forest Spirit misses the shelter of the rainforest. They miss swinging in the trees. They consider returning to the skyscraper to plead with the Bird-King to bring the trees all back; the thought of returning to the place where they’d been so hurt fills them with such dread that they jettison the thought. They walk towards the single tree, and with every step they take a patch of flowers sprouts in their wake: bluebells and buttercups and yarrow. Bees and butterflies flutter about among the new flowers, each eventually settling along the line of plants to pollinate. Two of the Forest Spirit’s eight tentacles wrap around each other to form a solid rod which they use as a walking stick; this, too, bursts with new life: the tentacles grow a dark green ivy that spreads all over the Forest Spirit’s body until they take on the appearance of a weeping willow in summertime. 

A melody played on an oboe fills the scene. The sound comes from nowhere in particular, and in another moment it is joined in harmony by the notes of a Moog synthesizer. The harmony of the two instruments evokes a sort of neo-pastoral optimism, as if the Forest Spirit really might have the power to revitalize the rainforest, to bring back the trees and the running rivers and the mosquitos, but not alone: not without stewards and protectors and collaborators and scientists and a shifting of paradigms, a shifting from torture and exploitation and ecofascist sentiment to a new way, or an old way wearing new clothes- this is the song which the oboe and the Moog play together to the open field where the Forest Sprit walks with slow determination towards a single tree beyond which lays a cobblestone fence and a wall of hedges.

The Forest Spirit desires to see what lies beyond the wall of hedges. They reach the tree, a sturdy oak with dozens of initials and lopsided hearts carved into its bark. They stand for a moment in the shade. They continue walking towards the fence, which is high enough to reach their waist. They hurl a leg over, straddle the flat stone, and pull their body across to the other side. They turn around to see the field they’ve just crossed, and spot a flock of soft pink flamingoes standing one-legged among the wildflowers.

The hedges are thick and solid, perfectly rectangular and flush in such a way as to render them impenetrable. The Forest Spirit reaches out a tentacle, aiming to imbue one of the hedges with floral life. Nothing happens. They frown. They walk alongside the row, certain that there must be an access point somewhere. 

The mouse is rather happy to see that the rainforest has become a simple countryside.

The Forest Spirit finds a bronze gate after a twenty minute walk along the hedges. It is taller than the shrubs, and its posts culminate in sharp points at the top. An intricate pattern of bronze triangles connects the posts, which gives the gate the appearance of a snowflake. The Forest Spirit wraps three of their tentacles against the right side of the gate and leans forward. A shrill, sustained sound squeaks from the gate’s hinges, and the door slowly gives way. As they step inside, they notice that the grass beneath their feet is as unkempt as the grass outside: it comes up in spurts of vegetation that sometimes reach as high as the Forest Spirit’s thigh.

The gate closes of its own accord. The Forest Spirit stands engulfed in green, surrounded on all sides by hedge. A massive inlaid stone circle peeks out from beneath the vegetation at the center of the entryway, which seems to the Forest Spirit like a sort of annex: three separate paths radiate from the stone circle and branch off into the hedges. They walk until they are standing on the hard stone- on its surface is etched one word in a flowery script that the Forest Spirit does not recognize. They consider the three paths before them, and the gate behind. The hedges bow inwards towards them as if they are the sun and the hedges are hedges accelerated in time. They try to chirp their sonic chirp. Nothing comes out of their throat. They walk forward into the middle path.

The Messenger tends to the Bird-King in his cavernous bedchamber. She is pleased to see that he is dying, because although his reign over this dimension did not create the destruction and the disease and the disorder that eats at the fabrics which keep the layers of reality distinct, it certainly took advantage of the decay. She feels it necessary to watch and ensure that his life-force drains from his body. She sees, however, no reason to do so with cruelty, so she brings the Bird-King tea and crackers and tells him stories of her days on her former plane of existence, where the laws of physics were simpler but the people equally complicated. The Bird-King vomits off the side of his bed into the void. Bits of his beak flake off and flutter into the open pit as he hunches over, bedsheets wrapped around his legs. His colorful body is dwarfed by the stark white cloth.

The Messenger spends most of her free time in the library, a corner of which is devoted to endless shelves of books containing every tweet ever tweeted. Here she searches for the answers to life’s greatest mysteries, questions like “what is goodness?” and “why did that comedian say that hurtful thing?” and “how does inter-dimensional border-crossing work?” She becomes very anxious reading the tweets but learns nothing that she didn’t already know. She takes all of the library books off the shelves and drops them one-by-one from the penthouse windows. 

By the time the Bird-King perishes, the tower of books reaches just below the penthouse window, the long one which looks out at the countryside from the bauhaus-inspired living room. The library is empty of books. The Messenger lifts the Bird-King’s corpse from the bed. His beak has disintegrated entirely, and as she lifts him a smattering of pallid feathers break off and flutter into the chasm. She carries him across the rope bridge into the living room to the window and heaves him out onto the book pile.

She pilfers several gallons worth of gasoline from the Bird-King’s penthouse garage and dumps them out onto the pile of books. She strikes a match and drops it out the window. The body and the stack of literature and knowledge and tweets and vinyls alight. The flames form a ring which descends as the fire grows downward. The Messenger watches until, with the flames about a third of the way down the stack, the tower of books collapses. She pulls her chainmail back into place. She drinks a glass of water, eats a fistful of deli meat from the smart fridge, unzips her fly and pisses on the marble floors of the Bird-King’s kitchen, and walks to the grand staircase to make her descent back down the skyscraper. She considers floating down the elevator shaft, but she is afraid of both tight spaces and heights, and she does not have the energy to float for that long, anyway. Floating exhausts her more than running, so she runs down, and down, and down through the building as the Forest Spirit goes forward and forward and forward through the hedges.

The hedges are arranged as a labyrinthine maze, with forks and dead-ends and circuitous paths and a disorienting degree of sameness. The Forest Spirit gets lost. They spend several hours choosing paths and trying to build a mental map of the maze, getting hungry and dazed as they go. They try several times to chirp and echolocate to no avail. When finally one of the paths opens up into a large circular space with an inlaid stone in the ground and a bronze gate looming over them, they fall to their knees and weep. They try to leave out the gate: it will not budge. They turn their attention to the hedges and try to shrivel or reshape them with forest magic. Nothing happens, just as nothing will grow beneath their feet. They curl up in the grass beside the gate and sleep for two hours. They dream of happy squirrels. They wake and eat several fistfuls of grass and weeds, which gives them a small degree of sustenance but does nothing to soothe their growing hunger. They return to the maze and choose the path on the left. 

As they re-enter the labyrinth, the Forest Spirit decides to mark their path. They pull up a circle of grass, but the grass grows back within seconds. They tear a chunk off of a hedge, but this, too, reassembles itself in a flurry of stitches. They lay one of their tentacles on the ground, step on it with their fully weight, and hurl themself backwards. The tentacle rips free from their body. Vibrant green blood gushes from the socket, which they plug with the end of one of their working limbs. They use their fangs to shred the severed tentacle into twenty pieces. At the next fork, they set one chunk on the path they intend to follow. They watch it for several minutes, and once they are confident that it will not disappear, they continue onwards. Their injury pulses and throbs. Their stomach growls. The sky grows cloudy, and in an instant a rainstorm barrels down upon the hedge maze.

The Messenger sees the rainstorm as she travels through the countryside. To her, the storm appears to form a perfect swirling circle in the sky, its precipitation contained within the boundaries of a field of hedges. Where she stands, atop a hill between the maze and the tower (the tower is a skyscraper no longer, having shrunk and turned to brick and the penthouse rearranged into a turret and the entry doors gone tall and wooden the moment the Messenger set foot out into the world) the day is clear and sunny, and the fields go on, pleasant in every direction save for the localized squall. She sees a crack of lightning pierce the sky above the hedges.

The Messenger spots a farmhouse and a barn off in the distance, with a herd of livestock in the pasture and rolled bales of hay and an irrigated plot of what she is fairly certain are carrots. She sets off down the hill toward the farm.

Something deep within the labyrinth roars. 

The Messenger turns, considers the dark hedges once more, and continues towards the farm.

The Forest Spirit turns, rattled by the sound, and considers the fork ahead of them. They are badly hurt: their tentacle wound is not healing as it ought to, and their right foot is charred and flaking from the lightning strike. Their ears rings. They are ravenous. They are slipping in the mud.

They decide to pursue the roar by following the path that heads roughly in the same direction. They drop a piece of tentacle as they go. A little bubble pops where it sinks into the mud.

The Messenger watches a rabbit bound across the field.

The Forest Spirit again becomes lost. Each path looks the same and each fork looks the same and each dead end looks the same as all the others and the bits of tentacle are gone. They fall to their knees in the muck and let their eyes close, the rain splashing all around them. When they open their eyes again, a single black rose grows up from the earth. They lean in and inhale, and as the musty scent fills their nostrils the corridor of hedges sprouts a colony of black roses, all bending towards the Forest Spirit. The roar comes again- closer now, as if it is coming from a spot just around the corner. 

The Forest Spirit stands and runs towards the sound. While they run, they channel their energy to grow two whips made of thorny rose stems around the tips of two of their tentacles. The corridor veers left, and the Forest Sprit reaches the center of the labyrinth where a Minotaur sits atop a thirty-foot pile of bones and smokes a cigarette.

The Minotaur’s fur is white. She has six pink udders, three on each side of her torso. Her hands are human hands, covered in fur except for a patch of pale, exposed skin on each palm. Her legs end in hooves. She has a long gray tail, two short sharp shimmering horns atop her skull, and eyes as smooth and absent of color as a cue ball. The Minotaur takes another drag from her cigarette. The pile boasts bones from a variety of species- some the Forest Spirit recognizes, like human and capybara, and others foreign. The rain falls all around but never seems to touch the Minotaur. She stares unblinking at the Forest Spirit from her perch.

