Questions and Answers                                                                     س و ج

what do you know about home?                                                          – س
i know of voices that swivel into purple song,                                       – ج
tongues forced to sleep under the clouds of their mouth
like how قل — to say in Arabic, mutate to hold your tongue hostage
when I say it in Hausa, عقل.

what do you know about the water?                                                   – س
i know it waits for bodies of men by the river,                                    – ج
to be thrown when their tongues pronounce tsaro, security,
with air rolling into the thinnest door between their lips to say tsoro, fear.

what do you know about war?                                                            – س
i know of how it seeps hope out of the vein                                       – ج
of a country’s name, out of the barricade of a child’s dream
and makes of the mother’s heart a garden the size of her child’s grave.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist and photographer from Bobi. She is a student of Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, winner of the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart and BOTN Nominee with works in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, Agbowó, Omenana Magazine, and elsewhere.

Return to Issue #26 | Support The Deadlands

You die in the stupidest way possible, slipping off a ladder while scooping leaves out of the gutter, the wet, mulchy scent of them the last thing you ever smell. You land just wrong, and as you do, you imagine your mother—smoke trailing from the cigarette wedged between the first and second fingers of her left hand, no words, just the look of perpetual disappointment she had for you ever since you turned ten years old, like everything about you and every choice you made from that point on would always and forever be wrong.

You’d privately hoped you’d go out doing something cool—a tiny act of rebellion against your mother’s opinion of you—skydiving, rock climbing, maybe saving someone from a fire. At very least you could have gone out like your mother, lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, payment for a particular vice. But this, this right here, is bullshit.

Crossing over confirms that your mother was wrong about at least one thing: death is not clouds and angels, or even demons and pitchforks. Part of you wishes you could say I told you so, but you’re a little too stunned by what death actually is to be gloating.

Because, as it turns out, death is a diner at 3:00 a.m., a perfect recreation of the place you spent the worst hours of your life. The place and time you can pinpoint as where you gave up, and simply let everything unravel. Where you decided it wasn’t worth it to try, and your mother was right about you after all. Something in you turned rotten, you wanted things you shouldn’t want, but you lacked the ambition or skill to achieve them, and so you would always fail.

The diner at 3:00 a.m., both then and now, smells of burnt toast and fry-grease and coffee sitting on the warmer for too long. The floor is checked red and white, scuffed by a thousand pairs of shoes, and there are tiny rips in the round, padded seats lining the counter where laminated menus sit beside shiny napkin dispensers. The clock on the wall ticks softly, but the hands never move. It is 3:00 a.m. and it will always be 3:00 a.m. and no, nope, nuh uh—you are not putting up with this again. Fuck that noise; you’re out.

Easier said than done.

Outside the diner, death is a sandstorm. You walk straight away from the door where jangling bells announce your exit, and grit blows into your face and abrades your skin. You can’t see a fucking thing, not that there’s anything to see, and every step forward slides you two backwards as well. Faint panic takes hold, because even if your mother was wrong about the clouds and angels or the demons and pitchforks there’s another thing you’d much rather her be wrong about: that you can’t change the fundamental things that God has decreed.

Your lot in life is your lot in life, and your place in death is your place in death as well. You can’t just up and decide that you don’t want to be a girl anymore, or a boy either, but just yourself and who needs fucking labels anyway? God named you at birth and has judged you in death; no amount of crying or wishing things were otherwise will make an ounce of difference either way.

You very much want to cry about it right now, but you can only imagine how the grit would stick to the tears on your face, so you swallow down the pain—something you perfected while alive—and give it one more go.

The sandstorm has other ideas.

Finally thirst—yeah, who knew you could be thirsty in the afterlife, well, Tantalus, you suppose, but you’re not Greek or a king so what the fuck—and exhaustion drive you back inside. And when you turn around, just for now while you catch your breath, the diner is right fucking there like you never went anywhere at all.

The bell jangles over the door, heralding your return. You stand in the entryway looking for little differences, some sign of a cosmic joke, any indication of why you’re here.

The last time you were in this particular diner, back when you were alive, you were holding a letter informing you that unfortunately even your safety school couldn’t find a place for you, nor did they have any scholarships to offer should you want to put yourself on their waiting list, meaning that you couldn’t afford it even if they had accepted you. At that moment, you were also worrying about how you were going to even pay for the cup of coffee and the plate of pancakes keeping your sorrow company, and that’s when your aunt called—the one with insomnia—clearly expecting you to be out or asleep, hoping for your voicemail. She informed you your mother had died. Thought you should know. The funeral was last week. Don’t bother coming home.

As you hung up your cheap-ass pay-as-you-go phone, your simultaneous feelings were despair that you’d never gotten to prove your mother wrong—that you could make something of yourself after all, that you did have the guts to stand up and make the world see you for who you are—and relief because the letter in your hand told you that wasn’t ever going to happen anyway. None of which took the sting out of the absolute shittiness of the situation, because after all, she was your mother, and some small and lonely part of you still wanted her approval and hoped that one day maybe you could find a way back to loving her and being loved.

So, yeah, worst hours of your life. They were, however, fucking good pancakes.

You spent hours staring through the window at the red burn of taillights, and moths bumping their fragile bodies against streetlights the color of a week-old bruise. Given the dead hour of the night and that no one was clamoring for your booth, the waitress took pity and let you stay. Your face must have said that you needed somewhere to be right now, and you spent all night memorizing the cracks in the faux-leather seats and the scratches in the melamine and counting the packets of sweetener in the little white plastic container wedged between the salt and pepper shakers over and over again.

Now, when you’re dead, from inside the diner, you can’t see anything outside at all. No parking lot, no moths, no trash swirling in the breeze or flattened between the faded, painted lines. The sandstorm erases it, like the world, the afterworld, ends at the diner door.

Inside, everything is the same, but different somehow too. The same scratches, the same sugar packets in their pastel colors. But there are no people, not even behind the counter, dashing your hope of more pancakes. There is a pot of coffee on, the one you smelled when you first arrived, and all the salt and pepper shakers look freshly filled. Someone must have been here once, which means someone could be here again, and you get a faint, tingling sense of potential in the air. Death is a diner at 3:00 a.m. now, but could it be something else, maybe?

The jukebox in the corner glows with coruscating bands of pink and orange and yellow light, like a neon sunset, just waiting for someone to drop a quarter into it and fill the place with sound. The thought of reaching into your pocket for a coin instills panic all over again. Your fingers cramp, and your stomach cramps, and there’s a low-level buzz of fear. Your mother’s voice is in the back of your head telling you not to make a fuss, be quiet, accept things as they are.

There’s a part of you, a small part, buried deep inside, that rages like the sandstorm outside. All your life you’ve been taught—until you began to teach yourself—to push it down, to pretend it isn’t there. It’s the part of you that wants to grab hold of the status quo and tear it all down. Why can’t you self-advocate? Why can’t you demand the world change? Why do you always have to be the one to give way?

There’s another part of you, a small voice lost in the howl of the sand-and-grit-filled storm, that says if you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else will. The world will never change unless you force it to. This place, this diner you can’t leave? It’s your fault because you’re too afraid to demand it be anything other than 3:00 a.m. Just like you’ve always been afraid to demand the world see you for who you are, to make space for you, because it’s so much easier to fade away.

A shaky breath later, one that rattles with the tears still held inside, you think okay, what’s the worst that could happen, really? You’re already dead. If you don’t try now, when will you ever try? There’s nothing else to lose, so what if you change just one small, stupid thing?

