In the introduction to her collection, River of Bones, Rebecca Roanhorse asks the questions, “What do we owe our ancestors, what do we owe our history, and what do we owe ourselves?”

Impossibly big questions that thread a relationship between historical obligation, love, and retribution. Not only does Roanhorse not shy away from analyzing the complexity of characterizing what it means to be made a stranger in one’s own home, but she does it with a flexibility that efficiently portals the reader between subgenres, centering character arcs at the heart of her work. This comes across in “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience^TM,^” which has become one of Roanhorse’s most publicly recognized stories. Roanhorse explores the historically cyclical encounter of colonization from several different angles, including the visitor-(settler) asking the person from the culture they are about to dispossess to perform their culture before it is completely taken from them.

“A Harvest of Beating Hearts,” the second story in River of Bones is curious about the ways love invites us into the exploration of our anger. Wherein “Abigail Fields Recalls Her First Death, and, Subsequently, Her Best Life,” follows up with a fast-paced action sequenced story of a Black Native girl given a second chance at life by the desert spirits who she calls on to avenge her people killed by a white man.

A plant rooted in survival threads its way throughout this collection, not only emphasizing the decisions we make to survive, but also the grief in the loss that inevitably travels with survival. Roanhorse takes a writer’s scalpel to look for the pieces that are vanished in the process of surviving cultural, societal, and personal apocalypses. In “White Hills,” Roanhorse interprets Toni Morrison’s quote, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, sometimes you survive in part…” quite literally when the protagonist is asked to give up a piece of her body in order to maintain the privileges she has been given access to because of her proximity to whiteness.

Nina Simone once said, “The role of the artist is to reflect the times,” and Rebecca Roanhorse reflects a full range of contemporary human sensibilities, acknowledging the subjectivity of morality, so the good, the bad and the ugly all are wrapped up into the possibilities of every person. Desire breeds obsession, love shields and protects what is vulnerable, while the cunningness that survival requires, asks us to be more curious than afraid of our own anger. Roanhorse does not imagine worlds where characters can fall neatly into any one category about anything.

Instead, lonely queer boys can summon the dead to save them, discontented women kill for their sapphic love, the monster-eater can and does become the monster, and spirits of the desert are on the side of the dispossessed, swallowing whole the dispossessor.

There is the story the people are given about the nation and there is the truth, scattered and fragmented at the site of its attempted destruction. Roanhorse, through insisting on the living of her Black and Native often Queer characters offers a counter-telling of the stories that relied on erasure to protect those in power. Dark fantasy and horror become a tool to depict the undercurrent of a country whose origins are founded on slavery and genocide.

“A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” examines the objectification of women’s bodies with a body horror haunting that reflects the ghost of history sweeping through the relationships and world building of this collection. “Falling Bodies”, while taking place in a far future where Earth has been colonized by aliens, goes back in time to invoke the failed experiment of living side by side with one’s captors.

“River of Bones,” the title story which also happens to follow the second book in Roanhorse’s Sixth World series, closes out the reader out with a riveting eco-love story. The reader is invited to follow Kai and Maggie as they find their way back to each other in the midst of fighting for their lives, and their autonomy. This novella offers a delightful conclusion to an incredibly versatile collection.The last story is one that could not feel more timely in its solidifying the collection’s invitation into living and loving through the collapse of a political worldbuilding, while holding onto the most intimate experiences of grief, desire, heartbreak, and with the insistence on an unyielding spirit, hope.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda: Hello Rebecca, it is such a delight to be engaging with you and your creative process in this way. I have had the privilege of reading your upcoming collection of short stories, River of Bones and Other Stories, and I would love to know what putting together this collection of short stories has shifted inside of you?

Rebecca Roanhorse: I don’t know that it’s shifting anything inside me, but it definitely feels like the end of a particular era in my writing life. It’s been gratifying to be able to look back at the last almost decade and see my short fiction collected in one place. Some of these stories only exist in e-books or on websites, so it’s cool to seem them in print.

SNK: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience^TM” may be one of your most well-known shorter works, appearing as the first story in this collection. That said, it is incredible to see how the tone of the collection reads as so wide-ranging. At what point in the process of writing a story do you realize you have decided on a voice or tone that feels right for that particular story?

RR: Usually from the beginning. Short stories tend to come to me fully formed, unlike novels which are a process and often require extensive revision. Shorts are really my chance to explore an idea or a voice or even an event in the popular consciousness without a lot of overhead and commitment. I usually know who and what they are from the beginning.

SNK: In a previous Clarkesworld Magazine interview with Arley Sorg you spoke to character being one of the most important elements of story for you. Is there an aha moment when you realize you have written a well-rounded complex character? Does that aha moment feel different when moving between short stories and novels?

RR: In novels, characters need depth and a relevant arc—they need to grow and fail and arrive somewhere different from where they began. Shorts, for me, need that much less. They need to exist in their moment and function to tell the story I’m trying to tell. I’m always concerned with character, but not as concerned in shorts.

SNK: Vengeance as an idea comes up in such interesting ways throughout this collection, whether it be about avenging settler colonial theft of life, or taking life in order to satisfy the one you love (Shout out to the deer woman). In our present reality, there is often a narrative that names the people who are resisting apathy, the aggressors or the disturbers of peace; how do you navigate writing violence from the perspective of the oppressed?

RR: I don’t really write violence for spectacle, although I’m also not wholly against it. I am a big fan of the John Wick franchise and I’ve written a Predator comic. But I do try to ground my violence in purpose, and I try to be very aware of who commits the violence and against whom violence is committed. It is another element of story craft that is important to balance. It’s also worthwhile to note that not all violence is physical—there is emotional and social violence that can be just as devastating and effective.

SNK: In that vein, you write Black and Native characters who are morally complex. You have talked in the past about your work being interested in complicating the moral binary of good and bad. How do you think your background in religious studies and theology seep into this particular curiosity?

RR: Ha! What an interesting question. I am sure my studies have had an impact in a myriad of ways, but I don’t think I can pinpoint a particular influence. I also make room in fiction for things I wouldn’t tolerate in real life. Perhaps ironically, good and evil feel much clearer cut in real life than I like in my fiction. I think a lot of my desire to write morally complex Black and Native characters stems from my desire to push back against stereotypes like the Magical Negro and the Nobel Savage. I want my characters to span the gamut of human experience and emotion, something often denied them. If that makes them morally gray, so be it.

SNK: In the last Psychopomp interview you did (welcome back) with my co-editor Arley, you phrased very beautifully how a book’s publication, “can only capture a moment in time for the author—who they were and what concerned them when they wrote it—and then we move on to what’s next.” What are the different iterations of yourself you see strewn across the timeline of these short stories and their publications?

RR: I think characters who struggle with identity and belonging are hallmarks of my early work. The theme reflects my own struggles and the larger zeitgeist of an era of identity politics. As I write my ninth novel, I am much less concerned with identity for example, at least in the way it defines us as marginalized. Now, we’re in an era of growing fascism and institutional collapse, and, not unrelated, I have an 18-year-old heading out into our messy, complex, and dangerous world. I also need to figure out what’s next for me, now that my day-to-day role as a mother is receding. I’m simply not the same person I was a decade ago, and my writing will reflect that.

SNK: You seamlessly transition between lengths and subgenres in your writing. What practices ground your process when you are moving between stories that have vastly different structural arenas?

RR: I don’t know about seamlessly. There are some lengths I really struggle at, although short story tends to come fairly easily. I don’t outline my short stories, but I do outline anything over 20k. So writing each of those separate forms is a very different process. With short stories I try not to overthink the work, whereas with novellas and novels, I tend to obsess over the structure and characters and plot, probably to a fault. What keeps me grounded in both is knowing what I am trying to say and doing my best to get there.

SNK: Originally this interview was going to be published in our Fantasy issue 100 that centered around themes of migration and transition. What are some of the strengths of writing about, to, and through liminal spaces?

RR: I am a creature of liminal spaces. This is my natural environment. I am sure there are both strengths and weaknesses to abiding here, but I also think this is where artists best create—in the ambiguity and flux of change and thresholds. Artists should never be too sure of themselves or who they are lest it hinders their ability to metamorphose.

SNK: Writing from the margins, I think, makes us more wary of the consequences of getting ourselves wrong. One of the things I love about your work is that you do not shy away from the experiment, and speculative fiction feels like the perfect arena for experimentation. As Octavia Butler said, “there are no walls.” That said, you craft your characters with so much care that their wounds, desires, loves and hatreds feel easily accessible to the readers. How do you write through/against the expectations that come up around any burden of representation tied to queerness, and cultural identity?

RR: I think you kind of have to say “fuck it” and write what you want to write. The human experience is messy and unsure and, in the end, lethal. Writing scared is no way to write. Writing worried about what other people think is no way to write. If that’s what consumes you, maybe don’t bother writing. The problem arises when one person is held up as an authority of a particular experience, and sometimes, most times, being designated as such is out of the author’s hands. It is something done to them, not something they have done. So it is inherently flawed, and we all know those who lift you up are quick to tear you down. So don’t worry about it. Be true to yourself and your experiences, write with integrity and do your best. Your function as an artist is not to placate or even represent, necessarily. Your role is to create, and creation requires transgression.

