I often look to anthology calls for writing prompts (even if I don’t always end up submitting), and the seed for “The Rainmakers” came from a call for joyful, queer, post-apocalyptic stories. I’m a lifelong fan of the disaster/apocalypse genre, but it can be bleak. The idea of writing a story that centred joy and hope in a genre that usually centres pain and nihilism really appealed to me.

Your anticipation of how our present vernacular might evolve in your imagined future is one of the things that makes this story so convincing. The Haters, the Rainmakers, randos, and newbs—can you tell us how those ideas evolved?

I think the best way to describe my writing process is “in medias res pantsing.” I go into every project with a solid idea of the key plot and emotional beats, but I don’t world-build in advance. Instead, I like to dive straight into the story and the voice of my MC and see where they take me. In this case, Clem’s voice immediately felt like a slightly folksy, grown-up version of today’s young pop-culture vernacular. As the story evolved, I decided to lean into that vibe wholesale and play around with how words often get adopted by the broader population and work their way into common parlance over time.

This story is one of those that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy, with the world-building being so strongly centered around a climate-based post-apocalypse, but culminating in an act of magic in calling the rains. As you were writing it, did you have a sense of where it would fall along genre lines? Is there other magic in the world you created, outside the boundaries of what we can see in this story? Come to think of it, are there other stories to be told by and about the troupe and their world?

A lot of my writing tends to straddle genres, and I enjoy playing around on the fuzzy margins of things, so I didn’t really give any conscious thought to the combination of a climate-based post-apocalyptic story with magic, other than knowing I wanted there to be magic in this world. I think I knew from the outset that it would fall between genres, but the duality there fit the mood I was looking for. Magic (be it real or imagined) can bring wonder and joy, and I wanted to take a setting that’s usually quite grim and layer in beauty and hope. I chose to combine the “real” magic of calling the rains with the equally important but less tangible magic of love, optimism, altruism, and compassion that the Rainmakers also share.

Is there other magic in this world? There might be; I’d have to write more to find out! I think there are definitely other stories to be told in this world.

Ultimately, this is a story of hope. I think many of us share Clem’s dream for an end to Haters and a world committed to spreading the love. Do you think it’s a world within reach?

That’s a hard question. I wrote the first draft of this story a few years ago, and I have to say my faith in humanity’s been a little shaken since then.

That said, I still have hope. The world is full of people who are willing to put their own comfort and convenience aside, stand up to hatred, and do whatever they can to help others. I have to believe that compassion and kindness will win out, in the end.

What are you working on now, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m currently working on a few bigger projects, including a genre-bending novella (post-apocalyptic modern fantasy for the win!) and an adult horror novel with a very Canadian setting.

As for what you might see from me in the future, I’m always writing short stories, and my agent and I are looking forward to sharing my creepy Upper-MG horror.

Like all fat people, but especially fat women, I have to accept that most of the creators I admire and respect have intractable issues with my body. They feel perfectly entitled to use it as a joke, or as the site of horror and degradation, or a proof of failure, or a metaphor for avarice, sexlessness, and/or evil. I must also prepare myself for interactions where my body is in danger (hospitals, doctors offices, interactions with the law) for the derision and devaluation my body will be afforded, because that hatred seeps through fiction to fact, from joke into policy, and is obvious at every level of public interaction.

The tropes of fat hatred are so deeply embedded in our culture as to be some of the lowest hanging fruit, suitable for the laziest writers looking for the simplest shorthand and not caring whose caricature they are painting for the thousandth unoriginal time. King, one of the most influential and widely read American authors of all time, should be better than this, but he isn’t. He has presented fat bodies in a hateful, derisive light for four decades, and he has not learned to do better in all that time. It’s not one character, in one book. It is his pattern.

Let’s examine the evidence of King’s campaign of fat hatred.

King’s 1986 novel, IT, is a gripping and memorable yet controversial novel about how terror in childhood and adulthood take on different shapes but present the same challenge. The story’s titular villain can take on any shape: werewolf, giant spider, and of course the sewer clown, Pennywise. But King pens page after page of prose frightening the reader about fat women, if there are no other monsters available.

Eddie Kaspbrak is an utterly stock character: the sickly kid. He’s small for his age and skinny. He’s always got an inhaler in his mouth, gasping through imagined asthma at any moment of tension. But his asthma is not the product of his own imagination; it is his mother’s invention.

Eddie needs an inhaler only because his mother is awful. She’s a hypochondriac, and her treatment of her only son verges on Munchausen’s by Proxy. She’s overbearing and overprotective, creating an environment in which Eddie is afraid to make friends or ever find a reason to leave her.

All of this would be enough to make readers hate Mrs. Sonia Kaspbrak, but just in case they don’t see it: she is also fat. Her body is described with utter disgust, in terms of breadth and swelling, how suffocating her massive breasts can be when she crushes Eddie to her large body. Sonia Kaspbrak dies a fat person’s nightmare death; a coronary that causes her body to block the entrance to her home and necessitate showy measures for its removal.

King’s distaste is clear, but he’s not done. When Eddie grows up, he marries a fat girl named Myra. Naturally, she looks just like his mother (in the 2017 two-part film, they are played by the same actress.) Myra is weak and solicitous where Sonia was domineering and rude, but it’s the same story. Myra keeps Eddie from joining a tennis club, from having a healthful life of any kind. They stop having sex for some reason (despite the fact that she was fat when they got married, and fat women have sex all the time) and her size is given as an acceptable and clear answer as to why they have no children. Myra Kaspbrak is a self-hating fat woman, concerned that she cannot perform her job as a chauffeur or fit into any uniform she owns for their limousine service. Her body is described in dehumanizing terms: she’s a horse, she’s a hog. King also loves to describe fat women’s bodies as “swelling like comber-waves in the sea.”

I know that he loves it, because this exact same descriptor comes up again in King’s 1983 short story, “Word Processor of the Gods.” Here, too, a decent guy is saddled with that most terrible of burdens: a fat wife. Here, too, the fat woman is selfish, a screeching harridan, a greedy bitch whom no one could possibly desire. King’s protagonist unmakes the couple’s child and stresses that, in a life where they had no offspring, the wife becomes fatter still, cruelly describing hers as a life where everything goes into her body, but nothing comes out. Lina, the woman in this story, is literally written out of existence by the titular wonder, to be replaced by her thinner sister-in-law, so that the writer in the story can be rid of his own mistakes without guilt or the expense of a divorce.

King’s 1980 short story “The Wedding Gig” lacks the description of fleshly combers, but once again casts a fat woman in the pitiable role: Maureen Scollay is a self-loathing fat bride who takes control of a mafia empire with naked aggression and aplomb during her own wedding reception, but even this does not liberate her from King’s scorn. He ends the story with the darkly hinted rumors that success and grief made Maureen even fatter; the real sin of a murderer and mafia queenpin was and always will be that she was too big for her white dress.

This derision King shows is gendered, but it is not solely applied to all the King’s women. He also clearly hates his fat male characters.