There’s a tower of those big plastic cups, the cloudy kind that always look a little bit dirty even when they’re freshly washed, and a cardboard container full of straws wrapped in that paper that’s such a pain in the ass to peel off. You help yourself to some water. And then you dismantle the cups from their careful towers and line them along the counter in a series of pyramids and almost-cubes, making patterns of your own. It isn’t exactly Stonehenge, just your own tiny plastic monument to tell the world you were here.

And then you set out from the diner in the opposite direction.

Same deal. It feels like the sand is stripping layers of your skin away, and you’re genuinely surprised when you look down and don’t see polished bone. Your mouth is parched, and your eyes water, and fuck, fuck, fuck, you turn around and head back inside.

But you refuse to panic this time, and you’re not ready to admit defeat. You’re getting angry more than scared, but now that your thirst is slaked, you’re getting hungry as well. The world didn’t end when you rearranged the cups, and since there’s no one around to stop you, you think, why not make a go at cooking those pancakes yourself? Maybe the diner won’t be done with you until you finally stand up and take what you want.

Everything you need is right there, and the grill is even thoughtfully on, but turned down low. The attempt goes about as well as you’d expect for somebody who once fucked up boxed mac and cheese. And your mother’s disappointment is there in the back of your mind again, and maybe she’s right, maybe you are just a screwup after all. You didn’t get into the colleges you wanted and you could have applied elsewhere, looked for other solutions, but you didn’t even try. You lost a series of low-wage, shitty jobs and when you couldn’t hold down anything regular, you bounced around doing odd jobs and temp jobs scraping together just enough to get by. After that night in the diner at 3:00 a.m., you decided to let yourself drift, just biding time until what? Until this. Until you died.

After dumping the disastrous results of your pancake adventure into the trash, you settle for a couple of packets of those crackers they serve with soup and you pour yourself a cup of the coffee that, despite the smell, actually tastes freshly brewed. Maybe there is some kind of grace waiting for you after all.

The coffee gives you hope. There has to be something else out there. Something better. Something more.

You try again, and the wind howls and the sand pummels you, demanding you submit, sending you slinking back inside.

It’s not demons and pitchforks, but maybe this is your own private hell. Your inability to escape proves there is something wrong with you. You don’t want it enough, you’re not strong enough. You have to accept your lot in life; some things are decreed and will never change.

The third time you return to the diner, you startle to discover that you are no longer alone.

All the breath goes rushing out of you because the person sitting in the last booth, tucked all the way into the corner, looks an awful lot like Elvis.

In place of breath, memory comes crashing in—the other worst moment in your life, made more terrible by being wrapped up in one of the best, most bittersweet moments, its roots stretching all the way back to the last time you remember feeling your mother’s love.

You were seven years old and your daddy had just up and left, no note, no word, no kiss goodbye to tell you it wasn’t your fault. Rain pounded the sloped shingle roof and streaked down the windows; the whole world was tinted blue and smudged with shadows. The power wasn’t out, but the lights were off, and your mother snugged you up against her on the sagging old couch, tucked right into her side so you could smell cigarette smoke and fabric softener and the chemical-laced talcum powder scent of the spray she used to set her hair. She pushed an old VHS tape into the player under the TV and told you how when she was little, whenever she felt sad about something, she would listen to Elvis.

And just then, for the length of time it took a record to play, the sadness would melt away. She would soak in the music like a good, warm bath, and by the time she was done, the hurt would be a little less and she’d be ready to face the world again.

That night, the night your daddy left, sitting in front of the TV, you watched a VHS compilation of Elvis’s greatest performances all the way through and once more over again at your mother’s side. Bathed in the TV’s flickering light, hearing the drumming counterpoint of rain outside, felt like magic. The hurt couldn’t touch you, not as long as Elvis’s voice wove its spell; just in that moment, everything would be okay.

That memory was in your head at ten years old, a rift beginning to form between you and your mother that you didn’t yet understand. Between getting home from school and your mother getting home from work to take you back to the school for the annual talent show, you took a pair of scissors to your hair. You were meant to be done up in ringlet curls and sing you don’t even remember what, maybe “America the Beautiful” or something like that. But you had a different plan.

You’d bought a box of black hair dye with your allowance on your way home. Once it was all rinsed out and your hair was dry, you used almost a full can of your mother’s hairspray swooping your newly-shortened hair into an Elvis Presley pompadour. Earlier in the week, you enlisted your friend Jaelyn to help bedazzle an old pair of sweatpants and one of your mother’s blouses that she never wore anymore into an approximation of Elvis’s famous rhinestone jumpsuit. You were going to sing “Blue Suede Shoes” and win your mother’s heart.

You wanted to evoke her childhood and that night on the couch. You knew work had been rough for her lately, and even three years later, she was still missing your father—or at least missing having someone—and life was grinding her down, starting to make her hard. You wanted to see her smile, let her feel like, at least just for a little while, everything would be okay.

You still remember, even now, the way her keys jangled as they struck the floor. The way she shrieked and grabbed your wrist to drag you back to the bathroom, trying to scrub out all that black dye, repeating over and over again, “What have you done, what have you done?”

You never made it to the talent show. Your mother grounded you. The only time you left the house for a week was to go to the salon and have a hairdresser do her best to fix the mess you’d made. Your mother was so embarrassed she wrote a note to the principal claiming you had strep throat and could someone please bring by any schoolwork you needed and just leave it on the front porch?

You didn’t know it back then, but your mother had already started to suspect things about you that you didn’t even know about yourself. Things that shook her view of the way the world ought to be and left her terrified. That’s when you first remember her lecturing you about the world being immutable, about certain things being decreed by God and unable to change.

“Do you think you know better than God? Do you think you can just change way He made you on a stupid whim?”

You remember the words, accompanied by the smell of spaghetti, your stomach twisted so you couldn’t eat anyway, pushing the noodles around on your plate, fighting not to cry while your mother repeated questions she didn’t want an answer to anyway.

Elvis soured, became the symbol of everything broken and wrong in your relationship, which only got worse from that day. A wound that wouldn’t heal, and so you finally gave up and left home at sixteen. Another failure in your mother’s eyes, another example of how you were no good, how instead of facing up to the realities of the world, you simply ran away.

So this Elvis, here, now, in this diner at 3:00 a.m., takes your breath away. Elvis young and far prettier than was strictly decent for a man at the time, back before life broke him into itty bitty pieces, and now that you think about it, maybe you didn’t die in the stupidest way possible after all. The thought makes you want to laugh and cry all at once at the sheer absurdity of everything, and maybe tears do start in your eyes a little because the bathroom doors in the wall behind Elvis’s head no longer say Men and Women, but melt into a kind of squiggly nonsense blur of letters that mean absolutely nothing at all.

What the hell? Why Elvis? The house you grew up in—your house, but not your home, not since you turned sixteen—used to be full of his music. It was your mother’s thing, and then briefly it was your thing together, and then it was nobody’s thing at all. Your mother never played an Elvis song ever again, like what you’d done at ten years old had poisoned him forever.

Instead, your mother found other things, and doubled down on them—hymns and cross-stitched Bible verses. Beauty pageants and rodeo queens. This is what it means to be a boy and this is what it means to be a girl, and you don’t get to choose. She made one of the pillars of her faith the idea that strict rules governing gender were a thing God delivered to Moses via the burning bush along with Thou Shalt Not Kill.

So again—Elvis? Really?