SNK: The year has just begun, but I am curious; what does writing, and publishing feel like for you at the start of 2026?

RR: Fraught. Difficult. Necessary. We are definitely in a time of change and pushback against marginalized authors. Many young writers won’t make it out of the starting gate as publishing pulls away from championing and marketing them. It’s a travesty. But it’s also a reminder that being a writer and getting published are two different things. Write because it feeds your soul, write because your stories matter. Commercial and professional success is the icing on the cake but cannot be the raison d’etre. Capitalism will always let you down.

SNK: What possibilities do you think dark fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction at large offer when faced with large scale systemic and societal inequities?

RR: What do they offer to the reader? Validation that your horrors are not imagined, escape from the confines of conformity, hope that stories can save you, or at least offer a respite. Plus, genre is fun.

SNK: My final question comes with so much gratitude for what you make possible by sharing your imagination with us. Thank you, Rebecca. What would you like readers who are coming into River of Bones to carry with them as they read the collection?

RR: I think the theme of the collection, as I say in the Introduction, is that “identity is fluid, desire kills, and survival makes one a monster.” Do with that what you will. These stories were mine emotionally, but they are in your hands now, Reader. Enjoy!

Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer. Her short story collection, River of Bones and Other Stories is out March 6, 2026, and her novel set in the Star Wars Andor universe, Edge of the Abyss, is out September 2026. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pup. She drinks a lot of black coffee. Find more on Instagram at @RebeccaRoanhorse and on BlueSky at @rebeccaroanhorse.bsky.social

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Future Archives: The Burned Letter of Nima Bahari of the Kupokea People from after the After

I write this letter because I do not have words to say, do not know how else to name what has occurred in the last few weeks or days or hours. I do not know which would be the most honest answer except it does not matter. She is gone and it is my fault. I write because we promised each other if one of us transitioned before the other we would write ourselves into memory like the storyteller from millennia ago said: “Everything you touch you change, everything you change changes you.”

I write because it is just like that. She was here and then she was not and everything is changed. This letter will be burned after I write the last word. I will burn this and use it to feed the fire that will burn them…

#

First Years After

When the Wageni first come, they are birds that sing a song we do not understand, but we are a curious people, so we want to know more. Their drones buzz and flutter and spin around us like magic. It is a dance of wonder and delight. Our children laugh and squeal and try to chase the flying things that are always so far out of reach. On the first day it is only a few hours of curiosity before they leave, disappearing into the stars that brought them to us. That first evening, we throw a party. We throw parties for everything curious. This is what we have learned from dying often. Celebrate everything, and we do.

***

First Years Before

I am thirteen years old and in my solar systems class when I reveal to my best friend what I was before I became a person. We are deskies, which means we are close enough that our legs graze each other’s hairs when we swing them. Ms. Namu has the ears of a hawk—she probably was a hawk in a past life—so we do not speak. We pass notes back and forth, mastering the art of holding paper like feathers, soft soft.

I heard my tata and mum speaking about my past life.

Ehe? What did they say?

You first Nima.

What do you mean me first?
You’re the one who started this conversation.

I know you know what you were.
Tell me…
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaassssseeeee.

Ohhh I know what you were doing now.
You were just trying to get me to be so curious about your gossip
that I would tell you all my secrets.

Tuni frowns before scribbling hard and fast.

best friends are not supposed to have secrets.

Tuni, come on. I told you I would tell you in due time.

Okay fine. Then I’ll also tell you in due time.

I open the note, crack a smile, and nod once at Tuni before turning my attention back to Ms. Namu. I start counting backward in my head from a hundred. I get to fifty-four before Tuni cracks, passing me another note under her desk.

A lion.

I look to Tuni and she curls her fingers and her face, imitating a soundless growl. It is the most spectacular thing I have ever seen. I can’t help it. I laugh. It is a soft laugh, barely even a chuckle, but Ms. Namu the hawk will have none of it today. “Nima and Tuni! Detention now.” I feel bad because I have gotten Tuni in trouble, so I scribble a quick note before we walk out, heads down, avoiding the shame we might receive in other people’s eyes. I slip it between Tuni’s fingers, knowing it will be the key to her forgiveness. When she opens it, she will read in my horrible handwriting…

A star… I was a star that exploded.

**

Many Years After

“Nima! Niiiiiiiimmmmaaaaaaaaaaa!” I am removed from my reverie by Tuni’s voice, which is almost as big and tall as she is. Her locs fall all the way down her back, a mane of interconnected fibers so thick and lush, most of the lockers from our tribe go to her for her lion’s secret recipe to strengthen their own hair. Tuni, who was the biggest troublemaker in school, is now on her way to becoming the head educator of our district. Technically she is my supervisor but you would not know. “Lost in the skies again ehh?” She chuckles, showing off the deep dimple in her left cheek. She shakes her head, the beads at the end of her locs clicking in a patterned sound that compliments her laughter.

“Always.” I smile back, not even pretending.

I grab my notebook and pens as she grabs my hand.

“We’re late. And I know you do not care about something as measly as time, Ms. Supernova, but as for me I do not have the luxury of choosing when I will or won’t be somewhere.”

“You’re the one who chose this big fancy job, no?” I scold her, not even bothering to react to the nickname she decided on what feels like lifetimes ago. I have tried to explain to her that there is a difference between the star that is exploding and the supernova after the star has exploded, but she always dismisses it as frivolous details.

“It is all the same,” she says, and how can I argue with that. From the time we are young, we are taught that we are all the same—and yet when I look at my best friend, I am in awe of our differences.

“Why are you in such a hurry to meet these Wageni anyway?” I ask, attempting at sounding tired. “What’s so special ehh? We have had visitors before. It’s always the same thing, people from other planets, curious about our world come and see and eventually they get bored and leave. Always the same.”

Tuni tsks at me. “They want to bring their children to our schools. It is different this time. They want to stay.” 

I roll my eyes as she hurries me along the turquoise seashell-colored corridors of our campus, now empty after the end of the education day. In the distance we can hear voices. The booming voice of Abu, the year-twelve to year-fourteen math teacher, carries as he flatters someone we do not know and cannot see. I groan. Abu is a panderer. He will flutter and titter like a peacock around any person who he thinks has something he wants. In fact, I wonder if he was a peacock in his past life, or a politician. Something slithery, but not a snake, snakes are too good for him. As if he can hear my thoughts when we walk in, he eyes me with a death stare that could transition me on the spot if I were in any way afraid of him. I am not. I ignore Abu and look up at the aging T’cha Sue who is stepping down from the head educator position and making room for Tuni. T’cha Sue, in her yellow flowered matching kitenge blouse and skirt, does not notice me but gives Tuni a small frown of displeasure for our lateness. I feel Tuni’s shame radiate in heat waves. I squeeze her hand and she lets go. It is a small moment. It is a small shame. Both will pass. I shift my gaze to the Wageni, whose presence I had not fully registered. They are tall, straight-backed, big-eyed, soft-mouthed, brown with hints of gold like the dark sand on seashore that shimmers in the sun. The one who speaks to T’cha Sue is their community leader. She wears some kind of uniform that boasts their people’s colors of choice, blue and yellow. I wonder if that is why T’cha Sue wears her yellow suit today and her sapphire earrings. Tuni is already being introduced as the up-and-coming head educator, a star of our people, who over the years has offered creative ways to engage our youngest students with the most innovative knowledge rooted in experience. I am distracted by the flying drone that buzzes around the Wageni, and translates our languages. Ever since their first visit, our children have been fascinated with these little birdlike devices that seem to dance on air. I study the drones, capturing as many details as I can to explain in my next imagination and memory class, already patting myself on the back for the excitement I am sure to receive from my year-eight to year-eleven students. The “what if”s they will derive from the flying robotic contraptions. I don’t notice him at first, the person who will shift everything I know about everything. Hidden behind their community leader, S., a tall woman whose booming voice and big presence suck up the room. I have always been drawn to the ones that hide behind those who want to be seen and as I will come to find out, Totlo has always enjoyed seeing more than being seen.

He coughs, and I notice him looking at me, big eyes and shimmering skin enchanting me. And there is curiosity between us. I can sense the pull of it almost as strong as I sense my own breath. We have been taught to celebrate curiosity. It is a lesson I sometimes put away, but mutual curiosity is harder to ignore. It is a force that draws even those who have sworn off adventure into what they do not yet understand.

“Nima.”

Tuni hisses, and I realize by the way she says my name that it must not be the first time she has tried to get my attention. I plaster on a smile and turn back to the conversation at hand as if I have always been paying attention. “Your memory and imagination class, I am sure you can expound on what I have said about it.” And behind Tuni’s eyes is the plea please don’t ruin this and I always do, no matter how hard I try not to, but you cannot blame a girl for trying. I look straight ahead at the Wageni prime minister.