The Minotaur flicks her cigarette into the pile. She claps her hands together and a flash of lightning strikes the ground inches from the Forest Spirit’s uninjured foot. They jump out of the way with a yelp.

“There is some confusion in the English language over whether ‘labyrinth’ is synonymous with ‘maze’,” the Minotaur drawls. “In classical tradition, the labyrinth is generally depicted as a unicursal structure-”

The Forest Spirit lashes one of their whips up towards the Minotaur. She catches it neatly in her fist and yanks, sending the Forest Spirit sprawling forward into the bones. Facedown, the Forest Spirit hears the Minotaur crunching her way through the field of hard tissue. They roll onto their back, grab several longer bones with their tentacles, and heave themself upward onto their feet. 

The hedge maze is gone. The countryside is gone. The very earth is gone, replaced with, as far as the horizon stretches, fields and fields and piles and mounds of damp-smelling bones. The sky is a swirling mass of dark clouds. The Forest Spirit whimpers. They hear a snapping sound behind them, and they whirl around to see the Minotaur only several feet away, an axe in each of her hands. They tighten their tentacles around their scavenged bones and their remaining whip. One tentacle still plugs their open wound.

The Minotaur lunges. The Forest Spirit counters left and swipes a tentacle holding a femur towards the Minotaur’s torso; she blocks it with an axe, binds it upward, and slashes with the other axe at the extended tentacle. The Forest Spirit pulls their tentacle back, but their momentum follows and the Minotaur rushes forward and swings both axes in towards their stomach. They hunker down into their knees and parry the axes with a bone on each side. They flick a tentacle, and the whip catches the Minotaur across her snout. She snarls as a line of blood reddens her white fur.

The Forest Spirit ducks and pulls away. They slide on the slick bones, wet from the ever-pouring rain, and half-stumble half-run down the pile, landing off-balance on their feet a quarter of the way from the bottom, which forms a valley between this mound and the next.

The Minotaur descends slowly towards the Forest Spirit and speaks: “But the labyrinth was built to keep the Minotaur in captivity and so it could not have been a single path: it must have been a maze. And the Minotaur often asked herself: why did they create me only to lock me in a cage? And she asked herself, too: why weren’t they capable of building a better cage?”

The Forest Spirit steadies their feet and readies their weapons. They breathe, and a line of black roses sprouts up through the bones between them and the Minotaur. The Minotaur crushes the roses beneath her hooves as she walks. 

“Did you ever meet the Bird-King?” The Forest Spirit asks.

The Minotaur does not reply. When she gets close enough, the Forest Spirit hurls a bone at her head. She moves to dodge it; they flick their whip out again. The Minotaur crouches. The bone whirrs past her. The whip goes sailing over her head, and she steps forward and severs it in twain with an axe. The Forest Spirit pulls what is left of the whip back, closes some distance to the Minotaur, and sends the whip back out again. This time she deflects it with the flat of her axe blade and traps it beneath her foot, forcing the Forest Spirit to abandon the weapon. Both charge, assaulting each other in a flurry of bones and axes, parries and strikes and binds and feints and slashes. The Minotaur gains an edge and pushes the Forest Spirit back down towards the valley with every swing of her axe. 

Towards the bottom of the mound, the Forest Spirit blocks an overhead strike and drives a bone into the Minotaur’s ribcage. The Minotaur groans and drops to one knee. The Forest Spirit pummels her several times over the head. With blood trickling down her face, the Minotaur sweeps one of her axes upwards and catches the Forest Spirit in the chest. She pulls herself to her feet and pushes the blade deeper in. The Forest Spirit drops their bone-clubs. 

The Minotaur pivots and slams the Forest Spirit’s body into the ground. She drops her second axe and drives the first deeper into their chest. The Forest Spirit tries in vain to choke the Minotaur. Their tentacles slap ineffectually at her face. Their feet kick at wet bones. Their body thrashes. Black spots cover their field of vision, and something furry nuzzles into one of their tentacles. Reflexively, they wrap their tentacle around it and turn their head to look.

No sooner does the Forest Spirit recognize the creature in their suction cups as a mouse than it morphs in a flash of hot light; they scramble to keep hold of it as it grows heavy and long and plunges through the Minotaur’s heart and back out the other side of her body. She collapses sideways and the Forest Spirit loses their grip as the Minotaur’s body, pierced through with a long spear, tumbles the rest of the way down the pile of bones and comes to settle in the valley. The spear changes back into a mouse, which scurries off.

The Forest Spirit stands and pulls the axe from their chest. The field of bones disintegrates, eaten up by insects and fungi, and grass grows through the decaying matter and flowers bloom and birds flap through the sky and the countryside returns. The Forest Spirit stands on a hill of dirt at the center of the hedge maze. They wave a tentacle, and their wounds knit themselves back together in a latticework of plant material. At the bottom of the hill lies the body of a dead cow. The Forest Spirit walks down to it, their stomach rumbling, to whisper a prayer and dig a grave.

The Messenger knocks on the farmhouse door. Nobody answers, so she walks over to the barn and eases the door open. There are no people or livestock inside, but the smell of farm life is pervasive and there are animal stalls and mountains of hay and the sunlight comes in golden through the slats in the wood. The Messenger sinks into a cushion of hay. She pulls the green handkerchief off of her face, folds it neatly, and slides it into her bag. Her forehead goes hot and feverish. Her beard itches. She wonders how things are going in her home dimension. She closes her eyes, draws in a shaky breath, and dies on the exhale.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

Poppy on the Mountain

There was snow even though Poppy’s handheld radio said there wouldn’t be. My phone had no reception on the mountain and there was no Wi-Fi and I hated the basement with its cold porcelain tiles where the 2005 Dell lived with its whirring slab of hardware right in between the washing machine and the stationary bike, so I sat down in the kitchen, exposed beams twenty feet overhead, and opened the copy of the Boston Globe with which Poppy had just returned from the general store. I sipped at a cup of Poppy and Grandma’s coffee, which they made from a mixture of dark beans and light beans for reasons I have never understood. In the fridge were three cartons of 1% milk. You could take your toast with butter or Promise margarine. 

“I can’t believe you eat that stuff,” I said to Poppy, a piece of bread thick with margarine halfway to his mouth. He did not look up from the business section, but his features rippled with tension. I imagined that he’d made that same face when he read my letter, his silver-stubbled cheeks and his laugh lines going taut as he tried to make sense of what I meant by “pronouns”, of how a single person could be referred to as “they”, of where I had gotten lost in a paradigm so simple as gender. In fear of how he’d treat me in the aftermath of the letter I’d packed my bag only from the more traditionally masculine stock in my closet, a pair of jeans and a couple of sweaters, though I had come with my fingernails painted in a minty green and there was no hiding the length of my hair. Poppy either did not notice the nails or chose to ignore them entirely. I had not shaved for several days, and hadn't brought a razor with me, and my facial hair was already turning my face rugged and my thoughts towards self-loathing.

I had no plans for those two days, knowing that Grandma would come up with a couple of activities for the two of us to do together, and I would take myself on a hike around the mountain one day or the other, and with the rest of my time I could lay around and read a book in their bright renovated farmhouse that always smelled like wood. I would not ski, even though the resorts were open and I usually went at least once during a visit if I could. The thought of riding a chairlift with Poppy was giving me vertigo. I could smell his aftershave from across the table.

Poppy gestured towards the style section of the newspaper, which lay in front of me on the table, and held out his hand. “Could you pass me that, kind sir?”

I handed him the paper.

It was this house in the crystal evergreen winter, it was the house on Cape Cod that Poppy’s father had built with a team of carpenters in the 1950s by the greasy seafood diner that baked bread loaves the size and shape of a human head in the muggy New England summers. Behind the Cape house (the “cottage”, Grandma called it, which she drove to for two weeks every spring to “open” and for two weeks every fall to “close”, besides her trips in the summer with Poppy to join us after the long drive from Maryland or alone to host her six friends from nursing school: “the ladies”) was a narrow public beach where you could stand and watch the train bridge creep down and up across the bay. Once every trip on a hot summer day my dad’s friend from college visited the cottage with his wife and their kids, always the same chaos, the same weird injuries, my little brother in the hospital because one of the kids dropped a horseshoe crab on his foot and it came out the other end like a bloodied alien finger, my mom too tipsy to drive because she had half of one cocktail, my dad too tipsy to drive because he’d had nine cans of beer, my mom ending up behind the wheel with my dad in the passenger seat, the friend’s wife taking care of me on the couch because I’d fainted on the beach, my little brother in the hospital again another summer because another one of the kids cracked him in the forehead with a baseball bat.

Another summer, and the friends came again. Their curly haired toddler was old enough to fixate on me by then, chasing me around the cottage; I recently rediscovered this person on Instagram and saw from their bio that they were using gender-neutral pronouns: a kindred spirit, someone who recognized a thread between us in their toddlerhood wisdom.

There was a July fourth in the cottage, years earlier, before my little brother could even speak, where I’d crept down the creaking basement stairs, an exposed lightbulb covered in spider webbing and casting a warm yellow mist all around me, to locate the source of the shouting I’d heard from my bedroom. It’s the only time I can remember seeing my older brother cry, bent over in the basement garage, Poppy wailing away at his buttocks with his open hand after an unsuccessful trip to the beach to watch the fireworks. The noises, it seemed, had been too loud for my brother, who as an adult continues to be extremely sensitive to sound and who also owns two handguns.

