You wandered through the muted grasses of a misty dreamscape, where tombstones marked the way forward. Your feet sank into millennia-old earth refreshed by yesterday’s rain. Through the haze, the occasional shape of a transparent balloon swelled into your vision before dissipating. The afterimages of ghostly eyes and open mouths were all that remained.

Most of the tombstones resided in stony silence, alone and unmarked. If you stood next to one, only the faintest outline of the next tombstone peeked from the blurry horizon, and when you reached it, the one behind you would disappear. You gave each you passed a polite nod of greeting, a silent acknowledgement to mirror their own. No other guides stood in the fog to point you along an invisible road.

At the first accompanied tombstone, you found a woman digging at its foot.

“Good day,” you said. Her silhouette clarified as you approached. Her shovel did not stop its meditative scooping. Dirt piled into steady mounds around her rectangular pit.

“Good day, young traveler,” she said.

Her back hunched from her years, and a smile entrenched wrinkles around her eyes. Waist-deep in the ground, she continued to hone away at the earth, until her short, silver hair mimicked the dewy grasses sticking up from the surface.

“Do you need help?” you asked. Her arms moved with a jerky rhythm like brittle twigs bound in twine, yet she lifted little mountains with the fluidity of splashing water.

“Oh, no thank you, young traveler,” she chuckled. “You’re too green to be digging just yet. I’m almost done anyway. This will be nice and comfortable for a proper rest soon.”

You peered into the pit, where she patted the soft dirt at the bottom and tucked sheets of dust into the frame.

“Comfortable?” you echoed.

“It’s been a long time coming for me, dear,” the woman said. “I could use a nice long sleep.”

She beamed up at you despite her frail arms clutching the shovel and her back bowed over the earth.

You continued your walk through the plains. At the next tombstone, this one silent and unaccompanied like many others, the digging woman behind you faded into the mist. You treaded around the rectangular indentations in the spongy ground at the foot of each subsequent tombstone. Some of the earthen perimeters were hewn with jagged, careless strokes; others were cut as if by a mason.

You passed many tombstones before you encountered another accompanied one, which you almost failed to greet. Unlike the first, this woman had descended twice the distance and dug with a ferocity unparalleled. She stood straight, with her legs drilled into the pit, and plunged her shovel as if hammering rock.

“Good day, are you all right?” you called. You balanced your toes on the edge.

She stabbed the earth a few times, dislodging ungraceful hunks of dirt before she looked up. Her mouth drooped into a frown, but the widened eyes turned her expression from an impending tantrum to a plaintive, tearful one.

“Miss, why aren’t you stopping me?” she asked.

“What should I do?” Lowering yourself to the lip of earth would not bring you to her outstretched hand and she did not reach up. The distance might have been too great even had she raised the shovel for you to grab.

“Come down,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I don’t think I can.”

“I said come down.” Her teeth bared as if in pain and her glossy hair, the same color as the ground, flitted across her eyes. “You come down here with me!”

You shook your head and stepped away from the edge. Her shrieks faded as you reached the next tombstone. When you looked back, you could neither hear the young woman nor see the marker of her excavation.

The mud swallowed your fraying shoes, and the mist discouraged retracing your footsteps. More silent tombstones passed in your wake. Pale rays of light illuminated particulates in the air and sculpted them into wraiths, their mouths open in wordless questions or soundless howls. The humidity filled your lungs with the smell of soil and sod.

A movement in the fog caught your eye, too intentional for the wind, and too opaque for a specter. As you approached the next tombstone, the shadow turned into a woman, lean and willowy, with a shovel in her hands. Her dark hair was a wild mess, but the silver-rimmed glasses that framed her eyes glinted, freshly polished.

Unlike those in your previous encounters, she dug with a reluctant gait that oscillated between a methodical transfer of miniature hills and lengthened pauses where she stood contemplating in the crevice. Occasionally, she would lift the shovel and chip it into the walls of her descent.

She continued to dig and chip as you stood at the open mouth of earth, where rocky teeth encircled her collarbone. Oddly, the hole she dug did not follow gravity in a direct path, but rather veered into a semicircular curve.

“Good day,” you called.

She let her shovel rest at her side and placed her hand into one of the indentations she had hollowed out. The makeshift grip filled her palm with silt.

“Keep walking the road aboveground,” she said.

“There isn’t a road as far as I can see,” you said. “But this, is this a grave or a tunnel?”

“Fate does not commit.” Her voice unrolled like a ball of thread, laid flat without a change in amplitude.

“Will you climb back out?”

“Haven’t decided that either.” She looked up at you. The muted light reflected two cloudy windows over her eyes. “You’d best keep walking. There are no roads underground that you won’t have to dig yourself.”

“Then is this a tunnel?”

“Could be a grave.”

She turned her back to you and resumed her digging, strategic and plodding as she carved out a ceiling of earth. You resumed your unguided walk through this neighbor to the netherworld, onward to the next tombstone, and wondered when you would have to dig under your own.

Nat Nguyen is an Asian-American writer of Vietnamese and Taiwanese heritage. She has been a pianist, a martial artist, an X-ray crystallographer, a software tester, and a psychology researcher—none of which prepared her for falling off a toboggan while descending a mountainside, being attacked by a crow, or getting lost in a snow-covered forest. She graduated from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing. You can find her at natnguyenh.carrd.co.

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biddy bye bye
bought and sold
and when we cry cry

crawling cold
and if we dye dye

our blues gone old
we say my my

the table’s told

biddy bye bye
frightened fawn
and if we fly fly

the fuels withdrawn
Whisper why why

touch the dawn
float too high high

the baby’s gone

biddy bye bye
tale’s gone sour
heave a sigh sigh

every hour
voices pry pry

we ought to cower
but we lie lie
truth devour

yes we lai lai
a shroud of flowers
yes we lye lye
skin and scour

River (they/them) is a poet in the US. In lieu of a bio River asserts that the current conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is a genocide inflicted on Palestine by Israel and the US. It must cease immediately and permanently, apartheid ended, and Palestinians must be afforded dignity, self direction and freedom. Accountability must come to those in Israel, the US, and other countries who supported and committed war crimes, and reconciliation and reparations must be made.

Return to Issue #36 | Support the Deadlands

The long and thin of her stretches past the calculations. She ran the numbers ten times and she may not have a tape measure out here to drape across the space-curve bounding her legs—but eyeballing it, she spots at least four variables needing another century of physics to pin down.

Nothing hurts. Not the malformed formulae against her pride, not her body against… well.

She didn’t exactly plan on it coming to this, is the thing.

Obviously.

Before any of them had their heads thrown back against the shuttle seats rocketing out of atmo, the captain rewound the old speech in his throat. Lethal risk comes with space travel by way of having a body. The vacuum is relentless. It tears and rips, distorts, inverts, obliterates.

The captain continued, each sentence a rut that let his thoughts drift elsewhere, and she leaned farther forward on every word.

The black hole Samatar 961 boasted more anomaly citations than any other mapped astronomical landmark. It will tear and rip and distort and invert and obliterate beyond anything they could ever anticipate.

And she didn’t salivate learning this, but it would have been fitting.

The tips of her toes brush against her hair.

The diameter of Samatar 961 is estimated at 2.7 AUs, 404 million kilometers.

It feels—

It feels—

If she’s lined up this narrowly, atom by atom, then she can puzzle herself back together however she wants.

From the USS Recursion, she remembers the ring of light orbiting the black hole just outside the event horizon, a clear demarcation. The outside edges bled and leaked, distant stars stretched like sap. She held her hand against the porthole in her bunk, squinted, let her eyes blur the two together. Skin and nuclear fusion, fat cells melting to plasma.

The other physicists put their backs to the portholes in the mess hall during meals. Hard enough to stomach the food as it was, they said, but that thing lurking in the periphery, just out of focus—spooning the latest attempt at mashed potatoes into their mouths loomed over their consciences as a profound act of disrespect. Couldn’t they see that Samatar 961 was starving? The least they could do was turn away.

One of those colleagues once coauthored a paper on spaghettification.

She always did like spaghetti—and if the center of the Milky Way can taste like raspberries, surely some passing dust cloud in the infinite vacuum holds a hint of oregano.

Samatar 961 deserves a good meal.

She’s fed so much of herself to it already, years of a dissertation, more years of postdoc research, hours and hours of skipped sleep and meals and visits home. Lifebloods of friendships, left to shrivel and crack.

On her twenty-seventh straight hour in her closet of a doctoral student office, facing the wall of her calculations with three colors of chalk gripped between her fingers, she stared at the doodle of the black hole at the center. A crude scribble in pale yellow.

Will you be the death of me? She didn’t remember saying it out loud, but her advisor had been passing by and nudged the door open with his foot, pointedly asking after her last meal and the last time she slept. Neither of her answers got him to leave her be.

The senior physicist on the Recursion liked to hover. Not literally, though hir work had touched on related theory—ze could exist in the edge of a crowd while standing at its center and took up space like light in a room already well-lit.

Four times on the voyage to the border of Samatar 961’s safe zone, ze lurked behind her shoulder on the bridge, watching her watch the black hole.

Always the same sort of opener, an airy quip about the way her eyes swelled hazel as she studied it, as if it were so desperate to consume that it grabbed at the hollows of her pupils instead.

There’s no one to insist it to on this side of the event horizon, but she still senses the urge.

No matter what her advisor may have heard that day, she doesn’t have a death wish.

She’s curious, is all.

She’s curious how she can still have thoughts at this stage, this unraveled. Time distorts this close to the center, so maybe it takes that much longer for the synapses to connect, but without her sensing the difference. But then—she can still see, too, even while the gelatin of her eyes has spun into threads. She sends a signal to her spindly, distorted arm to point up toward the Recursion, the matte gray metal smeared against the distant starscape.

Her bones don’t break, but her arm curves and twists like it’s expecting the clean snap of marrow.

Something toward the core of Samatar 961 shudders with an abyssal sound, and she feels the line of atoms at her furthest point lean forward at a faster clip.

Yes, yes—pull her apart, draw her out into quarks and neutrinos. How else is she supposed to—

There should have been a better way.

She had that thought so often. A better way to study a black hole, a better way to have a body.

The first time she heard about black holes, she was nine years old and flipping through the battered encyclopedias at the back of her third-grade classroom. There was a project due on the horizon, something involving poster board and construction paper and copious amounts of glue all orbiting the astronomy unit.

Black holes consume everything that draws too close, her teacher said. We only call them black holes because we can’t see past a certain point. The physics won’t let us.

By the time she was twelve, she prayed every night to the stars to become a black hole. Not to be seen, only felt. And she didn’t know why. Couldn’t put words to it.

She told her mother what she wanted to be for Halloween that year and in return got only a question of whether she was perhaps too old now for all that.

But there had to be a better way. Prestigious astrophysics programs took her in, but still, surely, there had to be a better way. If she concentrated enough, maybe the dense point behind her ribs would collapse further, sink down into the plane of space-time and let her hide.

The doctorate helped; she could duck behind an honorific over email.

The position on the Recursion helped; a crew of two hundred eyes was better than Earth’s several billion.

Two hundred wasn’t zero. It could be zero. There was a way to make it zero, if she massaged the math in just the right way. That’s what science was for, after all.

In her bunk, her whole body fatigue-stung, she stared up from her pillow through the porthole—toward Samatar 961, the darkness warping the vacuum, that unknown place inside no one has ever seen.

The math was good enough by now. Her limbs hummed through the surface ache into a new thing entirely. Past pain, elsewhere. At her center, but also just outside of her. It wrenched her to her feet, to the closet of G suits by the service air lock. Kept her upright as the single thought spinning around the inside of her skull sloshed at her sense of balance.

I just want to be something else.

It’s started to shear her apart finally, thank the stars thank God thank the Big Bang gravity all the laws of physics all the unproven hypotheses all the dorm room what-ifs.

Again, Will you be the death of me, but it’s not a question of fate, no, it’s a request. Please, please. And it’s not death, because that’s too simple. That’s not the operant word. Me, that’s it. Make me something else. Will you be the death of me so that something else can finally live.

Molecules shred to atoms shred to particles. Words pop apart into letters into lines invisible in the void.

She’s not a she. She’s not anything language can touch.

It’s perfect.

On the bridge of the Recursion, the captain motions for the air lock’s breach alarm to quiet.

Ahead, at Samatar 961’s event horizon, is a G-suited figure frozen in a wave goodbye.

Haden Cross is a science-fiction and horror writer based in Arlington, VA. Their writing has appeared in Eleven-ThirtyEight, Much Ado About Cinema, and Star Trek‘s official website. In the afterlife, they plan on haunting Herman Melville’s shelf at the local library, but in the meantime they can be found at hadencross.com or on Bluesky @yavin4.bsky.social.