Returning to IT, Ben Hanscom is the fat whipping boy of the doorstopping horror classic. His friends call him “Haystack,” after Kayfabe-era wrestler Haystack Calhoun, who famously tipped the scales at over 600lbs. Ben is subjected to humiliations both large and small for his size, but the worst castigations come from the pen of his creator. Anytime Ben runs, King narrates hot and heavy how much Ben hates the sensation of his bouncing tits and pendulous gut. Whenever Ben considers his crush on Beverly, the ubiquitously desired girl of the Loser’s Club, he must at some point comment on his own undesirable flesh as part of the equation. Everyone, from the evil clown on down, calls Ben “fat boy.” Although he is a brilliant kid, an architect and a poet, a brave fighter against both bullies and monsters, everyone remarks first and last on his body. Ben is shamed and abused into losing weight by a high school P.E. teacher who touches his body with revulsion by way of motivation, serving up yet another terrible lesson on how King feels about fatness and the people who live it.

In King’s 1978 dark fantasy magnum opus The Stand, the great writer’s fat flogging post is Harold Emery Lauder. Harold is also described in dehumanizing terms, his fat communicating his weakness, his lack of character, and his lasciviousness to the reader at a glance. Like many fat characters, Harold is also a coward with bad hygiene and an unevolved sense of self-awareness. King is somewhat kinder to Harold than to Ben; perhaps because the characters in The Stand are facing the drastic reduction of the human population and even the assholes are precious. Harold is brilliant, like Ben. Harold is gifted by the narrative with a beautiful woman as a consolation prize, like Ben.

Fat is feminizing to both characters; their masculinity is held hostage by their own round asses and enlarged breasts. Both of these examples ransom it back by losing the weight. Ben puts himself on a diet and a running regimen designed to get revenge on a cruel gym teacher. His transformation is swift and satisfying; thinness lasts him through adulthood, and he is unfailingly remarked upon in King’s long descriptions as the kind of guy who could take home any woman he wants.

Harold, under conditions of post-apocalyptic privation and unremitting labor, gets thinner, too. He loses his feminine curvature (not to mention his acne) to time spent in the sun, doing archetypally-described honest work. Harold is not truly redeemed; his thinness does not save him from betrayal and a terrible death. But it does allow him to take on a new name and see himself in a new light. He gains what Ben Hanscom calls in his own story “a little dignity and a little peace” by doing the only thing a fat character is allowed to do to become better: losing weight. King works precisely, over the course of a thousand pages, to make the reader first hate Harold, then to pity him, and finally perhaps to love him for a fool who couldn’t be any better than this fate allowed. His weight loss is a concrete and undeniable part of his arc toward something like redemption.

This is an aspirational narrative; fat people in our culture are encouraged toward no other goal quite the way they are goaded toward weight loss. Prodigious and maintained weight loss are applauded with greater fanfare than finishing a PhD or opening a business. Americans love nothing so much as a set of before and after pictures. No other image provides positive proof that an individual can control their own destiny quite like Oprah dragging a wagon full of lard. No moment is as humiliating as when Myra Kaspbrak begs her husband not to leave by promising to stuff him with food. No moment is as triumphant as Ben Hanscom giving the skinny finger to his gym teacher.

No fat woman King has ever written has achieved anything like that moment of triumph. I’m no fan of the moral arc of a fat person becoming better and achieving their dreams primarily via weight loss, but King won’t let any fat female character recover her dignity by even that dreary and predictable means. King’s fat men lose weight and gain our respect. King’s fat women stay fat and get fatter. Their fat defines them, and drags along the classic comorbidities of greed, stupidity, and weakness.

In his 1979 short story “Quitters Inc.,” King devises a system by which women are punished if men gain weight. Under a draconian and 100% successful rehab process for nicotine users, if the new non-smoker gains too much weight in the process of quitting, the organization sends someone to chop off his wife’s little finger. This is a fascinating combination of motivating a male character through the abuse of his female partner (not a fridge, perhaps, but a mini-fridge) and expanding the concept of joint ownership of the body. Throughout King’s work, men are portrayed as the victims of their wives’ weight gain; in “Quitters Inc.,” women are made to suffer in a much more concrete fashion for their husbands’ unruly bodies. There are no couples in the story that feature a husband whose wife is trying to quit smoking; the torture never appears on the other hand. The distribution of guilt for weight gain is always biased in a King story.

The only time Stephen King’s fat women get any relief is in one brief aside in 1980’s Firestarter, when psychic protagonist Andy McGee uses his MK-Ultra powers to convince a group of paying dieters to stop overeating and go on walks; theories of weight loss that they’ve clearly tried before. However, these women lose weight due not to their actions, but to a literal magical intervention of male willpower.

With a career spanning five decades and dozens of books, it’s natural that some of King’s early work feels problematic and dated to audiences now. It is easy to pick a few books from the unenlightened eighties or the clumsy nineties to malign a writer with a long and distinguished career. From Needful Things to Thinner, King’s attitudes reflect terrible times for diet culture and fat acceptance. However, it is harder to read his 2020 release If It Bleeds. King has not learned much since his early days; evidenced in his depiction of a tertiary character, a fat woman whose children are missing in the aftermath of a bombing. Despite her reason for existing in the story as a representative of community distress in the wake of tragedy, King spends more words on how “vastly overweight” she is, how she “billows” as she moves, and most critically, how she “will be very lucky to survive the day without having some sort of cardiac episode,” than on anything else about her. The character recites the names of her missing children, but never her own.

In 2021’s Billy Summers, it’s the same old fatphobic song. King writes corpulent mobsters who waddle and gobble, who have no other characteristics besides fatness and the avarice and incaution he always groups with the fat body. When the eponymous hitman dons a fake silicone belly to bolster a false identity, an accomplice tells him to put on a sweatshirt to cover his assumed bulk. “It’s what fat people do,” she tells him. It makes me want to reach through the page and say: There’s a reason for that, Steve. You’re the reason for that.

Knowing from experience as well as documented research the dangerous medical implications of fatphobia makes me think about where doctors and nurses gain their expectation that every fat person they see is like the ones they know from books: hypertensive, diabetic, and noncompliant. I think about the books these future health care providers might have read long before college and residency. I think about Stephen King, who has lain at the mercy of an army of doctors when he was struck by a van on the side of the road in 1999, breaking his leg and hip, puncturing his lung, and bashing the brain that has brought the world so many wonderful stories. King had the advantage of lying before doctors who thought his life was worth living and his body was worth mending. No one wrote novels for his nurses to read that tell them that he was destroying his body by living in it, that he was mere minutes away from a heart attack and heroic measures would be wasted on him. They worked to save him, because his life was worth saving.

Is mine? If they saw me lying on the table and thought of Myra/Sonia Kaspbrak, newly brought back bigger than life by actress Molly Atkinson in the 2017 adaptation of IT, would they work as hard to save me?

Americans see fat people every day. We know them and love them; we work with them and we know they have sex lives and ambitions, that they do more than hate themselves and heave and cry. After all, we are them. We respond to these stories, to all of King’s stories, because we recognize ourselves and others in them. But if the books we read and the movies we watch make fat bodies into portals to horror or the butt of the joke, do we see ourselves clearly or kindly? Not in the Stephen King literary/cinematic universe. Not in 1974, not in 2021.