It was at my nuclear family’s home in Maryland beneath the dogwood tree in the front yard, its flurry of white petals always fooling my brain for a moment into thinking it was snowing, that I stomped on a hornet’s nest in the mulch and collapsed in the grass as I was stung twenty-five times, and it was in the clawfoot tub that Grandma soaked my wounded body in warm and soapy water. It was in the same front yard ten years later where I vomited, hammered on cheap vodka and inexperience, and the same bathroom where Grandma caught me blacked-out on the floor bleeding from my right elbow, having managed to tear the metal toilet paper rod out of the wall when I fell.

There was an old song Poppy would sing as he puttered around any of these various homes. When I was in a production of Guys & Dolls in high school, I was shocked to walk into a rehearsal to hear the chorus girls singing it:

I love you

a bushel and a peck

a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck

a hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap

a barrel and a heap and I’m talking in my sleep

about you!

I was startled by a knock on the front door; I had not known about the hunters before that trip. They would drop by in their flannel shirts, always sweating and a bit unsteady, to let Grandma and Poppy know as a courtesy that they’d be out there in the woods with their equipment. Poppy would talk to them briefly about philosophical concepts like the circle of life and thinning the herd. Poppy was not a hunter, was never a hunter (and in fact I once watched him turn and walk away from a parade on a trip to Italy because a horse broke their leg and officials arrived to kill the animal) and he did not own a gun or even consume red meat.

I planted myself half in view. I wanted to watch the visitor, constantly shifting his weight not side to side but front to back as if he were about to dive from a great height, with an expression that said he knew he could only win bronze at best. Poppy made no attempt to introduce me, but the man acknowledged me with a quick wave. To express my displeasure, I crossed the foyer without returning the gesture until we could barely see each other behind the heavy wooden front door. I could see the man’s white pickup truck parked where the road stopped in a massive bank of mud-speckled snow. Beyond this mound the road technically continued, but the next house was miles off on another face of the mountain and accessible by a much more serviceable road, so the town plowed TR-88 only as far as my grandparents’ house. The white pickup’s passenger-side mirror was smashed and dangling loose from a cable.

The man on the doorstep rubbed his right eyeball. Poppy would never have let him in the house; Grandma told me later in the car that she would have preferred that the land was posted, but Poppy would not hear it for a political reason they apparently had not discussed in detail. Poppy shook the man’s hand. This apparently was not taken as a cue that the conversation was over; rather, it seemed to invigorate our newest friend, who spoke next about a bridge over in nearby Bellow’s Falls which neither the residents on the Vermont or New Hampshire side of the river wanted to claim as their own.

Poppy happened to be well-versed on the subject, and cheerfully corrected the man’s details: “Not at all! You’re thinking of the two hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money that the council spent just to measure the darn thing,” and so on. The man left shortly thereafter, hiccuping. I watched him return to his truck from the kitchen window; he took a rifle from the backseat, pulled on a backpack, and set out into the woods.

Grandma did have a plan for us that day; we toured the nearby village’s Makers Day, where fifty or so artists and craftsfolk would open their homes and studio spaces to visitors for tours, demonstrations, sales. We bundled up, Grandma in a black turtleneck and a vermillion jacket made from that awful plasticky stuff reserved only for deep winter apparel and myself in a thick black peacoat and fluffy pink scarf (“sherpa”, I think the style is called, which smacks of colonialism to me), and stepped outside into the crisp mountain air.  The snow drifted towards the Earth, consistent but unintrusive, cold and soft and friendly. We climbed the hill to the short red barn: I knew from experience that there were bats in the rafters, that if you snuck out there in the middle of the night with your brothers just to poke around in Poppy’s forestry equipment you could see their brown eyes blinking overhead. We clambered into Grandma’s Jeep in front of the building. I turned the radio on, at which she rolled her eyes, at which I started fiddling through the stations and then gave up and turned it back off, dissatisfied with my options. She asked me about Kathryn, who I’d broken up with a year and a half prior but still spoke to on the phone every month or so. We drove down the hill, across the winding mountain paths, through the town with the church and the post office and the general store and one restaurant and nothing else, not even a gas station, chatting about local politics, the crux of which always seemed to center on which streets would be registered as incorporated town roads and therefore receive services such as snowplowing and pothole filling. Grandma and Poppy went to town meetings and Poppy sometimes spoke, because the road leading to their house had been contested twice in the fifteen years they’d been living there. They’d had no such concerns in the affluent Philadelphia neighborhood of their middle age, in the six-story townhouse where they’d had a grand piano and a private elevator. 

Grandma looked like my mother behind the wheel: the same high cheekbones, the same washed-out freckles beneath the same hazel eyes, the same milky skin with the same glacial blue undertone, the same thin hair cut in the same boyish style that got them both looks from other women which they never noticed. I wondered if I would look like her someday, aware that the older I got the more and more I looked like Poppy.

Our first stop was at the house of an abstract painter. She didn’t have a separate studio- just a living room with all of the furniture covered in transparent plastic, a workstation in the corner, and paintings with price tags lined up around the perimeter. In the corner by the entrance was a table with a coffee pot and a tray of cookies. I ate a cookie, and the taste of manufactured lemon shortbread lingered in my mouth as the painter showed us her technique, Grandma cooing affirmations while the woman poured paint from a cup onto a canvas, her right arm dancing to make the colors splash and swirl.

“This is the fun bit,” the painter said, her apron splattered with turquoise dots, the smell of her sweat rich in the air, and lifted a gun-like power tool connected to an outlet via orange cable. She lowered the instrument over her painting and waves of heat pressed down against the acrylic goop, spreading and drying it into textured patterns and subtle gradients of blue-green. Grandma was transfixed, her eyes glued to the painter’s sturdy hands, the painter’s close-trimmed fingernails, the painter’s bicep straining with the weight of the heat gun.

The door clattered open and the spell broke, the painter stepping away from her work to greet a new group of visitors. We circled the room, pointing out our favorite pieces to each other (and I silently cataloguing my least favorites, as well), and left without purchasing anything.

In the car, Grandma offered me a Mento. I ate three. There were always Mentos in Grandma’s car, just as Poppy always ordered one glass of Sprite and one glass of merlot at restaurants and insisted on talking to strangers in elevators. I opened the map which detailed the location of each artisan and navigated Grandma to a house tucked into a valley of pine trees. There were roads not identified on the map, and we took a wrong turn that brought us to a low metal gate that said NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES above a blocky drawing of a snowmobile crossed out with a scarlet X. We doubled back, and confirmed we were on the right track when we spotted a line of cars parked along the side of the road. At the end of the road was a fairytale house with a thatched roof and cobblestone and an adjacent hut with a chimney and a swirling cloud of smoke.

We were greeted by a dog in the yard between the buildings. I gasped and bent to the spotted brown mutt, scratching their head with one hand and pressing the other to their chest to keep them from licking my face. Grandma stood behind me, frozen. The dog’s tail wagged and I am sure that if I had my own tail it would have been wagging, too. Still, no matter how often I wake already craving coffee and sunlight from a dream where I have a big fuzzy rear extension and no matter how much the new deposits of estrogen in my machinery have moved my fat around in ways that bring me such great joy, the closest I can get to a tail is a buttplug I sometimes wear when I play with my lover, Kirk, which has a soft swaying imitation that trails along the floor when I get to my knees and lick peanut butter from Kirk’s fingers.

This way is probably for the best. I would not want, actually, to be a dog. I just want to be loved on like a dog, cuddled like a dog, scratched between the ears, to know where I stand and who I can trust and to be given unguarded affection, and these desires I am beginning to see as attainable inside my human frame. The dog wandered back towards the pyramid of firewood stacked against the side of the hut, and I stood, feeling sturdy and grounded and refreshed in my heavy winter boots. There were two signs in the yard: one pointing to the hut which read “Thomas Fulton, Glassblower”, and the other pointing towards the house itself, which read “Buck Fulton, Ceramics”.

We entered the hut and stepped into a material wall of heat. There was a small crowd ringed around a line of blue tape on the floor, and a man in corduroys and suspenders with a potbelly and a thick white beard sat in a chair within the tape, spinning a molten ball on the end of a metal pole at least as long as he was tall. The pale skin of his face was coated with soot, and his blue eyes reflected the plasmic tangerine glow of the hot glass.

What he was making was a vase: a skinny, curvy shape, twisting the pole and lifting it and popping it into a furnace and holding the glass down with tongs and spinning the pole and placing his lips to a mouthpiece at the end. I pictured his lips melting and fusing to the metal, which they did not. He told us they were having problems keeping the ovens hot enough as he fiddled with a dial on the wall, that all week he’d been getting up every two hours at night to make sure the pieces weren’t cracking on the metal racks.

His wife circled the room, passing out homemade snickerdoodles and apple cider from a tray. I took a cider and a cookie, and Grandma took a cider.

“I love this stuff,” Grandma murmured, her nose buried in the paper cup. It was true: she could be found sniffing out apple cider in the corners of every festival and coffee shop and roadside stand. The cookie was too stiff, in my opinion. A snickerdoodle ought to have a hearty chew.

In the other building, which was dark and cramped where the studio had been bright and loud and spacious, the glassblower’s adult son sat perched on a stool in the kitchen between two tables of unimpressive ceramic mugs and bowls. He did not seem interested in speaking to us, simply watching us with his lips pressed together and his right hand picking at the fingernails of his left. We departed quickly, the dog sleeping on a pile of burlap sacks beside the firewood in the yard.

“I don’t understand how somebody as smart as Poppy can still watch Fox News,” I said as we got into the car.

Grandma put the car into reverse. “I don’t even go there, hon.”