“All of who we are as a people sits between what we remember being and what we know it is possible to become. The class calls on the specific part of our students’ critical thinking that navigates past and future. It is a nonbinary method insisting that their recall and imagining are both for their individual selves and the collective whole.”

S. looks at me, a shadow traveling over her eyes, an expression I cannot place as the drone translates what I have stumbled through. She breaks into a tight smile. “It sounds like a child’s game. A theory that everything is possible. Does it not breed foolishness?”

“Foolishness?” I incline my head to the side, curious about the translated word that feels misused in this context. I open my mouth to begin an unrehearsed rant, and Tuni squeezes my hand, so I settle for a soft “Nothing curious is foolish.”

S., the Wageni leader, does not even take a breath after hearing my statement before responding. “Daydreaming about what has passed, playing games with what isn’t even here, is a privilege my people have never been afforded.”

I smile. I understand her, but I feel she has not cared to understand me.

“We have teachers of our own.” She says this to T’cha Sue, occasionally glancing at Tuni but never at me. “We will integrate them with yours as we integrate our children into your communities.”

T’cha Sue says, “Of course, we welcome you into our fold, but what you say must be discussed with all of our elders and not just turned into yes.”

S. nods and the people she has come with nod with her. They share an unspoken agreement and the one that I cannot help but stare at stares back at me and without saying a word to each other, we share an unspoken agreement. Our mutual curiosity will be fed.

**

Many Years Before

When we are sixteen, our marks begin to form. For some all at once, for others slowly over years, especially the ones with difficult past lives they would rather forget. The marks are tattoos sketched by the air into our skin. Seven is my number, seven lives before the one I live, seven versions of me somewhere in the universe. I have always become too big for the thing I am supposed to be, burning out quickly. Before I was a star I was a cat, I think, the whisker mark makes me out to be. It was a short life. I imagine I hated to feel confined and would go where I did not know how to go. The mark before that one is covered by the sea, a whale down deep underneath the waves. In this life I am drawn to the ocean’s edge, constantly searching for kin I have forgotten who may have forgotten me.

Tuni is on life twenty, which is not a surprise to me. She has always felt older, even though in this life I came a year before her. I have teased her often for being more adjusted to the world we were born into, instinctively surer of how to stay away from the things that will hurt us. Of course the explosion in me gravitated toward her. Before a lion, she was nyasi that grew long and untouched in the grasslands of the West. Her nineteen marks are elegant, daintily etched, except for one that is not fully formed. It is like a shadow of a life that does not want to reveal itself. She does not let me touch it—it hurts, I think—and she does not want to remember, so I tell her we do not have to. We are here now with this life as best friends and that is more than enough. I say, I would explode a thousand times if it means I get to be here with you again, and she smiles and calls me her big Ms. Nova.

***

Many Years After

The boy who is not just a boy looks at the chief captain with something akin to worry. An expression that has found familiarity on his face as the years have aged her. “You look tired. Sit.”

He offers her a glass of water in her cabin on their ship, which she has refused to abandon, even though their people have been offered ample accommodation on the planet they have begun to occupy. In the galaxy files it has been numbered and categorized as planet 014969. Its people refer to it as Kupokea: to receive.

Commander S. laughed at the irony when she first heard that, considering it was to be their new home. She now paces back and forth in the sparsely decorated room, being that she is the kind of person who has learned through brutal experience not to keep meaningful things in plain sight. The room contains a singular bookshelf, a double-sized bed, and a desk and chair. No pictures, no memories. The only sentimental items Commander S. has time for are her people.

“What does the word say?” she asks as she takes the glass offered to her and gulps down the water in one breath. Even the goddamn water is magical on this planet. She shakes her head in disbelief as her taste buds adjust, still not used to the pureness of clean river water. She hopes she never gets used to it.

Totlo asks, “Which part?”

“The promise in the Word. Say it.”

He obliges, voice soft. “You shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the planet of berries and honey to inhabit.”

Commander S. walks toward the leftover breakfast tray by the tall brown bookshelf mostly filled with navigation and planetary geographical texts. Books about the universe from times past that were more theoretical than practical, many debunked long since. And yet Commander S. reads and rereads these books almost as diligently as she reads the sacred texts of the Word.

The tray holds a pot of milk and a bowl of blackberries dipped in honey, the same breakfast she has asked for every day since their arrival. She takes a small silver spoon and collects as much honey as it can hold, then she deposits the honey in the tall glass of milk and stirs diligently.

“Does this feel like home to you?” She asks Totlo, who responds after a few heartbeats.

“…They are a very welcoming people.”

“That is not the question I asked.” Commander S. brings the sweetened milk to her lips slowly. Unlike the water she had gulped down, she lets small sips sit on her tongue, savoring the creamy texture.

Totlo responds with a question of his own. “What is home? How would I know what home feels like if I have never felt it?”

“Home is freedom. The land is ours to own, use, extract from. If only your mother were here to see what is possible. It is disappointing, what we could have been earlier.” The commander laughs, looking outside the tinted window of her room in the ship at the expanse of the land before her. “But this, dear niece, is cause for celebration not grief. A gift on our terms. Harvest blackberries from the fields we have been given. Draw up a list of minerals that we can use as currency. Our work is just beginning.”

Totlo does not respond.

**

Many Years Before

There is a song the children sing when they play their games, about a woman who came from the stars.

Kumbuka kumbuko
Kumbuka kumbuko
She loved him,
The man who did not die
The man who she was meant to kill
She loved him, so he could not die
Kumbuka kumbuko
Kumbuka kumbuko

And Now

He finds me. I knew he would, or rather I sat with my curiosity, letting myself linger on the brown eyes, curly not-quite-kinky hair, and dusty skin. When the memory interrupted my lesson planning, I let it. When the desire to know carried into my dreaming, I welcomed it. I’ve read books from other planets that called this feeling a crush. Though the curiosity of crushes was not always mutual.

When Totlo—whose name I do not yet know—finds me I am sketching on the common bridge by the water, one of my many favorite spots to be. I sense him more before I see him, sense the hesitation and indecisiveness that guides the soft steps on the stone cobble staircase on my left. I immediately know it is one of them and not one of us. My people announce themselves, almost always if not always distinct. And my past life marks do not glow in the recognition of kin.

“Come sit,” I say and do not look up, focused on shading in the shadows of the horizon line. It is harder without color to get it just right, but it is a new challenge I am working on with my students. Imagining our world without color. This one stretches their imagination more than most, though I have a strong suspicion that Tito and Tamera, the twins who were born seeing every color but blue and green, will find this particular assignment exhilarating. Already, I have heard Tito whisper about doing a presentation on a colorless sky, and Tamera is thinking about presenting on the forest without green.

As for the rest… I erase the off-kilter wave in my drawing and rework it… I have to make sure that this is the most alive piece I have ever drawn. I hear the gasp behind me as the mgeni’s scent fills my nostrils. He smells like lavender. I breathe it in, letting my chest expand.

“How did you…?” He sits down beside me. “This is incredible!” The little drone bird around him translates, and I can tell from the inflections in his voice, in his own language, that his reaction is honest. I smile.

“Asante,” I say and the buzzing bird translates as I attempt to capture the darker air just underneath a cloud close to the sun. I place my pencil down and look up. My turn to gasp.

The mgeni is beautiful, as I remember. Dark eyes, skin flickering like starlight, lips curved upward, soft…

“What are you doing?” The translated question catches me off guard, but I am quick on my feet.

“Sketching, can’t you see?”

“Yes. Why? And why no color? And how this alive? Do you do this often?”

I wonder if the translation is word-for-word or if some things get lost. I laugh.

“I do not know which question to answer first.”

They seem to consider this for a moment, then say, “wherever you travel with your answer, I will follow. Take me where we can go together.”

“Ahhh, so you are a poet?”

I hear the word in his language, it sounds similar to ours: mshairi. I love when languages do the thing of familiarity, holding secrets of their own past lives. I wonder if our languages were kin in a past life. I do not wait for him to tell me if he was or wasn’t a poet, instead I answer his questions.

“This drawing is for my students.” I say, looking over my work now with pride flowering in my chest. “I am trying to prove a point.”

My second statement piques his interest, as I knew it would.

“What is the point you are trying to prove?”

“That there is beauty without color.”

And this takes him aback even more.

“Why?”

I shrug my shoulders. “A game of ‘what if’s.”

We sit in silence, and even though we are strangers there is something easy about the silence.

“You have a world filled with more color than I have ever encountered.” He shakes his head. “Why?”

He still does not understand, and I cannot help but teach. It is who I am in this lifetime.

“Look out there.” I point into the distance where a whale’s blowhole spurts a lively burst of sea water into the air.

I cup my hands around my mouth and scream as loud as I can.

“Eeeeeeeeeiiiiieeiiiiiiiiiieiiiiiiiiiieiiiiii!”