Other writers are building better on the foundations of what we grew up reading. Folks like Matt Wallace, Sarah Hollowell, Sarah Gailey, Jennifer Weiner, Kate Stayman-London, Julie Murphy, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, Alex Smith, Hilary Monahan, Amy Spalding, Marianne Kirby, Jody Houser, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Broder, and many others are writing books and stories where fat people have sex, go on adventures, save the day, and live lives like the ones we recognize. A whole generation of writers who inherited derision and erasure from writers like King will go on fattening that inheritance, making it our own. Writers like King may never notice or reform, and that’s just fine. We do it for each other and for the people like us who need these stories. We do it so that thin old men who hate the fat body aren’t the only ones on the shelf in horror, in fantasy, in science fiction, or anywhere.

Stephen King is a rich and inventive multiverse unto himself, populated by interconnected horrors and wonders that have terrified and electrified millions of readers, myself included. He is a blue-collar everyman white novelist whose fears look familiar to us, because his vision is the one that has always been accepted, just as his body is the kind that must always be protected. But he still writes a fat body—my body—as one of the scariest things in all the many worlds.

Good thing there are other worlds than these.

The mirror we face is cracked and wreathed in vanity lights that flicker in time with the strained chugging of the ancient generator outside. The smells of old perfume, road dust, and hush puppies fill the painted wooden wagon that serves triple duty as my transportation, home, and dressing room. I blame the generator for that last odour. We restocked on biodiesel at our last stop, and now everything smells like frying corn.

“It’s your go-to, glitter. You can never have too much.”

Thomas nods and bends over the worn, hand-stitched journal he carries everywhere. “Glitter,” he whispers, as his stub of pencil scratches across the page.

“But first things first.” I trade the lip gloss for a facecloth and hand a second to Thomas. “We’ve got to cleanse, glue down those bushy man-brows, prime, colour-correct, and girl…conceal, conceal, conceal.”

• • • •

We pulled into Sweet Spring at sunset, and from my perch on the box of my wagon I got a prime view of the colours—reds, oranges, and purples—sweeping the saffron-yellow sky above the mesas.

Sweet Spring was a little place, not much more than a few farms and a trading post, but it was neat and in good repair. That always boded well. It looked like the whole town had turned out to greet us. Women, men, and children in their much-mended and wash-thinned best lined the rough dirt road, waving and cheering as we drew near. A little girl with dark braids ran forward and threw flowers on the path in front of us. She giggled when one of my mules bent low to snatch them up. Good ol’ Harvey; he was never one to turn down a treat. And who was I to begrudge him? The roads through the Dry between New Angeles and Sweet Spring were long, hot, and nasty. Narrow, hard-scrabble tracks through rough terrain where water and food were scarce, and good people were scarcer still. They were dangerous, those roads. Easy to get lost and starve, easy to run into trouble. Roving bands of Haters liked to ambush the weak and unwary out there on those roads. They usually avoided travelling Rainmakers, but people like that are rando, and we’d pushed hard to cover the distance quickly. Harvey was one tired mule, and he deserved his treat.

We came to a stop in the dirt square at the centre of town and tied up at the hitching posts there. We’d tend to our chores—unharnessing, grooming, feeding—once the formalities were over with.

Here the town leaders—both official and otherwise—awaited us. Faces young and old, stamped with a mixed bag of emotions: hope, interest, uncertainty. My eyes slid past them all, drawn immediately to the small, white-haired woman who stood by the edge of the group. A sturdy, well-built young man sat on a wooden crate in front of her, staring up at me with curious eyes. The woman wasn’t big or particularly well dressed, and her face was creased with wrinkles that spoke of many long years between the yellow skies and sand, but her presence had weight. Everything about her—from the tight twist of her bun to the firm hand resting on the young man’s shoulder—radiated authority. I didn’t know if she held any official title, but there was no doubt she was in charge. She was the one who’d sent for us, I was sure of it.

When my fellow Rainmakers, sixteen of us in all, had assembled, I bowed to the woman.

“Emma Allen, I presume?”

She nodded, a short, sharp movement. “The same. Glad to see someone got our message. Took y’all long enough to get here.”

The young man gasped, but I laughed. I liked people who spoke their minds, especially little old ladies. Show me a feisty old girl dishing shade, and my mind immediately went to my old drag mother, Fifi Foxxx. Now, Fifi—she’d been a Queen, full of pride, sass, and determination. Emma Allen was the same. No candle to Fifi in looks or glam, obviously, but the attitude? Hells yes.

“All’s well that ends well, I s’pose,” she allowed. “Welcome to Sweet Spring, Rainmakers.”

“The pleasure’s ours. Thank you for your hospitality.” I gestured to the young man who sat before her. “Is this the boy you wrote about?”

She nodded again and nudged the young man to his feet. He was handsome enough, with clear skin, bright, wide-set eyes, and a full set of teeth. There was a resemblance to Emma in those features. A grandson, perhaps, or great-nephew? Potential, too. He had good bones. But did he have what it took to be a Rainmaker? Of that, I wasn’t sure.

“This is Thomas, my grandson. Turned seventeen last planting, but he’s had the calling long as I can remember. He’s a Rainmaker through an’ through.”

If I had a sequin for every time I’d heard that, I’d glitter like a diamond.

According to folklore, having a Rainmaker in the family was lucky. You’d be blessed, the stories said, with fertile land and bountiful crops. You’d be fertile and bountiful too, the whispers added. From a purely practical perspective, a Rainmaker’s hometown got priority when it came time to call down the clouds. Out here in the Dry, where one rainstorm could spell the difference between famine and plenty, that meant something. I’d seen all sorts of unsuitable candidates put forward by desperate people hoping to change their luck.

“We’ll see.” I offered Thomas my hand and received a firm shake in return. He had working hands, rough and strong. No surprise there. He was a farm-boy from head to toe. Strong wasn’t a problem. Rainmaking could be hard labour, and there was always room for someone who knew their way around livestock. Rough, on the other hand, was an issue. A Queen always took care of her skin. If we took him on, that skin would need fixing.

“Hello, Thomas. When I’m Rainmaking, I’m Clementine Devine, and I go by her and she, but right now you can call me Clem and him/he is fine. Tell me about this calling of yours. Why do you think you’re meant to be a Rainmaker?”

“Well, Queen—”

“Clem is just fine, when I’m out of drag.”

“Well, Clem, I think I’ve just always known, ever since I first saw a troupe of Rainmakers come to town when I was a little sprout. I want to help people. Be useful, make sure they’ve got what they need. That’s what Rainmakers do, isn’t it? Help people and spread the love?”

“That it is. But being a Rainmaker isn’t easy, Thomas. If we accept you, it would mean leaving all this behind; your town, your family, your friends. It would mean travelling all around the Dry, fending for ourselves and making do. Sometimes we go weeks between towns.”

“I can do that, sir. I’m strong, and Gran says I’m smart enough. I’m used to doing my share.”

“What about fighting? Can you do that? There are Haters out there, and they don’t always respect the rainbow flag.”

“Can’t say as I’ve had any experience with fighting, sir, but I’m willing to try. An’ I’ve hunted a fair bit . . . I’m a good shot with the rifle.”

He seemed a fine lad, open and hard-working. But that wasn’t good enough. If it were just hard work—travelling between communities, delivering messages, medicines, and goods, helping out, lending a hand—then any sensible young man would have fit the bill. But Rainmaking was something more, and very few had what it took.