You’re about to call bullshit all over again, nope out and take your chances with the storm, when not-Elvis looks up and gives you the sweetest, saddest, most heartbreaking and heartbroken smile you’ve ever seen. The breath goes out of you all over again, and it occurs to you that you’re not alive and so technically you shouldn’t be breathing at all.

In the light hanging over not-Elvis’s booth, the angle of cheekbones is harder than you would have expected, but the jaw is softer and the lips are fuller. This Elvis is not one thing or another, but a multitude of things, someone more like you who doesn’t fit so easily into those God-given boxes your mother held dear. Looking at them, you feel lifted and boneless all at once, wanting to slump into the booth across from not-Elvis, and maybe even let yourself cry finally, for real and for good.

You don’t want this—your mother’s version of the world where nothing can ever change, your own personal hell where you’re too afraid to stand up and demand this diner to be something different. A disco, a library, a swimming pool. Anything thing at all. You’re tired of bending so the world doesn’t break you. You already made one small change, and maybe that’s enough for a start—changes can compound, a snowball becoming an avalanche, all starting with just one flake. Maybe you can remake this world, remake this memory, into something better, reclaim the diner and reclaim Elvis, not trapped here, but making a place where everything can be okay and nothing hurts, at least for a little while.

You ask the first question that comes to your mind.

“Do you like pie?”

The way not-Elvis’s smile lights up a notch, which somehow lights the whole damn room, makes you think for just a moment that maybe you do believe in God after all.

You help yourself to two slices from under the glass domes on the counter—banana cream for not-Elvis and lemon meringue for you. You can’t remember if the pie was there before, or if you willed it to be, a soft, creamy-whispery yellow for not-Elvis, and tart, bright lemon sunshine for you. And damn if the pie isn’t even better than the pancakes, and you find yourself sobbing and telling not-Elvis everything while they listen patiently, and then you’re out of words, blotting your face with a wad of napkins from the metal dispenser and saying you’re sorry over and over again.

You don’t know if you’re apologizing to not-Elvis or the child you were at ten, or sixteen, who didn’t have the strength to demand your mother’s love, to say, This is who I am and you don’t get to care about me less because of it. Or maybe you’re apologizing to your mother for not being someone she could love, for the hard life she lived, the jobs she worked, the bitterness and simultaneous ache she had for the man who left her behind. You know what it’s like to love someone and hate them in the same breath, to miss them fiercely and be hurt by them, but also hold them in your heart as the only one you want to run to in order to make it all better again.

Not-Elvis covers your hand with their own, and this time the smile says they understand everything you said and more—all the things you don’t have words for or just didn’t think to say.

Like how you know deep down that none of your apologies were for your mother, but how you loved her anyway, even though her definition of the world wouldn’t allow her to love you. Not in the way you wanted to be loved, and you’re not sure where that leaves you, so you look not-Elvis in the eyes and ask.

“So what happens now?”

You’re pretty sure the real Elvis—or the other Elvis, because this one seems more real to you in this moment than anyone else could ever be—never had eyes like galaxies unfurling. Eyes like forever spiraling out into more forever, or approximately how long you tried to walk away from this shitty diner and failed, all glittering with star-stuff and the base elements of the universe. But this one definitely does.

Not-Elvis’s cosmic gaze holds steady, it holds you, all the parts of you, even the ones that feel like contradictions, especially the ones that feel like contradictions—like your love for your mother. It holds all the parts of you that feel broken, like the edges of a shattered diner coffee cup grinding against each other, because even though you love her, your mother still did a number on you.

Under that steady gaze, you understand. Death, like you, like not-Elvis, like love, isn’t one thing or the other. It’s not punishment or reward. It’s a multitude. And it can change. Death, like life, but without the stupid bullshit limitations of external circumstances beyond your control—like skin, or organs, or blood, or where you live, or how much money you do or do not have—is what you make of it. Your mother was wrong. This place, this diner at 3:00 a.m., which once held the worst moment of your life, could be anything at all.

You smile, and not-Elvis smiles back at you with relief that you understand. It’s going to take time, because dead or alive, you’re still you, and your baggage isn’t something that you can let go of right away. But if you work at it, well, maybe death might just be all some people say it’s cracked up to be. Someday.

You feel light, giddy even, weirdly like dancing. You slide a hand into your pocket, and there’s a quarter there waiting for you.

“What do you say,” you ask not-Elvis as you scoot out of the booth. “Feel like shaking those beautiful hips of yours one more time?”

Their smile broadens, and they join you on the diner’s impromptu dance floor as the first notes of “Blue Suede Shoes” fill the room.

You don’t know exactly how you’re going to proceed from here, but for starters, maybe you’ll give making pancakes another try.

A.C. Wise is the author of the novels Wendy, Darling and Hooked, as well as the recent short story collection, The Ghost Sequences. Her work has won the Sunburst Award, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Stoker, World Fantasy, Locus, British Fantasy, Aurora, Shirley Jackson, Ignyte, and Lambda Literary Awards. In addition to her fiction, she also contributes a review column to Apex Magazine. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

Return to Issue #26 | Support The Deadlands

An Inconvenient Corpse

Jamie asks about “how/where/when to die for maximum inconvenience.”

A flippant question deserves a flippant response, but let me begin on a serious note: A human being is not an inconvenience.

I am not making light of anyone’s mental or physical health, financial situation, access to care, or social safety net. The living deserve dignity and consideration, and I personally feel that the dead do as well, to the best of our ability. Every day people are denied respect, dignity, and care because of their health, poverty, weight, or any number of other factors. I know too many people who have internalized the narrative that they deserve less, they take up too much space, they don’t provide enough value. They’re inconvenient.

You are not.

A certain degree of morbid humor and glib detachment is necessary for a first or last responder. And there are assholes in every profession. In this context, however, the “inconvenience” I’m grousing about is the pure pragmatic logistics of a situation, not any kind of moral judgment of the deceased.

With that being said…

Ask instead, dear reader, where would be a convenient place to die, exactly? Falling into a live volcano leaves very little mess to clean up. Becoming a frozen landmark on Mount Everest is technically littering, but at least you won’t smell much, and no one is going to bother dragging you down. Perhaps an expanse of desert with some helpful scavengers nearby?

But, as the internet reminds us, we live in a society. So more likely you will die within some sort of civilization, and someone else will have to move your body. Within that context, the most convenient death probably takes place in a hospital, preferably one with a morgue.* Any sort of care facility comes next, followed by a home death under hospice care, with a sensible nurse on hand.

Few things in this world, however, prioritize our convenience, and death is certainly not one of them. So, if you’re looking around your house one day and wondering where the worst possible place to die would be, there are multiple factors to consider. A useful metric might be, if a friend asked you to help them move furniture in or out of this space, how annoyed would you be and how fast? And what kind of furniture? An IKEA bookcase? A sectional sofa? Their grandmother’s irreplaceable heirloom vanity? Is the vanity…leaking? Is the entire family standing in the room crying while you try to not bump the vanity against the doorframe? (Maybe this metaphor is getting away from me.)

The same factors apply to moving anything, though. How big is the object? How heavy? Are there stairs? How many? Is the space cramped? Are there tight corners in the hallways? Did some lunatic decide to build a house with a cobbled walkway, a spiral staircase, and a second-floor home theater in a retirement community? Ahem. (My party trick is telling people how hard it would be to get a body out of their house. Why am I invited to so few parties?)