And the whale responds, whistling back. The stranger watches it in awe and laughs at the response, just as the whale disappears back below the depths of the sea.

“That is my kin,” I whisper, my voice scratchy. “She recognizes me as I recognize her.”

He cocks his head, waiting for me to say more. I consider pulling up my sleeves so he can see the marks right underneath my elbow, but as much as I feel uncannily trustful of this mgeni, something holds me back. I do ask, however, “Have you heard about our history?”

He nods. “Bits and pieces, as much as your community elders have been willing to share.”

“Ahh,” I say. Turning back to the sea, I start the story. “So you know we do not die.”

“Who is the mshairi now?” He chuckles.

“It is not just poetry or metaphor.” I smile. “We transition. When our time as what we are is over, we move elsewhere, our energy transferred. In a past life, I was a whale. It was a while ago, so I do not have access to the language anymore, but I do recognize undrowned mammals as kin. They teach me how to breathe and how to see. You see underwater, deep down under, there is no light. It is just darkness for spans and spans of time and space.”

I wait for the mgeni to recognize where I am going with this. And finally, he nods.

“It is a world without color.”

“A-plus.” I grin. “Who are we to tell the whale that their world has no beauty? Isn’t that such a tiny, horribly pathetic imagination to insist upon and hold on to?”

We sit in silence after that. Comfortable, watching the light turn dusky. After more than a couple of breaths the mgeni says, “I have something like that too… a past life.”

And the mgeni tells me about his people’s planet. He says there are many things he cannot—No, should not say aloud but he wants to say them anyway, and I let him because I know I have felt that way around him too and we are in one of my favorite spots, and only my kin under the water can hear what we say.

 The bigger story starts somewhere before the moving planet of travelers; the story continues with empires bigger than travelers seeing those that did not conform to empire as not deserving of any planet to call home; the story goes on that the mgeni’s people called themselves wanderers, survivors, moving militaries hired to fight proxy wars that were not theirs to earn rest on planets filled with empire’s people who rejected them regardless of their blood being shed in the wars. And across generations their numbers reduced from millions to hundreds of thousands, now contained within their broken histories on their ships filled to capacity with survivors who were tired of never having anywhere to call home. It only made sense that unrest broke out.

Then there is the story of Totlo. The story of how he was the daughter of their people’s prime minister, which in leadership is similar to our elders. His mother was killed in a coup that was quelled, and his aunty, her sister, hid him… The story goes that his mother was always the softer of the two sisters, but the story also knows that they lived in a universal economy that abhorred softness, and this they learned the hard way. The daughter of the prime minister had to disappear to be protected: that’s when Totlo became Totlo, a distant nephew of the commander. The story goes that when Commander S. took up leadership she ran a tight ship. Learning from her sister’s death, she took no chances and also promised what her people needed to hear, a home. Commander S. said it was written in the stars, the destiny of the traveling wanderers. There would be, was, will be, is, a planet they would all call home.

Totlo shivers, shaking off something he does not want to confront. I see panic in his eyes, but as he looks at me something he sees allows him to let the panic pass.

 “I have been in training under Commander S. ever since,” he says, with truths hidden in the simplicity of that statement. I want to hold him, to share his grief, share in the loss buried beneath his chest. I nod and let the tear I considered holding in fall.

“I think about her sometimes.” He continues after a while of silence. “The girl I used to be, and it feels all at once so long ago and as if it is still now who I am.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I guess I was wondering if that is what it feels like? The past life?”

I nod now, allowing myself to travel with his answer, instead of asking more questions.

“It feels like many different things, but you understand in a way most people who are not us do not. When we transition, we do not mourn as those from other worlds with other deaths do. We do not think of ourselves as gone, we simply think of ourselves as changed, and that is something to be celebrated, but we also honor and celebrate the versions of ourselves that we were before our energy knew it was to be something else.”

I take Totlo’s hand in mine as the little blue-and-yellow drone buzzes around us. I wait for us both to inhale and exhale before I whisper, “I see you.” The bird translates, and I want to know he is hearing me, so I search his eyes for confirmation. “If you give me permission, I want to see all of you.”

***

Many Days After

“More than usual,” Tuni says, and I rack my brain to remember what she said before this.

I give up. “Sorry?”

Tuni sighs. “That’s exactly what I mean, Supanova. You’re up in the stars again and not in a fun way.”

I let the side of my mouth lift into the cheeky smile that almost always softens her. “It’s always a fun way, mama,” I say more than ask.

She gives me her supervisor look, one of the rare times the almost supersedes the always.

“It is not.”

“Tuni,” I say grabbing her hands.

“No, Nima. Listen, you have been spending so much time with that boy, and when you are not with him you are hardly here. I can’t look like I am favoring you at work, not when all eyes are on me, and besides do you not think it is all bit fast?”

I raise an eyebrow. “What is?”

“Everything… These Wageni coming in and all of your attention being captivated by him in the ways it has, and I know you are impulsive, but remember when we were younger and you had nightmares of exploding and you would carry the panic and I would tell you to take a breath? I think you need to take a breath.”

To demonstrate, she inhales deep and touches my chest, holding her breath until I also inhale, and after my exhale she touches my lips and shakes her head. More breaths first. I do not tell her that I know we are doing this more for her than for me, but when she is calm, I hug her.

“I’m right here. I am not going anywhere.”

Over the years we have learned that in her past life, Tuni lost her pride, or they lost her. Past life memories are fuzzy and unreliable, but the feelings both resolved and unresolved sometimes travel with you.

“It’s just…” Tuni collapses into a chair by me. “Everything is changing so so quickly, the Wageni… ask our elders to change the ways we do things agriculturally, and in our education system. That Commander S. wants to add military training. She says that eventually we will be a military base for other civilizations to come and train their people. Military training in education? Tuni? Mad ting! And the elders may as well be going senile. Instead of outright refusal, they bring up her intergalactic currency, the favor she has found with empire, and now they are actually considering it. Even T’cha Sue has started going for some of the Wageni’s religious gatherings and when she speaks to me these days she goes on and on about how ‘the Word says this’ and ‘the Word says that.’ That’s not even the point, the point is war and education should stay on separate paths, Nima! It feels like everyone is losing their mind, and that boy is not helping. What is so special about him anyway?”

We have always been honest with each other, even when it hurt, sometimes especially when it hurts. “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, mpenzi,” I say, squeezing her shoulder.

 She shakes her head and she says, “Is that what you think this is? I am always happy for your happy, Nima, never doubt that. It is just in this moment everything feels so…”

“Different?” I offer weakly as she says, “…unsettled.”

I nod. Unsettled is not something you can actually explain, but I want to try. “In my unit 303 class on imagination, we talk about change as possibility turned concrete. What we have not actually known, but only dreamed, is made real and that leaves us feeling detached from our own knowing. One of my students has called that being unmoored, which is a great metaphor for unsettled.”

Ohh shit. Tuni is crying. I said the wrong thing like I always do.

“I’m sorry, just ignore all of that and imagine I said exactly what you needed to hear,” I say, and she laughs through her tears.

“Dummy. I don’t need you to patronize me or treat me like one of your students. I just need you to be careful, okay? My gut just tells me to be careful.”

And what else can I do but whisper assurances and affirmations, beating myself up internally for not being more present. It is like when we were young. I used to make her wait to tell her things on my own time, but Tuni was stubborn. Eventually, she always got the truth out of me.

“He is not just a boy,” I whisper. “They are so much more.”

When I see her head tilt, I let my words travel in a different direction.

“Their people have been through more than we can ever imagine, Tuni, Totlo especially…” I go quiet not knowing how much I can reveal. “He was the child of a former leader of theirs. One who was killed. I just think there is a lot we can teach each other about change.” 

“Everything you touch, you change.” She whispers the beginning of the quote from a storyteller millennia ago. I smile, catching the memory of us at twelve discovering and devouring stories from other worlds and other times.

“Everything you change, changes you,” I respond, relieved that we are okay, and I am thinking about what version of this story I will give to Totlo, who is as curious as most of my students to know.

***

Many Years Before

The story of how our people landed on our planet travels in many forms, shapes, and sizes. There is the version that starts with a planet of lost souls who began here just before the first Earth’s sun exploded. There is the story of smaller big bangs than the first universal one, sputtering new worlds. A story of pseudo-Earths found, some built, making the irony of resource wars that much more palpable. And there is the hierarchy still carried into the galaxy, the intergalactic empire slowly building rulership and regulations that control most worlds, an effort to avoid repeating mistakes of the past… As if the past were not scattered with leaders who built empires that destroyed what they claimed to protect.

But we are at the edge of the galaxy, small, unimportant, barely discovered. We are tethered to our galaxy, content with our world, and somehow because of that we have survived. What we have learned from our curiosity is that most Wageni see themselves as separate from the planets they inhabit. What we have learned from our curiosity is that we are not. Everything Kupokea is, we are. Our stars, our moons, our sun, our soil, our grass, our weeds, our cows, our bees, our fish, our birds, our locusts, our roses, and our thorns. We are everything we are and more and when those who come to visit refuse to honor this, darkness falls, or they leave. To be everything is not for everyone.