“What about the other side of it? The Rainmaking? Can you put on the drag? Can you dance and sing in front of a whole town to call down the clouds and the rains?” This was the question that counted. If he hadn’t really heard the call, this would be where it would show. I had yet to meet a boy who could fool me.

“I can do that too, Qu—Clem.” No hesitation. “I know my build ain’t great for it, what with my shoulders an’ all, but I’ll do my very best. An’ . . . ” His gaze dropped for a moment. When he looked up again, his eyes were filled with a longing I knew all too well. “An’ I want to glitter, Queen. I want to shine.”

A perfect answer, and a real one too, by my guess. Certainly good enough to let him try. He had the calling all right, but only time would tell if he had the skills. Not everyone was cut out to be a Rainmaker.

• • • •

“Once you’ve got a nice, smooth surface, it’s time to contour.” I apply highlights and shadows to my own face and then help Thomas with his, showing him how to accentuate his cheekbones and soften his square chin.

“Me, I’ve got a right big schnozz, so I like to go in with a lot of highlighter on the bridge and tip to snatch it in. Yours is narrower, so we shouldn’t have as much to do there.”

“What if I make a mess of things?” Thomas’ voice trembles with nervous energy. Fear too, I imagine. “What if I forget the words or the routines?”

A Rainmaker’s first performance is always the hardest, and despite all his strengths, Thomas is no different. He’s as jittery as a spring kid, glancing at the door and jumping at every sound.

“Not likely, given the way you’ve been practicing. And even if you do, it’s not a big deal.”

He stares at me, a look of horror on his half-baked face. “Not a big deal? How can you say that? Those songs are tradition. What if I screw up, an’ the clouds don’t come, or if—”

“They’ll come. Yeah, the songs and dances we perform are tradition, but the real magic’s in the intent. If you put your heart and soul into it—dance for your life and spread the love—the rains will know, and they’ll come.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“’Cause I’ve been doing this almost my whole life, Thomas, and that’s more years than I’ll ever say out loud. I’ve seen all sorts of mess-ups and missed steps, but I’ve never seen the rains stay away. If we dance, they’ll come.”

• • • •

We left Sweet Spring late the next morning, after delivering a sack of dusty, well-travelled letters, helping repair the generator at the Trading Post, and swapping some sheet metal for corn meal, cooking oil, and five precious jars of powdered mineral pigments. Mixed with jojoba oil, beeswax, witch hazel, and clay, they’d become concealer, blush, eyeshadow, and lipstick.

Thomas hugged his parents and grandmother goodbye, and promised to write often. He exchanged tearful embraces with a young man and woman as well. The rest of the troupe bent our attention to harnessing our mules and gave him his privacy. It was never easy to leave home and the ones you loved. Leaving to become a Rainmaker was harder still. We travelled the Dry for months on end, stopping in towns along the way to lend a hand as needed or call down the clouds. A few days here, a week there, never long enough in one place to find love or form attachments. Being a Rainmaker could be a lonely life. Could be, but didn’t have to be. If those young folk loved him, they’d be patient and welcome him back with open arms when the turns of the seasons brought us this way again.

From Sweet Spring we travelled south. Thomas shared with Milo, who had the biggest wagon and acted as drag mother for our troupe. It was Milo’s job to show newbies the ropes and start them learning the songs and dances for calling down the clouds and the rains. When and if we were sure Thomas was staying, we’d trade for what we needed to build him a wagon of his own.

Thomas was eager to learn and full of questions. Only good manners—hammered into him by his grandmother, I imagined—kept him from peppering us all day long. On the second day I took pity and invited him to ride with me and ask anything he liked.

He asked about where we were headed (south to Tumbleweed and beyond) and how long it would take to reach our first stop (seven or eight days, if the weather held). He asked about make-up (lots) and costuming (sparkly) and where we got our wigs (donated hair and very fine craftspeople in New Angeles). Finally, after a few moments of pensive silence, he asked “Why did you become a Rainmaker, Clem?”

I knew he’d ask eventually, and I’d already thought about what I’d say. I’d learned over the years that while everyone asked, not everyone was comfortable with the answer. Thomas was a steady lad; he’d be one of the ones who could handle the real story. Still, best to give him a choice about it.

“Do you want the easy answer, or the real one? Real one’s not pretty, just saying. A bit TMI for some people.”

He studied my face for a moment. “Both, if that’s okay with you.”

“I wouldn’t have offered if it wasn’t. The easy answer’s that I heard the call, just like everyone else here in the troupe. It’s true, too, for what it’s worth. One of my first memories is of sitting in the back of my father’s truck and holding an old wedding dress he’d . . . found. ‘Keep it off the bed and keep it clean,’ he told me, ‘or I’ll whip you till you bleed.’ He meant it too, so I held that dress all bunched up on my lap as if were the most precious thing on earth, and the whole time, all I could do was stare at it. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, all lace and sparkle and little beads that caught the sun coming through the dirty windows and glittered like rainbows. I wanted that dress more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I wanted to own it and wear it and make it my second skin. I wanted to be that dress, if that makes sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. I felt the same way when Callie—that’s my older sister—got married a couple a’ years ago. She looked so pretty, and all I wanted was to try on her dress. Wouldn’t a’ fit me, a’ course. But still . . . ” He paused a moment, eyes closed in reminiscence. “What about the other answer, the too-much-info one? Is it something bad?”

“Yeah, it is. For some people, it’s unforgivable. And I understand why. Even when you spend your whole life learning to spread the love, sometimes it’s hard to forgive.”

“What do you mean? Did you hurt someone?”

“No, not me, not directly. But my parents did. My parents were Haters.”

Thomas’s eyes widened, but he didn’t flinch or gasp. “What happened?”

“What always happens with Haters. They attacked and people died. Haters learn the opposite of spreading the love. They believe in looking out for number one, and taking what they want, and survival of the strongest. To grow up a Hater is to think the world’s made of fear and greed and pain. That’s what I was taught when I was little. I didn’t know there was anything else till the day I saw that wedding dress and realized the world held beauty, too. I wanted that beauty in my life, and I got my chance the day our band attacked a troupe of Rainmakers.”

“They attacked Rainmakers?” Now there was horror in his voice.

“They did. My father was a Big Man in our band, second only to the Boss. He was tough and macho and full of ego. No matter what anyone else did, he had to do it bigger and better. When his chief rival for the Boss’s favor raided a fat trade caravan, my father needed an even bigger prize. I guess he figured Rainmakers would be just the thing. I was around ten years old, and he brought me with him. I was old enough to fight, and he wanted me to be a Big Man too.”

“Did he kill them?”

“Are you kidding? Hells no! Rainmakers are always more than they seem. You should know that. Not saying he didn’t do damage, but when the bullets stopped flying, most of the Rainmakers were still standing, and my father’s raiding party were dead in the sand.”

“What about you?”

“I was the only survivor. They found me hidden under the seat of my father’s truck, all ragged and feral and covered in scars. They were scared of me, at first. I can imagine what must have been going through their minds. How could such a child understand any show of kindness? How could such a child learn to spread the love? They debated whether to leave me behind or take me to the closest town. I asked if could stay with them instead.”

“What did they say?”

