Nathaniel Krenkel has lived in Kansas, Michigan, Utah, Glasgow Scotland, New York City and the Hudson Valley. He now lives, with his wife and two children, in Portland and North Haven, Maine. He owns the record label Team Love, and  is currently working on a sci-fi children’s book series. 

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There is a haunted house. It is made of whalebone, of mammoth bones, of overhanging cliffs and caves. It has carvings on the bones, and deep in the caves there are aurochs painted on the walls, the small handprints of women. The house is inland. It is next to the ocean. It is on wide, grassy plains. It is made up of people like me, and people who are not like me, and people who have expectations placed upon them by me, and by others. Primitivism, adaptation, competence. The ghosts of beliefs that linger, that color the homes that we live in, the bare biologies of them.

There is a haunted house. Beside it are midden pits, and in the pits are bones and stone chips and shells. When the house is by the sea there are always shells, piles of them, the insides eaten out and the shells left to rub and scrape against each other in pits. Hold a shell up to my ear and I can hear the ocean, but the ocean is right there, not much farther than whalebone can be dragged, and I don’t need shells to hear it. If I did, there’d be enough for a thousand ears, a thousand years, so when the shells are held up to the ear there’s something else to hear instead. And if, afterwards, the people who sift, chalk-handed, through the shells go for a dinner of mussels, of oysters, of all the whorled and juicy whelks, then it’s nothing but repetition, the actions of the dead brought back, carried on, the bodies of the living a late echo through time, a shell echo.

There is a haunted house.

If the middens are graves, they are not the only ones. Different bodies are buried, and there are objects buried with them. Tools, clothes, the remembrance pollen of flowers, although it is possible that the pollen came from insect incursion and not any sort of planting. When the graves are dug back up, there are breaks in the bodies: shattered bones, missing teeth, and these are present whether the skulls are flattened at the front or not, whether the thighbones are shorter, thicker, whether the ribs are longer and less curved. The proof of DNA shows a Neanderthal presence in many of us, evidence of sex, of raising well. Love, perhaps, of the sort that gave burials and grave goods, the possibility of flowers. It’s hard to imagine (it’s all too easy): flowers on the graves, flowers for the living. Which well-loved family member might have brought them to the other?

(Perhaps it’s just jealousy speaking. No one’s bought me flowers in ages. I could buy them for myself, I expect, but it seems a more certain thing to wait for death. I’m sure some will turn up then. Generations expect it.)

The haunted body, the haunted house. European heritage on my part, so there’ll be, tucked away in there, evidence of ancestry. I hope so. I’d like to be part Neanderthal. To know that some part of an ancient race exists, still, that it lives on. Is that a haunting? Perhaps. We’re the subjects of past traumas, and extinction is a trauma, one that’s written on bones and the memory of shells. Curious to know what’s still in there, how much my own structure houses the remains of the living and the dead. There aren’t deer painted over my walls; I barely even use lipstick. But still, but still.

I wonder how much can be brought out. I can say that I’m housing a ghost, but that’s a metaphor only; spirit boards aren’t going to work here. They’re a relic of a different type of house, still haunted, but even there I think they draw something out that’s not actually present. No evil entity, no invitation to possession. Just the unearthing of what’s buried inside so, you know, it might work after all.

No sense trying to conjure up a past that’s already recognizable in mirrors. Those are the things I can do already: color a hand and imprint the shape on walls, toss empty shells into piles, build a place of paint and bones. So many thousand years, and there’s not a lot of difference. It’s the other I want, but I’ve not used a spirit board before and nothing happens at first. Well, why would it. It’s a literate communication, not meant for the remnants of an individual not bound to literacy. But that’s a presumption of objectivity again, a reaching out that’s predicated on the separate existence of the other. If I’m looking to shovel off what I already am, then literacy is no barrier.

Nothing, still. No Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, though which would be which I don’t know. No sudden increase in body hair, as if a Neanderthal were a werewolf and not a person no more hirsute than I am. I wake up in the night and hear flutes playing, but I’ve never been musical and if the ability to play anything at all is embedded in the memory of DNA, it’s buried too deep for me to unearth it. I probably dreamed it anyway, and if I did there’s no reason to believe it came from the wrong side of the family, the haunted side.

The hunted side.

They made art, too, and I can’t do that either. Shells strung like macaroni, bird bone jewelry. The cat brings a dead bird in, and I bury it with chips of stone – not flint, I wouldn’t recognize flint if I fell over it, just gravel from the driveway – and dig it up again weeks later, scrape out those little honeycomb bones. They’re so light, so delicate, and it’s hard to string them together so that they don’t shatter and it doesn’t feel artistic, I must say, it just feels ghoulish. The cat’s more interested in the final product than I am. I wear them anyway, throw bones on the board, paint myself with ochre. It smells disgusting, an oily swamp aroma, so I wash it off again.