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because we loved our country

& it did not love us back:                            the night we died

at the gates of heaven

we dragged our feet like soldier ants                     & walked

like devils on our way to heaven                       we wore tattered clothes

& the angels

laughed at us for coming from                    a crooked country

we carried the holes

our country dug inside the skin of our bones

& fresh bullets fell        from

their mouths       like hot yam         you said we looked dirty

& i laughed

aloud        like a rooster       & declared that we looked exactly

the way

our country wanted us to look        you tore my flesh apart

to see the ruin

that my inside had become      &        i opened the gates of your eyes

to see

the extent of the flourish      of your blemish            you said

you were grateful

for the impacts your country had      on your body          & because

it did not

shatter you as a whole             but only crumpled your intestine

& i threw

my tongue         against the gates of heaven          & threw

my palms to a distance

to worship the creator         for shattering my flesh          & for

remolding my heart

into pieces          you said we did not live enough on earth

but i said it was

not my wish to die together          with the body of our country

you said

we did not love the country enough          but in what other way

can you show love

again        if you have already offered your body           we loved

but were

not loved      i took bullets for you          my country           because

i did not know

that you were the one         holding the rifle         i threw my body

into the fire

for your sake          ignorant that the source of the fire was you

you bombed

my skin          yet            i enjoyed the fondness of the furnace

& although

we were tired           we walked          as if we conquered the world

when we reached

the gates of heaven         we met you at heaven’s gate       holding

a rifle &

throwing its breath            into the holes          of our nostrils

& still walked to you

Ayòdéjì Israel, a poet, writer and editor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Channel Magazine, Eunoia Review, The Deadlands, Ake Review, Defunct Magazine, OneArtPoetry, Sandy River Review, Whale Road Review, Nude Bruce Review, The Bitchin Kitsch and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @Ayo_einstein.

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On the Feast Night of Vengeful Ghosts, the thin atmosphere above the dome of Yaniv Town filled with floating lights. It was wintertime, when frost formed on the Martian sand and made fantastical shapes on the surface, all spiderlike webs and fairy circles. The snow, similarly made of carbon dioxide, often fell on Feast Night, also called Saints’ Night by some of the older residents. The snow was made of tiny, cube-shaped snow drops, and as it fell over the town and dissipated against the transparent thermoplastic dome it was illuminated by the thousands of floating lanterns that bathed the long winter in their ethereal light.

Maya Khouri could remember being out there herself, in earlier years. They’d put on surface suits and march into the long night through the air lock, family after family, children holding on to their parents’ hands. There was a sense of hushed expectancy, broken only moments later when they all got outside and all the kids started running. The grownups would tell them to stop, but halfheartedly. Maya would usually hold the tiny mindless lantern drone, and it was usually her who released it into the sky, to float there with its tiny rotor and rise slowly higher and higher into the skies. Then another lantern would rise, and another. They’d float on the wind, released into the atmosphere from all the nearby towns, from Port Jessup and Enid and even the hive-mind colony of La Navidad, and Maya would look out and see the clouds of light in the night sky, growing then diffusing as the lanterns floated wherever the winds took them.

It would go on for hours. Maya no longer went out there on Feast Night, not to celebrate. It had been years since she last released a lantern into the skies. Usually she’d be working at the izakaya. Feast Night was always busy. People would want food, beer, the streets of Yaniv Town thronged with guising folks in outlandish costumes. Maya didn’t want to close but she didn’t want company, either, not tonight. She’d hired Jelena Goldin instead, the girl always needed work, she was saving away her money for who knew what and it wasn’t like the Shiva factory she was slumming in raising godlings was paying anything half-decent.

Maya wrapped her coat around her as she walked down the street. It was cold even inside the dome. Kids holding candles walked in procession, behind them came adults carrying an effigy—St. Cohen of the Others, or an approximate representation of him, at any rate. There were still those who didn’t trust the digital intelligences that first emerged out of the Jerusalem labs so long ago. Martians have had to rely on analog tech for most of the first few centuries. Wetware was fragile, software crashed, but an air lock was a simple mechanism, oxygen generators could be fixed with spare parts, and everything could be built with several layers of fail-safes that required nothing more than hammers and screwdrivers.

Now the trains had machine minds driving them, and the Others had their own hidden cores buried deep somewhere near the north polar cap, guarded by their private mercenary army of Clan Ayodhya—but few Others ever came to the outback. Still, St. Cohen was celebrated along with all the other saints—and this night belonged to the saints and the ghosts.

“A soul! A soul!” old Mrs. Hasson said. She stood next to the Hassons’ ancestral spirit house, a huge and ornate construction like a doll’s house, in which the Hasson ancestors clacked and wheeled and generally passed the time since their long-ago deaths. Not much remained of a person after death: a few jumbled memories, long-term storage, traces of a personality—digital debris left in the node that intertwined with their squishy biological brain since birth. Most souls went to the Public Heavens. But some were decanted into miniaturized automata, like the Hassons.

Mrs. Hasson shoved a soul cake into Maya’s hands.

“I made them myself,” she said proudly.

Maya did not particularly like soul cakes. Still, she couldn’t refuse. She took a polite bite.

“Tamarind?” she said.

Mrs. Hasson beamed.

“It’s an old recipe,” she said.

“It’s my recipe!” a tinny voice said, and Mrs. Hasson’s great-grandmother, a cheaply printed, bright blue cube on wheels with two blinking eyes and an unmoving mouth, rattled out of the spirit house. “Came up with it back in, oh, when was it…”

“Nonsense, Edna,” another voice said, as another spirit, this one a dull green, emerged. “It was me who gave it to you back when you were a little girl—”

“Now, Grandma—” Mrs. Hasson’s great-grandmother’s spirit said.

“Don’t Grandma me!” the green cube said. “I remember it clear as day, I had nothing in the kitchen and—”

“They do go on,” Mrs. Hasson said apologetically. “It’s an old family recipe, anyway.”

“It’s very nice,” Maya said politely. “Well, have a good Feast Night, Mrs. Hasson.”

She walked on. In truth, the soul cake was too sweet for her. She disposed of it discreetly in a bin around the corner. Kids ran, shrieking laughter, down the road. Outside the Water of Life, the usual gaggle of four-armed Re-Born warriors stood talking. It was all they ever did; they hung out in their own encampment outside the dome most of the time. They were just kids, really. She’d gone to school with most of them, only they never grew up.

“Hey, Maya,” one of them said as she passed.

“Hey, Daud.”

“What do you think of the new canal?” he said shyly. He fell in recently with those Blaumilchs who liked to dig canals all over the place. Maya wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. It had been a long time since she enjoyed Feast Night.

“I saw it,” Maya said.

“Bloom, the guy who’s digging, he says he wants to run it all the way to Port Jessup!” Daud said.

“Blaumilchs say all kinds of things,” Maya said.

She was desperate to get away. But everyone in town seemed to be out tonight.

“We’re going outside to float the lanterns,” Daud said. “You want to come?”

He was sweet. She said, “I can’t, Daud. But thanks.”

“No problem,” he said; but he looked a little dejected all the same.

“Have fun out there,” Maya said. She walked on, faster. For a small town, it was surprisingly hard to get through. At least tonight. Usually Yaniv Town was more sedate, and usually Maya was more kindly disposed. Working at the izakaya, she saw most people come in from time to time. She grew up here, she knew everyone. But tonight she just wanted them all gone.

It was easier said than done. The roads were crowded with people, makeshift food stalls, members of the Town Decoration Committee handing out free lantern-drones and flags—Red Soviet, New Israel, Mars-That-Never-Was, the short-lived Anarchist Commune of Terminal Beach—and the kids ran around in their guising costumes. One kid ran straight into Maya, a tiny figure out of nightmare, and she held him at arm’s length and said, “And what are you?”

“I’m Elvis Mandela in Tokoloshe 3!” the kid said, stuck his tongue out, and ran off.

“That costume’s from Tokoloshe 2,” Csilla Chen said. “Hey, Maya. You want a drink?” She was with Emily Fitoussi, like she always was. “We have some rice whiskey. For the ghosts.”

“No ghosts,” Maya said. Emily Fitoussi nudged Csilla hard in the ribs.

“What!” Csilla said.

“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Emily said to Maya. She came around the stand. “You’re going outside?”

“It’s quiet outside,” Maya said.

“I know.” Emily gave her a quick hug, surprising her. “Go find your quiet,” Emily said.

“I will. I…” Maya didn’t know what to say. She turned to leave.

“But what did I say?” she heard Csilla whisper to Emily.

“Not everyone has ghosts,” Emily whispered back.

“Oh…”

Maya didn’t resent them. She just didn’t want the company. She went farther along, until the party crowds mercifully thinned. The co-op apartment buildings were crammed close together in this part of Yaniv Town, close to the edge of the dome, to the refuse and recycle center and the old abandoned chicken factory.

Bougainvillea Road.

She felt a twinge in her heart at the familiar sight. They had lived here when she was a child. Mum, Dad, Moss. She used to take Moss by the hand to the playground. She passed it now. Still here, grass growing between the cracks in the soft dark rubber flooring, the swings rusted. The Council sent maintenance crews here periodically, but sooner or later it always fell into disrepair again. The smell from the refuse center lingered in the air here, it never quite went away. She used to push Moss on the swing, his little baby legs dangling, his podgy little arms raised in exhilaration as he cried, “Higher, May-May! Higher!”

It was a good memory; but a memory was all it was. It was all a person was made out of, in the end. If you were lucky then someone remembered you someday; until the day there was no one left to remember a thing.

Morbid thoughts. She hated Feast Night. She gave the swing a push. It rattled as it swung.

Her memory kept supplying a missing smell in the air. It still smelled of the refuse center and it still smelled of the bougainvillea that gave the road its name, but the smell of the chicken from the factory was gone. It used to hang in the air for years after they closed it, a sort of earthly, unpleasant smell. She and Moss snuck into the factory once, just before it got shut down for good. Dad used to work there, but he’d never let them come in. But they did just once, when the whole place was shutting down anyway.

She saw it then. It was old, obsolete technology. Kornbluth chickens, they used to call the things back in the day. A giant, disgusting mass of organic cells, fed on algae, shaved in shifts by workers who sliced off chunks of meat to package and ship. It never rested, it never slept. It just lived and it grew and it grew.

Someone caught them and booted them out but was nice enough not to tell their dad. The factory closed, but the smell lingered long after, disinfectant and raw meat, and Maya never found out what they did with the last of it. Did they just leave it to rot? Or did they turn off life support and just keep slicing to the very end, until there was nothing left of it to eat?

She left the playground, walked past the old factory. Night pressed against the dome. The lanterns floated in the sky, thousands of them now, like tiny stars. They made the snow outside seem festive. An old woman, dressed all in black, stepped out of the shadows by the air lock to the cemetery, startling Maya.

“Maya Khouri,” the old woman said.

“Mrs. Byrne,” Maya said. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”

“But no one is here,” Mrs. Byrne said. “There is no one here but us ghosts.”

“That’s not true,” Maya said, unsettled. “I’m alive. You’re a—”

“A ghost,” Mrs. Byrne said, and she smiled a little sadly. “I died two years ago, don’t you remember? It was winter. I went to Earth when I was in my twenties, did you know that? The winters are so short there, not like here. I fell in love but then I fell out of it, and I thought of staying but I came back. Home is where your roots are, I suppose. But I wished I could have died in spring. I liked the spring clouds. Winter was so long, it felt like a relief to finally let go. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. They put my ghost into this body, but mostly I sleep. I always liked Feast Night, though, so I thought I’d come out tonight. I must say, I don’t feel very vengeful, though.” She smiled again. She really was a remarkable simulacrum, Maya thought.

“I thought you were also a ghost,” Mrs. Byrne said. “But I see I was mistaken. Here. Take this.”

She gave Maya a small glass globe, a candle burning inside it. It was heavy at the base.

“It has thirty minutes of oxygen,” Mrs. Byrne said. “Say hello to them for me, will you? To all the vanished ones.”

“I will,” Maya said.

“Then goodbye, dear. Until next year. I am off to scare the children. Like Sivan Shoshanim in Tokoloshe 3.”

The Mrs. Byrne simulacrum chuckled, then shuffled forward slowly and vanished toward the town center.

“Sivan Shoshanim was only in Tokoloshe 2…” Maya whispered. She carried the candle to the air lock, put on a surface suit, and stepped through to the outside.

It was quiet as soon as she stepped on the frozen ground. The town was always filled with noise, even when it was quiet. It had the hissing of the pipes, someone crying or laughing, cats fighting, people having a conversation, or the sound of Chains of Assembly playing its ten thousandth episode on some public feed.

All that stopped outside. And the falling snow with its tiny cubical snowdrops blanketed the world, and the lights of the floating lanterns overhead cast a myriad of shadows over the fairy-circle ice. Maya liked it. Her boots in the snow. She walked without hurrying, now. The suit smelled a bit, but that was all right. The public suits always did. The important thing, as her father always told her, was that they worked.