***

And Now

When my students ask me about the throes of war, I speak in mosts. I am quiet for only a heartbeat before I decide to tell them the truth. I tell them that most battles were not glorious, I do not say all because I do not believe in the history of something as wide and long as war that all is a word that can be used honestly, most not all, because I was not there, but I can imagine just as I can remember through ancestral kin and their words.

What I do imagine and remember, I tell my students, is that more was lost than gained most of the time.

Later when I am sharing this with Totlo at our usual spot on the bridge he says, “I wish it were that simple,” and disappointment travels through me, telling me how much I value his opinion. I chide myself internally, of course, I am not a perfect teacher, and yes, I can take critique, and it is okay that I am not as wise as I think I am. The last one I disagree with. I am exactly as wise as I think I am.

“It’s not that you’re wrong,” Totlo adds, seeing something on my face that infers my internal battle. “It is just,” he continues, “battle cannot be fit into a single sentence, let alone war. There is no way to answer questions about war to a people who have never lived through it.”

This statement is a sucker punch, teeming with the differences of our lived experiences. He takes my hand in his, tracing the lines on my palm.

“You have told me when you teach about memory kin, it takes you at least a few hours to get through a summary of the life of one being. To talk about battle, you must talk about what came before. The beings, tens, hundreds, thousands.” He shakes his head. “One of them searches for glory, the other only wants to live, survival. Then there are those in-between: the one who thinks about legacy, about children; the one who thinks about permanence, whatever comes after the ephemeral; the one who thinks about the day they are in, a bed, food, a lover—immediate pleasure; the one who thinks about God, faith in a guiding purpose bigger and higher than them. War is about all of them, these who live or die for a battle that barely makes it into a history book for millennia after to study and still repeat. So no, it is not as simple as ‘most battles were not glorious.’ It is everything the battle was and wasn’t, everyone the battle was and wasn’t. It was the anger of those whose worlds had been stolen, the heartbreak of those who never knew living without battle, the breaths, and the bodies, and the blood. And still it is not that simple, because how can anyone explain war to a people who have never lived it?”

Totlo has gone somewhere, into the recesses of their mind, somewhere far back that I do not know how to retrieve them from.

“You are safe now,” I say, flipping over his hands so they are both carried by my own. I press my right thumb into the center of his palm, loosening whatever tension it carries, and he remembers I exist. His smile is sad, and I am sorry I ever brought up the subject.

“I don’t know what that word means,” he says, “but I am grateful for you, Nima. You teach me what is possible in the face of a brutality I have only ever known to be true.”

A sudden surge of bravery travels through me, our faces so close I can hear his breath catching up with mine.

“May I kiss you?” The bird drone buzzes the translation in his language, and his breath hitches. He nods, and nothing else is to be said.

I lean in, catching his lower lip between my own. I nibble gently and let him push back as my tongue teases the roof of his mouth. His hands travel from my shoulders, down the length of my back, finding my waist, encircling the sides of my body with his fingers. I guide his hands, pushing them firmly against the small of my back as I climb onto him. This not just a boy, this beautiful being, this heartrendered soul. I kiss him with everything I have to offer in this moment, and his touch sizzles my skin with pleasure. My fingers slip into the pocket I have yearned for. They come away slick with water I want to taste. And this is a language we do not need to translate.

Be careful. Tuni’s voice in my head. Be careful.

But it is too late. He has swallowed my cares with his lips around my tongue.

It is only later when we are lying with the moon reflecting on the water, illuminating our faces on the dock, that I ask the question that I have been afraid of asking, my heart drumming under his palm. “Which one are you?”

“Hmm?” His voice is honey, dripping with sleep and satisfaction.

I hate to take him back to where he does not want to go, but I have to know. “When you talked about the battle, you talked about the one who searches for glory and the one who wants to live and those in-between. Which one are you?”

 He turns on his side to face me. “And this is why I said you cannot teach about war, too many ways to get it wrong. Everything I told you could be bullshit.”

I push myself off my pillowed wrists, onto my elbows, so I can see him better.

“But you believe it. Most everything we say is bullshit to some being in the galaxy, but our belief in what we believe is what makes us who we are. So I will ask again, Totlo, from what you believe about the ones who die and live through war, which one are you?”

He turns back to the moon and goes quiet for long enough that I think I may have pushed too far. Then, as my eyes start closing to the thought that this moon might be a great-great-great-grandmother passed, he says, “I do not know if I have found it yet. The thing that people fight to live for.”

That is enough, because it is honest. Even with Tuni’s warning bells in my head. “That is honest.”

***

Tuni places the chairs back at the end of a very long school day. The empire’s call to allegiance sounds in the back, from the outskirts of Kupokea city center where most of the Wageni have used their technology to build expansive settlements at terribly swift rate. The translation bird drones are not the only AI they have. Tuni has observed that most of the other grounded robots are workers and/or weapons. Her senses sharpen the way they did that first day she met the Wageni; the hairs on her arm stand. She hears the footsteps behind her.

“The day has ended, and you are still here?”

The voice itches at Tuni’s skin, pulling her neck. She smiles.

“Commander S. I, uhh, am surprised to see you here.” Tuni, who has always been taller than her peers and more broad-shouldered than most of her community, is a hair’s breadth shorter than the commander.

“I was just cleaning up,” Tuni says.

The commander grabs a broom from a corner of the history classroom and starts to sweep.

“No you don’t have to…” Tuni tries, but the commander interrupts.

“It is mindless work, good for the brain.”

They work in silence for a several heartbeats. Wiping down desks and whiteboards, sweeping and then mopping the floor. The bird drone, a constant buzzing reminder, never allows their skins to settle.

Tuni has never been one for niceties, especially with people she knows have an agenda. The hairs on her skin will not settle, but she decides if the commander will not state outright what she wants, then Tuni can repurpose the conversation for her own needs.

“Your people have traveled everywhere, and nowhere has been good enough for you to live—but suddenly here on our planet, you decide you were meant to settle? Why?”

The commander laughs, a booming laugh that threatens to lull Tuni into a comfortable state. As if there was a warmth that once existed in her.

“You really do not pretend girl, neh? Most of your elders are well-versed in niceties, but I could sense that you were different.” The drone buzzes an interpretation of the commander’s statement. “Why not, though? We make an alliance, we are more powerful together.”

“I have read about travelling militias. In fact, my kin-mother told me the story of one who came to our planet. She fell in love with my kin-mother’s brother. And what I heard from the stories was that alliances as a word carries friend at the tip of its tongue and subjugation at the back. There are many planets for you to build alliances with, why ours?”

“Something I have been curious about: you were a predator in a past life, weren’t you? Which one?” the commander asks, instead of answering.

“I do not see why that is of any concer—”

“Fearless to the point of disrespect.” The commander’s eyes spark with well hidden rage. Tuni sees behind the charming front she portrays in public. Tuni clenches her fist. Pink creeps into the periphery of her vision and she knows when she starts to see red, she cannot be held responsible for what bridges she will burn. This is a stranger in her home, and she has the audacity to dictate. The commander continues.

“I will answer all your questions if you answer mine.”

Tuni pauses, calculating, then asks, “All?”

The commander smirks, nods. “Yes.”

“Honestly?”

“If you answer mine honestly.”

“Deal. One condition: a question answered for a question answered.” She does not wait for the commander to agree to the terms before continuing. “Yes, I was what people from other planets consider a predator in my life before this.”

“Which one?”

“That’s a second question, my turn.”

“A question that starts with a statement is not a question.”

“Nice try. My turn.”

The commander obliges.

“It is because you are unimportant, insignificant, a pseudo-Earth on the edge of the galaxy with enough resources to not need to get involved with intergalactic politics. That is why. Empire offered us a chance to settle, make a home for ourselves on a planet they have no use for. We took it.”

Tuni nods. She senses the commander is being only partially honest.

“What happens during your transition? Your elders have given me answers that are vague and too poetic for my taste.”

Why does it matter, Tuni wants to ask, but these are not the rules.

“Our energy, what has been called matter, or spirit, or essence. The thing that fires the neurons in our brains is snatched out of our bodies before they decompose. It is turned into something else.”

“No. Tell me more than I have been given by your elders. I asked for the details. Do you remember your past lives?”

“In the moment of transition, we go to what has been called the in-between. Our remembering is vague. As we grow, we get our past lives marks, telling us how many lives we have lived. The most recent past lives come as tattooed shapes that when we touch, we feel more connected to. And when we find kin in this life, our marks light up, reminding us of our connection. Every tree, animal, person has a mark of something before, although very rarely a being is born that does not receive any marks. They are new energy, generated, created from outside our own limited knowledge of the universe.”

 Tuni takes one of the upturned chairs on the desks and positions it so she can sit facing the commander.

“My turn. Do we have a choice in what you want us to become?”

This takes the commander by surprise, and then her laugh again.