I consulted with a former EMT on this question, and despite being on opposing sides in the skeleton war, first and last responders largely agree: barring dramatic factors like insects and decomposition, stairs and bathrooms are the worst. I’m currently living in a third-floor walk-up apartment. Professional courtesy demands that I throw myself over the balcony if I believe the end is nigh. Or at least crawl down as many stairs as possible.

When making a house call, morticians normally have a collapsible cot, a body sling or a Reeves Sleeve, and sheets. (Check your van, kids; an ounce of prevention is worth hundreds of pounds of embarrassment and struggle.) Cots, like Daleks, are easily thwarted by stairs, and don’t turn tight corners well. It’s possible to “dolly” the cot on two wheels, but it’s far from ideal. Standard operating procedure, when a death is called in, includes asking the caller about obstacles in the home, such as steps, corners, or narrow hallways. The trouble is, very few callers have ever steered one of our cots. I’ve heard on multiple occasions, “It should be fine. EMS got their stretcher into the room.” EMS stretchers, however, are sprightly, graceful devices compared to the things funeral homes end up with. Whenever someone told me that, it was more likely that our cot would end up parked in the hallway (if not farther away) while my partner and I carried the decedent out.

We also ask about the decedent’s weight when taking the first call, although we don’t always get an accurate assessment. The combination of weight and accessibility factors heavily into how many people we send on the call (assuming available staff), and whether or not we have to call the fire department for a lift assist. When stairs are involved, however, a 6’3” corpse will be unwieldy no matter how thin they may have been.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to live their life. When it comes to death, however, I’ll happily hand out advice. For example: the third story of your house is not the place to put someone in hospice care! The second floor is bad enough, but perhaps unavoidable; the third is just rude. Have I had to carry someone down two flights of stairs in a Reeves Sleeve while their extended family looked on? Indeed I have, my friends, indeed I have.

Long before I became a mortician, I’d heard that people frequently die in the bathroom—specifically on the toilet. I don’t have the real statistics for these deaths at hand, but calls like that are usually memorable, even if they don’t happen all too often. Let me clarify here two different definitions of dignity. One is the quality of being worthy or esteemed—that’s the dignity all humans are due. The other, formal reserve or seriousness, is not present when someone dies in the bathroom. Not for the deceased, and not for the people moving them.

If you don’t have a third-floor bathroom handy in which to die, other extremely inconvenient options include face-planting in the middle of a doorway or expiring in a recliner. Or you could just slide down between your bed and a wall. If you really want the story of your death to be retold for years to come, die in the summer in a building with no air-conditioning. Or, for variety, in a house on a steep incline during a freak ice storm†.

The necromancer will emerge from the underworld in July! I’ll be answering questions at Readercon in Boston. If you’ll be in attendance, I hope you can make it to the panel. Otherwise, continue to send your questions through our portal, or ask @stillsostrange on the graveyard of Twitter.

* Fun weird fact: not all hospitals have morgues! I can only assume they’re powered by pure optimism.

† The second time in my career I had to call the fire department was during said ice storm, because my van couldn’t make it up the hill to the house. The first was for a heavy person who had died on the kitchen floor of a third-floor apartment. Morticians love the fire department, though I’m sure they don’t love us.

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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For Lunda, chi hollo li

Someone once told me
 That the weight of the unfinished story of you is
 too/ much/ to carry
I had never seen things this way because it has been my reality for twenty-two years to 
piece together your dark mythos 
 but
In this poem 
I will attempt to put the weight down 
and imagine something other than how you were murdered 
 something 

l
     i
g
     h
t
     e
r 

I imagine you in the kitchen
Grey river of box braids snaking to your waist like the balbasha’ okhina’
And you are teaching me to jam mulberries—Behi
you correct me because i can only speak Chickasaw In your house 
You are fluent and insistent—
On me learning 

You have two horses, one spotted 
Thobi micha lossayi
And the other just losa
We ride them after the jamming
 my little stained hands rubbing off into the white fur of your mare

We dance to Marvin Gaye in the mud room not even bothering to take off our dirty boots
You say don’t worry “alhchimbakma chofalila’chi” 
 As you lead me to the living room
Your mud tracks like bread crumbs—to kindle the fire

You sit and read so fearless next to the flames
Open and roaring 
Until the cinders smudge the pages and you fall asleep

I cover you up in trade cloth 
Feeling more like a mother than a granddaughter
I am aged by the youth of you

—Even now 
As you lie sleeping in bones and dust
This is how I remember you 
—in blood and cranial purples and damp playful hues
Like the stains of us on the mud and mulberries

Sunnie Smith-Ishtimonabi’ (she/they) is a homa’losa poet (Black and Chickasaw). Her people primarily come from Louisiana and Oklahoma but she was born and raised within the confederated Villages of Lisjan (Vallejo). She is a care worker, land nurturer, and anompa shali (language carrier). Sunnie’s poetry explores their own unique Black Native experience moving through grief work, their relationship to the land, and their journey through language revitalization. Sunnie’s poems are living works not just because poetry is never truly finished but because as her understanding and relationship with her language evolves so will the poems she utilizes it in. Her work can be found in Changing Womxn (journal) and is forthcoming in Abalone Mountain Press’s The Languages of Our Love anthology. 

Return to Issue 26 | Support The Deadlands

Last night, the iron lid on the unused backyard well got thrown off. The rusted, soldered latticed rods that had lain unmoved for ages had come off. Everyone said it was you venting your rage—untimely deaths made the spirits linger, wreaking havoc on those left behind. Was it you plotting, heavy-lifting, Appa? You died on Ekadashi—one of those rare, coveted days for leaving this material world behind, and you were cremated on Dwadashi—a fitting follow-up to your auspicious death. Going by the lore, you must be in Heaven. Why are you still pottering around here, Appa?

You are a big, round ball of rice, placed on a banana leaf. A handful of black sesame seeds are sprinkled on top. More gets sprinkled in eight more places.

Now the ball is sliced with a blade of grass, The pieces are thrown in eight different directions. The cue for you is to pick one out of the eight and move on.

The tiniest ball: a part of your ruptured spirit has found a direction. You must be on your way to Heaven.

Inside the house, the family has gathered to decide on the daily lunch and dinner menus for the next twelve days. Athai’s suggestion is to include all of your favorites.

When I think about your foodie favorites, I realize that your heart was in your stomach. You lived to earn only to eat. That’s why you stopped after having a single child. To avoid “deficit in family budget,” Amma had told me when your son and I had our second. Even my sister used to tease you that you would write off our sprawling R.K. Salai bungalow and hot cash balance for a good measure of tasty “Kumbakonam Kadapa.” I am realizing the importance of food when I watch your son perform the Pretha Karma, or the last rites, for the departed soul that is so full of food items.

And every day it is going to be absolutely difficult to stop seeing you in the sambhar, pitla, theeyal, kadayal, pachadi, and payasam we are going to enjoy in your name.

After your heart disease made you switch to salt-free, I remember your Sunday treats for us: hot tiffin packed in banana leaves and rolled in newspapers from Ratna Cafe, Saravanan Bhavan and Rayars. You sat us down to eat and watched us—interjecting with several “How is it?”s and “Is it good?”s as if you were the chef who had steam-cooked those idlis and flipped those onion rawas and crispy vadas.