The outdoors festivities were on the other side of the dome, next to the main air lock. Hardly anyone came down this way. Maya’s steps were etched in the ice. The twin moons hung in the sky, one large, one small. Maya came to the first of the graves.

Old, raised graves, austere. Some had bright artificial flowers left on them, but sooner or later those always blew away in the wind. The headstones, wind-weathered, looked their age. These were planted here in the early centuries of settlement, back when Yaniv Town was new. Once there had been nothing here. Then people came, and eventually the first of them died. She wasn’t sure which one it was. Some of the old graves were little more than rubble by now. It had started with one grave, and then another, and by now the cemetery extended into the sands. She made her way cautiously between the graves. No ghosts here, but the ground could be treacherous.

Something loomed in the dark ahead of her suddenly. Maya froze. The figure, vaguely human, turned and gave a strange sound of surprise on the suit’s comms.

“You scared me for a moment,” it said.

Maya stared. It was an old robot standing there, one of the humanoid ones. She recognized it. It had been hanging around town for a while. Few of the old robots ever came to the outback, so people noticed when one did.

“I didn’t think robots could get scared,” Maya said.

“They can,” the robot said. “I’m scared of ghosts.”

“There are no ghosts here,” Maya said shortly. Then, feeling rude, she said, “Why are you scared of ghosts?”

“Some of us old robots,” the robot said, “we were in the old wars. I don’t like to talk about it much. But sometimes I think about the people I… Well.” It brooded.

“You’re…” She tried to think. “Riperem-ol-Gud?” she said.

“You can call me Rip. And you’re Maya Khouri, from the izakaya.”

“I am.”

“What brings you out here on Feast Night, Maya Khouri?” the robot said.

“The dead,” Maya said. She didn’t really feel like talking. But somehow the robot didn’t bother her, it being there.

“Ghosts?”

“I told you,” she said. “There are no ghosts here. Not tonight, not on any other night.” She walked away. It took her some time, but she found the graves. She knelt in the snow and placed the small globe of the candle on the nearest one, the one that said Mohsan Khouri on the tombstone.

“Oh, Moss…” she said.

She didn’t look back. She could see the robot’s shadow fall on the ground beside her. She said, “They were in an avalanche, east of Tharsis. It was… I think it was quick. But there was nothing left after they dug them out, not even a memory.” She wasn’t going to cry. The candle flame shivered in the glass dome. The robot’s shadow danced on the ice.

“The people we bury here,” Maya said, “all they are is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” the robot said.

“Why are you here?” Maya said. “I mean, really?”

The robot hesitated.

“I guess I am scared,” it said at last. “Not of my metaphorical ghosts, that was a lie. A robot shouldn’t lie. But think—human ghosts are what is left in their node when the organic brain dies. What is a robot, then? We are nothing but ghosts, inhabiting a body. What happens to us when we cease to be? We were made in your image, and yet when we fade away, we become—well.” Its shadow stretched out an arm, encompassing the silent graves. “We become nothing. Who will remember us, when are we gone? I…” It fell quiet, then coughed, the recorded, embarrassed cough of a man who died many centuries past.

“I try not to think about existence too often,” the robot said. “But on Feast Night I allow myself a little indulgence.”

Maya looked at the graves. The candle flame shivered in the glass. She stood slowly and raised her head. Above her the lanterns floated in the sky, and beyond them were the stars, faint behind the Martian dust.

“Look at it,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Isn’t that enough? That it is pretty now? That we are here to see it? Then it will be gone, but there will be other beauties, and maybe no one will ever see them to name them so, but they will still have existed, somewhere in space. All we have is now.”

“Maybe,” the robot said. But it said it dubiously.

Maya nodded. As she watched the sky, she saw a bright point of light falling through the thin atmosphere.

“Look,” she said. “A falling star.”

“Quick,” the robot said. “Make a wish.”

Maya did, her lips moving without sound. The meteor’s light winked out, and only its memory remained. The cemetery lay in the lantern-light, wreathed in shadow, quiet. She took a deep breath of suit air.

Then she turned and walked slowly back to the air lock, passing the robot as she did. It did not follow. She re-entered the dome and when she turned she saw the robot still, standing alone between the graves, and she thought, it never really did answer her question.

She watched the robot and the sky for a long while more; but she did not see another shooting star. And she wondered what the robot had wished for, if robots wished for anything. She raised her hand, though of course the robot, with its back turned, didn’t see her. Nor did he hear her when she said, quietly, “Happy Feast Night.”

Then she turned, and the cemetery vanished from sight, and Maya went back toward the town and its myriad of lights.

Lavie Tidhar’s work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama, and the forthcoming Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming and World Fantasy Award winner Osama, and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom winner Central Station. He has also written comics, children’s books such as Candy and the forthcoming A Child’s Book of the Future, and created the animated movie Loontown and web-series Mars Machines. He is a former columnist for The Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London. His work has been translated into multiple languages. He lives in London.

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Oops…

Do cremated remains ever get mixed up?

The short answer is yes, although hopefully not often. Obviously crematory operators have a lot of protocols in place to identify decedents and keep track of them, but…. Every sort of mix-up that could happen to a body almost certainly has happened. Cremation in particular is the fussiest form of disposition, because it’s permanent. If someone buries your grandmother in the wrong casket—or in the wrong grave—that is still fixable. There’s no coming back from the retort.

In theory, could you have been handed back a stranger’s remains instead of your loved one’s? Yes. However, unless you have good reason to believe this, try not to stress about it.

The same answer applies for everyone who’s expressed concern that cremated remains might be comingled out of carelessness or a poorly vacuumed retort. It is possible, but try to imagine it in a sense of cosmic unity. We’re all the same stardust, after all. We can be the same finely ground carbon, too.

How does a funeral home lose someone’s body?

The most recent time someone asked me this, they then clarified that the funeral home found the straying corpse shortly afterward. I don’t know any details of this particular anecdote, but my somewhat cynical assumption is that services must have been delayed for the funeral home to have told the family about the misplacement at all.

If it makes you feel any better, though, there was a panic at the mortuary that day.

The reality is, humans lose track of things all the time. Keys, books, wallets, cars in parking lots, etc. Employees go home with work keys in their pockets. Books get misshelved in libraries. The good news is, most corpses don’t fit in a jacket pocket.

To be less facetious, the real answer is most often either a paperwork mix-up, or a computer mix-up. Two bodies are being checked in or moved at the same time, and paperwork is set down on the wrong cot. If no one checks an ankle tag, the mistake might not be noticed for days. In funeral homes with computerized records, a typo means that the body that was just racked in 3-B is checked into 3-D instead. The more decedents a facility has in their care, the more likely these things are to happen. When my funeral home in Texas had multiple ancillary coolers and refrigerated trucks during the worst of COVID, we were regularly scurrying to make sure that everyone was accounted for because someone had been checked out of their designated spot in the computer. We never lost a body, but there were a few tense moments.

Occasionally, those mix-ups do end very badly. As in, the wrong person was cremated. I have a morbid sense of humor, but even I won’t laugh about that.

One particular funeral home in San Antonio has extraordinarily bad luck. In 2015 a woman’s body was stolen from the funeral home overnight, in between her services and her final disposition. This was the source of much head-shaking and speculation when I was in mortuary school in 2019—as far as I know, her remains have never been located. In 2020, the same funeral home mixed up two decedents, leading to one being buried in the wrong grave. That error was caught and corrected, at least, but…yikes.

My greatest source of anxiety (other than the intrusive image of a double-decker cargo van full of corpses crashing on I-35 and sending bodies skating down the highway) was always embalming the wrong person. Any possibility worse than that fills my brain with static.

Diana asks: “Could it be that the ‘dead’ are actually those we consider alive, and that the dead are the ones who are really alive and free outside of this three-dimensional world?”

Entirely possible!

And Zach asks: “What if anything have you found helps relieve your fear of death? In terms of beliefs, practices, attitudes.”

As they say on the internet these days…bold of you to assume. I don’t remember having ever been afraid of death. Of things that might kill me, of course. I’m not trying to be an edgelord. I was in a bad car accident once that left me twitchy about driving in the rain. I watched Jaws when I was young and assume there’s a shark waiting in every body of water. But I’m afraid of harm, of suffering, of losing the people I love. Dying is the hard part, and I’m in no rush to speed that up. I don’t know if what comes after that will be a new adventure or a peaceful nothing, but I know that part doesn’t scare me at all.

In the same vein, people have asked me what I do to replenish my spirit. To carry the weight of the work I do. And the answer is simple: the work itself. Yes, I witness grief in layers and layers. I see the aftermath of violence, neglect, and suffering. I see loneliness that breaks my heart. But caring for the dead is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done. The work lifts the weight.

Moving into a teaching position has been amazing, and I love it so much. But I knew when I accepted the job that I would miss funeral embalming immediately, and I do.

In my new role as Professor Necromancer, I’m inundated with questions daily. Some of them are wonderful questions, like when my office neighbor asked to borrow a heart. Most of them, however, involve syllabi, quizzes, and how to log in to Zoom sessions. So I beg you, dear readers, to send us your own questions: more interesting than the syllabus, less complicated than Canvas. Use the portal at thedeadlands.com, or find us on Bluesky or other social media.

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. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on social media as @stillsostrange.

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In the ashes of a vanished city there rests a reliquary. Its gem-encrusted glass is fire-darkened, facets clouded by centuries and smoke.

To unlock its secrets, we assembled a team of archaeologists and biologists, exospecialists and chaplains, historians and children whose imaginations were all that managed at last to fill in the gaps of lost history. After a year (measured on this world as nearly two thousand days, each a handful of hours), we completed an inventory of the relics. Alongside, we crafted a calendar of nameless saints.

         I. Skulls: So far as skulls have sockets, teeth, crania—we found eight.
            Three in fragments, four of questionable composition, one whole
            and nearly familiar. Some were labelled with nails, others with paper
            that crumbled at our intrusion. One had hair still clinging to
            desiccated skin. One had glass eyes and bejeweled teeth. Four
            were reptilian, we think. One was cartilaginous, with
            selachimorphous teeth.

By our reckoning, a year on this planet numbers 1,822 days. Based on seasonal change, we divided these into 24 months, each lasting between 70-80 days.

The first eight months we named for each of these skull-saints, as follows:

                1. Braid-Skin
                2. Gem Tooth
                3. Half-Reptile
                4. Quarter-Reptile
                5. Cracked Snake
                6. Riveted Jaw
                7. Shark Bone
                8. Fragmentary Lobe

We celebrate the skull-saints with feasts in the last week of each month and fasts in the first. In between, we mourn.

        II. Pieces: Eighteen small bone fragments were found in the chest,
           determined to belong to twelve distinct individuals of at least six
           species. Some fragments were bound in ribbon, others in gold.
           Remains of jewelry and weapons could be matched through study
           to several specimens. Others remained naked, orphaned and bare.
           Once documented, we assigned these fragments to the next twelve
           months of the year:

                9. Vertebra, Humanoid
              10. Hand, Shattered
              11. Leg Bones, Amphibious
              12. Wings, Burned
              13. Satchel of Fragments
              14. Decorated Ribcage
              15. Inner Ear, Ribboned
              16. Gilded Vertebrae
              17. Reptilian Claws
              18. Femur, Unknown
              19. Tibia, Unknown
              20. Bone Dust

We begin each of these piece-months with a feast, followed by weeks of fasting. We finish in prayer.

        III. Stone: Three relics are siliceous in composition. They do not appear
            to have been ornamental, so are perhaps representations of distinct
            individuals of whom no remains could be acquired. It was also
            posited by the children that these pieces were themselves remains,
            though even the exospecialists could name no comparable known
            species. We classified them as such:

            21. Graphite-Limestone Composite
            22. Interstellar Fragment
            23. Iron-Veined Quartz

Each month, in honor of these saints, we journey through mountains and into caves, searching for meaning in the seams of unfamiliar land.

            IV. Chest: The final relic is the reliquary itself. Veined wood swirls with
                 burls and numerous anomalies, fusing impossibly with its glass
                 window and shadowed stones. It opens like a mouth, studs along
                 the lid resembling molars. There is no evidence of internal organs,
                 but the substructure is intricate—almost an inner dermis, a
                 skeleton, a soul.

The last month of the year we named in honor of this box, whether it be beast or merely a container for the dead:

                24. Casket, Decorated and Soot-Stained

At the conclusion of the year, we celebrate our find with a festival to rival all others. Archaeologists and biologists, exospecialists and chaplains, historians and children gather in the city that once was. Knee-deep in ash, we paint ourselves in the colors of the horizon and remember the lives of beings we never met in places we never chanced to visit.