Sometimes, in the mirror, there’s a flash of brown in my eyes. I get some colored contacts, cover up the blue that I know perfectly well was a mutation come from early Homo sapiens. Not that I know what that relic Neanderthal DNA does, exactly, but it lost out on eye color. The Black Sea mutation, giving me the color of blue water. By the time it turned up, the Neanderthals were long dead, dead for tens of thousands of years, dead with their flints and their grave goods and their grave flowers, the bits of themselves they left alive in me.

I like the brown eyes. It takes me no time at all to get used to them. An early mother, resurfacing. The haunted body, reanimating.

I try the spirit board again, watch it through older eyes, ancient colors. Those eyes blink as I push around the planchette, and there’s nothing to indicate an upwelling of prose, the stirrings of subconscious identity come into story, but for a moment, for several moments intercut, it seems as if my hands are bigger. They’ve always been small, especially compared with my height, but these are bruiser hands, broken-fingered and then healed again, a sharp flare of stiffness, and then the flesh as it is always was. The board, I think, is a bust, but if there’s memory in fingers there can be memory in feet as well, so I dig out the ochre, slather it on soles and try not to think about carpets, which are old and eaten up with carpet beetles and due to be replaced anyway.

The carpet’s torn up in the hall, the lack of fibers making prints clearer (there are no aurochs here, no cave hyenas, the leavings of that other family, the one that has my first allegiance). One footprint looks as it always has. The other is longer in the heel, the bone not shaped for long-distance running. If anyone were to ask, I could have told them that anyway, the bone necklace sharp against my breast, because I’m not a runner and the prospect of marathons as a means of hunting down my dinner is a terrible one.

The paint stains the wood. I don’t know whether to cover it over or not, leave the carpet off and varnish the floors, but when I come back after bathing, the ochre scrubbed off my feet, the only prints left are right-footed, the ones that always were. The long heel bone has worn away: haunting never stays forever.

I take out one contact, pretend to be heterochromatic. One blue eye, for the mirror, and one brown, for the past. I eat shellfish for dinner, and listen for echoes.

A haunting may not stay forever, but I can invite it to.

There is a haunted house. It is whalebones and mammoth bones, the inside of painted caves. It is long ribs and long heels, it is blue eyes and small hands. It has a bed of rubbish.

It doesn’t come when called.

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She has a PhD in science communication, and likes to mix up science and speculative fiction in both her academic and creative work. She’s sold close to 70 short stories, to markets including Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Strange Horizons. Her latest book, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, is a cli-fi novella published by Stelliform Press. She’s won five Sir Julius Vogel awards, attended Clarion West 2016, and was the 2020 writer in residence at Massey University.

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Christopher asks, “In modern times, what precautions are taken to ensure that someone is not buried alive?”

Very few, I’m afraid. None of our standard caskets come with emergency bells or breathing tubes, and the cement vault or grave liner would impede rescue. For the typical modern burial, the person will probably sit in refrigeration for a day or three before being embalmed. While waking up in our cooler might not be a pleasant experience, it would be preferable to waking up on the table. Once I get my hands on your carotid artery, you’re definitely not being buried alive. For decedents whose traditions call for rapid burial without embalming… In those cases, we must put our trust in modern medicine and hope for the best.

Jeremy wants to know: “How important, or what a distraction, [is] smelling things is in your line of work. … Do you need to be able to detect smells, to do your job properly?”

One’s sense of smell is definitely much abused in a mortuary. Decay, putrefaction, blood, urine, feces, and harsh chemicals are the primary culprits. Mostly a functional sense of smell is just a small misery. I become temporarily nose-blind to a certain level of stench an hour or so into a shift, only to eventually step outside and realize how much of the prep room is still clinging to my clothes. Some smells are bad enough that I never become inured to them.

There are a few instances, though, where a sense of smell is useful. I\’ve mentioned tissue gas before: Clostridium perfringens, the nasty little bacteria that accelerates decomp and can’t be killed by normal embalming fluid. Tissue gas has visual and tactile markers that morticians use to identify it, but those aren’t always obvious. The smell, however, is very distinctive. Once you open the jugular, you’ll know.

Bedsores are another distinctive and profoundly unpleasant smell. (Everything about bedsores is profoundly unpleasant.) A decubitus ulcer on a decedent’s tailbone might be missed when we first look them over, but once they’re on the table, the odor is quite noticeable. If I’m ever staring at an otherwise fresh corpse wondering why I smell rot, the answer is nearly always a bedsore.

I’m fairly acclimated to embalming fluid by now, but I still notice an excess. If the ventilation system isn’t working properly, the prep room will become markedly “spicy.” If I smell cavity fluid (helpfully cinnamon-scented, you may recall) after I’ve finished suturing my incisions, I know the person is leaking somewhere.

Adam asks, “How can I become a skeleton?”

Never fear, the power was inside you all along! The power is inside all of us!

The trick, of course, is to keep all your bones accounted for and articulated. That part is more complicated. It also depends very much on whether you want to be an educational skeleton or an heirloom skeleton.