Amma is having a meltdown today. Because she is making sevai today, your favorite. Those

steamed, hair-like strings remind her of you. Of course, since your relationship with her is woven tight with food. She had taken pleasure in making those frantic trips to and from the kitchen, carrying piping hot dishes to your plate. When I asked her the other day why she was so scared of your temper—you could go wild at a touch of extra salt, pucker at sourness. She thought for a moment before responding. “It was not fear; it was respect,” she said earnestly.

Now she is slumped over the steel bowl that has the glossy-white maavu. Her shoulders are tied in a knot, body trembling like a loose sack. The kitchen is no longer her fortress. The key bunch is now with the cook maami, jingling at her waist, and maami takes care of the entire day’s cooking.

Later, when we were left alone, Amma tells me that she heard you whispering in her ears, your hot breath in her cheeks to make sesame-tempered sevai. She felt your presence beside her. You scared her, Appa. Learn the art of letting go from your wife. Let go.

We are on the tenth-day ceremony. An important day filled with rituals. The driveway is full of food today. White rice spread like a carpet, some squished into tight balls; golden, crisp vadas; twelve different types of fruits; sweets: the sweet sesame balls, athirasam, muruku. The ladies have tied the nine-yard sari. Dripping wet, they come near the spread, lift scoopfuls and drop it along with the sesame seeds—each time repeating what the pandit says: We fill your aching soul with food; eat till your heart bursts, stop feeling for your loss. At the end of the ceremony, the driveway looks like a war zone. Our hearts feel trampled too.

In the evening we go to the backyard to light a lamp in your honor. The flame bursts, multiplies, goes up in a mild explosion. The low-hanging tip of the enclosure catches fire, and we are all alarmed. Was it you, Appa, creating commotion again?

That night, Amma is supposed to be left on her own. She would bid you her final goodbye. But I hang around.

Midnight, when she breaks her ties with you, I feed her a glass of warm milk to keep her guilt and cloaking feeling of failure away. The neighbor’s dog starts up a deep, disturbing howl, and all the day’s humidity ends in a thundershower. Your presence is an odorless smoke that fills the house. You have become nothing but a pinched memory in our minds. Indispensability is a myth. The show can go on without you, without anyone for that matter. Do you get that, Appa?

The rest of that night, I go back in time, stop to reminisce about some moments from the past. More food-related memories flood my mind. As soon as you opened your eyes after heart surgery, you asked for badam milk—homemade. You kept repeating it in the delirious state, so I had to rush to Krishna Sweets nearest to the Velachery flyover to get a few premade badam milk bottles since homemade would take an hour and a half and you wouldn’t stop asking.

The first time you wanted pizza, “Is it hot or sweet?” was your candid query. You put me in a spot with that query. I could give you only a confused response at that time. But so many times in the past and now, I keep going back to this particular interaction between us. Each time I come back with a different realization, an answer to some long-held conundrums.

It is the thirteenth day today, and we are all dressed in new clothes. Our faces are tired but relieved. All the crying has stopped. Even Amma’s repenting is on a temporary break and she looks withered, like a day-old flower in bloom. Her grief is no longer a constant blow in her head but unexpected attacks in big, swamping waves. I am quiet, have no adjectives or metaphors for life, which comes with all its plaits and twists and confronts us each passing moment.

Here is a metaphor and a fun fact before we part ways. Life is like the homemade ghee that Amma makes every fortnight: all golden and flowing at the top, grainy and full of fragrance at the bottom. But there is another layer—under this grainy bottom. The slightly burnt, blackened layer that holds all the textural surprises. Death, I’m sure, is also an interesting enigma as much as life is, Appa.

Here is another. Sesame—auspicious for Shrardhas—is full of phytochemicals. It is a powerful energy source and thrives even in drought-ridden regions. Be like sesame, Appa, ready to bloom and thrive wherever life lands you next. Continue your jaunt. Onward and upward. Farewell.

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar writes from Chennai, a metropolis in South India. Since she was young, stories have been part of Vijayalakshmi’s life—both telling and listening to. Her writing can be found in JaggeryLit, Spark Magazine, Exposition Review, Vestal Review among others.

Return to Issue 26 | Support The Deadlands

lift her from the watercolor sea
so easy to sink in the backwaters
don’t claw cracks in deep marine
those beasts once drowned weren’t
god after all

her skin is leviathan tooth-pocked
bloodfall waterdrip in your arms
cold glimmer-scales like stars in
her cosmic body so let’s pray to
god after all

that breath of smoke on the water
now long dead deified in dreams
you should shake from her flesh
praised by men who claimed a
god after all

men row to decimating seapush
they dread-weep half-damned
as you regard monitor watch
you fucking voyeur like you’re
god after all

the rush of shoreward running
so slowed by flesh-rotting men
until bonelight bodies carry her
pretty blood on since they love
god after all

Lucas Enne is an author of fiction and poetry. His influences include Jeff Vandermeer and Cormac McCarthy, and his works are published or forthcoming in The Dread Machine and Illustrated Worlds. See ennewritings.com

Return to Issue #26 | Support The Deadlands

The far stall in the ladies room in the Land of the Dead was backed up again. The day had already started terribly, with an email that hit my phone as I walked the 387 steps from my staff cabin to the front desk, an email from Lana saying Vera, I wanted you to find out directly from me that I’ve started seeing somebody. Call if you want to talk.

I did not want to talk. I did not want to have feelings about my ex dating someone in a serious enough way to send that message, which read like it had been written by a damage control committee. I did not want to keep walking through the late January gray—it perfectly matched my mood—or flip the “Open” sign, or sell weekday tickets to a roadside attraction two hours from where I’d left my life behind, or deal with a backed-up toilet an hour into my shift. I would not even have said that last bit fell under my purview, but the weekly janitor had been in two nights before, which meant “other duties as assigned.” Which was why I ended up plunging the toilet in the Land of the Dead and pulling a fast food burger, still in its wrapper, out of the toilet in the Land of the Dead.

There were two main perks to working for the Land of the Dead. One was being able to tack “in the Land of the Dead” onto any sentence. The other was working with Adelaide, the oldest, coolest queer I’d ever met. Blue hair with a rattail that was either decades out of date or art school au courant, six feet tall even with her back starting to curve in at the shoulders, butch as the local sheriff, who she played poker with because she believed you had to “keep your friends close and your enemies poor,” her words. I had a huge crush on her, and also wanted to take pictures of her and follow her around recording everything she knew.

She was the one who pointed out the “in the Land of the Dead” thing. She’d brought takeout Chinese from the place by the gas station at the exit for the Land of the Dead to celebrate my one-month anniversary working there, and when we cracked our cookies open, she told me to add “in the Land of the Dead” to my fortune instead of “in bed.”

I ate my cookie before looking at the crinkled paper. “‘The greatest risk is not taking one’—in the Land of the Dead?”

She tossed her broken cookie aside and held her fortune up to read it like a proclamation. “‘You can make your own happiness’ in the Land of the Dead. See, Vera? I totally believe that. Look at me.”

I couldn’t argue: she did seem to make her own happiness in this place. She had been the tour guide in the Land of the Dead for thirty-six years, as long as I’d been alive. She wasn’t expected to clean clogged toilets, and the tourists came and went from her company in good spirits. She said she pocketed about a hundred bucks a day in tips on summer weekends, more in the weeks leading up to Halloween. The Land of the Dead opened Wednesday to Sunday year-round, except Christmas and New Year’s; it didn’t really seem worth it to me to be open on Wednesdays and Thursdays—even our boss didn’t come in on weekdays, since he had a garage in town that I suspected made him more money than this labor of love—but I wasn’t about to say anything since, unlike Adelaide, I did not get tips, so those hours counted for a lot, even if nobody showed.