“A predator you were. That is certain. Everyone always has a choice.”

The commander plays with a desk that has a broken leg, flipping it over, unscrewing the cap at the bottom and tearing multiple pages out of the notebook and stuffing the hollow part of the wooden leg.

“Even if the choice is death or change, it is still a choice. But your people are lucky.” She adjusts the desk so it is stands even. “You do not die.”

She says this in a way that makes Tuni’s insides curl.

“You know there are worlds with technology that doesn’t require desks or tables for education. Technology in fact that would require so much less labor from you as an educator in the classroom,” she adds, as she leans on the now-steady desk.

“And from what I have read of these other worlds, that same technology has commodified, itemized, and bureaucratized labor nearly entirely to the point of erasing any meaningful relationship to work. I, on the other hand, can see how much my students expand their relationship to curiosity. I can see the fruits of my labor. That is not a question, though.”

“It is not. My second-in-command has taken a liking to your friend, for Word knows what reason. Tell me about them.”

Tuni’s skin tingles. It is asked casually, callously even, but this does not fool her. Nima is in love with Totlo, that much is obvious, but Totlo means more to the commander than just her second-in-command. Tuni must play this game wisely.

“That is not a question.”

“Okay, who is Nima Bahari?”

Tuni is surprised by her own laughter. A response that makes the even-keeled commander uncomfortable.

Good. Questions reveal almost as much as answers.

“Nima is…a teacher of memory and imagination, a student of everything in the here and now, a speaker to the worlds beyond our own, not even in this galaxy but in the universe outside of galaxies. Nima is a force to be feared.”

“You love her?”

“Two questions, but yes.” The vulnerability shared does not feel like a weakness but evidence of strength, a warning of the savagery Tuni is capable of, to protect what she loves. “I love her as much as we need words to communicate in any and every language. My turn. Who was she to you? The woman who fell in love with my kin-mother’s brother?”

An intake of breath.

“Are you sure it is the question you want to ask?”

Tuni does not hesitate.

“Yes.”

“I will answer your question, Tuni Upepo, but it will be the last. She was a leader of our people. She is gone now. I am who my people need to survive.” The commander stands. “Speaking of which, I am expected to give a teaching. You know, you are welcome to join our services, Tuni Upepo. The Word may surprise you with what it offers.”

“Your Word justifies colonization.”

The commander’s unblinking gaze would be unnerving for anyone but Tuni who when reminded of how many people the commander has probably killed, touches the mane tattoo mark underneath her left elbow, and stands up to match the commander. Tuni welcomes the growl sitting in the back of her throat.

“I know that’s why she was here, Totlo’s mother. Your purpose for us is to become your new technology. Tools, weapons, unalive.”

“I would be careful if I were you, girl. Language is powerful.. The words people say tend to reach back from beyond their lives, gnawing at any hope of a different fate. Language traps you.”

“Do you believe what you preach?”

The commander smiles, and that was enough of an answer.

“Come, listen. We welcome everyone into our fold.” The drone buzzes the translation after the commander is already outside the class.

#

Many Moon Months Later

“I think she’s brainwashed them,” Tuni says, her braided cowry shell beads clicking as she shakes her head, before our weekly educators’ staff meeting. We sit by the small stream at the back of the education center. I am exhausted from teaching my adult opt-in Sense-Making class, which, as always, is heavy with irony.

“It doesn’t make sense, Nima.”

“Nothing ever makes sense, remember?” I tease back.

Tuni kicks dirt on the playground. She comes to sit beside me, her shoulder up against mine. I shrug. I don’t know how to offer a better answer to Tuni, who has become increasingly paranoid about the Wageni and the commander being here in the first place. We have had a variation of this conversation so many times and it is a fine line between making her feel heard and not encouraging any fanatic ideas.

“Nima. How else do you explain the elders saying yes to everything she decides?”

“I don’t think they say yes to everything,” I offer weakly, which is a mistake.

“You are becoming as bad as them. Spineless, and uncritical.” She is vicious and I am sick of it.

“What in the galaxy is wrong with you, Tuni? Yes, things are changing, but things are always changing in the universe. You of all beings know this to be true. Are you jealous of the general? Mad at me for spending time with Totlo?”

She pulls away and I miss her immediately.

“Ancestors’ spit, Nima! Our communities are being patrolled by their militia police, our governance being restructured into hierarchical compliant modes, our agriculture practices being overturned to feed a whole people who do not form relationships to the land that gives them food, and you think I am upset that you have a new lover?”

“That’s unfair, Tuni. We are learning from them, and they are learning from us. We feed off of curiosity, we always have. Our education programming has expanded, and the technology and medicine classes are concurrently thriving.”

“And yet we are the only ones adapting to what we learn, while they use their knowledge of us to control us. Do you trust her? Nima? Really?”

“I don’t know her.” And that is the truth. I know Totlo loves her. I know the version he has known is the person who has protected him, raised him. I know that she loves him, or at least I think she does. None of this knowledge equates trust. None of this would be good enough for Tuni.

“I can’t believe this.” She shakes her head. “You are smarter than this, you know?”

“You don’t think the elders are having these conversations among themselves? Tuni, why do you want to be the one to fix everything? Let it go, beloved. It’s not that you’re wrong. I am aware of how much is changing in our world since the Wageni’s arrival. I love you for being worried about our people, but you have lived multiple, badass lives with variations of all kinds, and in all of that, our planet is so young that none of us have lived through this kind of merger. Two different people attempting to become one. Aren’t you curious?”

“It is not merging when they believe that they are superior to us. I have heard the guards gossiping about the commander’s nephew, and you? You’re a laughingstock to them. So is he, by the way. They think we’re simple. Ignorant indigenous folk who can be walked over, and our passivity proves them right.”

An alarm goes off: a fire on the outskirts of the upper market where the Wageni’s homes and ships reside. The whole city is in motion, people moving both toward and away from the fire. By the time we get to the commotion, we realize T’cha Sue has been hurt and is in critical condition with one of our healers.

“It is her!” Tuni’s eyes are wild.

“Who?” I look in the direction Tuni points. In all its blue-and-yellow metal glory, burning to the ground, scattering flames and heat as far as the wind will blow: the commander’s ship. Or at least that is what it used to be.

#

Future Archives: During the After (read as a memory that is happening)

I write this letter because I do not have words to say, do not know how else to name what has occurred in the last few weeks or days or hours. I do not know which would be the most honest answer except it does not matter. She is gone and it is my fault. I write because we promised each other if one of us transitioned before the other we would write ourselves into memory like the storyteller from millennia ago taught: “Everything you touch you change, everything you change changes you.”

This is a memory letter I write because it is just like that. She was here and then she was not. You were here and then you were not. This letter will be burned after I write the last word. I will burn this and use it to feed the fire that will burn them.

Tuni was right. About the Wageni, about the commander, about all of it.

They came to our planet with the intent to colonize, extract, and eradicate. The commander will deny it to the last Kupokea child transitioned murdered in the street. The commander will narrativize the past as one that advanced the people it exploited, and what will be missing from the narrative will be most of the truth.

Most of the truth the day I saw her eyes change as her ship burned.

All the ways I explained her harmlessness to Tuni disintegrated into ash.

Most of the truth of the second she lost her calm, and looked at me and Tuni as if we were a biting insect she wanted to squeeze between her thumb and forefinger, as if we were the very dirt on the soles of her feet. I knew, in that moment, Tuni was right about everything. It was too late.

A Mgeni soldier; Lieutenant X, was killed in the fire. The first murder since the Wageni arrived.

Interrogation interviews were conducted. They did not last long. These are the memories. Wageni trials were loosely patterned after the intergalactic supreme court of empire.

Commander S. already had a convict in mind. I still hear the voice calling over the education podium,

“Tuni Upepo is being tried for the arson of Chief Commander General S.’s intergalactic ship Titan. Tuni Upepo’s charges are arson, manslaughter, and insurrection. Until she is tried by a court of law Tuni Upepo has the right to…”

“Bullshit!” I yelled immediately as they held out bonds to cuff her, but Tuni looked at me the way she looked at me when we were thirteen years old in Ms. Namu’s class and I was about to do something stupid. Her look told me to shut up. So I did, and by all the kincestors, I wish I didn’t listen to her.

They took her. The elders were useless! Our people’s passivity proved them right. It didn’t help that T’cha Sue had been harmed in the fire and was still undergoing intensive treatment. Commander S. kept saying she would retaliate for the harm that was brought to both of our people.

Fire for fire.

The trial was a farce. Consisting of a jury made up of Commander S.’s most trusted advisors and two of T’cha Sue’s kin. The memory of it burns me from the inside. The evidence against Tuni was flimsy at best, but it didn’t matter.

Their court convicts the criminalized, not the guilty. I should have known. I would have known if it wasn’t for Totlo. I will never forgive him. How can I?

She is/you are gone because of him.

In the in-between, if you hear this letter as it burns, I want you to know. I remembered something from my past life. I want you to know before everyone else does.