Becoming an educational skeleton is fairly straightforward. There are many types of anatomical donation—your remains can go to a body farm, or be embalmed to later be dissected by gleeful medical or mortuary students. You can also specify osteology donation, whereby your bones will end up at a museum, university, or other facility for scientific research.

According to the website of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in New Mexico: “Through a weeks-long maceration process that takes place at the Office of the Medical Investigator, the soft tissue is removed from the skeleton. Once fully skeletonized, the remains are moved to the Laboratory\’s repository, where each individual skeleton is housed in an archival-grade box.” Maceration, in this context, is a form of controlled putrefaction, the stage of decomposition where proteins are broken down by anaerobic bacteria. As opposed to decay, which is aerobic decomposition (“aerobic” meaning that it requires oxygen, not Jazzercise). I don’t know if any facilities use dermestid beetles to clean human skeletons, but I hold out hope.

If you want to become a skeleton but not a teaching assistant, I don’t have helpful answers. Human remains are legally considered quasi-property in America, for purposes of disposition, and forms of disposition are very limited. Options are slowly broadening to include processes like alkaline hydrolysis and human composting, but right now there aren’t any legal avenues of which I am aware to willing your skeleton to your family or loved ones. If I learn of any, I’ll let you know. (Please do not attempt to skeletonize your own relatives. Even if they ask you nicely.)

The necromancer welcomes questions from all future skeletons! No need to cast your own bones—submit them through our portal at thedeadlands.com, or to @stillsostrange on Twitter.

Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. She lives in Austin, TX with an invisible cat. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on Twitter as @stillsostrange.

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I’m not having eyes anymore, but still I’m seeing him visit that wretched body, day after day after day. Time is not having meaning anymore, but he’s coming every time before sunset, via that little shop on Roosevelt Road. I can tell because he’s carrying a blue shopping bag that I’m imagining stretching tight across his face like cling film, his face reaching and pushing and groaning through the plastic while his lungs desperately suck at nothing but cheap chemicals and the stench of dead leaves.

He’s supping at a bottle of warm cider and scratching pictures in the dirt with a stick, while that discolored body is lying in the rotting leaves and mulch and filth of my forest floor. I’m seeing him from beneath the ground today, entombed and enclosed by mound upon endless mound of stale, wet, cloying earth.

So much earth.

I’m not having lungs anymore, but when I’m opening my mouth to scream I’m feeling the mud force its way past my lips, clods of soil pressing into the gaps beneath my tongue and behind my gums, roots and worms reaching down my throat and I can’t breathe, all I want to do is breathe, to get out. To stop him touching it to stop him perceiving it to stop him enjoying it.

I’m seeing his breathing getting heavy and he’s tap-tap-tapping that stick on the ground, on a tree trunk, on a hollow skull where the skin is stretched so taut I can hear the boom-boom-booming of the spiders’ footsteps like they’re banging the skin of a drum as they scuttle away from the man and his stick. I’m watching him for what feels like days but I’m looking up and seeing that the sun is still going down. Someone is telling me once that the sun is setting in the west and I’m looking at it now, sinking beneath the treeline where the forest floor is rising to meet the sky, where those final, dying fingers of light are penetrating the tops of the boughs and the dying of the light is so beautiful but I can’t breathe and I’m clawing at the earth and he’s still poking with the stick and it’s all I can do to keep myself from drowning, from suffocating, and why can’t I just be moving?

And then I’m being out and it’s dark and the man is gone. The stick is wedged in the body’s throat, only its leafy tip left poking out from between yellow teeth and white lips. I’m seeing it from the spot above the stream where I’m enjoying the foxes drinking on that first night.

I’m not having ears anymore, but I’m hearing the gentle trickle of water and the fluttering of moth wings in the night air of the woods. I’m not having skin anymore, so my face can’t be feeling the gentle breeze that’s making the branches sway above me or be sensing the tingle of moonlight on my arms, even though my hairs stand on end in the knowing that it’s there.

I’m breathing again and it feels like soaring, like I’m with the bats and the birds and the moths and there is no body and no man and no stick and he won’t be coming back with his blue shopping bag and that empty look in his eyes like he’s just as dead as it is. I’m remembering what it feels like to be having eyes and lungs and ears and skin and I’m smiling. Smiling at the water and the trees and the birds and the foxes. They are coming back tonight and even though time is not having meaning anymore, I’m smiling, because the best time is the time I watch the foxes drink.

Jonothan Pickering is a sporadic writer and editor of dark fiction magazine Seize The Press. He lives in the UK with his partner, where he spends his spare time watching pro wrestling and listening to synthwave playlists on YouTube.