I did not launch into my semi-prepared speech about how Poppy’s media consumption related to his treatment of me, and why I needed help speaking with him about it.

Our last stop for the day was at the home of a husband and wife who built custom-made bicycles in their garage. According to the husband, their typical build went for $4,000. I thought about Poppy’s father, who made belts and wallets in Boston’s leather district and made a small fortune investing in Tampax in the early 1940s.

We returned home just long enough to shower and change; that evening, we were going to see a folk band play several towns over. As I crouched to lace up my boots, Poppy called me by my legal name- the first time he’d used any name for me in the past twenty-four hours.

“Don’t call me that,” I said, not looking up from my boots. The front door opened in a breath of cold air, then slammed shut. I held back my tears until Grandma showed up in the mudroom a minute later. We headed out the door together, talking about the empty farmhouse in town which used to house a summer stock theatre. Grandma climbed into the passenger seat and I in the back, swallowed up against a wall of leather and upholstery.

The banjo player for the band was a trans woman. Poppy did not notice, but he did comment as we were leaving that she lacked the stage presence of her male collaborators.

By the time I made it downstairs for breakfast the next morning (I could smell the waffles from my room in the attic), there was already a truck parked at the end of the road. I checked right away because I wanted to go for a hike; it was a late morning for me, ten, the sun already shining bright and full against the mountainside. It was a different truck from the previous day, and I asked Grandma if anyone had come to the house.

“No,” she said, stepping out from behind the counter in a coral apron. “He pulled in maybe twenty minutes ago. I’m nervous about you going out.”

After I finished a waffle and a cup of coffee, and after I finished helping Grandma with the dishes, Poppy having left with his skis hours before I woke, I creaked down the steps into the basement. I walked past the washing machine and the computer and Grandma’s rack of dumbbells, the floor oozing coldness into the soles of my feet and up into my brain, and to the closet at the end of the hall. I stopped several paces short at the entrance to Poppy’s office, a little nook with a metal desk and several filing cabinets. This is where I had imagined, for the last six months, Poppy reading my letter, his gold wire-rimmed glasses down at the end of his nose, a checkered button-down beneath a daffodil sweater, a scowl chiseled into his face, the tender little child in his gut crying their eyes out at the whipping end of a belt in a dusty Watertown duplex or perhaps a little later in the darkest corners of the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School or perhaps simply going numb over the course of a lifetime spent stifled by codification, by the messages they’d internalized about which truths were immutable, about what was true to begin with, ripping to shreds four pages of handwritten material wherein I explained to him what “nonbinary” meant and how it applied to me and to him, Grandma leaning against the wall trying only for a moment to convince him not to destroy the letter before she retreated back upstairs.

I stood there, hating myself for failing to push harder, for failing since I’d arrived to look Poppy in the eye and tell him straight up that he would need to buy-in if we were going to have a relationship going forward, wincing every time he referred to me as a “gentleman” (something I couldn’t remember him doing in the past, though perhaps I simply wasn’t paying attention in the past), my mother’s refrain echoing in my head: “In so many ways, he is such a great man.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant by this, though I suspected it had to do with money and how much of it he’d spent to help us get through college, and perhaps other financial maneuvers he’d made that nobody had ever told me about. A couple of years prior on a Christmas break home from college, in my childhood bedroom, against the backdrop of my camouflage wallpaper, my mother told me that Poppy had been diagnosed with lung cancer and that under absolutely no circumstances was I to bring it up when he and Grandma arrived the following day.

I opened the closet at the end of the hall to retrieve every article of reflective or bright winter gear that I could find. I scavenged a neon orange beanie and vest, as well as a pair of reflective yellow gloves. I went upstairs and dumped the haul in the mudroom and stared out at the truck for a while. I went to my attic room and masturbated. I touched myself to the memory of a moment on the side of the mountain three years prior, when I’d brought Kathryn along with me and we’d gone for a hike and done what we’d both been waiting for days to do, maneuvering around our clothes in a snowbank. Grandma and Poppy had been disappointed when Kathryn and I broke up.

I wiped myself with my hands, pulled my jeans back up from around my ankles, and made my way down the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor landing, taking care to use my elbows instead of my hands. I washed my hands and brushed my teeth and avoided looking in the mirror. I went downstairs and flipped through Poppy’s National Geographic, fifteen minutes of my attention captured by a full spread showing the progression of their cover art since the publication’s inception until I ran out of patience and looked out the window again.

The truck was gone. I ran upstairs to pull a sweater over my mesh long-sleeved shirt and back down to the mudroom, where I donned my coat and laced up my boots and wriggled into the luminous accessories. 

I stepped outside and walked the shoveled path across the front yard, the snow piled up to my waist on either side. I passed the black metal lamppost that always featured in Grandma’s Christmas card and headed up the dirt road, past the barn to where the trails split. The pine trees cut off my view of the horizon from every side, and their scent mingled in the air with the snow and the mud. For the first time since I’d arrived, I could feel my muscles relaxing into gravity and my belly expanding with my breath.

My gut hardened and my muscles clenched their fists only a couple of minutes later at the trailhead. The white snow was dotted with droplets of blood; I knew what I was looking at, and I knew I had two other trails which I could follow to traverse the mountain, but I kept pace with the blood all the same, walking just a foot to the left of it, opposite the fresh bootmarks going in the other direction.

I passed the spot where Kathryn and I had lain down in the snow. I passed the little sled nailed to a tree which denoted a path that, when followed a couple of miles, led to a sugar shack where a small outfit tapped trees on lease from Grandma and Poppy to boil sap for syrup. The sugar shack had its own service road down the other side of the mountain. Kathryn and I had turned off at the sled, and when we reached the sugar shack, steam billowing out from a pipe at the top, we were greeted by a middle-aged man with an unkempt beard who smelled like marijuana. I told him who we were, and he gave us a free tour of the equipment and two enormous jars of thick, brown, nutty maple syrup. We sipped from one of the jars the whole trek back, lips sticky, my skin tingling from various pleasures and Kathryn’s nose pink from the cold. 

The blood, sticky in its own right, did not turn off at the sled and neither did I. It wound up the mountainside as a trickle of droplets in some places and splatters in others. I passed an abandoned shed, boarded up with plywood. I crossed a wooden plank atop a frozen stream. The further I followed the spots, the more certain I became that at any moment a bullet would come roaring through the pines and strike me in the neck and I would die in slow agony, and nobody would ever knew which blood was mine and which blood I had been following.

I chewed on an internal monologue: What kind of person would I be if dad was a hunter, if he had insisted on taking me hunting and dressing me up in camo and teaching me how to use a gun instead of simply trying to get me to play baseball for two seasons before giving up, or if he had refused to come to see my high school plays, or if he had complained when I came home from my first semester of college with my ears pierced? Will I inherit my dad’s familial baldness, or the heart problems that took his parents before I’d gotten to know them as an adult? I love you / a bushel and a peck / a bushel and a peck and what had Poppy’s father been like? When and how did he explain menstruation to his son, or did he explain menstruation to his son at all? What is it like for women who hunt when they go to gun shows and hunting clubs?

The droplets took a sharp turn off the trail into the brush. In the jagged landscape, uncleared and otherwise untouched, the trail of blood went chaotic: there were droplets still, but there were also streaks and smears and puddles and places where a bloody carcass had clearly been dragged along the forest floor, bootprints and chunks of flesh and matted bits of fur. I struggled forward, my feet catching and sinking in the snow.

Suddenly the path continued no further; the madness converged on a single point in space and time where a second penetration had occurred: this of a knife instead of a bullet, for at the end of the trail of blood was a mound of entrails, pink and crimson and gray, little wisps of steam curling off into the mountain air. I did not know at the time that gutting a bagged deer and leaving the intestines behind was standard practice.

It was after Grandma dropped me off at a New Hampshire bus stop, pulling away as I got on the bus, leaving the farmhouse for what would turn out to be the last time I saw it for twelve years, that I noticed I was grinding my teeth. I wept on the bus, massaging my jaw, the gray blocks of the Boston skyline looming over me. When the virus hit, I told Grandma that being quarantined with Poppy sounded like a nightmare. She laughed. I could picture her on her stool in the pantry, her spine in alignment and the corded phone against her cheek, surrounded by big glass jars full of flour and oatmeal and chocolate chips and all of her dish-wear, surrounded as well by fragrant sanded walls of cedar, Poppy cross-legged in house shoes on the uncomfortable sofa in the living room reading the National Geographic, neither of them having spoken to each other yet that day.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

The Unpleasantness

March 15th, 2020

I am going to write about what happened again. I have not thought about what happened except in the general for many years: that something happened which I did not and still do not understand except that I could not have possibly seen what I thought I saw. I kept a journal when I was at the inpatient program, but I am the queen of throwing out anything that might be of sentimental value, and I cannot find it. Probably, feeling like I had moved on, I tossed the journal in the garbage on a visit home from BU when my mother asked me to clean out my closet. I was messed up for years, I was fine for years, and now the memory is keeping me awake again.

I wish I had that journal. I wonder if I’m remembering it now the same way I remembered it then.

-Hayley

March 17th, 2020

Kit called today. Jerome picked up the phone. He thinks I should stop talking to Kit altogether, but he would never push or argue and he sat and listened patiently while I told him what she’d said over a bottle of Tempranillo. Her call really disturbed me. I hadn’t thought about it for so long, and she called me only a week after the memories started coming back. I didn’t tell her, before or during her call, how much I’ve been thinking about it. It’s weird, and it’s just like Kit to pop up like that. She wanted to talk about a robin’s egg she found on a walk through her neighborhood. She said it felt like an omen. I pivoted, and we talked mundanities instead: her brother’s new baby, her roommate situation, my bees. I could tell she was dissatisfied when I ended the call.