As the light fades, we set fires on every hill and search the alien sky. Constellations wheel above us, their shapes still in progress as we settle into this new home, drawing meaning where we can. This civilization may yet yield its secrets to our waiting minds.

One day, our saints will rise anew.

Marisca Pichette is a queer author and bone-collector based in Massachusetts, on Pocumtuck and Abenaki land. More of her work appears in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Vastarien, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and others. She is the winner of the 2022 F(r)iction Spring Literary Contest and has been nominated for the Best of the Net, Pushcart, Utopia, and Dwarf Stars awards. Her speculative poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is out now from Android Press.

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My father died on a hot day in the cold season, a heavy day in February. He died on a Saturday when flocks of North American tourists beach their bodies, bloated from beer on the white sand, and in the clear, shallow waters of Jamaica. His death seemed an expression of divine transcendence, if you believe these things.

I believe.

My father woke one morning in 2015 after a year bedridden. He was afflicted by an illness he never accepted. Once diagnosed, he took to bed, upset by the treachery of his body. The early morning light shone on my father. He woke with an appetite. Before, he had struggled to consume the food given to him. He couldn’t get his small mouth to open wide enough. Eating was akin to lifting a ton of concrete with his teeth. The ceiling fan whirled overhead, trying to muffle the sounds of the street and the stray goats bleating in hunger. Unable to see because of old age and his condition, my father felt the curtains of skin on his belly, his muscles and vanity gone. His body reduced to dregs while his bones wore his skin as a threadbare suit. My father had spent his life as a dapper and fit man; now his cotton pajamas swallowed him whole.

His third wife tells us he yelled at her to get him breakfast. I trust how she described his last day because none of us, his children, were there. We are abroad, living American and European lives. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned everything her mouth couldn’t say. I see her tugging at her pallu, so it drapes over the shoulder to show off her saree’s gold embellishments. I see her walk to the humble kitchen while the dance of fabric hides her disdain. She fulfils his request out of dutiful respect. Jamaican women, regardless of class, are taught to be polite to their husbands even when their marriage stinks.

Someone ran to the back yard and sliced stalks of callaloo from the garden. His wife prepared it in the usual way Indian women do: peppery, with long slivers of softened onions and tomatoes mixed among the wilted leaves. It was the perfect style to go with the boiled green bananas on the plate. Faster than Bredda Anancy tricking Sistah Mongoose into giving up her best mango, my father was presented with his favorite dish. Father licked his lips. He ate the spicy callaloo mashed into the bananas with gusto.

My father was talkative on his last morning alive. I wondered if he made his pronouncements thinking he was Jesus centered among lambs and children, teaching them about love, duty, and forgiveness. Or was it an opportunity for my father to clean up his act before final judgement? “Without salt fish in the callaloo,” my father mused out loud, “this meal isn’t as nice as what Aunt Gertie used to make. Rest in peace, my dear. We will meet soon.” He was experiencing a memory lapse. His aunt was alive and had 104 years to my father’s eighty-one. She would outlive him, as she had outlived his mother.

A small framed picture of a Jesus—with pale hands clasped in quiet prayer, his blond hair cascading past his shoulders—hung high above my father’s bed on the wall. Jesus’s blue eyes were set to always look away from the viewer. There are many versions of this on walls throughout the island. Sometimes Jesus stretches his hand out to the clean-faced, anonymous children who look up at him. Others show a lamb draped over Jesus’s shoulders. Sometimes Jesus is nailed to a wooden cross looking betrayed, carrion birds flying overhead in the sky. My father’s version of Jesus sat high on the wall, indifferent to my father’s ailment. The picture was close to the ceiling out of deference to Jesus and because my father was terrible at manual labor.

I have limited memories of my father because I never lived with him or stayed in his house. As a child, I saw him when his van came to the city to pick up shipments from the wharf that he could take back to his store on the other side of Jamaica. My father was a short, stout man who boasted of his many women. There were whispers they were desperate women. People he coerced into giving their flower with the promise of trinkets. Women he refused to acknowledge if he saw them on the street.

I remember, though, his plastic rosary swinging from his neck as he would reach into the van to give me a little treat. I can see his mouth open, the gaps of missing teeth showcasing his tongue as he called me Princess Anne. I don’t remember his carousing or his attempts to “civilize” my mother, as my brother says. I don’t remember the arguments about my mother’s backward beliefs or how she was the worst kind of Jamaican: A biracial woman who wanted to be Black. Memories of him are secondhand, passed to me like the cast-off clothes Mother accepted from friends for me to wear.

One year in the nineties, my father brought me Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 vinyl record. Her music was all I talked about. Happy to have his attention, I emptied my thoughts to him. I was in the middle of explaining some choreography, when unsolicited, my father confided in me about his and my mother’s relationship.

“Your mother is an ignoramus. Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“Stupid and superstitious,” I answered in my twelve-year-old voice, at once ashamed he called my mother this but intrigued an adult was confiding in me.

I often felt this about my mother. Her insistence to burn any hair I took from a comb seemed more ridiculous and less about keeping ghosts from harming me. “That’s why you call Ghostbuster,” I told her in all seriousness.

I look back and think I should have told him her beliefs weren’t any different from his priests. But I agreed with my father. This, I thought, was true of my mother.

“No, no.” my father shook his head. “It’s from the Latin for ignorare, a legal term. What juries used to say: ‘We don’t notice.’”

Consternation twisted my face.

“Your mother claims she didn’t know a lot of things, but Anne, she should have known more than anyone who I am.”

Their breakup began a few months before my birth. Perhaps March. Maybe April. My mother was heavy with me in her belly, which is around the time my father started seeing his second wife, who is carrying my half-sister. Mother did not know this yet.

Mother said she sensed the presence of a powerful enemy. Two vultures perched themselves on a wall nearby as she pinned the nappies on the clothesline. This is the point in the story where I would roll my eyes in disbelief. My mother would tut-tut at my incredulity, happy to punctuate my childhood with the morbid details of her life.

The energy, she continued, was stronger than any protection offered by the talisman she had wrapped in scarves at the bottom of a drawer. She held the clothespins in her mouth and looked at the birds in their hunched-over stance. One hand was in her dress pocket. The other held the nappies in place on the line. The birds were the size of wild turkeys, about two feet tall with heads and necks devoid of feathers. My mother, of course, knew vultures only appeared for dead things. She feared Death had marked her baby and the birds were sent to collect my soul. She kept asking the birds who they came for, as if they were out for a stroll and stopped by for tea. They stayed silent. Their black feathers and beady, cold, telescopic eyes never moved from her exposed hand.

A sharp pain struck my mother on her side. She clutched her belly as the pain moved to her navel. She called for my brother, Rich, who was around fifteen at the time. The pain couldn’t be explained. It wasn’t the normal labor pangs. She doubled over as if making herself small would trick the avian spectators into taking the pain back. My brother found her this way when he arrived. Years later, when I ask him about this moment, he will tell me it never happened, or he can’t remember the details, or he will choose silence as his response.

My mother says my brother screamed at the vultures, “Move! You blasted devils!”

The creatures were still and as calm as palm trees in the eye of a hurricane. They watched my brother pick up rocks, take aim at the birds, and hurl the stones towards them. They hit the wall, missing the birds. Aware of the threat my brother presented, the vultures spread their wings wide ready to defend their perch. My mother screamed in pain to Yemoja, protector of pregnant women. The birds left as if someone had yanked imaginary chains to call them away.

My brother helped my mother to the house where she rushed to the washroom and undressed. She doused her body with Kananga water. She muttered prayers of protection to her ancestors. She set tasks in motion, believing it would make me safe. She opened a Bible to Psalms 91 and read aloud what she had long ago memorized. I’ve heard her hum it many times when she shined our wooden floors with a dried coconut brush.

“He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler…He shall cover thee with his feathers and under his wings shalt thou trust…Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror…that flieth by day…nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”

She did everything to return the message of pain to the unknown sender. She cracked an egg into an enamel cup before placing it on the roof. This was an Easter fortune-telling ritual, but my mother was grasping at salvation the way drowning people grab hold onto the sea, breathing water instead of air. All she needed was for the egg to take the shape of a baby to assure her the one inside her belly would be fine.

My mother attributes my safe and healthy birth to her quick thinking, but it came at a cost. Once obeah is put in motion, only a personal sacrifice can avert its power. Her hand, the one exposed to the stare of the birds the longest, would curl and atrophy as I grew older. My mother would launch into some version of this story if she caught me wincing in disgust at the sight of her hand, the bulging knuckles, and stiff digits. Regardless of how she tells the story—sometimes the vultures circle overhead; sometimes more appear; sometimes she yells, and the vultures burst into a thousand tiny pieces of flesh—one thing remains the same: my parents stop being together.

My father tried to woo her back, even after he remarried. My mother never spoke to my father again. He is no longer her Wellington. When he died, she did not attend his funeral and sat on her verandah shelling peas pulled from her garden and humming the psalm.

I am a prisoner of my mother’s many fables and my father’s promiscuous lies. Growing up in the wake of their shattered relationship, I found myself entangled in conflicting beliefs. Loyalty pulled me in opposite directions. My father’s betrayal manifested in the form of a new family, complete with two sons and a daughter. They mirrored what he left behind with my mother. And we reflected the family he abandoned before us.

Steadfast in her convictions of the old way of life, my mother clung to her beliefs, which wrapped me in a cloak of shame. Her zealous adherence to folklore and the mysticism of the spiritual realm was the undercurrent of my everyday life. I wanted ordinariness. Something grounded. An escape. Caught as a prisoner between the competing beliefs of my parents and my father’s too-keen interest in young women, I struggled to forge my own identity. I sought physical, cultural, and emotional distance. As soon as I could, I moved away from Jamaica. By disconnecting, I was allowing my true self to flourish. Liberation allowed my shame to diminish.

Father gripped the edges of his bed to sit upright. Success! His short legs peeked out from underneath the sheet. He pressed the last remaining kinky curls across his bald pate and smoothed the wrinkles in his shirt. Spittle accumulated at the corners of his mouth. He wiped it clean with his thumb and index finger, and it pulled his bottom lip slack. The effects of the spices were too much to bear. A wildfire ignited his mouth, scorching the roof with the intensity of a thousand pepper seeds. He fumbled for an enamel mug on the nightstand. He found nothing, not even a cup of mint tea sweetened with the honey from his hives.

He barked, “Get me a drink.”

The alacrity with which people moved—I am certain there were other people in the house—indicated Death must have tired from swinging in the hammock outside and entered the room. Its presence is known. The people in the house start humming the same tune. They start singing, “It’ll soon be done, these troubles and trials.” They chant the course for the crossover, telling Olodumare my father was ready. Father was the only one with silent lips.

The singing continued. The room brightened. Hotter. Father slurped juice and laid in bed. A burp escaped his lips—and always vain, even to the end, he apologized. His third request came after.

“Read something to me. Anything.”

Someone called for younger eyes. The Bible was opened. Ecclesiastes. My father knew the message by heart. Happiness is meaningless without something true to believe in. The heat in the room intensified. The singing stopped.

Father saw his mother and firstborn, a baby who died a few days old. Oshun appeared next to them. She didn’t ask him as she does of other elders if he wanted his spirit to return to the family in a different body. She told him he’d lost any chance at redemption. He’d hurt too many. Death gently tapped his head. I believe he bargained with Oshun to return as a guide and she said, “Yes, because your children do love you.” Many years later, I would see him in my dreams.

Someone said, “Last rites. Hurry, go get the priest.”

My father went to sleep and never woke up.

My mother says you sense Death deep within. It penetrates the guts of the living and will leaden the feet of the dying.

“Ma je nku kin to ku [if people had their way, they would never die],” she would say.

Death slows people down so they can enjoy life. Death is the one who can make a place for the living to come. Death is sent to escort people to the peaceful realm, while Life releases them to the chaos of ours.

“Tell me who is a more wicked friend? Life or Death?” my mother would quiz me.

“Life,” I said, knowing this was a wrong answer.

“Stupid girl,” she said to me. “Jack mandora, me nuh wah nun [I have told it the way I received it]. Life can only bring problem and botheration. Death is relief; Death is friend.”

My mother has been seeding the spiritual practice of obeah and knowledge of the old gods of Yoruba since I was born. This was what she knew and had been forbidden by my father to practice when they were together. She believed if she had been able to talk to the spirits then, they would have told her he was bad to women.

“Bad how?” I would ask.

She ignored me. Instead, she would say I was marked to carry on the practice and to always listen to the ancestors. By telling me the stories her Coromantee grandmother told her, my mother hoped her way of life wouldn’t perish, forgotten and burnt-up, resembling the cane fields after a harvest.

Belief kills and belief cures. Obeah practice is clandestine by nature in Jamaica. A private pursuit often deemed black magic operated in a conspiracy of secrets where everyone does it, but no one admits to it. But my mother is not ashamed of her òrìsàs and relies on their guidance and protection. She poured all she knew into me because she believed I was a vulnerable target for the women my father wronged.