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After “Here I Am” by Martin Espada

She slides into the Hammerstein Ballroom,
             gorgon at a monster’s bash, styling and profiling.
Brass hands like Isotoner gloves
             clawed with brass tacks.
The vamps vaping vixen necks
             ease off, mad scientists
mathing at stray ears ease off, the organ
             stops grinding the way faith
dies in a Catholic church when the priest
             reveals his true face: Stheno
smirks in red snakes and sunglasses
             silver sequin gown, sharp
contrast to her bald copper scales, aching
             as she steps off-kilter, nonplussed
after being just drafted into the Amazon order.
             Her neckline does not hide the fresh mastectomy.
The hospital did not argue and got
             the fuck out hell’s way
when she told the surgeon she’d
             fly from Libya to New York.
Striding past the golems guarding the guacamole,
             she’s a gal searching for a stiff drink as if to say
yo: sis numero uno been dead for thousands of dictators
             and numero dos been incognito since
The Bikini Island incident but I represent, I soldier
             in the name of ugliness. This is Stheno
slinging her gospel like baiju at Soi Cowboy and espresso
             at the Louvre, until the girls slice their faces
with broken glass and the visitors spit on the paintings,
             who married Gus from Hoboken, just to
divorce him one week later when the surgeon told her
             the mastectomy wouldmake her prettier.
One year later, things are as they should be, she says
             as tumors blossom in her other breast,
the symmetry a relief. She Skypes me from the surgical
             theater. I see her crunch down
on the hand of a careless RN. Stheno wants
             the surgery today, right now.
Anesthesia be damned, table circumscribed
             by surgeons and sorcerers
smelling like latex, sweating bullets. Last update
             to her wiki page reads Stheno:
Immortal with breast cancer, after every treatment
             she laughs like a yogi. On the night she
enters the ballroom, starlit in silver sequins,
             (her boa            not made of feathers)
I hear a golem say, “How? Why?” I reply
             Why? Because she’s not ashamed.

David Arroyo is a nerd and ex-Catholic. His Dungeons & Dragons alignment is Neutral Good.  He holds an MA in English from Florida State University and a MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast. He’s published poetry in Coffin Bell, Nocturne, Stirring, Silver Blade, and The Chamber.

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O dervish! Annihilating the self is the very name of lasting existence.
                      ~Khaja Yahya Kabir

Excerpted from The Sayagi-Khana of Katib Dilkhasta:

Among the strange happenstances and peculiar mischances of ancient times is the story of a dervish in Ghazni who dwelt only among the dead.

This was not, in and of itself, unusual. The annals are overflowing with friends of Allah who made cemeteries into their abodes. Baba Abdal of Herat was known to hold court among the headstones of Khiyaban. Far to the west, in the lands of Syria and Egypt, Jamaluddin Sawi once did much the same. But even among the ranks of death-drawn mystics, this dervish of Ghazni stands out.

For one, he was never known to utter a word to any living person. He neither asked for alms nor accepted any that were proffered. People would sometimes see him drifting barefoot through the graveyards, clad in a tattered goatskin, head and face clean-shaven. They took to calling him Dervish Chughak, for he reminded them of a sparrow, so restless and brittle.

Now this Dervish Chughak subsisted only off what could be found in cemeteries. Often he ate berries from the mulberry trees shading the tomb of mighty Sultan Mahmood. In leaner times he could be seen chewing grass from more ordinary graveyards. He would drink straight from the old well next to Hakim Sanai’s mausoleum, paying no heed to looks of approbation. Some sick-hearted individuals gossiped, after burials, about whether Dervish Chughak might have a sinister taste for meat.

If the accusations of vagrancy and cannibalism disturbed Dervish Chughak, he did not show it. He simply kept roaming the graveyards of Ghazni, steady and careless as the rhythms of time.

Zubair cannot remember when he first came to Kalan Qala. The Sahib says he was born in the east, in India, but even at the grand age of twelve, India is only a hazy notion. Zubair’s whole world is the fort and its sandstone halls, its gleaming cedarwood lattices, the shade of its plane trees, the wasteland stretching beyond its ramparts. Such splendor for only three souls: the Sahib, Zubair, Farishta.

Farishta! Even her name is enough to rattle his young heart. She is of an age with Zubair, old enough that the Sahib has begun pulling her into a more reclusive world. They have to be more careful now: exchanging their careless flights of old for the cellars from which the Sahib has Zubair fetch ice, the flat rooftops where one can escape the heat on summer nights. They are not yet old enough to feel the gorge yawning between a servant and the Sahib’s daughter.

There are others who serve the Sahib too, though they do not live in Kalan Qala. Every month a caravan crosses the waste to the fort’s iron gates, dust billowing beneath their camels’ hooves. These nomads in their colorful robes never come farther than the courtyard. They unload provisions with bangled hands, keep their tattooed faces turned from Zubair’s. As if he is the strange one.

Less often comes the cavalcade: a column of horses flowing swift above the plain, pennants snapping over helmed heads, swords slung across rich robes. These riders do not wait outside like the others. When the cavalcade comes, the Sahib is less tolerant. Zubair’s eyes have been shadowed by bruises for being slow with the wine, undercooking the meat.

“They make him nervous,” Farishta says, after one such visit, one such punishment. She is lying on the hay next to Zubair in the empty cattle shed. The roof cuts across their vision; the firmament’s midnight glow silvers the world.