This sense memory came back to me talking to Kit, not even of Kit herself but of the long drives to see her in my Jeep, the coconut air freshener never enough to keep off the musty, wet dog smell I’d inherited with the vehicle. Kit lived two hours south of me, where the identical houses and the ceaseless development and the well-funded public education systems gave way to cow pastures, Civil War battlefields, independent bookstores, and conservative small towns with banners strung high over main streets. Kit’s particular small town still had a drugstore soda fountain. If you ordered a Vanilla Coke, they’d mix vanilla extract into the cola themselves. 

We mostly fucked in cars. We only ever had penetrative sex once that I can recall, despite being supposedly straight, sexually active high schoolers. Our favorite places to station the Jeep were church parking lots in the dead of night. Our justification was that they were deserted, but in hindsight I have to believe that the sacrilegious nastiness got me wet: visions of our worship services still feature in my brain’s masturbation compilation. In a church parking lot, God could watch us devote ourselves to the orgasm and consecrate the Jeep with saliva and cum. Once a month, Kit took communion between my legs. For aftercare-we-didn’t-know-enough-to-call-aftercare we’d snuggle in the backseat, half-dressed, bruised up and blissed out, and read Mary Oliver passages to each other in the incandescent haze of my car’s door lights.

Kit was the first person I’d ever been physical with who treated me like she cared about me and my pleasure, who spent just as much time or more experimenting with my body and asking me questions as she did trying to get off herself, something I didn’t know I deserved. I’m grateful to her for what we learned together, without which I don’t know if I would have recognized what a brilliant lover and man I have in Jerome. 

For my drives to see her I would make playlists and burn them onto CDs. I’d burn an extra copy for Kit, who would listen to them after I went home and text me later to tell me which songs she’d liked the best. I’ve been listening to that music again: The Mountain Goats and Sufjan Stevens and Motion City Soundtrack and The Postal Service. Jerome teased me the other day when he caught me craning over my jigsaw puzzle in the dining room and listening to “Let’s Talk About Spaceships.” I laughed and reminded him that I had mostly gone to high school with white kids; my parents could afford a private high school, and insisted on it.

Kit and I were anguished teenagers with violent experiences living in our bodies: I’d been in a house fire when I was five and lost much of the skin on my face and the grafts had healed in irregular waxy patches, and Kit was a transsexual who had genuinely no idea until her twenties and hated herself with a deep and disorienting passion. Kit’s bullies called her a fag, and mine called me a zombie. I had friends in spite of my otherness, but I don’t think Kit really did until she got older.

Kit came to my place less often, but often enough. My parents liked her. She and my dad would read the same books and talk about them together at the kitchen table, snacking on apple slices and cheese.

Sometimes we graffitied quotations from our favorite novels on the walls of abandoned silos and defunct bridges: You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with God.

Kit believes we managed to get in touch with something, though.

-Hayley

March 17th, 2020 (cont.)

To clarify, what we experienced in August 2012 was a shared hallucination. And I’m not saying that Kit is crazy. She can’t be any crazier than me, because we both remember it exactly the same way. We did from the start. I guess what I’m saying is that, for some reason, Kit really wants it to have been real. She still brings it up every time we speak on the phone, twice a year or so. She won’t talk about it with her therapist, but I refuse to be that for her. I’ve told her that.

It’s possible that something else happened, the doctors would tell me, that our psyches concocted an impossible fantasy to replace a sickening reality, but I can never remember it any other way. If Kit can, she’s never told me.

We were walking hand in hand in a humid forest, sweating, talking about whatever. What we witnessed was

March 18th, 2020

Sorry. Panic attack. Will try again later.

-Hayley

March 21st, 2020

We had been on a trail which led through the woods and opened up onto a field of tall, dry grass buzzing with heavy white flies. A path cut through the grass, so narrow that we had to walk along in single file; the sun was high and yellow in the afternoon sky, and I felt homesick, displaced by the two hour drive south to what felt like another world in my seventeen year old frame. We swatted at the flies. I caught one behind my ear and crushed it between my fingers and my palm, and I felt its slick insides lubricate my skin. I pushed into Kit from behind, slipping my hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She spun, grabbed my waist, and tugged on my hair. I set the moment on fire by falling backwards off the path, pulling Kit down with me.

Every time I drove to Kit’s I smelled like me, and every time I drove home I smelled like Kit. 

When she came, I spat her discharge into the grass and kissed her on the mouth, our bodies entangled prostrate on the Earth’s crust. We rose, my bare knees dirty below my khaki shorts. My skin tingled. The trees rose up around us on every side, the sky lush with their leaves. I ate a handful of almonds from the leather bag slung over my shoulder. Kit whistled a song from one of my CDs, her hands stuff into her front pockets. The flies grew thick.

Ahead of us the path widened back into the forest. I don’t think this is where we began to hallucinate, but it is true that we were discovered back in the field, and not deeper in the forest where we both remember going. I went back to that field once, a couple of years later on a visit home from college, armed with two of my friends from high school and a can of mace. We parked beside the same trail map that Kit and I had parked beside, but this time I actually looked at it. I brought us straight to the field without telling my friends the truth about where we were going. The trail ended at the edge of the field, the patch of forest where we’d had our episode torn down and replaced with excavators and bulldozers and a sign advertising a new lot of townhouses. I felt nothing.

I remember the trees looking beautiful lining either side of the dirt path, the sun pouring past branches and leaves like golden syrup poured over hotcakes as Kit and I crossed from the field to the forest. Particles twisted in and out of sight, catching the beams of light as they floated. Fuzzy brown vines curled up trunks. A pair of butterflies flitted over a patch of tiny eggshell flowers. We walked slowly, with reverence. 

I caught up to Kit again and curled my right hand around the crook of her left elbow. We leaned into each other. It was cooler in the woods than it had been in the open field, and her shoulder felt cozy against mine. The air smelled like magnolias, sweet and dense and cut with acid. Something rustled in the brush to our left, and we stopped. Or, at least, we experienced something rustling in the brush to our left and we stopped. I don’t know exactly which bits of my memory of that day are real and which are not, except for the parts which literally could not have happened. But something could have rustled in the brush. 

Maybe that’s what set us off in the first place.

“Did you hear that?” Kit asked.

I nodded. I looked down the path behind us and could not see the grassy field we’d come from. I felt strange. We’d only been walking in the trees for a few minutes, and I couldn’t remember the path turning. I thought about my Jeep, parked at least a forty-five minute walk back along the trail. I heard the rustling again and whipped my head around. I saw a tawny shadow dart through the trees. Kit’s eyebrows lowered and tightened, and her face lost all color.

“I’m bleeding,” she whispered, and showed me her hand.

Um.

I’m not totally sure, though.

March 22nd, 2020

No, actually, I am almost certain that she must have been bleeding, and that she must have fainted there among the luminescent particles, because they did stitch her hand up later in the hospital. I know that for a fact.

“I’m bleeding,” she whispered, and showed me her hand. It was splotchy with red, and a crimson line across her palm oozed with fluid. I caught her just as she lost consciousness, propping her limp body up with my own, my brain scrambling to find a way to lower her gently to the ground. I managed to get under her, land on my rear, and pull her down from above.

She came back pretty quickly. I fed her water and almonds from my bag. She had been fiddling with the pocket knife in her jeans when the movement in the woods startled her, and she somehow managed to slice her palm open. I used the knife to tear a strip from the bottom of my t-shirt to wrap around Kit’s palm. I slid the knife into my own bag as we sat there under the trees, Kit’s head in my lap, and I realized that I wasn’t sure anymore in what direction we’d come from. Kit was apologizing. I shushed her and told her to focus on her breath. I had known that Kit was a fainter, and while I had never seen it happen myself, she had told me enough stories about trips to the doctor’s office that ended badly to know that this was not a genuine medical emergency. Still, I wanted desperately to get her home.

And still there was something moving in the trees. It was vaguely deer-like, but it wouldn’t stand still for long enough that I could make it out. And it could not have been a deer. A deer would have run. A deer would not be lurking, dashing, watching. The next time I heard the creature move, I flung a branch in its direction. The noises stopped. Kit set her clammy hands on my leg and pulled herself to her knees. I helped her stand, holding her waist with one hand and an arm with the other, Kit protesting all the while that she was fine. Her face was bone white.

“I don’t know what direction we came from,” I said. Kit looked back and forth down the path and whimpered. “Okay. We’re going this way,” I said, and took Kit by the hand, pulling her in the direction I thought looked brighter, since the sun had been overhead in the field. The dancing particles mocked us in their dizzying snowfall, and I could swear I heard the animal following behind. Every minute that passed I became more and more certain that we were going the wrong way, but Kit began to insist.

“I have a feeling,” she said. “I have a feeling.”

But soon we had been walking far longer than we had been before Kit fainted, and I was growing more and more anxious. I couldn’t stop thinking about the return journey: the now hour’s walk back to the Jeep, the twenty minute drive back to Kit’s house, the two hour trip on the interstate to get myself home.

“K—-, we need to turn around,” I said.

“I’m telling you I have a feeling,” Kit replied.

“I don’t care about your feeling. I want to go home, and we’re going the wrong way.”

“You don’t know. We don’t know what the right way is.”

I turned around and started walking in the other direction. Kit called out my name from behind me. I kept walking. Kit called my name louder and louder until she was shouting, and the beast exploded out from the trees in front of me. I jumped out of the way, and it went barreling past me towards Kit. It was larger than a deer- more like a moose, but with muddy yellow fur. In the brief moment during which I saw its face, I was sure I saw six eyes: two set into the skull where you would expect them, two more on either side of its long snout, and two more still nestled into the hinges of its jaw. The eyes bulged out like a frog’s. It dipped its jagged antlers towards Kit. I took the knife from my bag and sprinted after it, but at the last second the creature changed course and galloped off the path, heading deeper into the forest.