“When the clamor and kerfuffle died down, not much. They were too surprised. Finally, one of them—a big, round man who I later learned to call Philip when he was off stage and Fifi when she was on—asked me why.

“’Cause your clothes and your wagons are so pretty.’ I was sobbing, too scared and desperate to be tough. My father would’a beat me silly if he’d seen, but he was dead in the dust, and for the first time in my life, I could speak my mind. ‘Like the wedding dress an’ the flowers an’ the pretty girls. I want to be pretty too!’

“And that was it. They took me in. Taught me to spread love instead of hate, and to dance and sing the clouds down. Some people don’t like to hear my story, because they’ve lost family to Haters, or been hurt themselves. I guess it’s easier to be angry when what you’re angry at isn’t the same as you at all. I make them think. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“Well it shouldn’t. They should be relieved.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because your story proves that hate isn’t bred into the blood and bones. That it’s taught and learned. And if it can be learned, it can be unlearned too. Maybe someday there’ll be no more Haters at all.”

That was my dream too.

• • • •

Once our faces are done, I help Thomas with his wig. Milo gave him free run of the extras, and he’s chosen a cascade of loose brown curls that fall to the centre of his back. It’s an interesting choice for a newb, nowhere near as flashy as blond or red, but the moment it’s on, I know he’s made the perfect choice.

“Beautiful.” I hand him some bobby pins. “It’s beautiful. The highlights bring out the colour of your eyes.”

He smiles a shy smile and gazes in wonder at his reflection in the mirror. “I look like Callie.” He laughs. “Only with better cheekbones.”

“That’s the spirit!”

I rise, fetch the garment bags from their hooks on the door, and hand one to Thomas. “Best for last. Here’s your dress.”

He takes the bag in loving hands and slides the zipper down a few inches to reveal the masterpiece of vintage silver satin and Swarovski inside.

“It’s a classic, passed down from Rainmaker to Rainmaker for I don’t know how long. Last one to wear it was Fifi, and I’ve been saving it for just the right Queen. Now it’s yours. I’ve altered it; it should you fit just right.”

Thomas pauses mid-zip and stares up at me. “But Clem . . . wow, I . . . I don’t know what to say. Thank you! I mean—”

“No thanks necessary. You just wear it and shine. You’ll do great.”

• • • •

We stayed two nights in the town called Tumbleweed and a week in Cottonwood Creek. What with planting season still a month off, we did whatever was needed and traded chores for our food, fuel, and water. Milo was a blacksmith, Finn had trained to be a doctor before he heard the call, and Isla could sheer a sheep in three minutes flat. Thomas made himself useful too, chopping firewood, digging post-holes, and doing just about anything else we asked. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, and he had a quiet, earnest charm that put people at ease.

But was he a Rainmaker?

Of that, we still weren’t sure.

We stopped along the road for rehearsals, out in the Dry where there was no one to see but ourselves. Thomas picked up the songs and dances quick enough, but as for performance, he lacked the je ne sais quoi that made a true Rainmaker.

“You need to be more confident,” Milo told him. “Smile, sashay.”

“Make sure you’re well rested before rehearsal,” Mia suggested. “Have a snack.”

“Picture success,” Finn said. “Positive thoughts only.”

Thomas tried it all, but there was still something missing.

“Give him time,” I told Milo. “Give him time. Some people just need the right push to glow-up.”

• • • •

We were two weeks out of Cottonwood Creek and five days shy of Kéyah when the Haters attacked. They caught us by surprise in a narrow valley between two high bluffs, the perfect place for an ambush. Mia and Ezra had been riding scout, but they’d given no warning. That meant one thing. They were dead, outnumbered and overwhelmed before they could raise the alarm. If we didn’t fight back hard and fast, the rest of us would follow.

The way was too narrow for us to turn and flee, and there was nowhere to hide as the bullets and arrows rained down on us.

“Take cover!” I yelled.

Wild screams and curses echoed down from the crevices and shadows of the boulder-strewn slopes above us. Howling, foul, violent language, promises of pain and torture. I’d known those words once, had shouted them myself and watched our victims—innocent farmers and traders—cringe in fear. Not this time. We were Queens, Rainmakers, and we wouldn’t be intimidated.

“Take cover and return fire!”

“At what?” Thomas gasped as he grabbed his rifle and ducked behind the seat. “I can’t see them!”

It was typical Hater strategy. They’d stay hidden and pick us off one by one. It would work too, unless we changed the game.

I grabbed the rainbow flag mounted next to my seat and jumped down. “Aim for the ridgeline and the shadows.” I ran to the middle of the dusty road. “They’ll show themselves. I’ll make them.”

I waved the flag above my head and screamed at the hills. “Hey you, Big Man. Where are you? I know you’re up there! Show yourself.”

“What’s he doing?” Thomas cried. “Clem don’t be crazy, get back here!”

“No, he’s right,” Milo hissed. “Just wait. Haters are macho; they can’t resist a challenge. He’s going to draw the Big Man out.”

I smiled a thin, fierce smile, and waved the flag harder. I’d grown up in that world, surrounded by that toxic fear and insecurity. Milo understood.

“Come on, you big coward,” I yelled. “I’m right here! What kind of leader are you? Hiding like a frightened child. Come and face me, if you’ve got the balls for it! Face me like a real warrior!”

A roar of angry denial echoed from the shadows on the ridge to my right as a beefy man broke cover and rushed me like an enraged bull. He went down in a short, sharp rattle of rifle-fire. Simple, predictable, sad. Big Men were all the same.

Now for the iffy part.

“Your Big Man is dead,” I called to the darkened hills. “If you lay down your weapons and leave, we’ll let you live. If you fight, you’ll die.”

We gave them a chance, because violence was the opposite of spreading the love.

We gave them a chance, but they didn’t take it. Haters almost never do.

They screamed and cursed and poured down the slopes in a blood-thirsty, blade-swinging wave.

We cut them down.

Like I’d said to Thomas, Rainmakers are always more than they seem. We trained every day, and once they’d shown themselves, the Haters stood no chance.

When the last of the Haters had fallen, I found Thomas behind the wagon-seat with tears streaking his dusty cheeks.

“I’m so sorry Clem, I couldn’t do it! I tried to shoot, but all I could see was their eyes. They’re people just like us! How can people hate so much? And how can I kill ’em without becoming just like ’em?”

I wrapped my arms around him and held him close. “It’s okay, Thomas. It was your first real fight. Shooting a real person’s harder than a target. And that’s love holding you back. Never apologize for love.”

We searched the slopes and the hills beyond for survivors. We found a little girl, no more than four or five, huddled behind a boulder with the body of her mother. She hissed and spat at us as we approached and scrabbled for a rock to use as a weapon.

“She’s just a baby.” Thomas’ face was pale. “No bigger than my littlest sister. How could anyone bring a baby to a fight like this?”

“Hate’s learned young,” I replied.

Thomas knelt and smiled that soft smile of his. “It’s okay, little one. We’re not going to hurt you. You’re safe with us.” He offered his hand and much to my surprise, she set down her rock and came to him. He scooped her up and carried her back to our wagons, away from the carnage.