As proof, my mother would offer up a list of illnesses from my childhood. Whooping cough. Headaches. The mumps. A clew of parasitic tapeworms escaping my body in front of the entire preschool class made up of the scions of Jamaica’s ruling class. She cured what she could with herbs and bush medicine. Goethe leaves pressed to the temples relieved the pressure in my head. Rat soup from the cane fields ceased the whooping cough. The mumps I contracted, though I was vaccinated, disappeared after a spiritual doctor suggested wrapping my head in cotton with tobacco leaves under my chin. Turmeric cured everything else. For added measure, my mother went and placed conch shells beside my pillow to ward off evil spirits. It seemed I owed my life to a series of never-ending herbal elixirs or purification baths.

My father was a casual Catholic who adopted Catholicism when he realized my mother would never forgive him. I never believed my father embraced the faith or turned his back on us until the day he called my mother ignorant. I guess if his ancestors couldn’t help him win my mother back, then perhaps the Virgin Mary could help him atone for the wrongs he did to women.

To her.

Up until a certain point, I believed in my mother’s spirits and obeah practices and less in my father’s saints. What stopped me from falling in step with my mother was a banal event. It was the mid-eighties. I was in grade four. I became a passionate reader of the Children’s First Illustrated Bible and the Book of Revelation. I was floored to know God was as destructive and temperamental as Anancy. I was also alarmed Death was seen as a foe and not a companion.

I was a solitary child, overshadowed by the gregariousness and athleticism of an older brother who assumed I understood social cues. Knowing most of my classmates were Christians and Hindus, I began my mission of converting them. I clambered up the stunted logwood tree at the back of the playground during lunch break and yelled to the children. I told them not to be afraid, but they were all going to die. They needed to know what my mother taught me. Death is an impossible friend who is dumb.

I screamed, “Your Mama will die. Your Papa will die. We will all die and must sing to live long and have a good death.”

When a teacher told me to stop, I answered, “They don’t know how to sing to Death, Miss, and I need to teach them.”

A letter went home with me. It told my mother obeah and whatever form of ancestor worship and backwards Coromantee beliefs she practiced were not conducive to a progressive Jamaica. My mother never read the letter. At home, I traced my index finger over the word animism. I learned the meaning. At night, after a meal of fried conch, I folded the letter and kept it between the pages in my Children’s First Illustrated Bible. I looked to the ceiling for my mother’s spirits or Anancy spinning himself into mischief, willing me to join him. For the first time, he didn’t appear.

Saturday, mid-March 2015. Our father was buried in the small graveyard of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, not far from his home. We gathered from faraway places. A brother in the U.S. military on leave from his post in the Middle East. One uncle from near the North Pole. Distant relations from India. In-laws from Ghana. Siblings from America. The sun was shining its suffocating smile on our heads as it cast its long tentacles on the rooftops, streets, cars, bodies, and the pyramids of green Scotch bonnet peppers in the marketplace down the street.

My brother Rich stood beside me. Rapids streams of sweat ran down his fat face nestling in his beard before being wiped away by his broad hands. He longed to leave, but was bound by duty to stay. He and our father had a falling-out when Rich was a teenager. They hadn’t spoken since. My brother held his teeth together while pushing out both lips towards a point and forcing air out to make a truups sound as he grabbed my attention. I followed the direction of his lips. He was looking at our father’s other children milling by the gravesite.

“I can’t believe they buried him in the church,” he said for all to hear.

The day my father was buried was the first time we met our siblings. My brother hummed “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” We laughed. We were cordial to the others, offering shallow condolences to each other.

“Sorry for your loss,” I said to my half-siblings, and they parroted the same to me.

We were strangers united in blood and grief. Rich and I scanned the graveyard as ropes slipped the casket with our father’s cadaver into the ditch. My father’s children were watching us watch them. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror where someone else has your hair or nose or holds their hand akimbo like you, but it’s not quite you. There are many of us. Nine by wife number one. Three by my mother. Two by wife number three. In all, fourteen siblings.

My brother and I played a game. It was the one we played when I was a child. Sibling or stranger?

The turnout of the siblings would have made my father happy. His children’s middle-class occupation is testimony to his righteous influence. He emulated the culture of faraway lands enshrined in the midcentury colonial queen and country. As a young man, my father aspired to never live the life of a field rat. My father in his way could have been a revolutionary fighting against the principalities enriched by the blood of his ancestors and the destruction of Indigenous ways. He could have chosen to treat women as more than objects. Seeing my father in the casket was seeing a shadow of who he could have been.

I know the Hungarian priest was aware of my father’s history with women and secret beliefs in ancestorial guidance. Father’s tithing and generous contributions to the parish sanctified him enough to have a church funeral and burial overseen by a foreigner. The priest ended his liturgy. He told our father in the sealed casket he had received the Lord’s blessing and implored God to bless and watch over our father in the afterlife.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the priest said.

“Amen,” we responded in unison as we tossed handfuls of red earth onto the casket.

Regardless of belief, Death is the one god we share. I mouthed the words my mother taught me over and over until our father’s casket lowered. “Band kouyon, manjé a fini, allé pann kôt zot.”

“There is nothing here, Death, you damn fool. Go hang yourself.”

Soni Brown is a creative writing instructor and arts community creator from Kingston, Jamaica. Her writing is influenced by her time growing up near plantations where she always felt the spirit of the long dead. Her writing can be found in The Believer, AARP, Cosmopolitan, and Desert Companion. Her craft and work has been supported by Tin House Summer Scholar,  PREE Caribbean Writing Studio, and the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Soni is currently working on her debut book, a memoir about her mother’s dementia and her own cultural erasure and assimilation. You can find her on most social platforms @neonscrawl.

Return to Issue #36 | Support The Deadlands

I saw Sad Tommy the ghost in line at Starbucks behind a woman runner whose blonde hair in a ponytail hung to the middle of her back. The runner ordered, moved aside, and there was an instant, just a blink, when Sad Tommy stepped to the counter, facing the barista, as if to erase the gulf between the living and dead.

Then a cop filled the space where Sad Tommy stood, not eclipsing the ghost, but swallowing him. “A grande caramel macchiato, please,” said the cop. Sad Tommy turned out of the larger man, wandered to a back table, and sat.

Why Sad Tommy hangs out at Starbucks interests me. They built the store on an empty lot two years ago, but Sad Tommy looks like a middle-aged business man from the 50s. Hair combed into Brylcreem perfection. Old-fashioned suit. Tie.

He removed a metal box from his jacket, snapped it open, took out a cigarette, tapped it against the table, then lit it. He watched people or stared into the distance. Most days, when he finished his cigarette, he left, sometimes through a door, other times through a wall, or he faded into a wisp.

I don’t get ghost physics. He passes through a wall, but he can sit in a chair? A living person walks through him, but he rests his elbows on a table? For that matter, where does he get his cigarettes, or is he forever lighting the same one?

Maybe that’s why he’s sad. He’s mostly not here. I’ve seen other sad ghosts. Also frustrated ones and irritated ones, and ones who seem puzzled. Never a happy ghost or a busy-looking one. Ghosts must not have agendas.

The barista took my order for two black coffees. I worked at a coffee shop once, when I was young. It has a satisfying rhythm to it, steaming milk, rinsing cups, greeting customers. Cinnamon in the air and sweet rolls and cocoa. I liked the firm click of the plastic lid over a paper cup. Most customers are in a good mood. Why not? They’re getting their drinks, wrapping hands around the warmth.

Well, except for Sad Tommy.

“Here you go, sir,” said the barista.

I walked to the back of the store. Sad Tommy didn’t react. When I put the coffee in front of him, I said, “Hope you like it hot.”

He started. Looked up. My heart leapt. This is it, I thought, but then he turned away. His eyes were blue, a thin, water-color blue. Ghosts are kind of washed out. I thought we almost connected. More than anything I want to connect.

If you wish to mess with a ghost, go into an empty room and say, “I see what you are doing,” or “I know you’re here.”

You don’t have to be aware of them as I am. Good chance the room is actually empty. Still, every once in a while, you’ll catch one.

Or, move toward an unoccupied chair as if you’re going to sit, but stop yourself at the last second. “Sorry,” you say, “I didn’t know this was taken.”

If you’re in a restaurant and the table next to you hasn’t been cleared yet, a ghost could be leaning over the dishes, maybe pretending they’ve just had a great meal. Same thing with a beer mug on a bar above an empty stool.

Not always—in fact, hardly ever—but that’s where I see them.

Here’s your best shot if you want to give yourself an opportunity to be near ghosts: I’m seldom alone in a theater, even when I’m the only paying patron watching an afternoon matinee.

I’ve never seen ghosts interact with each other, but they might. They don’t generally pay attention to the living either, wrapped up in their loneliness or grief or whatever it is that drags them down. Marilyn Monroe said, “In life, we weep at the thought of death. In death, perhaps we weep at the thought of life.” But I’m sure they see us and hear us. It’s just that almost all of us don’t know they’re there, so they tune us out, or they’re so wrapped up in being dead that we don’t matter.

Sad Tommy looked at me though. That’s a beginning.

Practically Dead Dimitri sits on the stairs into my apartment building. He almost never moves, but once his gaze turned toward me, and then back to the street. He’s sort of like one of those stone lions flanking the door of a library or classy building, except wearing a soiled Cossack coat no matter the temperature. “How’s it going?” I said as I keyed myself into the building. Nothing.

He’s not a ghost, but he might as well be.

The coffee went on the table next to my laptop. I’d learned to limit myself to sips so when I finished work five hours later, I reached the bottom. The computer dialed the first number. “Good afternoon,” I said. “I represent Chambers Automotive Maintenance. If your car’s warranty has lapsed, or you’re worried about coverage in the case of major mechanical failure, we have a program that protects your investment from crippling expense.”

They hung up. The computer connected to the next contact.

Four o’clock to nine. Right through the dinner hour. Best time to call. We only dial landlines. Too many people block unknown numbers on their cells. Almost everyone I talk to is old, older than me. Phone solicitation is a dying job.

Cold call phone sales are the worst. I get paid for attempts, but I make my best money when someone buys. That’s about one of every four hundred calls. One night I sold five policies. Generally that would be a good couple weeks. Disability checks and Social Security cover my bills, not that I’m over the hill! Calling pays for luxuries: coffee, a meal out, streaming services. If I’m feeling flush, fish and chips with a beer at The Keg and Kettle.

I’m fifty-three. Heart issues. Had an “attack” a couple years ago. The doctor said, “We brought you back from the precipice. You’re a lucky man,” although later he compared my heart to a tattered flag. “It’s in a delicate condition,” he said. “There’s considerable damage.” I saw my first ghost while on recovery. Guy in surgeon’s scrubs stood at the foot of my bed, looking at me, then dissolved into dust motes in a sunbeam.

Phone calling doesn’t stress me. Hit the dial button, make my pitch, move on.

I get hang-ups. Occasionally they’ll curse and yell. I don’t let it bug me. After all, they’re strangers’ voices. I’m one too.

The barrier between life and death haunts me. I sleep late, go to bed early, take frequent naps so I can quit thinking about mortality, the cessation of breath, the last thing I might see, and the last thought I’d think. I’m too close. Sometimes I skirted the edge: I’d exhale, then hold it. That’s what the beginning of the end will be like. You can do it yourself. Decide not to inhale. A few minutes, maybe only a couple, you pass out. Of course, you would breathe on your own, but if you didn’t, soon, your oxygen-starved brain shuts down, irretrievably. Another couple minutes after that, and you are gone.

That’s it!

For all the sleeping I do, falling asleep terrifies me. It’s like practicing. Waking up surprises me over and over.

It’s morbid, I know, so when I get out of bed, I walk downtown, away from creepy thoughts, often going to Starbucks.

Leaving the apartment helps mental health. I bought a paper from the newsstand at the corner, then headed to the park. Autumn had been mild, but the first frost wasn’t far in the future. I settled onto my favorite bench, overlooking the pond with the sculpture of a boy sitting on a rock hanging a fishing pole over the water. Ducks paddled about. Folks were out walking. I liked living downtown. There’s a light rail station two blocks away. On weekends, buskers played music. A psychic set up a card table for tarot reading. During the summer they hosted a decent farmer’s market.

A regal-looking woman in a green dress that came to the middle of her calves strolled past. Could have been in her thirties. Hair tucked under a jaunty hat. Her hands were behind her back, and she looked up at the buildings left and right, spine slightly arched, like a tourist; her pace steady, measured, assured, comfortably within herself. Not tentative like other ghosts, but she was gauzy, and her shadow barely darkened the sidewalk. Something new, a self-possessed ghost.