On the quiet days, I restocked shelves in the gift shop of the Land of the Dead, dusted the museum exhibits, played games on my phone, designed paper cuts, and read whatever appeared in the Little Free Library in the parking lot, mostly culled books Adelaide brought from the library in Chattanooga on her monthly outing for drag queen bingo. (I’d gone with her once; she knew everybody in the bar.) The Land of the Dead was a good place to work on ending my addiction to social media, because it had no Wi-Fi and not much in the way of cell reception; I could reliably contact the outside world only on the path from my cabin to the shop.

If nobody sprung for Adelaide’s tours she hung out with me, but if even one person paid admission, she’d start her spiel for them. Not their fault nobody else had come, she said; they still deserved to be educated. That’s what she considered it, and I guess her part was educational, since her tour and the museum and the Path of the Dead got us state arts grants. The Path of the Dead was pretty cool, a boardwalk through the woods with interactive displays about various cultures’ death rituals, customs, myths, and beliefs, done far more tastefully than you might expect for a place like this. Adelaide said she’d had free rein to develop that section—she’d built the entire thing by hand—and she owed it to the different peoples represented to get it as close to right as possible.

Realistically, I think a lot of people only came for the amusements section: the arcade, with The House of the Dead and Ghosts and Goblins, The Twilight Zone and Addams Family and Nightmare on Elm Street pinball machines, and a claw machine full of cheerful rubber skeletons; glow-in-the-dark indoor mini golf, the walls painted with various facts that those who skipped the educational stuff might have missed.

And, outside: Dante’s Inferno and Persephone’s Wild Ride. The Inferno was a scrambler, Persephone a dark ride. Both designed for The Land of the Dead in the eighties at no small cost, during the park’s boom time, according to Adelaide. The amusements still had their own staff, a couple of twentysomething townie boys. Every night, they jumped in their truck and drove back down the mountain the second we closed; in the time I’d been there they’d never once stayed for a drink with us, though I’d heard Adelaide offer.

I think they didn’t really know what to say to me. Adelaide made sense; she was part of the landscape, George Lazaridis’s first and most lasting hire, the one who’d realized his vision and transformed it. I’d showed up eight months ago in a place that as far as those guys were concerned, nobody moved to on purpose.

I’d taken this job out of complete desperation.

“Quit before Mrs. Ferrera dies,” my friends had said for years. “She’s ninety years old.”

To which I responded that I couldn’t leave her in the lurch; I felt a certain responsibility as the only employee of Ferrera’s Art Supplies for the last fifteen years, and I’d liked being able to do my paper cut designs behind the counter during quiet stretches. Some part of me had hoped for one of those movie situations where I’d find out she’d left me the store, but it turned out she hadn’t ever gotten around to writing a will, so that dream died with her. If you could call it a dream; maybe it was just another thing that would have forestalled me actually figuring out what to do with my life. (Ironically, that was why Lana had broken up with me too, a few months before my job evaporated; she said watching me tread water was exhausting.)

Mrs. Ferrera had always bragged about having the last analog store in a digital world; I’d never considered the implications for me. Over ten months, I applied to seventy-six positions in every field I could even tangentially say I knew anything about, everything from art teacher to museum guard to copy store clerk, and nobody had bitten, most likely a combination of bad job market and a lack of terminal degree and my outdated computer skills and a lack of referrals. I had a working knowledge of ledger sheets, but no idea how Excel worked. I had never used a point-of-sale system, and nobody seemed interested in teaching me. Atlanta offered me nothing but chain-store greeter options, like I was ninety myself, and those wouldn’t have covered city rent after the split.

Lana was the one who suggested I expand my search to the whole state, which was how I ended up storing all my worldly belongings in her garage and relocating two hours northwest, to a cozy staff cabin in the Land of the Dead. She and I had stayed friendly, and maybe part of me had been hoping that if she saw me take her advice, if she had a chance to miss me a bit, we might eventually reconcile.

All of which is a very long way of explaining why, eight months into my employment, my friend Adelaide the tour guide leaned against the wall beside the hand dryer to watch and offer moral support as I reached down the toilet and pulled out a burger, still in its waxy wrapper.

“My money was on a diaper,” she said. “What does it say about fast food that that thing still coheres? At least now you can say you’ve unclogged a toilet in the Land of the Dead. That can go on the firsts board, right?”

The firsts board was a running list I kept on my refrigerator. She had suggested it after the fortune cookie dinner; said she’d done it for her first few years. She didn’t have many firsts these days, but she claimed she enjoyed watching me experience them.

“Second time this month, actually.” I wasn’t in the mood for enthusiasm.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I got an email this morning. My ex met somebody.”

She stepped aside to let me toss my wadded gloves and burger into the wastebasket under the sink. “Oh, hon. I guess that means you have to stop imagining you’re going to get back together? I’d hug you, but you need to wash your hands first.”

The front door chimed the chorus of “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and we both turned toward it.

“I’ll go tell them you’ll be out in a minute. You wash up.” She headed down the corridor, then turned back. “We’ll hang out tonight. I’ll give you a new first, in honor of your eight-month anniversary.” A declaration, not an invitation; she didn’t wait for a response.

A distraction from Lana, in any case. I spent the afternoon puzzling over what she was so sure would make my firsts list eight months in. We’d covered every cuisine within an hour, several varieties of edible, and every drink that didn’t require a blender, since most appliances tended to blow my cabin’s breakers. We’d made out once, for my six-month anniversary on the job, just so I could say I’d kissed someone in the Land of the Dead. It was a fun night.

This day brought thirteen customers in total, including the three teenagers who came from town once a week for the arcade, two death tourists, and two carsful of travelers made curious enough by the highway ads to take the exit on their way between Atlanta and Chattanooga, one of which I blamed for the toiletburger.

At five, the amusements guys funneled the stragglers toward the gift shop, where I gave them half an hour to part with their remaining dollars. Then half an hour of cleaning, for me. Adelaide was gone by then.

A barrage of text messages pinged my phone on the path to the cabins. Lana had said what she needed to say in the morning; I’d responded I’m happy for you! with a smiley face that I hoped conveyed no sarcasm. Sometime in the day, six mutual friends had checked on me, which I guessed meant they’d been waiting for her to tell me. I stopped walking and responded to each with a variation on I’m happy for her/I’m fine that I hoped also sounded sincere.

Adelaide’s lights were on in the far cabin, and I headed over as soon as I’d changed out of my toilet-diving clothes. Past the six empty cabins between hers and mine, more relics of the boom years, or at least years when the amusement staff weren’t townies.

“Come in,” she called before I raised my hand for a courtesy knock.

Her cabin had the same layout as mine—there’s only so much variation to be had in a single room with a postage-stamp bathroom— but hers felt lived in. She had actual framed art on the walls, by her friends, and curtains and lampshades and a rug and a love seat and a bedspread all in different patterns that somehow complemented each other’s color schemes. She’d made her own bookshelf, and the coffee table, and the hutch where she kept dishes. She’d fit a queen bed in, and still it felt cozy instead of cramped like mine.

The room smelled like microwaved ramen, which told me tonight’s surprise wasn’t culinary. She sat on the love seat with her bowl up to her chin. I grabbed the second bowl and settled on the floor rather than risk spilling on her bedspread.

She peered down at me as I dug in. “I’m glad you’re eating. That’s a good sign.”