The Sahib, nervous? The thought is baffling. The Sahib is the one who makes others nervous. Weeks can go by without Zubair looking directly at his face. He keeps his eyes on the hem of the Sahib’s robe (black, edged with gold thread), the edge of his beard (shot through with gray), the twist of his mouth (commanding, downturned).

“Who are they?” Zubair wonders, not expecting an answer. He is surprised to hear one.

“They come from the king.”

“King? What king?”

This question appears to test the limits of Farishta’s knowledge. “The king of the country. He also rules Persia, I think.”

Persia, Zubair is given to understand, is something larger than a fort and its vistas. What exactly this means is beyond him. “What does the king want with the Sahib?”

“Agha helps him. Does things for him, the things no one else can do.” Farishta picks up a straw and tightens her fingers. Soon there is smoke curling out of her fist. The straw begins to blacken. Ash drips to the hay.

It is happening more and more often. Small black handprints appear on Kalan Qala’s walls where Farishta touches them. She can understand the camels’ gossip when the nomads bring supplies. She tells Zubair of recurring dreams in which she meets men whose faces are wreathed in white flame. The things no one else can do.

“If the Sahib is helping the king, why would his men make him nervous?” Zubair says.

Farishta frowns. She moves her head, and a shadow slides across her cheek. Zubair wants to reach out and brush it off, but he keeps still.

“There’s something happening in the country. People are fighting. Agha doesn’t like it. He says chaos is the worst thing to happen to a country, that it’s worse than murdering people. That ‘a hundred years of tyranny are better than one day of anarchy.’”

Now it is Zubair’s turn to frown. “I don’t understand.”

Farishta sighs. “Neither do I.”

Her foot brushes his, and he forgets all about anarchy and kings and the Sahib’s frown. Their fingers knot in the hay. Farishta is humming a birdsong tune.

This is Zubair’s world. He knows it will be thus forever.

It is well-known that on Thursday evenings, after the call for dusk prayer, many people in the neighborhood of Ghazni’s Bost Gate visit the grave of Khaja Adina. They light lamps near the saint’s mud-brick dome, sometimes tying wish-threads to the silver-leafed oleasters around it. The nearby graves are dappled by the shadows of women, stray dogs, and Dervish Chughak.

One evening, as Dervish Chughak probed the oleasters’ boughs for olives, he overheard the conversation of two nearby widows. They were trading news of the rebellion that had engulfed the kingdom for over a decade. The king’s cavalry had been able to surprise the rebels in their camp in the Sulaiman Mountains, the camp thought to have been so cleverly hidden. Strange, the widows murmured, how the king was always one step ahead.

It had been thus for years. In the beginning, the rebels’ victory had seemed assured. The Mongol king to the north was wildly unpopular. Bad enough that his messengers and officials were entitled to bread and board in every village. When they began demanding bodies for their camps, cobblers and weavers and smiths, it had been too much for most. There was hardly a family in the south without someone in the uprising.

But the rebels’ luck had quickly soured. Unseasonable dust storms slowed their marches and damaged their stores. Strange plagues swept through their pack animals. Worst of all was the way the king always seemed to know of their movements. Even with the people’s support, victory was a far thing. The most they could do was try and stay alive.

Dervish Chughak heard the women’s worries, but was hardly paying attention. His eyes were on a crow in the branches overhead. It was an exceptionally fat and attentive specimen, with a silver underbelly. It stared back at Dervish Chughak with naked interest. By the time it spread its glossy wings and flew, the women had long since left.

Some evenings later, Dervish Chughak was wandering a different cemetery on the outskirts of Ghazni. Some of the graves there had headstones; most were marked only by colorful pennants. He knelt by a newly fastened green banner and pressed his face to the cloth, breathing deep. For a moment he could smell a hint of Eid musk, taste the sweet crumble of roht on his lips, feel a rose threaded into long locks he did not have.

“I’m close,” he murmured, not quite to himself.

As if in response, gooseflesh rippled down his arms. His gut lurched, as if he were about to plummet.

He’s found you again, the voice said, echoing in the hollows between his bones. Deep and sweet and feminine.

“I’m close,” Dervish Chughak said, not paying attention. “I can feel death’s veil. When I touch the pennants, when I sleep in the tombs’ shade. I am so close. All that is left is to part it.”

You can’t part the veil from the side of death. You need to go, before he gets here.

“And start again?”

You’ve done so before.

“Too many times.”

Don’t destroy yourself for a dead woman. The voice was already fading.

“Don’t go,” Dervish Chughak said, but he could feel her slipping away. He raised his voice. “I’m close. I can part the veil, I can bring you back, I can do it. I’m so close, Farishta!”

But he was alone again among the dead.

Zubair is in the courtyard, beating dust from the Sahib’s rugs, when his heart starts to pound. He can feel the blood drumming in lines along his skull; iron bitterness floods his mouth. He looks up at the Sahib’s tower, haloed by the setting sun, and starts running.