That evening we piled the bodies, over twenty in all, beside the road, and set Mia and Ezra, whom we’d found hidden in a gully with their throats slit, alongside them. Rainmaker or Hater, in death we’re all the same. We gathered brush and dry grasses and made a pyre, and when it was burning high, we sang the long farewell. Familiar voices, familiar song. We’d sung it before, and I had no doubt we’d sing it again. Such was life in the Dry.

But as I sang and watched the flames dance, a new voice joined the rest, strong and clear. It slipped along the edges of the song, adding harmony and depth. Adding layers of meaning that cut to the core.

This is grief, the voice sang, for lives lost and lives wasted. This is pain and desolation. But this is promise, too. Of redemption and fortitude and a chance at a new tomorrow where no one learns to hate.

Heart tight, I spun to find the source of that voice. Thomas sat a few feet away with the little Hater girl on his knees. His eyes were closed, his face tilted to the sky and cheeks wet with tears, and he was singing for all he was worth.

I’d told Milo that sometimes it just took the right impetus for someone to find their sparkle. Thomas had found his. Helping real people, doing real good, it brought out the Queen in him like no amount of practice ever could. He was a Rainmaker for sure.

• • • •

“Would it be okay . . . that is, my Gran gave me some of her jewelry before I left, and I was wondering—”

“Yes Thomas, you can wear your Gran’s jewelry.” I slide the glittering chain from the faded velvet box in her hands and fasten it around her neck. “Perfect. Now you’re a Queen.”

She turns and looks in the mirror once more, letting her breath out in a shaky sigh.

“Wow. I never imagined I could look like this. I’m so happy, Clementine.”

“Use it. Take that feeling in your heart and share it with everyone out there.”

I clip on my own earrings and slide my feet into my size twelve rhinestone heels. Like Thomas’s dress, they’re precious, passed down through the generations since before the sky was yellow and the earth dry.

It’s a short walk from where we set up the wagons to the town square, and we blow kisses to the crowd as we go. The traditional cheers of “Yaaaas, Queen!” and “You go, girl!” echo off the hills and fill the dull yellow sky with startled birds. Soon we’ll fill that sky with clouds, and then the rains will come and the crops will grow.

We take our places. Milo, as Raspberry De-Light is on my left, and Thomas, as the newly minted Miss Love O’Plenty, on my right. I give Miss Love a grin.

“Ready?”

“Not really, but let’s do this thing anyway!”

The music starts, and we dance and sing, beginning, as always, with “It’s Raining Men.” Miss Love’s voice rings out clearer, stronger, and more powerful than it ever was in rehearsals. As strong as it was in grief, and just as beautiful.

The skies open and the rains fall. We dance, sing, and glitter along with the deluge.

Rainmaking is a thing of beauty, and joy lights the wet faces of the crowd, including the little girl who’s become Miss Love’s constant shadow. She isn’t the first orphan to be raised by Rainmakers, and she won’t be the last. Her smile makes my heart happy.

Joy is a form of love, just like sorrow, compassion, and hope. Just like a child’s smile or raindrops on the dry ground.

Spread the love; it’s what Rainmakers do.

Not anymore.

What am I now? Insect-crawled, lizard-basked, dust-dry-parched-dirt. Tepid water draws me back to the old man who kneels on what was once an island. He leans out from the tree’s shade to pour hoarded rain onto my cracked bed, and I drink it greedily.

“Won’t be long until the rains,” he says. “Things will be better then.”

Better. Briefly, until standing puddles become swamp-sticky mud and even the lizards desert me.

Tennuh has been with me all his life. I remember him as a boy on a raft, fishing for his family.

“I always loved this little island,” he tells me, although I already know. “My father told me never to set foot on it. But then I fell into the water, and you guided me to it. And there I was, right where I shouldn’t be. With no raft.”

I remember. Faced with the choice—stay on the island until someone came to find him, or brave the current—he’d chosen to swim. I couldn’t say what prompted me to save him, except that I enjoyed the way he sang as he poled, his heron stillness as he waited for fish. He’d had a pet heron, for a time.

“I found Norri here, too,” he muses. “Barely fledged, and both her parents gone to that wildcat.” He smiles a little at the memory of the bird, his face as crack-lined as a dead riverbed. “I miss her.”

So do I. I miss all the herons, the little quick-paddling ducks, the brown-pelted otters who passed river-rounded rocks down through generations.

I don’t miss men, because they haven’t gone anywhere.

Tennuh looks up as he hears singing from upriver. Men walk where they once sailed, all heavy-shoe-thumping where tiny shrimp grazed.

It was men who made me this thing I am now. I forget, when they’re not here. I only remember being a river. But then they come with fox-mating-shrillness, and I remember the dam they built and how the water slowed to a trickle and stopped.

If I were still a river I could kill them. If I were still a river I wouldn’t want to, not more than the handful that are my due as the heron-eats-the-fish-eats-the-shrimp. Sometimes during the rains I can hurt them, send them slip-sliding in mud and tripping over sunken stones. Sometimes, when the rain is torrents, I’m briefly a river again and catch the careless in a flood.

The water is upriver, heavy and expectant like storm clouds, but I can’t reach it. It belongs to men, now. They keep it all for themselves, to water their fields and homes. Even if I could, the resulting flood would kill Tennuh. I’d miss him; he’s more heron than man.

“I won’t be here forever,” Tennuh says. I wonder who will talk to me then.

The singer reaches the island and greets Tennuh, calling him Grandfather although he never mated. I remember her. She’s barely an adult, in a patched dress the colour of daisies. Her sandals dangle from her fingers. “You should come into town, so someone can take care of you.”

Tennuh shrugs. “What would I do in a town?” he asks. “Let me die on the river.”

“But it’s not a river, Grandfather,” the girl replies. “It’s a road.” I try to widen the parched-cracked-earth and swallow her, but it ignores me. She bends and picks up a smooth stone. “See? It even has cobbles.”

“There are better roads,” Tennuh replies. “Paved roads. I’ve seen them. Why do you think I stay here?”

The girl gives a wide smile. “I like this one. I like the little lizards and skittery bugs, and the way it cuts down into the ground like a secret place all overhung with trees. The way the mud squelches between my toes when it rains.”

I remember a barefoot child dancing in the rain, a mother shouting. She’s too young to remember anything but a road.

“It’s a road that remembers being a river,” Tennuh replies. “Just like I remember being a fisherman.” He pours rainwater again to take the sting out of his words.

The girl’s expression becomes sombre. She removes a flask from her bag, removes the stopper and pours. Her water is cool and remembers being underground. “I’d have liked to see it as a river,” she says quietly, “but it is an excellent road.”

She stoppers the flask again and says a farewell to Tennuh. As she heads downriver she starts to sing again, and I follow her all the way.

a brightly cropped cloud takes dew across the length of a waxed May, left undated

like a girl refusing to repeat her skin.

raw light greens me to fed wisdom, stunned by a famished desire.

this much piety to sun, all for my faultless photosynthesis.

nothing is more fertile than this hardship.

I attend the wild reserve of oxygen to exist.

stuck to a cylinder & inhaling of rich aura.

at dusk, for want of grape I did a heartless thing.

life, snapped soon as the smashing of quick thumbs

ending a sapling peeled from the underbrush of dead nails.

blood massing the infinite length of my palms, like the alarming of a red text.

I say this with all aspects of my tear gland, death-eager as a budding poet.