I remember how stars explode.

Supanova, the version of me you called back, was a memory eater. I remember that I ate memories of the galaxy, of the formation of our planet, of the worlds before. I ate memories and I remembered

how to burn.

**

Many Days Before

Totlo finds me pacing in my memory and imagination classroom. The education campus is closed pending the verdict on Tuni’s case so I come here to hide, and to plan.

“Can’t you do something?” I keep asking even though the answer never changes. This time his voice is different.

“Nima…”

“It is absurd,” I continue. “How did it get this bad? Was it always this bad and I just didn’t see it? They’re going to see it is absurd right?”

“Nima. Sit down.”

I continue pacing. “It’s your people, Totlo. Don’t you have any power? Can’t I at least see her?  I haven’t touched her since before they took her, and I know she doesn’t look scared in court but that’s Tuni. She won’t look scared in front of anyone but me.”

“Nima.” Totlo’s voice breaks as his bird translates. I refuse to look at him. I have to keep moving. The classroom is not big enough, but everything outside of it is too big. I walk to every corner of the memory-infused room. The chairs stacked on top of the desks, the self-portrait of me and Tuni on my table, the constellation kin lights she got me as a gift, reflecting on the ceiling. I have not been able to turn them off since she was taken.

“Nima, she is gone.”

I think it must be a mistranslation. Of course I know she is gone. She is not here. He continues and maybe if he hadn’t it wouldn’t be true, but he does.

“As she was being taken back to her holding cell on our justice inquisitions ship, Tuni tried to escape, knocked one of our guards unconscious and the other, seeing her as a threat, shot her three times. It was excessive, but our people are a trained militia, they shoot first. The commander is holding him for questioning…”

“No.”

I do not want to hear anything else, but Totlo keeps talking and his drone keeps translating.

“She was alive when she got to the healers but barely. They couldn’t save her.”

“You did this!” I scream. He walks up to me, but I won’t let him near me.

“There’s more.” He whimpers. “I burned it down.” He unsheathes two letters from his coat pocket. “The ship. It was me. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean for things to go this way… Nima.” He starts to cry and I walk toward him as the information sinks in. I punch him, square in the jaw, and the letters fall to the ground as he trips backward. It is not enough. He keeps talking.

“I love you, Nima. I know you loved her. I will do anything.”

I can’t stand the buzzing drone flying in the space between us. I can’t think straight. She’s dead. He burned the ship. She is dead. He burned the ship. I yank the drone out of the air and throw it as hard as I can against the wall. It falls, tripping over his words. I grab a chair and walk toward the fallen drone. I smash it over and over and over again, knowing every hit silences Totlo’s voice. I shatter the translator device into tiny little pieces and break one of the chair’s legs in the process. I fall to my knees, panting.

Totlo speaks. I cannot understand him. I do not hear him. I do not see him.

I scream at him. He cannot understand me.

“Leave.” I point to the door. I will never forgive him.

Tuni, my Tuni, who will be, already is, something magnificent in the next lifetime. Tuni is gone. We did not die before they came, but what else do i call the way my heart shatters.

I have known beings that have transitioned. Animals, people, plants. I have seen energy leave, disperse, travel. There is always a transition doula who guides the life seeking to inhabit a different body. Tuni did not have that. She was not surrounded by her people, she did not get to transition on her own terms. She is gone. I weep.

The grief is so intense I am certain it will consume me into my own transitioning.

Time passes. I do not know how long, but I cry, I throw up, I sleep fitfully, waking to a moon’s light filtering through the windows. A warm breeze unsettling what wants to be still. I see the letters Totlo left. Two of them. They are in the Wageni’s language. He once gave me a translation dictionary he said belonged to his mother. He found it on the ship a long time ago. I use it to translate the words, slowly, painfully. It takes time, but I am glad for the distraction.

The things he was trying to tell me do not make sense.

Why did he burn the ship down? The letters are puzzle pieces, evidence of something that could help me understand. They are both written in the same hand but addressed to two different people. Salma of the Wanderers and My precious Tottie.

I wipe the tears that fall furiously as I translate. I am angry at everything, but I am Kupokea. I cannot outrun my curiosity. I read.

Dated: The year before Totlo’s birth

Salma,

Sister,

I couldn’t do it. I am sorry. I know I failed us. I failed our people.

But they are alive. Just like us, granted it is different. The Kupokea deaths do not hold as much gravitas as ours, they come back,

but I went for a transitioning ceremony and even in the dancing, even in the laughter, there was silence, there were tears. I know you will say I have become soft…softer….

I think to myself I may have.

You would too, I think, if you lived with them for as long as I have, and maybe it is time for us to allow ourselves softness.

Of course there is K. I do not think he will return with me, but we have accepted the ephemerality of our love. It has been, sweet sister, a thing they call mutual curiosity. I have exciting news, I think. I need to do one more test to confirm.

Try not to worry. The Word also tells us, “Home is a people not a place.”

Have faith. We have made it this far.

Everywhere we are together!

The second letter…

Dated: The year of Totlo’s thirteenth birthday

Tottie,

I have been waiting for your marks to appear, and nothing yet.

K, your kin-father, told me that sometimes, rarely, a being will be born and grow through their whole life without any marks.

They will be new energy. It would be unsurprising if that is what you are, energy made special just for me, or maybe you simply need a few more years for the marks to appear. I don’t know if I have that.

Our people are exhausted, and looking for a scapegoat.

Empire is too big to blame, too vague, too many heads. I, as our people’s leader, am its representation. Small enough that removing me may feel like a victory, and they need a victory. I have overpromised. I have led us to fight in wars that are not ours, to put food on our tables and keep the ships we have. I have helped us survive.

I sometimes think about the choice I made on Kupokea. If I had gone through with it, what Salma and I had agreed, we would have a home, but I couldn’t do that to your father, couldn’t let that be your origin story.

I do not know how this will play out.

You will be safe. S. will protect you. However else she fails, she will protect you.

Here’s a little secret, you will change but you will never die.

Love,

Mama

My heart hurts for Totlo, and I hate him for it. I hate all of them. This woman I have never met who fell in love with one of our own. Tuni’s kin. I recognize too what she does not say underneath what she does. They were always going to kill this version of us. Our language of transition excusing mass murder, turning it into something softer, something more malleable, an iteration of us that would be born into their subjugation as universal knowledge. A knowing not to be questioned, and she couldn’t do it. Totlo’s mother couldn’t do it. Instead she gave birth to one of us.

Salma, on the other hand. I remember the ways she looked at me and Tuni when her ship burned down. And now Tuni is gone.

I burn the letters. I find my rage has turned into hunger.

**

And Now

I find Totlo by the bridge. Our bridge. I knew he would be here, or rather, I both dreaded and hoped his being here into existence. If this is going to work, I need him. He carries a small, oddly shaped box on his lap, a trail of goosebumps across the length of his arm. I resist the urge to touch him as I sit. The familiarity of our intimacy warring against the betrayal.

“Nilikuanataka kukuona.”

His accent is terrible, and he places emphasis on vowels that should not be emphasized. Tuni would ride him hard for the way he speaks our language, but Tuni is not here, and I destroyed his translator.

“Nataka akufe pia.” Totlo opens up the box on his lap and words pop up on a screen as he speaks, translated into my language. “i want her dead too.”

“It is an older translator mod. It is…difficult to get a new bird, but this works for now,” he says and the words appear on the screen in front of me in my tongue.

“Did you read the letters?” he asks. I nod. He sighs.

“I found them in my aunt’s cabin, hidden. There was a third one. It was from the leader of the free states of empire right before the coup that took my mother’s life. Before I was born, she came here on a mission to gas the people of Kupokea. A quick, mass transition. Gassing is a tactic our military had used before in other wars on a smaller scale, never a whole planet. It was different though. Our people had heard about the ways your people transition, it wouldn’t be genocide if you didn’t actually die. And the hope was in the next lifetime you would be born into a world governed by our people without the memory of what you used to be so there would be less chance of resistance.”

I draw myself away from Totlo, wrapping my hands around my knees as disgust convulses my face.

“All of this was before I was born, Nima. I didn’t know any of it,” he says and shows me the translation. It doesn’t matter, I need him to finish the story. I don’t say anything. He looks like he wants to touch me, but he changes his mind, and pushes through what he has to say.

“She couldn’t go through with it.” He laughs bitterly. “She fell in love and had me instead. Commander S. didn’t like that. As the years progressed, my mother lost her taste for the militia. We fought fewer wars for empire, which meant less currency. We were surviving on scraps and the goodwill of richer planets that had no use for a people who only knew how to fight but refused to be hired to do it.

“The third letter was to my aunt, right before my mother died. She was given information about the coup that was to take place. Commander S. was given a small mission, told to leave until things died down. Instead of staying to fight by her sister’s side, she left and let it happen. She took me with her too. Then held me through my grief and the secrecy of my life as she grabbed the helm of power for herself.