I knew what Kit was going to do a split second before she did it, but I hesitated. She ran after the creature, and I ran after her. We chased past trees, through bushes, under branches, the world whipping by, the shadows of the trees casting us in premature dusk.

I wonder how my life’s trajectory might have been different if I could have stopped Kit before she reached the glade up ahead, where the particles shimmered again captured in beams of sunlight, which drew closer and closer as we ran. I wonder if I would still have spent that September at the inpatient program in North Carolina, drinking tea and unpacking my trauma in a valley of autumnal foliage. I wonder if I still would have put off going to college the following year. I wonder if Kit and I would still have had our tearful goodbye on her front porch after a weekend of packing her things into boxes to a soundtrack of Springsteen albums. I wonder if I would have reconnected with Jerome, the cute geek-rapper I’d met in North Carolina, the only other brown person “healing” in that countryside brick mansion, who I kissed for the first time at his show in Baltimore who I married in his parents’ backyard who gets depressed when reviewers call him “intellectual” (“as if the default rapper is assumed to be stupid,” he says every time) who didn’t even flinch when I first wanted to show him my apiary but gleefully made friends with the bees and got a little weepy when he tasted the honey straight from the hives. I wonder what nightmares I would wake up to in the middle of the night, thrashing and shouting and falling back asleep in Jerome’s embrace, or whether Kit would feature in so many of them. I wonder if Kit would have called me today to tell me that her grandmother, who had always been very kind to me, always sending me home with cookies, had fallen ill one afternoon in quarantine and never woken up.

On the phone call this morning (which I received, blessedly, while Jerome was out on a walk), Kit tried to associate what happened to us with the spread of the virus, rambling about how the thing we saw was sick, how it had sneezed on us, how sickness has been dogging her ever since, how she’d come across that robin’s egg last week. I told her, as I always tell her, that what we saw in the glade was not real. I told her that she needed to talk to a new therapist, someone she would be honest with, someone she hadn’t been hiding a medically critical secret from for most of a decade.

Jerome came back from his walk with a bouquet of wildflowers for the kitchen table.

-Hayley

March 25, 2020

One theory is that we crossed paths with a human being or human beings who did something far too horrible to us for our brains to bother remembering. 

-Hayley

April 1st, 2020

Here is what I saw: the moose-creature stopped beyond a felled tree, in that little glade which had been cleared of plants and brush, particles in the light. I could see a bluish shape cresting over the lip of the fallen trunk. The creature snorted and brush a hoof against the ground: clup, clup, clup. Kit slowed to a walk, but when I called out to her she looked back at me and started running again. She vaulted over the tree trunk lying in her way, coming down heavy on the other side.

The ground shook three times as if the planet’s tectonic plates were shifting. I stopped and steadied myself against a trunk, my heart pounding, trying to catch my breath. A gargantuan shadow swept in, stretching over and past me and darkening the brush. The antlered creature turned to Kit and spoke in a low voice that sounded as if it came from several vocal chords, distinct and dissonant and strange: “You ought to leave this place.”

Kit did not move. The earth shook again, and the shadow moved closer to the glade. The particles grew in number, and their movement became faster and more direct until they were swarming in a frenzy around the blue shape. I ran towards Kit again. Instead of vaulting the downed tree, I slid under it where a ditch left a gap below. I slammed my head against the bark, hard. I ended up on my back with my shoulders and head trapped under the tree and my legs dangling out the other side. I screamed as I felt something clasp my ankles, and I was dragged into the light. The world spun in my dizzied vision. I made it to my hands and knees and vomited, Kit crouched down beside me. A huge thundercrack rang out to my left, and a sharp pain shot through my ear. I turned my head.

It was later in my hospital room, white and dizzying in a entirely different way, that my mother would lean over to tell me that the doctors were treating me for a concussion.

The egg was enormous- at least as tall as Kit and certainly wider- and there was a crack running from its top halfway down the side of its cyan shell, a branching crack that ended in a dozen points across the surface. I can’t remember if I understood it as an egg at the time or if it was only later, in retrospect, that I recognized the event as a hatching.

I wanted to stand. I grabbed a fistful of Kit’s jeans and leverage and buttressed myself on my right leg. Kit grasped my triceps, pulling me the rest of the way to my feet, and held me close to her body. She smelled like grass. Another thundercrack, and the fissures spread lower and wider on the surface of the shell. Right at the top, the shell lifted, attached to a sticky bubblegum web of embryonic material. It lowered, then rose again a little higher.

“I am begging you to go,” the many-toned voice came again. “This is not for human eyes. Your presence here may have repercussions we cannot predict-“

An arm, long and three-fingered and covered in fluids and blood and bits of shell, pushed out from within the egg and reached towards me and Kit. A second, a third, and a fourth arm joined it, smashing and pulling through the surface of their container. Finally a head burst out, all gnashing teeth and with too many eyeballs to count. It sneezed. A volley of phlegm arched and splattered us, our shirts, our pants, our shoes, our faces. A strand entered my mouth. It was thick on my tongue and tasted like magnolias. I tried to spit it out, but it clung tight to my gums.

“This hatchling is sick.”

Finally, we ran.

It was a police officer who found us- a tall, white cop with an endless gap between his front teeth- shivering and dirty in the meadow, broken down in the morning dew. We’d been missing for eighteen hours. According to him, I tried to stab the cop with Kit’s pocket knife, which is how I ended up with that judge’s order that sent me to North Carolina. I don’t know. I don’t remember that part. I try not to dwell on it.

So that’s how Kit and I remember it.

-Hayley

April 14th, 2020

Hayley,

I am writing this entry on your behalf. When you come back and reread this log, I want you to know that I wrote this before you woke up so that you will believe me when I say I also saw what you saw. And I am terrified.

At least, I hope you saw it too.

Or maybe I hope you didn’t.

The doors to the house are all locked, and the blinds are drawn, and you are asleep in our bed. I rubbed aloe into your skin. I am sitting in the rocking chair by the bedroom door with the baseball bat. I tried to call Kit, and she did not pick up.

You were standing in the apiary, your protective gear gleaming white in the afternoon sun, and I was watching you from the back porch and drinking my coffee. You reached your hand into one of the hives and all of the bees came flooding out of all of the hives all at once. They filled the air so thick with bodies and buzzing that I was afraid that you would suffocate. Irrational, but. I dropped my coffee and the ceramic mug with the fox on it shattered all over the cedar slats. I rushed down the stairs towards you, and you came limping through the blizzard of insects, slowed by the bees crowding you and stinging you through the suit, and that is when I saw, lurking in the open field beyond the hives, obscured by a wall of yellow and black, what I can only describe as a fucking monster.

It was so covered in eyes that I couldn’t tell which bulging shape was its head, and arms came thrashing out of its body in a hideous pinwheel, its skin dripping with what looked like snot. It was gliding slowly towards the house. You reached me at the steps, and we made it into the house, the bees stinging both of us in their frenzy.

A cloud of bees came in through the back door with us. I can hear them buzzing around the house now. I killed three that came in under the bedroom door a couple of minutes ago.

You are covered in dozens of welts, Hayley, but you are breathing and you are stable and we spoke before you crawled into bed and you were perfectly coherent and I know that we will be okay. I may venture downstairs in search of weapons and food when you wake up. The propane tanks, I think, are an option. I want this to be over.

I love you with all of my heart.

-Jerome

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

Terroir

The queen was throwing a party. She had grown tired of looking for solutions, hiring all manner of sorcerers and witches and architects, none of whom could help, and so now she was spending the last fistfuls of the realm’s coffers on a lavish celebration. A week before the festivities, her guards stopped a would-be assassin from ending her life. He had dressed as a guard himself, and carried a hollowed-out reed in one sleeve and a poisoned dart in the other. He got as far as firing the dart when Meltock West, the queen’s honored protector and provider of sexual services, twisted himself into the blowdart’s path and took it in the neck. West died within minutes, black foam dribbling out his mouth. The assassin had been executed in the traditional fashion: a public disembowelment. The only attendees were the executioner, the royal guard, a handful of slaves, two commoners with a mangy dog, and the queen herself.

The first order of party planning had been to relocate the wine racks to the ground floor, where they replaced a parlor that had previously been used for smoking tutroot, a practice that the queen detested. 

The guests began to arrive several days in advance. Most of them had the same shameful, wet-cat look that had become so pervasive throughout the realm, their eyes darting about as they spoke even to the queen. Throughout the planet, even, if the queen’s last emissaries from Offtish were any indication. The Island States were gone altogether, as far as we knew. The guests brought relatively little with them: a week’s clothing, some regional delicacies. During her early years on the throne her party guests would come with entire caravans carrying expensive gifts, like horses and fine clothing and highly skilled prisoners. Now they came only with the smallest trains, on boats made of glossy wood or on horseback through the Queen’s Mountains. Some brought their families, or their lovers for whom they’d abandoned their families, or beloved pets. They slept in the Ivy Castle’s lavish guest rooms, brightly colored and packed with cushions and blankets and kept absolutely as dry as possible by the queen’s slaves.

The queen no longer set foot outdoors. She also no longer bathed. She drank water only when she grew dizzy, and even then she forced it down in great swigging gulps as if she were trying to get drunk off it. I once swept the remains of a glass that she’d drank half the water from and then hurled at the floor. When the realm’s religious leaders came to her two months before the party to proclaim that the Divine was sick, that she must change her administration’s course, redistribute the wealth and properly allocate resources to the people and free her slaves and perhaps then the flooding would stop, she’d had them strapped to weights and dropped into the rising waters.