I put my paper aside and followed. She paused at the flower shop, inspecting bins filled with daisies and petunias for planting. A shoe store caught her attention, then she moved on, still sightseeing. If she’d produced a camera from her purse to take a picture of the skyline, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, she walked through the unopened door of La Petite Baguette. When I entered, the bakery smelled warm and yeasty and full of calories. Pastries and tarts and rolls of bread filled display cabinets. The baker pounded dough on a floured table. White dust powdered her arms and face. She smiled a greeting, but I was the only customer. The Green Countess had vanished.

I bought two croissants.

When I climbed my apartment steps, I put one croissant in my pocket, and the bag with the other on the cement beside Practically Dead Dimitri. “Beautiful morning,” I said. He didn’t move.

Dying filled my thoughts for weeks after my “attack.” I took comfort from a Sandra Bullock movie called While You Were Sleeping. There’s an elderly woman in the story whose health is fragile. Another character mentions she’s had “attacks.” The woman said, “They weren’t attacks. They were episodes.”

I like that. An episode happens in a larger story. It’s not the whole story. My “attack” was an episode in a big story. I didn’t know that at the beginning, though, not the first week after the hospital discharged me. I watched a young couple sitting in the bistro, The Little Soup Shop. She wore a wool sweater that overlapped her knuckles. He seemed earnest in a collared shirt and neatly pressed khakis. They had that first date look. His posture strained to be relaxed, but he leaned toward her when he spoke, and she bent toward him, like static attraction. It almost crackled, drawing them close.

The doctor told me that I might feel depressed afterward, or anxious or tearful. He prescribed propranolol, a beta blocker, because I’d been sweaty and shaky. I quit taking it after a couple days. It gave me nightmares, horrifying dreams where paralysis pinned me to my bed. Bats or buzzards or shapeless black, flappy creatures circled me, closer and closer.

They smelled of the end.

So when I observed the couple, I wanted to yell, “It’s a fake. What you’re feeling doesn’t matter. Death knocks on your door.”

My porcelain chest, frail as a teacup, barely held my weakened heart in place. It could crack and would, and I would end. The woman reached across the table, put her hand on the man’s cheek for a second, then laughed. Tears ran down my face.

Middle of the afternoon, an ordinary, midweek afternoon, while a couple fell in love in The Little Soup Shop, I wept thinking about their deaths, and mine, and every soul walking on the street outside, and how fucking scared I was.

The hospital’s chaplain talked to me my last morning in the hospital. I asked him if he knew what happened when we died. The only ghost I’d seen until then was the dissolving surgeon, and I thought he was a hallucination. I thought the chaplain would give me a comforting answer about God and heaven, but instead he said, “Death is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

The first days after they discharged me, while I quit my job, while I applied for Social Security and disability, while my savings dwindled, I couldn’t rest for a second without feeling my heart ticking a terrible countdown timer. Bump, bump, bump. That’s three beats I’ll never get back. There’s three more.

That night, after I staggered from The Little Soup Shop, despair-soaked, I chose While You Were Sleeping as I sat still as possible on my couch. Any effort might be the last. Then the old woman spoke: “They’re not attacks. They’re episodes.”

I played her speech over and over.

Ghosts hang out around the same places and repeat actions. Sad Tommy smokes a cigarette in Starbucks. An old man ghost waits at the 5^th and Broadway bus stop with his straw hat on the bench beside him almost every Friday. A frazzled-looking woman cradling a grocery bag in her arms like a child paces the sidewalk in front of Grant Elementary about the time the buses arrive. Students walk through her when the first bell rings, dismissing them from class.

I arrived at the park beside the fishing boy statue, hoping to find the Green Countess. Other than a moment of recognition with Sad Tommy, I’d not communicated with a ghost. I sat with them. I followed them. I confronted them, but they turned away or dissolved. The one time I startled Sad Tommy, he reacted, but the Green Countess struck me as different from the ghosts I’d seen so far, not beat. Maybe she had a secret. Who had she been in life? Why had crossing over not made her bereft?

After an hour, I walked to the French bakery, ate a raspberry tart with a cup of their coffee, waiting for her, but she didn’t come.

That evening, I worked at the computer, saying over and over, “I represent Chambers Automotive Maintenance.” Not a great evening for my total number of calls. A retired couple in Virginia talked for a half hour about their car, and how they were giving it to their son. It was an old car, and they didn’t want it to be a burden if it broke down. They didn’t buy the insurance when we finished, but they were pleasant. Ruined my quota.

They distracted me enough that while we talked I forgot about the Green Countess. Soon after I thought about her, and when I slept, she appeared in my dreams.

The next day, no sign again, and none on the third. I walked as far as I dared, through the clothing district, to the better restaurants, even the art museum. It’s quiet there, and cool. I saw several ghosts among a school field trip, standing in front of sculptures and paintings, walking in the gift shop.

On the fourth day, I went to Starbucks. Sad Tommy faced the barista as he had every time I’d seen him, then sat at the table in the back. I took my drink and egg sandwich and sat across from him. He didn’t look away, but he wasn’t looking at me either. He didn’t vanish, though. His metal cigarette case came out of his jacket. He tapped a cigarette on the table before lighting it.

“I’m searching for a woman you might know,” I said. He glanced at me, just a twitch of a look that acknowledged my existence. “She’s classy. Wears a green dress and pillbox hat. I saw her at the park by the lake and in Le Petite Baguette. Could you tell her I’d like to meet?”

Sad Tommy finished his cigarette while I breakfasted. Oddly, sitting with a ghost comforted me. We were like acquaintances who already knew each other’s stories, so we shared time in silence.

He stood, then walked through the wall.

I tried giving the same message to the old man with the straw hat, and to the woman in front of the elementary school, but I couldn’t tell if they knew I was there.

Pills define me. In the morning I take down my white pill container. It’s a six-inch-long rectangular box with flip-top lids labeled for the days of the week. Under each lid is enough room for a half dozen pills. I asked my doctor when he prescribed them if they were “lifetime medications.” Would I be on these until the end of my days? “Yep,” he said, as if that was the answer I hoped for. I wondered whether I’d live to refill any of the prescriptions, or did a single bottle contain all I would use?

Another couple pills at lunch, and then my evening meds, this time from a yellow box.

Sunday evenings, I line up my pill bottles on the kitchen counter, then meticulously put the correct pills into the days-of-the-week boxes. I wondered if they’d studied the interactions of so many medications. I also thought it might make sense to throw them away and just take one baby aspirin in the morning to see how I’d do. Start from scratch, so to speak.

My doctor said it was better living through chemistry, then laughed. I didn’t find it funny.

Even with the meds, I sleep poorly, use the bathroom too often, have cold spells and night sweats, suffer from vertigo, and any walking pace above a shuffle makes me wheeze. When I complained, my doctor said, “It’s better than the alternative.”

On the other hand, I’ve gotten good at taking pills.

The next morning, the Green Countess sat on my bench at the park, clear-eyed and undistracted, watching me as I approached. “It’s a nice day,” I said as I joined her.

She looked onto the lake, where a breezed ruffled the water.

I said, “Thanks for meeting me.”

She nodded.

The bench pressed solidly into my back. Now that we were here, I didn’t know how to begin. I folded my hands in my lap. I thought if I could observe her, she would teach me about what lay beyond. Was she scared? Did she hurt? Did she have desires? Was she self-aware, or just an echo of whom she’d been when she lived? Why were there so few ghosts? A city our size should be crowded with the dead going back hundreds of years, but now that I had a chance, I couldn’t speak.

She reached toward me, fingers extended and slightly down, as if she wanted me to take her hand. A bracelet made of slender chain dangling a small stone graced her wrist. Then she faded away. She shrugged in the last instant as if to say, “What are you going to do?” as if disappearing amused her.

Trenchant Memorial bordered the park on the far edge. A walk around the lake would be about a half mile, more than I’d gone since the hospital. The doctors suggested I take gentle hikes. “Nothing steep. Don’t do a lot of stairs, at least until you feel stronger.” Getting to the cemetery didn’t seem that hard. Stones and crosses filled the property, covering the hill beyond. A maintenance worker in a golf cart, shovels and buckets piled into the little trailer it towed, waved as he passed.

Since I’d started seeing ghosts, I’d wanted to visit. What better place to find spirits? But I had the cemetery to myself. A Mylar balloon, its ribbon tied to a baseball-sized rock sitting on a tombstone, said, “Congratulations!” The breeze swayed it gently back and forth. I wondered if the ground’s staff would tolerate it if I brought a balloon that said “Get Well Soon!”

I spent the morning wandering among the graves, the most ghost-free area I’d been since I’d begun paying attention. Recently cut grass left a crisp, clean odor that reminded me of summers when I was twelve. Dad paid me a dollar to do the lawn. I remembered taking my shirt off, feeling the sun on my back like a blanket. My legs were strong then. I’d reach the yard’s edge, wrestle the heavy machine around, and go the other direction. Never out of breath. Never tired. Holding the buzzing handle, letting the roar consume me.

When I exited the cemetery, I turned to take it all in. Hundreds of gravestones lined in neat rows. Nothing frightening in the cemetery. I thought I could spend a pleasant hour there, resting on a blanket, reading a good book.

I woke near midnight to the apartment’s low groan. The building was old. It creaked and cracked and moaned in an alarming manner when temperatures outside changed. But it seemed something more roused me. I turned to look at the window where a streetlight gave an incandescence. Sitting in the chair, half in the dark, the Green Countess sat. I pushed myself up on the headboard. Had she followed me? Had she always known where I lived?

We faced each other in my room for several minutes. She seemed so transparent that I wondered if I only imagined her, constructed her shape from shadows and suggestions, and then she moved, cocking her head to the side, and I knew she remained.

I became self-conscious about my apartment, my worn pajamas. Her elegance threw it all into contrast, but I was stunned by happiness to see her. Finally, I said, “You are welcome here,” my voice a rude break and way too loud.

The Green Countess rose, crossed the room to my bed, and lay beside me on her back, hands laced across her stomach. She’d set her purse on the nightstand. When she let it go, it vanished. I scooched down until my head rested on the pillow, looking at the ceiling. No sounds in the room now except the thready beat of my pulse in my ears. I almost convinced myself I’d dreamed her like I had the night before, but when I chanced rolling to my side, she was there, our faces inches apart. She closed her eyes. Her expression relaxed, and soon, like her, I fell asleep.

I’d like to say there was a moment when my life changed, that I had an epiphany about death, or I suddenly came to peace with bad health, the pills, the doctors’ appointments, the dying pigeon that is my heart, but the transformation slipped up on me sometime over the days after the Green Countess’s night visit.

I still take my coffee at Starbucks. I wave at Sad Tommy, and once, I think, he moved his hand to wave back before catching himself and heading for his table for a cigarette. The old man who waits at the bus stop doesn’t seem to notice me, except once when I read a newspaper there and I caught him looking over my shoulder. I shifted to give him a better view, and then he vanished like a murmuration of birds, holding his shape for only a second. The woman who paces in front of the elementary school continues to ignore me and everyone else. I wonder if she eternally waits for her child to be dismissed from class. Maybe her daughter or son still lives, now an adult, unaware that Mom can’t let go and has never abandoned her post.

I see the Green Countess almost every day. Sometimes she’s already at our park bench. She smiles, then watches the ducks. Other times I’m alone and she appears. I think she sits closer than she used to. I think from the other side of the abyss she sees me as a friend. Her dress is perfect. Her composure perfect. Whatever happened to her, she continues on, unruffled, an inspiration.

Today I came home after stopping at Le Petite Baguette. I’ve grown fond of their croissants. It was time to open the laptop and make my calls. At the top of the stairs, I set a bag with a croissant next to Practically Dead Dimitri. I fumbled with my keys at the door.

Dimitri said, “Thanks, man,” and slid the bag toward him.

For the first time in months I walked to my apartment without thinking about my chest. I felt at last a lightness, a hope, no barriers, a path before me that need not end, as if.

James Van Pelt writes full-time in western Colorado. He has coached swim teams, taught high school and college English, and enjoys the numerous hiking trails near his home. His work has appeared numerous times in Analog, Asimov’s and other venues. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (now the Astounding Award), and been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. He hangs out on Facebook and loves chatting with fans and writers.