It is like this now, at the age of twenty. He has lashed his spirit to hers, and her moods drag it along on their paths. Each drop of saliva he drinks off her lips, each cut from her nails, each stifled moan in his ear makes it worse. He can be washing out a latrine pot when sudden pleasure yanks at his innards; he can be thrown deep into sorrow while simply baking bread.

Zubair does not care. Why would he? Farishta is his world, his hereafter, whatever lies beyond both. This is simply one of the gifts that come with loving someone who can do what Farishta can do. He would love her even if it were not so.

But this time is different. There is a wildness to Farishta’s feeling, something that shades on panic. Zubair bounds up the stairs to the Sahib’s study with a stick in his hand and a sickness rising in his throat.

I’m coming for you, he says silently, casting the promise ahead of him.

The wood of the Sahib’s door is aglow, the dying sunlight falling over all its calligraphy wrought in red gold. There are raised voices behind the portal. Zubair slows as he approaches, cocks his head to listen.

“Agha Jana, please,” Farishta is saying. Her voice sounds as if it has been torn up by thorns. “I’m begging you not to do this. Do not make me do this.”

“How can you even think such a thing?” If Farishta’s voice is ragged, the Sahib’s is a burning wind rolling over the mountains. “My own daughter would have me turn traitor?”

“There are deeper loyalties than those owed to a king. I’ve read it in the books of your own library. Philosophers and storytellers, they all condemn tyrants. And he is a tyrant, Agha.”

“He has been responsible for every scrap of food that has ever passed through your lips,” the Sahib says. “He raised me up when I was nothing, nourished me when others would have mounted my head above the city gates. I owe this country nothing, and neither do you.”

“He is making you his partner in murder. We’re scholars, not soldiers—we shouldn’t be scrying for rebel camps, sending curses on men we do not know!”

“We are people of our word, and we do not abandon those who did not abandon us.”

Farishta pauses. “You do what you have to, Agha Jana. But I have no part in this.”

“You will do as you are told.” The Sahib’s voice drops.

“I don’t have to be here. Not for this—” Farishta’s voice snaps off at the wet crack of flesh striking flesh.

Pain scythes through Zubair’s jaw, then again through his stomach. He crashes wide-eyed through the door.

Sunlight flares through the lattices, half-obscuring the books and rarities in the room’s niches. Farishta lies on a brightly patterned carpet, a line of blood running from her mouth onto the collar of her red robe. Over her stands the Sahib, his foot raised for another blow to her midsection. They stare at Zubair on the threshold.

The words tumble from Zubair’s mouth uncontrolled. “Don’t touch her.”

For a moment the Sahib only stares. Understanding floods his face, disgust sours his expression.

“You?” he says quietly.

“Agha Jana,” Farishta begins.

The Sahib’s mouth twists. He slashes at the air with an empty hand. Zubair is wrenched off his feet and slammed against the lattices. The Sahib is advancing, his hand outstretched.

“You’ve done this to her,” he says. “This is you.”

“No!” Farishta snaps, getting to her feet, but the Sahib ignores her. There is a spark dancing across his fingernails.

Zubair tries to speak. Not to him, to her. To say sorry. He cannot get the words out.

“You’ve brought this on yourself,” the Sahib says, and he flings the spark.

He sees the red blur of Farishta moving too late. The spark catches her in the chest, blossoms into an inferno.

Cloth and skin and bone peel, blacken, snap. The fires billow into her hair and race down her limbs. Farishta does not scream. She only spins to face Zubair, her lips burning off her teeth, her eyes brighter than the fires, brushing his chest with her fingertips, and she pushes.

Then Zubair is flying, splinters of the lattice tearing at his arms, the wasteland blurring beneath him, flung distant from Kalan Qala, his tears muddying Farishta’s ashes on his face.

Of the extraordinary circumstances reported about Dervish Chughak is that, as he roamed barefoot across the wide earth, he would sometimes leave behind ashen footprints.

Zubair does not know where he is, nor does he care. He lies on the sandy plain where Farishta has flung him and waits for the sunlight, the crows, the wild dogs to claim him. He cannot see the difference between these deaths. He merely welcomes whichever comes quickest.

It is the nighttime cold that nearly takes him. He stares up at a garden of stars, ash-strewn limbs trembling in the breeze. A sliver of moon is limping across the sky.

Get up, he hears a woman’s voice say. He does not hear with his ears. It echoes inside him somehow, moving from the liver up toward the ribcage, vibrating between his backbone and ribs.

He breathes an answer through cracked lips, from a cracked spirit. “Farishta?”

Get up, Zubaira. I didn’t save you to die in the desert.

“You should not have saved me.”

Get up, Zubair Jana. If you don’t get up, how will you find me?

This breaks through to Zubair’s clouded heart. “Find you?”

I’m here. On the other side of death’s veil.

“What does that mean?”

You bound yourself to me, don’t you know I bound myself to you?

“You are still here,” Zubair says quietly.