I have seen absence become a metaphor for loss & decay.

time sorts the almighty formula for rot.

I’m elsewhere, happening to you as a puzzle

stalking you through the forest maths of trees & feral surd

like a topic for your distress.

what branch of thought triggers grief?

In the tongue-lolling umami of words, I’m a lad teething in honeyed places.

allow me this branding of dental relish.

we’d have more nights to worry about the sweetness of being veggies.

I was doodling a fish in the moon and thinking about magical markets when the world came to me in a montage. (Cliché but true.) The fish was using the moon as a pond. I imagined it endlessly circling its surface in an image reminiscent of the moon and ocean spirits in the Book One finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I’d always wanted to write about a coastal city with a secret. The story would have a heroine that had access to the magical market and an anti-hero who didn’t. I realised I wanted to write about the anti-hero.

The idea of the Light Market developed from conversations I had with a friend from high school. We would speculate about whether black markets were physical places, and whether they were actually magical. How did they get their name? What if black markets were actually full of walking shadows? What if they were a time and dimension only open to a chosen few? When I revisited these musings, I’d been exposed to conversations about subverting the idea of blackness as evil, so I wondered what the Light Market would look like.

The image of a fish is a recurring one in the story: the city’s shape, the view of the Light Market from the outside, and the language that your characters use always refers back to it. What can you tell us about the symbolism of the fish as it relates to the world you’ve built?

The fish is the world’s source of life. This world both depends on and fears its ocean, so its society has come to worship the ocean’s life-giving resource.

The curved shape of a turning fish is also reminiscent of a circle, so the inhabitants of this world have come to associate the turning fish with the moon’s cycle and influence over the ocean’s moods.

The masculine Guardian was born out of a need for a benevolent protector so these people could thrive on the vulnerable coast or precarious slopes of their city.

This story revolves around themes of class, privilege, and expectations; Muka’s parents are always pushing her to be the best, and Muka’s father even goes so far as to deny his own origins (“We’re different from her kind,” he says when Muka points out that he’s from the Guardian’s Tail himself). Are these themes that you find yourself revisiting in your work?

I’m more interested in exploring unbelonging and how that intersects with class, privilege and migratory subjectivities. In another of my short stories, “That Which Smells Bad“’ (FIYAH), I introduced a character that pushes herself to be the best because she thinks it’s the only way she’ll belong in her parents’ country. In “Who Defies the Watcher” (Apparition Lit), the main character dedicates herself to protecting dragons in part because it’s the only way she can feel connected to her heritage. In “Light Boy Blue Lake” (Djed Press), the narrator befriends a boy in a reflection because they share a migrant background and a similar loneliness.

I’m also interested in exploring the precarious position that an immigrant might occupy in a society, especially the idea of needing to prove their right to live in it. Muka’s obsession with meeting everyone’s expectations is not just born out of a desire to please her parents. It’s also a response to her position as an outsider in the Guardian’s Head.

The story ends with resolve, rather than resolution–an ambiguous ending that leaves the reader imagining the possibilities for Muka’s future. Can you tell us how and why you chose this ending, and are there plans to further explore the nature of the Light Market in future stories?

I chose this ending because resolve is a thrilling way to end a story. You know there’s more to this character’s journey than that, but there’s a sort of resolution in knowing that your main character has decided on a course of action. There’s satisfaction in knowing they’ve found a bit of themselves in the events that led them there.

As for the how, I knew that this story would be about how Muka became connected to the Light Market. As an origin story of sorts, the natural way to end it was in her resolve to destroy the place she used to admire.

There’s also much more to explore in this world. There’s also Lisa’s perspective to consider, and even Tarek’s. We haven’t even ventured inside the Light Market yet.

What are you working on now, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m working on an urban fantasy novel about a mysterious magician thief, a shady corporation and a main character trying to find their missing crush.

I want to speculate more Black joy like in “That Which Smells Bad” and more Black love like in my most recent attempt, “Their Eyes Were Chasing Sun” (demos journal).

I also want to write stories that feature more Frenglish. I haven’t read any stories with copious amounts of Frenglish and welcome any and all recommendations.

“At least they’re there,” she told me. “Be grateful.”

“I am!” I said, mindful of her situation. “I’m just lonely.”

Lisa nodded along, distracted by a problem in her textbook.

Lisa, who was chosen for the Light Market.

Water fills my rainproof boots. I shake them out. This is the only time I can visit the Guardian’s Tail. With the full moon in three days, I need to find the so-called sorcerer, Tarek.

I roam the uneven streets, looking for anyone who will tell me about him. An old man squatting under an awning ignores my questions. I keep asking, until he huffs and spits next to my boot. A woman hurrying with groceries sucks her teeth at me without stopping. Either they hate the sight of someone like me, neither Tail nor Head, or the rumours are right, and Tarek the Lost is a traitorous, unlucky figure.

Rounding a corner, I spot a group of three men, huddled just past a lump of black cloth hunched against the wall. One has a tattoo of the Guardian’s tail on his cheek. They stand over a crate, with cards decorated with the lovely blues and silvers of the Guardian’s scales. They glare at me as I come closer. I smile, having dealt with worse reactions.

“Do you know where I can find Tarek the Lost?”

Fish Tail raises an eyebrow at me. “Even if we did know, why would we tell you?”

I stand straighter. Rain stings my eyes. “I can pay you.”

One of the men spits. “Curse your offal money.”

I deflate. “I just want to know. The least you could do is tell me.”

Fish Tail once-overs me. “This district has never seen nor heard from you or your family before. I guess they abandoned their birthplace. Where was your money during the last storm? The last flood?” He shakes his head. “We owe you nothing.”

My cheeks burn. I don’t want to feel ashamed. My father told me his own family cast him out of the Tail, mistaking his ambition for a better life as betrayal of his kin. Ignorant fools, he calls them.

But I’m not ignorant, and I’m not a fool. The stories are true and I will find Tarek.

The lump of black shudders against the mouldy wall. Next to its folds, a silver bowl winks up at me. Out of guilt, maybe, I plop a gold coin inside, then a second, and reach for a third.

The lump tilts its head. A flash catches my eye. I hold my breath.

“Do you know where I can find Tarek the Lost?”

The lump rises, adjusting into a tall, assured man, the way my father carries himself, down to the edge in his smile. He throws back his hood, revealing a face that reminds me of the old celestial maps my father collects, a perfectly symmetrical illustration marred by stray scars. I stare at his eyes: one silver next to the brown, just like the rumours say.

“My name is Tarek,” the man greets me. His locs reach the bottom of his black coat; his hands hide in his pockets. “I usually round up the lost, but you seem to know exactly what you’re looking for.”

I drop the third coin, trying not to grin too wide. It rings as it lands. “My name is Mukamwezi. Please show me the way to the Light Market.”

• • • •

Tarek slurps his soup, spraying green drops on my napkin. He’s back to a semblance of the lump hunched against the wall. I sip from an overflowing mug of tea, leaving a milky crescent on the table. We’re sitting at a booth secluded from other patrons in a rumbling eatery. I feel safer now that we’re in the Guardian’s Scales, not quite slums but still a ways from the Head. His satisfied slurping makes me hopeful that he’ll actually help me.

“Why do you call yourself a sorcerer?” I ask.