Return to Issue #36 | Support The Deadlands

Beyond the dim, there is a six-foot gully,
so audacious & wide, it opens into the
oracle’s shrine. The voice of
Ibini Ukpabi, fresh-wet,
it saturates everyone’s
ear, it says, Kamalu,
the warrior god,
quelled
the
Gorgon for
our sake; for our sake,
he made sacrifices with his beloved
who fell short of his glory at the expense
of their sins. Now, in requiem to this, every homestead
shall sing of blood & blackwaters, which means:
the cost of a capital crime is a no-return
walk through the dark tunnel of
disappearance, where the
Gorgon now rules.
Outside, a wolf
prowls as if
enacting
a pact
with
the hooting
owl. The moonlight
scrapes through the dark presence,
a slingshot of pebbles hurl into Iyi-Eke
& echoes a man’s name; he has been found guilty of
the crime he was presumably framed for. Many went
this way. Each morning, we wake up to the
bloody torso of Iyi-Eke, the river so red, we
believe it to be the crimsoned evidence
of death from the ones who were cast
into the tunnel of disappearance
a night before. I did not know
that the way to heroism
is to lose your
way back
as
a villain in
the face of your
own kinsmen. Behind
the scene: a cast of light
reveals there was no night at all,
only the day opening into deep secrets.
A peep further, unfurls how the tunnel of disappearance
opens into the European Beach through the outlets of Iyi-Eke,
the thighs of the river, reddened with a bull’s blood;
something we swore was evidence of our quelled
kin. I never knew that the way to honour
Kamalu is to toss one’s kin into a
windowless façade of a pinhole;
something we were so sure
to be the way the gods
clipped off red-oiled
fingers from soiling
the rest of
our hands.
A
closer
surveillance
reveals how those
condemned to death in honour
of the pact with Kamalu are sold
behind doors for ten manillas & shipped from
the shores of Calabar into the transatlantic voyage.
Their names, chained, a thing with wings— lost birds,
singing of home — & then, become so cursed with foreign tongues as to never
sound like us; the villains who quelled their heads in a charade of pact with the gods.

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (he/him/his) is a speculative writer of Izzi, Abakaliki ancestry, a finalist for the 2023 Rhysling Award, a nominee for the Forward Prize, a data science techie and a medical laboratory scientist. He was the winner of the 2021 Write About Now’s Cookout Literary Prize. He has works at Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Mag, Nightmare Mag, Augur Mag, Filednotes Journal, Antithesis Journal, Kernel Magazine, Mizna, and elsewhere. He tweets @wordpottersul1.

Return to Issue #36 | Support the Deadlands

The Sea Witch is not one of the biggest boats in the Bering fleet, but it’s been around almost as long as the real stars, the big-name boats that people outside this little, hyperfocused, horrible, thrilling world pay attention to. People try to nickname her Ursula from time to time, but it never sticks, and—weirdly enough—the guys who insist on calling the Witch by that particular name don’t seem to do so great in terms of cash or keeping jobs. People up here remember things.

The Witch’s skipper is Jonah Hewley, and yeah, he was legit named Jonah forty-seven years ago by what most of us guys have to figure was a selkie who had a one-night stand with his dad. Hewley doesn’t look like the rest of them; the lines a crab fisherman’s face develops look different on him. There’s a weird tilt to his black eyes, a point to his ears, it’s like sometimes if you catch him in the right light he doesn’t look all the way real. Until he opens his mouth and lets fly, and then you know this dude is one thousand percent human asshole.

He’s an asshole who can find the crab, though, so if you can stand one greenhorn season on his boat and not either want to die or fail spectacularly enough to wash out, you might make it to a second year, and if you stick the second year on Jonah Hewley’s boat you’re pretty much set up to get yourself at least an interview on anybody else’s tub.

Which does not make this shit suck any less when you’re riding twenty-five-foot swells and the spray’s beginning to freeze and the fucking greenhorn at the rail is throwing the hook like he’s at some kinda goddamn garden party horseshoes game in between puking his guts, and you also want to throw up like you’ve been throwing up for three days now and fuck knows how you’re even walking around with how much you’ve puked and how little you’ve eaten and it is not like any of Hewley’s regular guys are gonna say hey go sack out for a second and maybe try to drink some fuckin’ Gatorade before you fuck up your kidneys or anything useful and—

—and the kid at the rail, you think his name is Donny, has hooked the line and is hauling it in and manages to get it through the block right the first time and the line comes up nice and clean with no fucking jellyfish all over it and then the bridle breaks the surface and he hooks it to the crane and the pot surfaces and—

—and it’s white, nearly solid white, it looks incredible, got to be close to eighty keepers, this is king crab season and you’re on the red crab and you want big numbers but this thing is not just good but great and—

—and the deck boss barks, “Dump it. Dump that shit now. Lose everything, lose it right now. Now.”

Grayson on the crane swings the pot back to the rail and the guys let go of the door-latch ties and he shakes it a little and the entire fucking haul, over seventy king crab easy, tumbles back into the Bering Sea. That’s thousands of dollars plopping back into the fucking water. You can see your own paycheck shrinking by the second. Why the fuck, you think, not remotely for the first time, did you even come up here again, instead of sticking around down south where the water is clear blue instead of whipped-foam white and you can work a shift on deck without freezing your goddamn nads off?

Grayson and the deck boss, Patel, look at each other and both shake like dogs coming out of deep water, and then Patel goes to the loud-hailer and says, “Empty ones, boss. Had to dump it.”

“Empty ones?” says the captain, tinny through the cheap speaker.

“Empties. Maybe one or two keepers, but mostly that was empties.”

“Fuck,” says the captain. “Pull the next one and let’s see if we’re on shit or if that was just a warning.”

“Roger that, boss,” says Patel.

You do not have the chance to ask stupid questions about it, not for a good twelve hours of solid hauling; of the string of fifty pots, thirty-seven have to be rail-dumped because of what the guys are calling empty ones: pure-white crabs, white as bone, white as bleach, that float for a second or two before disappearing back into the Bering Sea leaving a trail of bubbles behind, moving sluggishly. You know there’s not a new species of king crab that’s white all over like that, so what actually gives?

Everyone, including the skipper, is in an absolutely foul mood by the time all the gear is stacked back on deck, and it is probably only because you are so completely exhausted that as soon as you’re all inside and shucked off your gear you don’t have enough of a filter to stop yourself saying, “So what’s the deal with the empty ones?”

“The deal is you should shut your face, kid,” Patel growls.

You’re gathered in the Witch’s excuse for a galley/mess, all fake-wood Formica and vinyl, shoveling in Donny’s version of Kraft Mac & Cheese (it has baked beans in it for some ungodly reason) before you head back out to work. This isn’t eating for pleasure, it’s throwing fuel on the fire, and you all eat without tasting it much, which is probably a good thing. The ketchup bottle is rolling back and forth across the table like a goddamn metronome; somewhere along the line you must have forgotten to be seasick, because you barely notice the movement as you fork horrible macaroni noodles into your face. It’s not like that down in Florida, because the ocean’s not trying to kill you so hard; you might hurl a few times for the first couple days and then get used to it. Up here you really do want to turn inside out until that weird forgetting-switch thing happens, and then you basically just don’t pay attention to how much the boat is rocking. Getting back on dry land after one of these jaunts is hilarious because it feels weird that the ground’s not moving.

You’ve been working with this crew for two years now, spending winters up here and the rest of the year down south, and Patel still doesn’t really trust your ass to do what he tells you to, which is not fair. It’s not your fault the hydros happened to blow while you were working the crane last year, that shit was just bad luck. Sailors in general are some of the most superstitious motherfuckers alive, and fishermen even more so, possibly because they know the sea’s constantly trying to kill them, and it’s only because Captain Hewley himself decided to give you another shot that you’re even on this boat right now.

Hewley is looking at you, that weird black-eyed not-quite-human gaze thoughtful. “Tell him,” he says, after a moment. “Kid’s gonna hear the stories sooner or later, might as well tell him what to keep an eye out for.”

Patel pushes away his mostly empty plate and reaches for the pack of Newports lying on the table. “Fuck,” he says, popping a match alight with his thumbnail. “Okay. You already know this is basically the most dangerous job on the planet, yeah? Crab fishermen die like, what, eighty times the rate anyone else pops it on the job. Mostly that’s cause we’re up here on the fucking freezing cold Bering Sea and it wants to kill everyone stone-dead, so if you want to stay alive you got to stay lucky.”

He, and the rest of the crew, instinctively reach for the nearest piece of actual wood and rap sharply on it with their knuckles. The only ones who don’t are you and Donny the greenhorn-and-cook (for a certain definition of “cook”) and you trade confused expressions with him.

“What’s that got to do with empty ones?” he asks, and gets slapped—gently—upside the head for his pains by one of the other deckhands.

“Shut up, kid,” says Patel, almost kindly. “You know about dead loss, right, why we gotta keep the water running through the tanks and not beat the crab up too much with how the boat’s rockin’ all over the place, and how when you do get some dead crab in your tanks it poisons the rest of the catch unless you get in to town and off-load real fast, all that shit.” He leans back, blue smoke trickling from his nostrils. “The empty ones, they’re dead crab. Only they ain’t exactly all the way dead, on account of they’re still movin’ around, despite the fact they’re nothin’ but empty white shells.”

You think of white calcined bone, of the streams of bubbles the white crab sent up as they sank slowly underneath the water. Empty shells that move with no meat in them. You wonder, and try not to wonder, and chase another forkful of Kraft Mac & Cheese round the flower-patterned plate: how did all the meat come out without cracking any of the shells?

“You’re goofin’ on us,” Donny says, and you wonder again how the hell a corn-fed Midwestern farm boy found his dumbass way out here in the first place, even as the question kind of makes you feel better. “Dead crab don’t move.”

“These ones do, kid,” says the skipper, lighting up a Camel. “Best not to ask questions like why, about shit like this. Just trust me that they do.”

“We pick ’em up sometimes in the pots,” Patel says. “Like today, over half that last string had empty ones in, and you can’t just sort those fuckers out on the table like dirty crab and throw them overboard; anything that’s been in a pot with empty ones is no good. They might look just fine, big old keepers, but you put those crab in your tanks and you’re gonna wake up to a boat full of dead crab that’s already starting to stink. Can’t do shit about it other than clean out all the tanks real good and get someone to come say some words to make sure it’s safe again.”

“Or smudge it with sage,” says one of the other deckhands. Nearly everyone is smoking now, and a faint blue haze is gathering just under the ceiling. “Don’t need to be a Christian blessing or nothin’, you just need to get the juju fixed. We used sage on the Amelia Rose a couple times, worked okay.”

Donny seems to be having less trouble with the necessity for blessing the boat than with the idea of empty white crabs that move around and spread death. “What happens if you don’t?” he asks.

“Lose your catch,” says Patel. “Be lucky if that’s all you lose.” He pauses, looks at the skipper as if he’s not sure he should be saying this, and you think part of that’s theatrics for the kid’s benefit and part of it is not. The Newport dangles from his lower lip with half an inch of ash on the tip; he takes it between his finger and thumb and crushes out what’s left in the communal ashtray. “Listen, kid. A while ago there was a rookie skipper on—what was it, the Alaskan Hope, dumbass name for a boat—he got himself some empty ones early in the season and didn’t think he needed to get his tanks blessed, just washed ’em out and went right back to fishing. Whole rest of the season he’d be coming into Dutch or St. Paul with a boat full of dead crab, three or four times, whole damn tanks nothin’ but dead loss, and at the end of it he didn’t come back at all.”

The others are nodding; this is clearly a thing that has been discussed multiple times over God knows how many beers in God knows how many shitty little bars. Donny is looking spooked, which is just as clearly what Patel was going for.

“What happened to him?” you ask, wanting a cigarette yourself and not reaching for one; you quit six months ago, although sometimes up here you really kind of wonder why.

“Damnedest thing,” says the skipper. “He’d about filled his tanks, right at the end of it— they were live when he got ’em on board, at least—he was kinda stepping on the crab to push ’em down into the tank and get the lid on, you’ve seen us do it, both feet on top of the crab rather than the deck, and all of a sudden—” He snaps his fingers. “Crab underneath him just seem to give way, and down he goes right into the middle of ’em. Happened so fast the deckhands barely even saw it, as I hear tell.”

“They got him out, though, right?” Donny asks.

“Eventually,” says Hewley. “Wasn’t much left, just his rain gear and boots.”

“And the bones,” says Patel.

Hewley nods. “Some of ’em, anyway. The bigger ones.”

Donny is looking not just spooked but horrified. “You mean the crabs ate him?”

“Oh, probably he drowned first,” says Patel, not sounding convinced. “Guys tried to get him out, of course, reached down in there with a pole or whatever they got to hand, but the guy just sank right to the bottom underneath the pile of crab, thousands and thousands of pounds. Little bastards must’ve been hungry, I guess, but they were all dead too by the time the boat docked.” He lights another cigarette, meditatively. “Feel sorry for that crew.”

There’s silence for a moment. “Think they broke the boat up after a while, too,” says Hewley. “Sold it for scrap. Nobody wanted to go near it.”

“Have you ever had to do that on the Sea Witch?” Donny says. “The—the blessing thing.”

“Once,” says Hewley. “Long, long time ago. When I was just starting out. Never want to have to do that again.”

“Which is why we dump the shit as soon as we see any sign of the empty ones,” Patel adds. “So keep your eye out for anything white, and don’t ask stupid questions.”