“I’m okay, I think. Sad, but not depressed. She’s moving on, and I’m going nowhere.”

“You’re in luck,” she said. “We are most definitely going somewhere tonight.”

That surprised me. She generally maintained that nothing in the area was worth driving to on a work night. Not the restaurants, not the bars, not the one seedy dance club, which was in the parking lot of a truck stop and still had viewing booths in the rear even though it no longer provided live adult entertainment.

“Do I need to change?” I slurped noodles while she assessed my apparel.

“You’ve got hiking boots, right? We’ll go back to your place for those and a coat.”

“Are we going hiking? I don’t even know if I’ve ever been on a winter night hike. Is that the first?”

She shook her head like I should know better.

“You’d think I’d run out of firsts at some point. It’s been eight months.”

“Honey, I promise you, you’ve got a long way to go before you run out of firsts, if that’s really a thing you’re worried about. Groundhog Day in the Land of the Dead is just around the corner, for starters.”

“Ooh,” I said with exaggerated excitement. She laughed.

Sometimes I forgot that as isolated as I would have felt here without her for company, she’d been here for the better part of four decades without anyone else who had ever stuck around for long. How did she do it? I’d asked once, and she’d shrugged and said it was more interesting than I realized, which I took to mean giving tours was a more fulfilling gig than selling admissions and skull candy and plastic scythes.

After dinner, I washed her bowl and mine, and then we headed to my place. On her instruction, I put on my puffer jacket and hiking boots, and dug out a beanie and gloves, none of which I usually bothered with on the walk from cabin to work.

“It’s not cold,” I said.

“It’s colder in the woods, and always better to be prepared.”

“Were you a Girl Scout?”

“What do you think? Hon, there’s no ‘were.’ Scout for life. You?”

“My mother didn’t sign me up for anything that might involve her getting roped into volunteering. We bought the cookies, though?”

She snorted, which I interpreted to mean that cookies did not count.

I didn’t ask again where we were going, since she was clearly enjoying the surprise element. She led me from the residential area through the amusements yard and back toward the Path of the Dead, pitch-black beyond the entrance.

“I’ve been through here before,” I said. “You took me on both your tours my first week.”

“That was so you could talk knowledgeably to customers about what they each entail. Relax, we’re not doing the Path.”

As she said that, we entered the Path, her flashlight illuminating first the replica of a Cherokee burial mound, with plaques declaring that this was Cherokee land and explaining about the removal camps and the Trail of Tears. On both her indoor and outdoor tours, Adelaide made sure that was the first thing everyone heard, since in her words, if the tourists only took away one new fact from their weird death excursion, it should be that real lives and deaths happened here.

We passed the Egyptian Field of Rushes, and a tree with a large fiberglass chameleon facing off against a large fiberglass lizard, which had something to do with a Bantu myth. I was about to open my mouth to ask again if we were doing the Path, even though she’d said we weren’t, when we veered off the wooden boardwalk between the reptiles and the concrete banshee.

I hadn’t realized how much I appreciated the boardwalk until we left it. I’d never been a big hiker, and the question of what might be underfoot made me nervous. Ticks, snakes; I was pretty sure those went dormant in winter, though if you stepped on a sleeping snake it would probably take issue. And what lurked behind the thick trees? Black bears, coyotes, foxes, bobcats. Besides the animals, this area had canyons. Dropoffs. Rivers.

I followed as close as I could to Adelaide without stepping on her heels, trying to see what she saw in her flashlight beam, though nothing looked like a landmark to me. The halogens illuminating the amusements lot had already been swallowed by the trees. If she left me out here, I’d never find my way back.

I was about to tell her that getting me lost in the Land of the Dead was not a fun thing for my firsts board when her beam caught something different. It looked like two trees growing together, leaning into each other at about ten feet above the ground, like they were commiserating, or sharing a secret. Like they shared a brain; up close, they looked so entangled I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

“Did someone train those trees to grow like that?” I asked. “I’ve heard about artists who—”

“It’s not about the trees,” Adelaide said.

She grabbed my hand, pulling me forward between the steepled branches. Her flashlight’s beam winked out, and I stumbled and nearly fell before catching my balance. When I looked up, the sky was as dark and close as a closet. I could barely see my hands in front of my face. My feet shuffled forward, and it was dust like a dirt road they stirred, no longer the forest floor. A moment later, I collided with Adelaide’s back.

“Good,” she said. “I was worried you hadn’t followed.”

“Followed where?”

Adelaide raised her arms like a lesbian Willy Wonka. “Welcome to the Land of the Dead!”

I must have looked skeptical, because she added, “I know for a fact you’ve never been to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead before. This goes on the firsts board for sure. Look around!”

Was that meant ironically? There was nothing to see. The trees that had surrounded us a moment before had vanished. What phase was the moon in? The darkness held no moon, no stars, no satellites.

“Don’t turn back,” Adelaide said. “If you take a step backward, you’ll be back on the other side of the trees. Like, any step backward, no matter how far we walk now, and you’ll be instantly back. Trust me?”

I nodded, then vocalized, since it was dark and she was in front of me. “Okay. What about to the side?”

“To the side? Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know. This is a lot. I’m just trying to establish the ground rules.”

“Okay, well, I don’t know what happens if you step off the side. I’ve never thought to test it. This is a road. We walk forward on the road. Think of it like a dark ride; you can only move in one direction. Can’t you feel it?”

I tried, but I didn’t really feel anything. Not hot, not cold. Not scared, which was weird in itself, and definitely not any intuitive instructions she thought she felt. When she started walking again, it took only a moment for her to be swallowed by the blackness.

“Wait up,” I called.

I leapt forward and immediately plowed into her, after which I slowed to match her a step behind. I could have walked beside her, since it wasn’t like she was really leading anymore, but I liked having something to look at other than nothing.

Our feet made no sound as we walked. My puffer jacket’s arm didn’t swish against my body. I couldn’t stand the silence. “So which Land of the Dead is this?”

“Huh?”

“We just walked through two dozen of your own handmade displays about different cultures and death. Which one is this?”

She laughed, a welcome sound. “I guess you’re right. I guess what we work at should by rights be ‘The Lands of the Dead?’ Plural? But that’s all entertainment. This is the real thing. A real thing.”

“You still didn’t answer my question. Which one?”

She stopped and pointed some distance ahead at a brick-faced bar, lit by neon beer signs and a glow from inside. The first anything we’d seen since we started on the road–I couldn’t make any guess on the distance we’d traveled or how long we’d been walking.

“Mine.” She said it as if it was obvious.

“The land of the dead is a honky-tonk?”

“No. My land of the dead is not a honky-tonk. It’s the first gay bar I ever went to.”

Impossibly, we had closed the distance, though we’d taken only a few more steps. We were crossing the empty parking lot now. Dead winter grass and gravel crunched under our feet, the first sounds other than our own voices.

I let space open between us. “Have you been in before?”

“Sort of. For a long time it stayed far away no matter how much I walked. These days—I’ll show you.”

That should have made me nervous, probably, but somehow it didn’t. From inside, laughter, voices, music.

She gripped the brass door handle and swung it open without stepping in. I had to crane my neck around her to look inside. Two couples slow-danced in front of an old-school jukebox playing “Walkin’ After Midnight.” A dozen or so young men, Black and white and brown, stood near the bar chatting, and more in the booths. A few women, too, mostly Adelaide’s age and older.