No. Farishta’s voice grows fainter the stronger Zubair’s becomes. And yes. There’s a veil, Zubaira, and I don’t know how to cross it.

“I’ll find a way,” Zubair says. “I’m coming for you, Farishta. I promise you.”

She is gone, and he is awake. His limbs cannot stop shaking, and his teeth rattle. Death shadows his body and spirit. He does not care. He forces himself up onto unsteady legs. Sets one swaying foot in front of the other.

Voyaging into the desert, to part death’s veil.

Dervish Chughak was standing by the Citadel at dawn, staring up at the rebels’ heads stuck atop it. Death clung to the place. There had never been a moment, over the past decade, in which the Citadel had not been graced by rotting rebel flesh. The veil was very thin there.

He is coming, Farishta said.

“I’m not ready,” Dervish Chughak murmured in reply. “I need more time.”

You don’t have it.

“I can feel it. The way across. It’s here, Farishta, in Ghazni.”

You can find it elsewhere, Zubaira. The earth of God is vast.

The stirrings of panic rose in Dervish Chughak’s throat. “And what if I lose it? What if I have it here, and I lose it?”

I don’t want this for you.

His answer was raw. “The only thing I want is you.”

Dervish Chughak could not tell if she heard his last remark. Farishta’s presence was an unsteady thing, there for a few heartbeats and never any longer. It was not enough. It would never be enough. Not until he tore through the veil and held her spirit and drew it back by his love.

He leaves his name in the desert. Where it once rested, deep in his liver, there is only desire. It churns for days as he walks without food or water, his peeling feet sand-scoured until their nails leap away in fright. With each step his torn robe comes more and more undone. He does not pay attention. He has a mind for one thing only.

A Kurdish caravan finds him, homeward bound for Isfahan. There he wanders into the mosques and listens to the sheikhs’ lectures, ears perked for a specific knowing. From an Arab mullah he hears about the differences between the deaths of minerals, plants, animals, humans, and saints. He eavesdrops on the students of a philosopher discussing the cosmic architecture of the hereafter. In the ecstatic evening dances of the Jamali Sufis he once glimpses a black door bound in curling ironwork. He reaches for it, but it is already gone.

Months later he is in the unwalled quarters of Bukhara, the beating heart of the Mongol king’s power. He has made himself a butcher’s assistant. The nomads come in the spring with their herds, trading cattle and sheep and goats for long-bodied Turki mares that sell so well to the south. He recognizes some of their bangles and tattoos.

He pays far more attention to the way the knife saws across a bleating sheep’s throat, the quickness by which wool reddens, the instant in which pleading eyes lose their light. Sometimes he is the one looking into the animal’s eyes, holding it steady while the butcher moves unseen from the side. On other occasions, he will wield the knife himself. Afterwards he peels back the split cords of the throat to find death’s secrets, digs through offal to track the course of a life.

Then he is on a dusty plain outside Lahore, wielding a gravedigger’s spade. He lowers one shrouded body after another into the earth’s trust. He comes to understand how the earth never betrays that trust. His body is perfumed by dust and sweat and the scent of spoiled flesh. It is there, outside Lahore, cradling an old weaver’s body into the ground, that for the first time, he feels the veil flutter against his being.

Slowly his feet learn to find the unseen fault lines slicing through existence, the subtle threads of unbeing woven into the world. He moves from one graveyard to the next: Tashkent, Kashgar, Mastung, Uch, Bahraich, Gaur. With each step, he moves closer to the veil. With each breath, he repeats his promise.

“I’m coming for you.”

When the Mongols took Ghazni, they gathered its people in the Loyak Mosque and slaughtered them. They pulled the mosque down and left the bodies there to rot. Later, when people from the countryside came to investigate what had happened, they found the piled corpses and knew not to be fools. The story spread, and the near country submitted peacefully.

Of the Loyak Mosque, nothing remained but a single ruined wall and a burnt plane tree. Though it was not marked as a grave, Dervish Chughak knew there were seven skeletons still beneath it. He sat there often, their anger throbbing in the earth under his limbs. He was there, head bent, shaded by barren boughs, on the evening the Sahib of Kalan Qala found him at last.

The Sahib rode into the Loyak Mosque’s ruin on a tall bay mare. He wore a traveler’s ready-made robe and pleated turban, well-spun but unremarkable. His beard was more white than black, and the lines around his mouth ran deep. He seemed to be nothing more than a tired old man. The two swordsmen riding behind him held themselves with more pride.

The Sahib looked down at Dervish Chughak. When he spoke, his voice was raspy and hollow. “Have you finally stopped running, Zubaira?”

Dervish Chughak glanced up at the Sahib. The memory of a bruise rippled under his eye. He pushed off that memory, trying to push himself away with it.

The Sahib frowned: an expression from another time. “Say something.”

Dervish Chughak closed his eyes.

“Say something!” the Sahib repeated. “You bastard, you pissant. You cost me my daughter’s life. You destroyed my heart by poisoning hers. What do you have to say?”