“I remember that trip. There was a servant girl who stayed behind with my mother. Approximately the same build and height as me. She was my proxy, so they killed her. I’ve spent whole nights up thinking about her, and I can’t even remember her name. Aunty Salma taught me that well. How to forget. When I read the letters, I remembered how to hate her. I lit all her books on fire and they burned the ship down.”

His head fell as he whispered the last words that I read furiously on the translator. It does nothing for my anger.

“You could have said something. Why didn’t you? When they blamed Tuni!”

“I know there is nothing I can say that will be a good enough answer.”

“Try harder.”

“I had just learned everything I had been taught about my people, about my own lineage, about myself was a lie. The truth is, I was scared, and I didn’t know who I could trust.”

“You were scared, Totlo? My best friend was shot three times by one of your armed men because you were too scared to own up to what you had done.”

The machine on his lap buzzes as the translation works to keep up. I feel myself getting warm, heating up from the inside. The hunger is all-consuming, and I have to work hard to temper it.

“You were right,” I say softly. “It is not a good enough answer.”

“I,” he starts, “…my people…they aren’t evil. They are exhausted, wounded, broken from all the wars they have lived through.”

“And that is an excuse for mass colonization and eradication?”

“That is not what they thought they were doing.”

“We welcomed you with open arms, Totlo. My people invited yours with curiosity. The first of us to ask any questions, to push back, to doubt your diplomat, was unjustly tried for a burning that she did not commit and then brutally transitioned.” I shake my head. “Commander S. was going to kill us, and still will.”

“I am on your side,” he says decisively. I shudder as a sharp chill stirs my own goosebumps. “I have something to show you.” He pulls up the sleeve on his left arm. “It showed up a moon month ago. That’s when I realized there was something the commander was not telling me.”

It is a mark. A baby orca tattooed into his bicep.

“I started looking for memories, evidence of a time before. I wanted to tell you, but I was waiting for the time to be right. We are kin, Nima.”

I shake my head.

“Kinship is not blood, it is bond. It is earned. You do not get to call yourself kin because you have some of our blood. Your mother fetishized our people, and your blood aunty would have us all gone so she can take our planet for ourselves. You truly want to be kin? Prove it.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Die,” I say, and the word feels hot on my tongue. I will get him to agree.

Fire for fire.

**

Time Does Not Exist Here in the In-Between

In this moment of transition, after we are what we were, but before we are to be what we become, the streets smell like ash and blood; it is staggering. The slowness of this moment after the After, and it is here in the transition that you call it that; death, life. It is always both. We live because we die and we die because we have lived until we live and die again together.

I remember why it is so terrifying. The word death. I remember the earth littered with bodies, blood seeping into the cracks of the earth. I remember that it does not matter that the bodies change, break down, transition into the mycelium that feeds Kupokea. It matters that regardless of whether the transition happens within a second or a hundred years, the body is an echo of something lost, something that will never be that exact way again.

It is to be grieved. With deep guttural screams or stunted silence. It is to be yanked from the pits of those who bear witness. Those who do not die. It is to make everything stop for as long as time does not exist here. You pull on the strings of the universe itself, you the lion, you the whale, you the rat, you the kitten, you the exploding star, you the mango tree, you the child in a grown-up’s body, you the mother, you the lion, you the volcano, you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you wewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewe.

In the in-between of transition. All we can do is grieve, and those of us who are bold burn the marks of our deaths into the next thing that will carry our energy, the next body that will hold our spirit. I am blinded, individual. Trapped in the light of explosion, and still, I see with my hearing, my kin sharpening their teeth, filing their bones. Still, I remember that we are a curious people, and we can learn just as much about death as we already know about life.

Time does not exist here in the in the moment of transition, so we have all the time in the world.

***

Before the Transition into the After

Commander S. stands at the podium preaching in her finest blue suit, a yellow tie, and polished shoes.

“The Word executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, and sets the unjustly detained free. Comrades, have we not seen these promises fulfilled? Time and time again?”

A chorus of assent carries across the heavily packed room, filled mostly with the Wageni. Behind her, the wall is decorated with yellow stars and a blue moon, the picture of Lieutenant X. and a smaller picture of T’cha Sue wrapped in bandages with flowers all around her in a healing room.

“Since we have arrived, we have practiced the justice of the Word, we have taught and shared our knowledge, expanded the potential of this godforsaken planet, and yet for some people that will never be enough.” She shakes her head emphatically, showing contempt. “In fact, instead of gratitude, the response has been what would intergalactically, legally, be defined as terrorism.”

The crowd gets restless, rowdy. Commander S. smiles, extends her hands out in paternal gestures toward settling down.

“Now, now. We have been through this before, have we not?” Her voice rings clear across the room. “Our people have been trampled on and despised wherever we set foot, but we have survived. We have survived because we fight back.”

Someone lets out a low whistle, and a couple of folks in the audience cheer.

“The Word has told us to claim what is ours. To have faith, but, and remember this: faith without works is dead. We know that well. We carry that in our battle scars, in our wounds both visible and invisible. Without works, our faith is dead. We are dead. So we must work.”

A few “hear, hears.”

“Comrades. I have come to share good news. The terrorist is no more.”

 A child in the audience yells, “Down with terrorists!”

The commander smiles.

“Yes, child. The terrorist Tuni Upepo of the Kupokea people tried to escape her fate, injuring one of our own in the process. She was shot by Sergeant Lark, and as the people of this planet name it, she has now transitioned. May the memory of what waits for terrorists carry her into the next life.”

Totlo walks into the back of the room, and the commander acknowledges him from afar.

“These people. The Kupokea have not seen the wars we have seen. They are ignorant to the sacrifices necessitated by self-preservation, and that makes them weak. We are strong because we have had to be. We are strong because we have had no other choice. We will continue to be strong by setting examples of what we will not tolerate.”

***

“I’ll distract them.”

That’s what Totlo promised. Through the peephole, I see Totlo walk up to the front stage where the commander is and begin to speak. I carry the letter in my hand, the one that is mine. I carry a lighter in my pocket. I do not understand what he is saying without his bird drone, only the Wageni can understand him. But by the way the commander interrupts, interjects, and physically tries to push him off the podium, it is most of the truth. I enter from the side door he told me about and immediately I am faced with bodies and weapons carried casually facing the podium. They are distracted, clamoring to see what is unfolding before them. I am afraid for the first time, only a little. Then the fear passes.

I remember Tuni.

I feel warm, I draw on the heat infused into my rage.

Totlo says something and some people start to leave, filtering out through the back. Others stay, stuck to their chairs. Then she sees me. The commander laughs and draws her weapon.

Her drone translates as she says, “So this is the one who has run my nephew mad? He spews lies about me and my regime to our people. He calls himself Kupokea-Kin.”

Totlo wrestles the gun out of the commander’s hands, and she locks him in a choke hold.

“Make no mistake. You are my sister’s child but I will kill you, Totlo Amani.”

I waste no time, writing the last three words onto the letter in my hand. I flick the lighter, and burn it.

“Burning paper?” The commander smirks. “Your people have a strange way of…”

I lift the now-burning paper up to my mouth, letting the fire singe my lips, my tongue. I swallow the burning memory and hear the weapon go off as the pain sears through my chest.

Fire for fire.

Every molecule in my body carries the memory of all the lifetimes before this one, every version of me that I have been, that we all have been, transforms into cells both living and dead. In my hair, my nails, my skin, my eyelashes, my lips, are a burning collection of memory and imagination.

I am about to become what I have been. Supernova. Remnants of a dying star who must first explode, and after… After we will all come back.

Well, those of us who do not die.

After the After

Massacre takes on a different meaning. Here is what the general did not know after Nima Bahari exploded in the Wageni settlement. The commander did not know that rot eats itself out piece by piece by piece, ignoring the flaring damage it is causing, ignoring the searing pain. When killed unjustly, the mark burned into the next life carries a scar, a memory of what was taken.

The commander did not know that the Kupokea people, whose future deaths she had already begun to justify, were already retaliating. She could not anticipate that the avenging was already happening, before the first sword, before the first battle, before the first declaration of colonization. Before the man with a gun and a slave signs a document saying all are created equal. Revolt whispers. In every version of every universe, hierarchy demands the overthrowing of its keeper. Resistance is already blowing in the wind as rulers shake hands, (re)naming bodies and lands that already have names, claiming ownership.

The empire is burning down as it raises its first flag. By rejecting every other choice, it becomes its own poison, the dagger in its own side.

And us. We the grass grows back, we the trees replant, we the burned houses rebuild, we the babies without parents grow and become the ghosts of what we have lost, we the land remember what was taken from us and we reclaim it. We the planet of Kupokea reject the Wageni, we swallow them into ourselves, and the ones who refuse to atone we spit back into the stars, where they will learn how to burn the empire in which they were formed.

#

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14,000 words, published September 30, 2024

Publisher: Sean Markey
Editor: E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor: Laura Blackwell
Cover Art: inkshark
Layout and Cover Design: Christine M. Scott