“And get back to work,” says Hewley, pushing back from the table, cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth. “Got ten minutes before we need to start hauling gear, and fingers crossed we’re gonna see some numbers this string, instead of shit we gotta dump. Jake, Donny cooked, so you got dish duty first, hop to it.”

Jake hates dishes, but even he knows not to fuck with the skipper in this particular weird changeable mood, and starts stacking Corelle plates with bad grace as the rest of you go clamber back into your oilskins and try to pretend this is not gonna suck.

All through the rest of that endless fucking afternoon you cannot stop seeing that image Hewley described in your mind’s eye: the moment when all the crab legs sticking out of the tank hatch must have retracted, pulling back, letting the wretched man in, letting him plunge into the mindless writhing mass of crabs and closing over his head. How fast it must have been. How fast and how irrevocable, and you really hope the dude drowned quickly, once they had him in their claws.

There are no more empty ones that string, or the one after it, and the tense atmosphere on deck begins to relax a bit: gradually you begin to lose the immediate horror, but when you finally do get a chance to hit your bunk for a couple hours, you cannot sleep for thinking of it.

Sometimes insomnia happens on the boats, especially after a particularly fucked-up day. Your bunkmates don’t stir as you slip out of the half-hearted shelf of a bed and get back into enough of your clothes to maybe go look out the galley windows and see if there’s anything not nailed down that you can eat; you’re the kind of hungry that you get after the seasickness finally fucks off, like your stomach’s trying to make up for days of hurling. There’s half of a dinner roll still sitting in its bag on the counter and you think nobody’s going to miss it, and the sweet carbs and doughy, squishy texture kind of help your backbrain calm down and shut up—

—and you can hear the skipper up at the helm above you through the companionway stairs, the door up there must be open, shit, you’re not supposed to be fucking around in the kitchen like this, but he doesn’t sound like he’s in the mood to yell at anybody, the more you listen. He’s talking to someone, and you realize after a moment it’s gotta be Patel.

“—dunno if it was that smart to tell the kids that shit,” he’s saying, sounding a little bit like an ordinary person. “I mean. Sure, it’s fun to see ’em go that fabled whiter shade of pale and all, but it’s not like they’re up here for good. They’re seasonal, Dee. They don’t gotta know about shit like this.”

“They do if it means they know to fuckin’ rail-dump the pots soon as they see that shade of pale,” says Patel. “Anyway, I didn’t tell ’em the real bad shit. I figure if they want to know more they can summon up the nuts to ask you about it, lord ’n’ master.”

“Thanks a whole fuckload,” says the skipper, and then there’s a pause while he keys the radio and talks to someone else, and you think you’re probably safe to sneak back to your bunk when he cuts back in. “God, I don’t even remember the last time I told anyone the other story. Can’t even remember all the details now. Musta been back in the early aughts, I was still workin’ on my uncle Josiah’s boat, before I got the Witch. You know what I do remember, him telling me, seventeen and near pissing myself with fuckin’ terror after I saw those people in the water? That drowned-dead people do come back, sometimes. When they don’t die clean.”

Pause again, this one containing the little flick-inhale-sigh-exhale sequence that means he’s lit another smoke. When he starts up talking again the difference is noticeable: he doesn’t sound exactly like the large-and-in-charge skipper you’re used to, just an ordinary tired human, some random guy, and it’s weird.

(You wonder how Patel’s responding to this, which one of Patel’s patented non-expressions he’s wearing now. He’s got five that you’re aware of, and this entire conversation feels weirdly and awfully private, like you’re overhearing someone’s deeply personal moment.)

“I’m seventeen,” Hewley picks up the thread, “and I’m at the crane lookin’ down at the water and it’s glassy calm like it never is and I can see the anchor chain stretchin’ away down into the green and suddenly there’s this white blank face there instead, someone’s actual face swimmin’ up toward me, pullin’ itself up the chain hand over hand and I think oh shit someone’s boat must’ve sank, we have to radio the Coast Guard and pick up this guy and the rest of the survivors before my brain catches up to my eyes and—this guy I’m looking at is not a survivor.” The skipper pauses again, still sounding weirdly human. “For one thing, there’s, uh. A lot of his face is kinda missing, like it’s been nibbled. What’s left is white, fishbelly white, no blood anywhere, and there’s a crab crawlin’ out of where one eye should be. White crab. Not one of ours, little bastard, maybe so big across the carapace. But bone-white. And then I see another one in his mouth, and I think that’s when I snap out of it and get the fuck away from the side of the boat and yell for my uncle and the guys.”

Another pause, a brief one. “Turned out that wasn’t the only one who wanted to come up to say hi to us, that night. Turned out there were three that time. My uncle’s crew comes up on deck when I start yelling and they’re like aw SHIT not this again, but it’s clear they know how to handle it. I’m pretty sure they recognized the last guy who showed up, but nobody said anythin’ out loud where I could hear it, and they just go get out the stuff from the special locker and half an hour later we’re all clear of—problems.”

What the fuck is in the special locker, you wonder, but the skipper’s still talking. It’s not hard to picture him at seventeen; it’s hard to picture him discombobulated at any age. “Shit’s apparently sorted but I got no idea what to do with what I saw, and I’m freakin’ out. So I’m up there in my uncle’s fuckin’ wheelhouse afterward and all I can say is Those guys were dead, Uncle Joze, they were fuckin’ dead like he doesn’t know it, and he just looks at me and says Son, the problem ain’t that they’re dead, you know that and I know that, everyone on this boat knows that. Problem is that they don’t seem to know it their own selves. That they come back nonetheless, and we don’t know why. Maybe they’re hungry, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just lonely and want some company down there in the dark and don’t wanna wait for some other poor fucker to make a bad call and end up drowned, but that doesn’t mean we need to let ’em screw with us more than we have to.”

You can picture the skipper taking a drag off his Camel; you can’t picture him ever being scared. What you can do is hear his dead uncle clear as if the guy’s on the radio from the past; skipper’s a crazy mimic. The cigarette rasp is vivid, as is the change when he drops his uncle’s voice and goes back to his own: “But they come back. I never forgot that, Dee. Never forgot him saying that, like any other thing I’d need to learn if I was gonna have my own boat someday. I had a notebook I wrote shit down in sometimes, back then, and that one day I just wrote those three words: they come back.

“A while later, I finally had the Witch as a rookie skipper and I was workin’ hard as hell to keep his and my dad’s reputation going, and I think I got lucky a bunch of times, but there was a ton of work and money that went into this boat and I wasn’t sure I’d ever get out from under it. But that season we hit and blasted through each damn goal I set for us. I’ve never been as close on the crab like that again, holds filled over and over again with good live catch, and it was the same year that asshole on the Alaskan Hope died. Not that anyone was sad about it.”

He pauses, and again you can hear the pride in the new untrained crew, his crew, whom he’d assembled to work together to catch crab and earn some damn money on a well-run boat, unlike that asshole’s piece-of-shit rebuilt vessel.

“Everyone called that fuckin’ tub the Alaskan Dope and nobody was too particular about not lettin’ him hear, even in the beginning nobody liked him—when I heard about that shit it was like I was seventeen again and I swear I heard Uncle Joze in my head saying They come back. For—fuck, months afterward I remembered to say a prayer now and then, and one of the things I prayed for was never to see the Alaskan Dope skipper lookin’ up at me from under the water, what was left of him after the crabs were done, bones and shreds of oilskins, climbin’ that anchor chain or that buoy rope up toward my deck, his skull-face grinnin’ like this shit was the funniest thing he ever seen. I prayed that he’d never come back, and I guess I thought it wasn’t too likely, since they’d eaten most of him, even the bones. Not much left but some shreds of oilskin and those long bones. Not enough to put itself together to come on back up and say hi.”

“Boss, I don’t know if that’s better or worse,” says Patel, and for once you think you hear what the man sounds like when he’s being entirely honest, not bullshitting anyone on any particular wavelength. “I guess I hope it’s better not to have to think about some drowned-dead captain hangin’ around to maybe fuck with you if he gets bored, but the empty ones creep me out so bad, man. It’s—you know how you can sometimes hear the crab blowin’ bubbles with their fucked-up little mouthpart things when they’re down in the tanks? I know what crab sounds like when they’re alive and eatin’. I—maybe think I know what the empty ones sound like, too, boss, when they take their meal.”

You’ve never heard Patel sound like that. Like a regular guy, someone who’s not sure of himself or what he actually wants. You know him as the stalwart-heavy deck boss, no more yielding than a fucking bollard, sensitive as a Formica counter. The guy who’s talking now, slightly unsteady, is a guy you’ve never met—and the guy he’s talking to is only slightly more familiar.

“Well,” says Captain Hewley, after a moment, sounding more tired than you’ve ever heard him. “You know. Lotta people get to hearing sounds up here, Dee. Sometimes they’re bad sounds. Sometimes some not-so-great shit happens in the sea that you’re bound to overhear. Sometimes people don’t know when to quit on it and need a reminder to lie still. Sometimes the crab are gonna be hungry, and you have to hear them eating. Shit happens on a boat. It’s up to you what you do about it.

“Some guys buy ’emselves earplugs and get on with it, some guys just kinda say okay, this is how this is, some guys decide fuck this shit, it ain’t worth it, and go fish somewhere that’s not tryin’ to kill them all the time. I don’t judge.”

“Bullshit you don’t judge, boss,” says Patel, and both of them laugh, a warm sound that cracks the built-up sour tension in the air like a hammer on rime-ice, and on that wave of shared laughter you creep back out of the galley without the rest of your nibbled dinner roll, and crawl back into bed thinking you might never feel hungry again.

Because Patel is right about the sounds of their feeding, when they take their meal: the little sounds of mouthparts moving past each other, tiny chewing tearing smacking sounds. They don’t have big mouths at all, the crabs, but they are relentless, and you think even over the snoring of the others, the clatter and hum that is the background noise of the Sea Witch, that you might be able to hear it anyway, all the way down at the bottom of the ocean; that you may never not be able to hear it, no matter how far from the Bering Sea you end up.

Because crabs are everywhere.

Even back south, where all this freezing bullshit will fade into a bad dream, even under the blazing Florida sun throwing brilliant diamonds of reflection on water the color of clear bright-blue ink, water in which nothing can hide, where you don’t have to worry about drowned people’s swollen-soft remains pulling themselves up your anchor chain hand over hand because they’d like to come up and say hello, to be sociable, because in water this clear you can see a very long way down—even in this water, which is not trying to kill you, you think you will never be able to forget the sounds they make, and you wonder despite yourself what the doomed skipper of the Alaskan Hope heard in his own last moments, and if he had been conscious enough to hear it his own self: the chewing sounds.

The little mincing, chewing sounds, as the empty crabs begin to feed.

Vivian Shaw wears way too many earrings and likes edged weapons and expensive ink. She was born in Kenya and has lived in the UK, Maryland, and New Mexico. She writes about monsters, both in and out of classic horror literature; machines, extant and fantastical; disasters and their causes; and found family. She is the author of the Dr. Greta Helsing contemporary fantasy series, and a sci-fi/horror novella, The Helios Syndrome (Lethe Press). She reviews for The Washington Post, and her short sci-fi/horror fiction has appeared in Uncanny and Pseudopod.

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One way of measuring creatures is by volume.
For the purposes of consumption, we consider

parts. Like, it’s one thing to eat an ant, but what if
we’re talking just a leg or two, fallen into the pot.

How much is a lentil-bulk? How much to equal an olive?
The rabbis say it is true that something smaller than

a lentil is too small to consider, but at the same time,
that’s only true if the creature in question has no soul.

If there is a soul, volume is irrelevant and we must consider
their chance of survival. An ant without a leg is not the same

as the leg of an ant, when weighting sins of consumption.
We fall to pieces. We tear apart. We tabulate for hunger

and for heartbreak. One can be at peace with dying
but must still avoid being in a room with the dead.

Is any box full of bones a corpse? If a spine and a skull,
matched, we count one, one corpse. A whole, holy,

hole in the world. Even if the ribs are missing. Any
amount of bones taken from a grave remains a whole,

count one, held together by the act of burying, after
the skin, after the flesh, after the tendons. But a box

of parts missing a skull or a spine, unburied between
death and now, is something other than a dead man.

An unquantifiable loss. These are the lists of things you
should never touch: a limb from a corpse stacked

with two dead strangers, pieces of limbs mingled
from two or more still-living people, a half-kav of bones

from at least two dead things, a barrel of blood, a bone
the size of a barley grain if it’s been broken in two,

a spine and a skull from two corpses mixed in one box.
We prepare. We predetermine. We prevent personal pollution.

Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet.  Her work has recently appeared in Haven Spec, Identity Theory, Ninth Letter, The Dread Machine and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition.  She serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly and a critic for Pencilhouse.  She prefers walking in the woods to social media, so she budgets her time accordingly.

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