Her guest’s ships bobbed in the harbor, streaks of silver and gold in their hulls that gleamed dully through the mist. 

The Council of Advisors gathered for the last time the night before the party. The mathematician presented her latest calculations: technically, the rains could continue forever- but eventually, the flooding would have to plateau. There was only so much untapped moisture in the ice flows that had melted in the humidity, in the bodies of the masses drowning and giving their life force back to the clouds. And if the rains ever stopped, the waters would recede, but the face of the planet would be changed forever. The queen stopped her with a raised hand.

“I wish to discuss the party,” she said. The gamekeeper stepped forward to detail the stock he’d prepared for the evening.

We rose early in the morning to prepare the Ivy Castle. We shared breakfast together in our quarters, which were damp and moldy and flooded with ankle-high water. We cooked together, beans and quick-bread and boiled shoots of crawler-reed that we’d purchased from the nearby village with our collective monthly allowance, and we joked and smiled and kissed one another on the head. I placed my hand on Freckle’s thigh and left it there for the duration, squeezing him in periodic excitement. When we detached to complete our tasks for the day, we kissed passionately, our tongues and beards connecting, tangling, separating. Freckle smiled and crept away, his feet splashing gently on the floor, heading off to arrange flowers in the ballroom. I went upstairs in search of the gamekeeper, who held the key to the animal pens.

The gamekeeper woke before dawn each morning to watch the day begin on the third floor veranda. In the past, this meant watching the sun rise. Now, it meant watching the seeping gray darkness go violet, then a sickly green color. When I arrived, he was eating dried fruit from a pouch.

“You’re late,” the gamekeeper said. He sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” He handed me the key, an ostentatious piece of brass molded to look like an antlered deer’s head. “What do you think? Is there any talk among your lot about what all this means?”

“I could lose my tongue for answering that question,” I said.

The gamekeeper looked me up and down, then shrugged. “I guess the reason doesn’t really matter. It’s happening,” he said.

I remembered when I’d first been selected to assist the gamekeeper. The man had been cruel and boisterous; he made jokes to me in private about forcing the queen to suck on his toes, about burning the skin of her breasts with the hot embers from his tutroot pipe. These comments especially disturbed me, since I often tied Freckle up and beat him with a paddle, an activity that felt more like healing than it did like pain when all was said and done, when I held Freckle in my arms on our scratchy cot and kissed his eyelids and cooed softly until we drifted off to sleep, knowing that together we could hold something dangerous and charged between us and better love each other for it. Hearing the gamekeeper joke about twisting the same kind of intimacy into rape made me want to throw him from the veranda. I had seen him torture my friends and family. 

But now the gamekeeper was changed: he did not joke anymore, about anything. When he spoke about the queen, his eyes shifted and his hands slipped into the pockets of his fur coat. He smoked more and drank constantly and never got drunk. He let the rain on the veranda soak him thoroughly every morning, never bothering with an umbrella, and wandered around the castle, soggy, drinking from pilfered jars of spiced fluck and re-arranging furniture. The whites of his eyes were turning yellow. He turned away from me to cling to the railing, which I took as my cue to leave. 

I wanted to present a strong sense of normality that day, but I grew bold in the energy buzzing about the grounds. I looked nobles in the eye, and when they turned to look again I was gone, through doorways and down halls and up staircases. I entered the animal pens, a giant, hay-filled stable inside the castle itself, creatures crammed in until they could not move, living in each other’s shit and piss. The different species were divided by three-meter high fences. There were deer, horned throg, and prairie cats. In preparation for the party I was meant to drug the prairie cats and the horned throg; by the time the party came around, they’d be recovering from their fits of drowsiness. They would be able to run and even possibly fight, but with a decidedly sluggish quality. The deer I was meant to leave alone, since they presented no real threat of physical harm. On an impulse, I slipped the bags of powder into my boots and filled the animal troughs with unadulterated table scraps from the previous evening’s supper, dropped off outside the pens by the kitchen slaves. For one day in that castle I resolved not to fear retribution.

I hung around in the animal pens for an hour or so, scooping manure into a wheelbarrow. When that was done (and after I had wasted another twenty minutes or so doing nothing in particular), I took the powder out of my boots and poured it into the manure. I covered the wheelbarrow with a tarp and exited the animal pens. I wheeled down the corridors of the east wing, the utilitarian side of the Ivy Castle, and out a backdoor into the waste yard, where I dumped the manure out among the dead flowers and ever-growing piles of discarded junk. I ducked inside quickly before I could get too wet. The animal pens were my only task from the gamekeeper until the party began, so I was meant to find one of the slave minders in search of my next assignment. I deliberately took a path that brought me past the makeshift wine cellar. Two royal guards stood by the door, the butt-ends of their bronze tridents stabilized on the floor. We were under strict orders not to enter, as the queen and several of the higher ranking visiting nobles would be spending the day inside. 

To this day, I don’t understand how they thought they were keeping us from the truth. Willful denial, perhaps. I wonder if they truly thought we were stupid, as if because we’d lived among their wartime enemies they genuinely thought of us as subhuman or somehow different from anyone born within the boundaries of their own political state. I wonder if they thought we were stupid because our eyes had different shapes from theirs, our skin a different shade. Perhaps they didn’t care if we knew, if our fates were entirely irrelevant to them. I wonder what they said to each other among the racks of wine. I wonder if they argued at all as they tampered with the bottles, if there was any dissent among them about the proper course of action. I had seen the invitations that the queen had written, one of which Fletcher Tan had stolen and passed around the slave quarters, and at the time I did not believe that any of the realm’s scattered aristocracy would come.

But there they were, streaming out of their chambers when the bell rang seven, dressed in their finest clothes. As a collective they smelled sickly sweet, almost deathly, as if they had already begun to decay beneath their frills and high collars and had covered up the smell with essence of lavender and cherry and rose. We fed them appetizers from platters: boiled goat’s toes, cheese-breads, and fish eggs wrapped in leaves. We, too, were dressed in our best uniform- black silken pants and shirts with golden buttons, with shimmering golden capes draped across our backs. 

“Boy,” one of them said to me, leaning in, a red bit of goat stuck between his incisor and his canine, “why don’t you take me to a broom closet somewhere?” His breath smelled like a forgotten pair of shoes.

We were under a standing dictate not to perform sexual favors for anyone except under direct instruction from the queen; too many times had a noble raped a slave and either impregnated them or become uncomfortably attached. Still, it was always one of us who ended up stolen or beheaded or diseased, and never the nobility. I smiled at the man and nodded, and motioned him down a corridor that led towards the east wing. I could feel my stomach churn. I led him down a dizzying path of short hallways and sharp corners until, eventually, we reached a closet. I opened the door. He stepped inside, and I slammed it shut, locked it, and shimmied a nearby stool under the door handle.

“You’ll thank me in the end,” I said over the pounding of his fists against the wood. I headed back, and within two minutes I had slipped back into the party with a tray of krub, my absence unnoticed. There was drinking, mainly of spiced fluck and potato distillation. The gamekeeper lifted three krub from my tray and swallowed them all in one bite. I was surprised and a little disturbed to see that he was drinking water.

“I can fetch you a half of spiced fluck if you wish,” I said.

The gamekeeper shook his head. “If I’m going to die tonight, I want to feel every second of it.”

“I sincerely doubt that you’re going to die tonight, my lord. It’s only a party.”

He only grunted and wandered off, not bothering to take his key back from me. A trumpet sounded, and a herald’s voice called out to move towards the wine room. The crowd streamed almost hastily in that direction.

I entered the wine room. A selection of bottles had been pulled from the racks and laid out on a table, in front of which stood the queen. We filed in behind her and filled glasses from the bottles. The wines were deep, and red, and they left long streaking legs crawling down the sides of their glasses. The queen orated, telling a strange story about a young child with a basket of pastries who kept falling down a hole and popping back out in different places all over the world. She talked about her reign as queen, and all of the accomplishments that she’d made. She made a joke about the rain, and then she told us to begin passing out the queen’s vintage.

The nobles took the glasses from us carefully. Most of them kept the cups away from their faces, held out far in front of them or clutched in front of their genitals. A handful of them sniffed the wine, swirled the glasses in the hands, or even stuck their noses down towards the liquid. Once we were finished, the queen smiled.

“And, of course, we would have nothing without our faithful servants, who keep this castle running and myself from running mad,” she said. “I ask that you, my friends, drink with us as well, for tonight is a night to celebrate how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.”

We took our cups and stood in two rows behind the queen.

“What shall I say? The rain, for all of human history, has brought us life. It brings us plants, it brings us streams and rivers and lakes. It brings us the water for our washing, our bathing, our drinking. For so many months we have begrudged the rain, complained as it blocked our roads and flooded our villages and ruined our crops. Tonight, we drink to the rain. May it go on forever, and ever, and ever.” She raised her glass, put it to her lips, and drank. We were expected to drink next, to put the nobles at ease, and we did. Then, the nobles drank, first little tentative sips and then real swallows, and the ice was broken. Bottles were passed around. We refilled glasses. I drooled my mouthful of wine out onto my sleeve. 

The party continued. The gamekeeper and I descended to the animal pens and returned with the deer, who we let loose in the great courtyard at the center of the festivities. The deer raced about, hopping through the fountain and dodging columns and sliding in the mud. A smattering of nobles stepped into the courtyard, and the gamekeeper brought them to a wheelbarrow in the corner. From the wheelbarrow the nobles drew weapons: three crossbows, a bladed boomerang, a bundle of javelins. The gamekeeper and I stood together on the stone perimeter of the courtyard, watching arrows and javelins crisscrossing the space, punctuated by the boomerang’s long arc. A javelin caught one of the deer in the side, sending it skidding across the trimmed lawn and smearing the emerald grass with crimson. The nobles cheered, and the gamekeeper and I returned to the animal pens to release the horned throg.