Dervish Chughak put a hand to the earth, searching. He pushed the world to the edge of his senses. Where are you? There was only his body, the skeletons bunched beneath it, the earth that lay between them. Where are you? The tremor of his breath, the beating of his heart. Where are you?

It was not dust he felt beneath his hand then, but the silk folds of a veil.

Here, Farishta whispered.

Dervish Chughak smiled.

“What are you doing?” the Sahib said, his face darkening. “Are you laughing? You steal the very brightness from my eyes, and you laugh?” He turned to his two companions, his teeth gritted. “Take his head and bring it here.”

The swordsmen dismounted and drew their blades. Steel had not been bared in the Loyak Mosque since the Mongols’ coming. They advanced on the smiling dervish. They flinched and stopped when he opened his eyes and looked at them.

It was a woman’s face staring at the swordsmen, sharp and dark and drawn with rage. There was no mistaking the slice of her jawline, the sweep of her lashes, the arch of her brows. The plane tree’s shadows tumbled down around her. For a moment it almost seemed as if her face were wreathed in long curls.

The blood flew from the Sahib’s face. His daughter’s name hovered on his lips, but he had no breath with which to voice it.

Farishta raised a hand, twisting her wrist. The swordsmen’s heads twisted with it, snapping in unnatural angles. She got to her feet as they toppled at hers.

“Agha Jana,” she whispered, and wept fire.

It is known that, in the years after the Mongol conquest, an unexplained inferno destroyed what was left of the Loyak Mosque.

Records kept by dutiful secretaries of the Ulus Chaghatay Mongol kingdom show that, around the same time, payments and monthly provisions due to a small holding in the Sulaiman Mountains called Kalan Qala were discontinued. The landholder, one Ghiyasuddin Kharkash, who began his life as a woodcutter outside Gardez, also stops appearing in the royal registers from that moment onward.

The registers themselves came to a close within the year. Despite years of setbacks, the rebels in the south began to win one victory after another in their war against the Mongol king. Their bad luck had apparently reached its end. Following the battle of Dandan-i-Madar, the forces of the Ulus Chaghatay finally withdrew from Ghazni, Shorawak, Teginabad, and the region of the Sulaiman Mountains. The people were left to rule themselves, for a time.

The story of Dervish Chughak also came to an end. Neither the people of Ghazni nor those in any other city report him flitting through their graveyards after the war’s conclusion. It is assumed that he died and found his fate in the stomachs of dogs and the gizzards of crows.

The location of Kalan Qala was lost to time. To this day, there are none who can point it out among the many other ruins dotting the country.

However, there is a story remembered by some in the Pawinda caravans, who cross the Sulaiman Mountains every year, bringing horses southeast from Bukhara. They recall how, late in the days of Mongol rule, some of their ancestors came upon a windswept fort in the foothills. They crossed into its courtyard, curious about the halls they had never before seen, and stayed for the night.

In the night, some curious eyes reported seeing a thin figure lying alone on the rooftop, staring carelessly at the stars. But others say that there were two figures there, a young woman and a young man: fingers knotted, the girl humming a birdsong tune.

Tanvir Ahmed (he/him) is a scholar of religion desperately trying to placate the spirits of the rebellious Sufis about whom he writes. He holds a PhD from Brown University and is currently based out of Vienna. His short fiction has also appeared in Strange Horizons. You can find him crawling along the moth-eaten edges of centuries-old Persian manuscripts, or alternatively, on Twitter @tnvyrahmd.

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for Aunt N—

My dear ant comes
          to me in dreams. 
Because she’s so 

small, she can make                           
             a tiny hole in my 
cerebrum. My dear ant

offers me a glass of water. 
           She thinks I need to 
be softer than bones to 

breathe. My dear ant 
              is learning to exhale—
it is this close to surrender.

My dear ant asks me
              to sing her a hymn.
But, I am not sure she’s

more river than dust,
              to flow with my 
rhythm. I am not sure 

my dear ant can be 
                washed into the
surface of my lesion 

& not hurt, & be hurt.
                 My dear ant kisses
my cheeks. & the warmth

is an agony. the only thing 
                    she left behind. She
tells me she’s sorry. And I 

wonder why the dear bear
               the guilt for their own
misfortunes? My dear ant asks 

how my mother is doing. 
                & I say, fine. She’s healing. 
Maybe, you can visit her too 

in dreams, & cover the
                 moles on her flesh. 
My dear ant crawls

into my palm & says
                cover me, beloved.
So I cup my palm & sing her 

the lullaby she sang me 
                  at four. we fall
asleep, only to wake up

to my palm cold &
                   frozen. A sting
sprawling in my phalanges.

She was gone
                  again.
Again. Again.

Chinedu Gospel, frontiers IV, is a Nigerian poet & undergraduate. His works have appeared in Fiyah Magazine, Savant Garde, Foglifter Press, Hoax publications, Blue Marble Review & elsewhere. He tweets @gonspoetry.

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