A copper-haired trans woman in a black tank top and acid-white jeans washed glasses behind the bar, a towel over one shoulder. She was the first to notice us. Not us.

“Addie,” she said. “You’re too early.”

Everyone looked over, but not in a synchronized way, nothing creepy or ominous. Someone in the far booth waved at her. I’d had that moment before walking into a new bar, where all the locals size you up; none of these people spared a glance for me.

Adelaide. They all looked at Adelaide in surprise and delight. I waited for her to take another step, to cross the threshold, but she didn’t.

The song faded, and another began. Something faster, an eighties synthesizer riff driving it, something I didn’t recognize, but more people from the booths rose to dance.

“Karaoke isn’t until later, Addie,” the bartender said. “And you know you can’t bring friends. Come back later. We’ll be here, I promise. We love you.”

“I love you, too.” Adelaide didn’t move.

“Come on, Adelaide.” It seemed clear to me that the bartender was telling her to leave. If this was a dark ride, they were a diorama we were meant to see but not engage with; not yet for her, not ever for me. I touched her bicep, but she shrugged off my hand.

“One drink. We’ll stay for one drink. They can’t object to that.” She took a single step forward, but something had shifted. It looked like she was forcing her body through Lucite. She turned and reached for me, to pull me with her, I thought, and I stepped back, and my heel slipped on the mat of dead leaves that meant I was back in the woods. I landed gracelessly on my butt and hands.

Since I was already on the ground, I stayed sitting, staring deep between the twisted trees. Waiting, hoping Adelaide would step through, too. In the second before I’d backed out, as she’d reached for me, I’d thought she was trying to pull me forward, into a scene that was hers, or not hers, but definitely not mine. Now, picturing the look in her eyes, I wondered if that hadn’t been what she was asking of me at all. Maybe she needed an anchor.

I considered my options: wait here or try to find my way back to the Path and the yard and the known? No, the third option. I needed to find Adelaide, to offer her the help I’d failed to offer.

I scrambled to my feet and walked forward between the trees.

Into nothing.

Dark and dark and darkness, not even road beneath my feet, not even my hands in front of me, not even my own breath. I called out once to Adelaide, and no sound emerged from my mouth, if I still had one. And again, I should have been scared, but I wasn’t; this was a non-place that paradoxically felt like it would one day be known to me. I tried one step forward, but it felt like moving against a current. This ride is under construction. No, this ride is still in the planning stages, a space waiting to be used, a drafting board waiting for a concept, a sketch, a cutting away of negative space.

My non-foot stepped backward, and I found myself slipping again in the slick late-winter leaves of northern Georgia. A second later, Adelaide stepped through the doorway.

“There you are,” she said, like I was a kid who’d wandered away in the grocery store. She turned her flashlight back on, and I followed her wordlessly back to the boardwalk, then the lighted amusements yard, then to her cabin.

She flopped backwards onto her bed, boots and all. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I shouldn’t have pushed it when I knew that was the closest they’d let me get. I know it’s not time, but I can’t tell you what it’s like to see them and not go to them.”

“Who are they?” I dropped onto the love seat. She wouldn’t have brought me if she didn’t want me to ask.

“I moved to New York when I was seventeen. You don’t know what the energy felt like in the seventies; I thought I’d be there forever. That was before all my friends started dying. I took care of them, buried them when their families wouldn’t come. By the time there were none of them left, there was none of me either. I saw an ad where a guy needed help building a new roadside park about the dead in northwest Georgia, and I thought, ‘Who knows more about that than me? What do I deserve other than this?’ So I came here, and to my surprise I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the weird concept of the place, the land. I made new friends, found new lovers, buried some of them too. Built a weird little life here.” She waved a hand, indicating the cabin around her, or maybe the whole Land of the Dead.

“And built that doorway?”

“No. I found it. Maybe twenty years ago? I’d been here a while already. I would’ve sworn I’d explored that area before, but maybe not, or maybe I couldn’t see it until I needed to.”

“You’re telling me that the entrance to the real Land of the Dead is somehow coincidentally at the Land of the Dead?”

“I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think maybe George felt it too. Have you ever asked him why he picked this spot to build? It’s not exactly tourist central. I asked once and he said, ‘This was the right place.’ Who knows, maybe he goes through that doorway too.”

“To your gay bar?”

“No. You saw my gay bar because I went first and pulled you through. If you went on your own, you’d see something else. I’m guessing it’s not time for you to catch a glimpse yet, and you’d get lost and never even find those trees, or yours is different trees or something else altogether.”

“How do you know?” I didn’t tell her I’d tried it.

She propped herself on an elbow. “Honey, you know you’re not my first, right?”

I laughed. I understood, kind of. She’d been here a while.

“Anyway,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done all that research and built all those exhibits if I thought that what I see is what anyone else sees. I figure there are other entrances, other lands, other ways of being and not being. And even I would get sick of bar food after a while; I’m kinda hoping that’s the welcome center, and that one day I’ll step through the trees and straight into the bar. I guess I’ll find out someday.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then she told me to grab a couple of beers from the minifridge.

She hoisted her bottle. “A toast.”

“To my first time in a land of the dead in the Land of the Dead?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And your first time leaving a land of the dead in the Land of the Dead.”

Something about the way she said “leaving” made me realize she meant a bigger moving-on. Not immediately, but soon. I did like it here, sometimes, and I thought she was fantastic, but I had to go somewhere and do something, so that somebody greeted me someday the way the people in the bar had greeted Adelaide. I still needed to find my place, and my people.

How many folks like me had she given this tour to? How many mes had there been before me? More than a few, I guessed, from the look on her face. I offered one more toast. “To all the firsts. To beginnings.”

We clinked bottles and drank.

“Yours too?” She asked, as if it was my idea. “What are you going to do?”

I considered. “I want to try to sell my paper cuts. Like, at maker markets or online or something. I don’t know where.”

“I know some artists in Chattanooga if you want introductions.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I know some in Atlanta, too. I was always the person selling them supplies, so I never really introduced myself as an artist. Anyway, I didn’t leave Atlanta because there was nothing left for me there. It had gotten a little small, but maybe it won’t feel that way if I’m doing something new.”

“A place like this is good for resetting your sense of scale.” She waved at the close walls. “When do you think you’ll leave?”

I studied her face. She had seen a lot of people come and go; for the first time, it occurred to me she might even be the one who did the hiring. She brought people here when they needed it and then pushed them out before they got stuck, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it. “Not right this second, but soon.”

“Good. You need to make me a paper cut to frame on my wall, for starters. All my art is by friends, you know.”

“I’d be honored.” My brain immediately started in on the puzzle of what to make her: two trees entwined, maybe, surrounded by a forest boardwalk. It made me think of one other thing. “You know, I’ve been here for summer and fall and winter, but not—”

“Oh, you’ll love it when everything starts blooming. You won’t even recognize the trees when they get dressed up nice.”

“It doesn’t seem right to leave before I put that on my firsts board. I guess I can stick around a little longer.”

I sighed, faking resignation, knowing at the same time that it felt true. I was almost ready to go, but before I did, I wanted to be able to say I’d spent springtime in the Land of the Dead.

Sarah Pinsker is the Hugo and Nebula winning author of A Song For A New Day, We Are Satellites, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, and over sixty works of short fiction. Her new collection, Lost Places, was published by Small Beer Press in spring 2023. She is also a singer/songwriter and toured nationally behind three albums on various independent labels. A fourth, Something to Hold, came out in 2021. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and two weird dogs.

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