He must have noticed that the throg were perfectly alert, but he said nothing to me as we dragged the four creatures through the halls and released them into another courtyard for another set of hunters, these equipped with slings. This time we did not stay to watch, returning immediately to the pens to loose the pair of prairie cats high atop the castle walls. Only a couple of nobles joined us in the downpour, and they chased after the prairie cats with little caution, waving their spears around like parade flags. The gamekeeper shook my hand and followed them, unfolding his own leather sling and nestling a rock from his shoulder bag into its pouch. I stayed in the tower for a few minutes, keeping track of the gamekeeper’s dark shape. His arm flicked backwards, launched forwards, and fifty feet or so ahead one of the nobles collapsed. I retreated downstairs.

Back in the main halls, I saw a woman in a long gown of bright green collapse against the wall. In one moment she was laughing joyfully as a companion whispered into her ear, his hand halfway up her dress. In the next, she slumped against the stone behind her, wheezing. Her eyes fluttered closed. A little bubble of blood formed in the corner of her mouth, and she slid down the wall to the floor. Her companion watched. When the tension rushed from her neck and her head lolled against her clavicle, the man wandered off.

The horned throg were making a commotion down the hall, and I went to investigate. Somehow, two had gotten into the throne room. A group of nobles, all men, stalked about the chamber with their slings, hurling rocks at the frightened creatures. A projectile caught one in the eye, and it roared.

The throne room was a narrow rectangle with high ceilings hung with two chandeliers made of scarlet stained glass. The throne sat on a dais at the far end, its silver trim gleaming from the morning’s waxing. It was double-wide, having been constructed almost three hundred years earlier to seat the Twin Princes, who had taken responsibility for uniting the independent states that became the Ream of Allowell. The queen was fond of saying that the throne still sat two: herself and her shadow. If this was intended to be somehow profound, the message was lost on me. She’d had a lantern erected next to the throne, which we would light during her seatings to make her statement true. In recent months she developed a habit of blaming circumstances on the shadow and sending her courtiers away in bafflement. 

An errant stone clanged against the backing of the chair, leaving a dull mark in its place.

I didn’t realize that anyone in the room had noticed me until another stone caught me in the hip. My attacker let out a triumphant cry. I looked up to see the man strapping a new stone into his leather pouch, and I ran for the door. The next blow hit me in the back of the head, and I fell, disoriented. I covered my face with my arms. A rock skidded harmlessly beside me, and I heard a terrible scream followed by a violent crash. I peeked through my arms and saw one of the throg crouched over a hunter, its horns trapped in his gut. Stones flew towards it from every direction, each collision bending the creature lower and lower. Remaining as close to the ground as I could manage, I slunk out the door. Blood dripped past my right eye, and my head pounded.

Anastien, my sister, met me in the hall. “You’re hurt,” she said.

I waved my hand. “Is it still too soon?”

She nodded. “They’ve started, but there are still plenty left. The queen is tearing down all of her least favorite paintings and hurling them out windows.”

Anastien handed me a clean rag to press to my forehead. We walked together towards the kitchen. I felt lightheaded. We passed several bodies- one man had managed to collapse with his breeches around his ankles. We both jumped at a crack of thunder that sounded as if it struck just around the next corner. The whole castle reeked of spoiling milk.

In the kitchen the cooks had laid out several trays of fish-paste crackers. Anastien and I each grabbed one and headed back into the halls. I always thought that the kitchen was strangely far from the ballroom: it took three rights, two flights of stairs, and a scurry across a courtyard to make it there. That particular courtyard had been covered with a wooden dome in the early days of the storm, when it first became clear that the rains were not going to stop. Nobody had told us; one day, a week after all the food had turned up soggy to an important fashion demonstration, a team of local carpenters erected a scaffolding and went to work. More than once that same team of carpenters had returned to patch holes in the dome.

I became dizzy as we crossed the courtyard, and I stopped for a moment to collect myself. Anastien placed her chilly hand on my forearm and squeezed.

Inside the ballroom was carnage. The smell washed over me like a heavy blanket pulled from the washtub, and I doubled over and vomited on the floor. The largest concentration of corpses congregated around the banquet table, where the nobles seemed to have collapsed all over each other. Smaller clumps of bodies were spread around the room. Anastien called out. A couple of errant moans reached our ears. We let our trays fall from our hands, fish-paste crackers scattering around our feet.

“No more,” Anastien said. She strode over to the nearest bodies, which were slouched at a table loaded with plates of food. She fiddled with a couple of the corpses, checking belts and coat pockets, while I stood in place, my hand covering my mouth and nose. One of the bodies lunged towards Anastien, and she lashed out at it with a flash of steel, slicing it across the face and sending it sprawling to the floor. She returned to me with two daggers and handed me the clean one. “Did you pack your bag?” She asked.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go.”

We did not need the daggers, after all. Whatever nobles we passed on the way back to our quarters were already dead or dying, with the exception of one manic character we spotted smashing bottles on the floor through the open door of the wine room. We hurried along. Within an hour we were lined up at the docks, Fletcher Tan and a handful of the others who the community had elected to lead the exodus already on board the largest of the ships, rigging sails and setting folks up as comfortably as possible in the hold. Anastien and I dropped our bags below and returned to help roll barrels full of provisions taken from the castle cellars onto the ship. The ship had three masts, a carved figurehead of a sea-dragon, and a strip of gold trim encircling the circumference just below the rail. Engraved in the trim was the ship’s name: Typhoon. 

I reconnected with Freckle, and we staked a claim on a pile of hay with a couple of blankets as our bed, our bags employed as pillows. As we filled the vessel, it became apparent that the hold would be full, but not so cramped as to feel like another imprisonment. Here I would have space to stretch my limbs as I never could in the slave quarters.

I found my sister guiding our mother up the gangplank, and I offered my shoulder for stability. Our mother had been blinded and prematurely aged by the time she’d spent in servitude to the realm’s High Sorcerer, a man who had opened his veins with a severing spell when he realized he could not stop the rain. He’d strap our mother to the wall of his chamber and practice his spells, testing the limits of his capabilities on her body, her mind a thousand miles away in the benevolent fairy forests of her childhood. She smiled when we eased her below deck down the ladder, and the commotion hushed to a murmur as the people bowed their heads in deference to our mother.

If there was anyone who remained alive within the Ivy Castle, I did not see them when the ship pulled away. I scanned the walls for the gamekeeper’s fur cloak, the docks for the queen’s silver crown, but nothing caught my eye. I hoped the gamekeeper died violently and the queen died last, looking upon her work with finally an honest assessment of what it had amounted to. As we drew further off, I was surprised to see just how close the waters were to the main floors of the castle- at this rate, our quarters would be fully submerged in a week, the bottoms of the grand tapestries in the queen’s receiving hall just beginning to dampen. The whole structure looked as if it might slough away from the earth and crash into the sea at any moment.

Could it really be called the sea, I wondered.

The first days of that voyage were strange. The rains pounded the ship’s wooden hull. The winds whipped the sails about, and we had to keep pulling them down to protect them from damage. I fell into place as a deckhand easily enough; I was too young to remember the caravan that brought me as a child to the Ivy Castle and had otherwise never set foot outside the grounds, and I had no experience whatsoever aboard a ship, but I was strong and the work was straightforward and the rain and the spray and the waves refreshed me after a lifetime inside a musty castle. As the weeks went on, our socks grew damp and our feet began to rash. We found little worms wriggling in the hard bread, which we would pick out and chop up and add to our stews. Before bed we sang songs and the children acted out little plays, with sheets and tufts of hay for costumes.

It was like that for exactly one hundred days and one hundred nights. Freckle kept track, carving tally marks into the inner hull by the light of a candle. On the one hundredth and first morning, mother asked to go above deck.

This would turn out to be a project, because mother had grown too weak to ascend the steep wooden ladder. We debated simply carrying her up, but the space was narrow and we worried that the ship might rock. I tried to talk her out of going up at all, but she wouldn’t hear it. Anastien came up with the idea to rig her to the main mast’s pulleys and heave her through the hatch, and we set to fashioning a harness around her. We piled cots and hay at the bottom of the ladder in case she fell, but we needn’t have worried. She floated upwards on the end of the rope, her arms flung back, the rain streaming down through the open hatch and soaking her frail shape, grinning and cackling all the while. When she disappeared from sight and someone above shouted “we got her,” I scrambled up the ladder, Anastien right behind. We caught mother as she pulled loose from the harness and lurched forward, myself at one arm and my sister at the other. We let her lead us to the bow, where we stood on either side, propping her up as she stared out towards the rain pummeling the water. She mumbled something rhythmic and unintelligible. After several minutes, mother closed her wrinkled eyelids.

It took me some time to realize what had happened, but I think Anastien suspected it all along. When I began to sob, she consoled me, mother’s body suspended between us.

“She was ready, that’s all. She was ready.”

The entire community came above deck to see mother off. We covered her completely in a blanket, closed it tight with a length of rope, and lowered her into the water using the same pulley and harness by which she’d only just been risen.

Fletcher Tan spoke a prayer as mother’s body bobbed and drifted across the waters. She grew smaller and smaller, and when she was gone altogether I realized that the rain had stopped, and I heard a bird call out.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020

Recordings

The same stories, but formatted for your ears.

Terroir, read by Susannah Wilson

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020