Tarek smiles. He shoves his empty bowl away. “Let’s clean the trout first, shall we? Like they say, I can get the Unchosen to the Light Market, but here’s the catch.” He leans forward, all teeth. “I need the blood of someone who was chosen as a key ingredient.”

Lisa’s blood. “Why?”

“If you cannot guarantee that ingredient, then I owe you no explanation.”

He seems sure of himself. If he is the sorcerer rumours say, then his request is not as bizarre as it sounds. At least, not for me. If the Light Market is real, then so is magic.

I know it exists. I didn’t do all of this for nothing. All I need to do is get inside, and the Market will grant my wishes. I’ve pored through enough lore, I’ve waited, I’ve prepared for this day.

“How much blood?”

Tarek raises an eyebrow. “A promising start.” He swipes my napkin and scribbles a few lines.

I watch the lines rip through the fragile paper. My stomach tightens. What if the blood isn’t—what if she isn’t—

He places a thumb-sized vial on the table. “Just a drop, in here. I’ve written the other ingredients for the formula here, to justify the price you’ll pay me to gather them. All you need to do is meet me at the Guardian’s statue—the one at Rwego’s Reach, not the docks—on the night of the next full moon.”

He slides the napkin over and I look through the ingredient list. Half the words are gibberish. “How can I trust you not to take my money and run?”

Tarek laughs. “This is classic!” He leans towards me. “What exactly brought you, the worst kind of rich girl, to the worst possible district in Cael? What made you think a sorcerer, of all people, exists? What possessed you to think that an urban legend—a seabait fantasy! —was real?” His one silver eye flashes. “Now you struggle to trust?”

Point taken. I slide the advance towards him. “The rest will come on the full moon.”

The most I have to lose is this money. And possibly Lisa’s trust, I realise, staring at the vial. At least Rwego’s Reach is in the Head.

“Perfect,” Tarek tucks the money into his coat.

I stand, feeling awkward. “See you on the full moon then.”

“One last thing.” Tarek slides another item across the table. “Use that for the blood.”

• • • •

Lisa’s braids sway in the distance, piled into a precarious bun. She is easy to spot in the hallways of Highlands Academy: everyone else is moon-hued. We both stand out because of our so-called seabait looks. Lisa more so, because she’s actually from the Guardian’s Tail.

I wave. She raises a hand in greeting. Tarek’s needle is cool against my fingertips, hidden in my skirt pocket.

I feel guilty.

When I first heard we were getting a scholarship student, I was like the Guardian somersaulting over water. Lisa was cross and hard-faced, but I eventually won her over with my charming personality and unwavering conviction that we would be friends. My mother opened our doors to her, if she so wished, for a place to study or stay the night. The trip to the Tail is long, after all, almost three cable transports over two hours of travel.

Lisa is the only one who didn’t laugh at me when I told her I believed in the Light Market. The only one who listened. Classmates pinched their noses around us, or muttered seabait under their breaths. Lisa alone smiled when I declared I couldn’t wait to turn eighteen. That’s when I’d finally see the Guardian’s fins in the moon and gain access to the Light Market, where none of those unpleasant things could reach me.

It’s been three weeks since we turned eighteen. I haven’t seen a hint of scales.

Lisa, on the other hand, has shown sudden interest in the lore. I know she didn’t truly believe in the stories before, so her constant questions are unsettling.

As she gets closer, I note the shadow under her eye, which looks like a swollen bruise. One knee is bandaged under the ripped edge of her skirt.

“What happened?” I ask. “You look like you’ve been through a fight.”

“Yeah, made the mistake of not changing clothes for it,” she says, taking books out of her locker. “Listen, can I borrow your notes for astronomy? I know I shouldn’t assume you’re an expert just because of your dad, but. . . ”

“Yeah, no worries,” I say, already fishing them from my folder. “May I ask what this fight was about?”

Her shoulders tense. “Tail stuff. Rougher than being called seabait.”

I feel pricked. “Okay.”

The clock rolls into lunch hour without an opportunity to complete my mission. Lisa sits across from me in our corner of the canteen, opening her notebook while I unpack my lunch. I offer part of my roll, but she refuses. I place it next to her anyway. She lets it be for another two seconds before ripping into the fluffy bread and going back to writing. School is one of the only places where she can concentrate on her schoolwork, so she even studies through lunch.

I feel guilty for not joining her. Lazy, my dad would call me. To gain respect, I need to work like there’s no other option but first place.

Lisa looks drained.

Lore says, those who have access to the Light Market can travel in and out every full moon, drawing whatever they want from its bounty, but Lisa curses the Guardian under her breath. Only Lisa could gain access to the Light Market and still be cross. The Market should be everything she ever needed.

I consider pricking her while she’s busy muttering over celestial bodies, but if she can notice the roll I placed next to her, then there’s no way I can make a move without raising her suspicions. I could ask for permission to prick her, but I don’t know how to explain. If I said that it was all for the sake of joining her in the Light Market, would she understand?

“Lisa,” I begin. “If you got into the Light Market, you would tell me, right?”

Lisa bites on the end of her pen and scribbles in her notebook. She responds without looking at me. “What if there was a rule that you couldn’t tell anyone you got in?”

Okay, that is basically admitting she got in. “Well, what if I wanted to get into the Light Market, and I hadn’t been chosen. Would you support me, no matter what I did to get there?”

Lisa snaps her head up. “No.”

My smile sinks. “Why?”

“You don’t need the Light Market, Muka. Have you ever considered that you already have everything you need?”

I rip a chunk off my roll. “Money doesn’t get me everything, contrary to what you believe. The Light Market could grant me what I’m missing.”

“And what are you missing?”

I roll my lips. “Can’t you trust me?”

Lisa sighs. “I’m just saying. Maybe it’s time you stopped turning to fairy tales to solve all your problems.”

“It’s not a fairy tale!” My voice echoes across the canteen.

Now we have an audience, including Claudia Hightower, silk-haired queen of the final years. Her lips tremble, a perfect picture of fragility. “Calm down, Muck-a.” She winces at Lisa’s black eye. “I know they don’t teach you to control your temper in the docks, but I beg you. I would hate to see you expelled.”

Lisa surges from her seat, and Claudia recoils. “Go ahead and expel me then, mudslider.” Lisa clicks her tongue, plopping her foot on a chair to tie her shoelaces. “I’ll gladly hand over the number one spot to Mukamwezi when I leave. Or did you forget that seabaits are smarter than you?”

I pinch the needle hard. Not smart enough.

A week after I won the achievement award for astronomy, my father called me into his office. I entered with a grin that dissolved when I saw his scowl.

“Why are you second in your class now, Mukamwezi?” he asked. “Are you slacking off now that you’re wasting time with that dock girl?”

“Dock girl?” I blinked. “But dad, aren’t you from the Guardian’s Tail too?”

“We’re different from her kind.”

How can we be different when all our classmates treat us like we’re the same? “She works just as hard,” I tried to explain. “I’m happy that she’s number one.”

“That girl? Are you slacking on purpose?”

I have never slacked a day in my life. And now Lisa is acting like the only way I could take her spot is if she left. Lisa who has the Light Market, who already has a place where she belongs.

I exhale. A fresh red film seeps through her once spotless bandages.

“Lisa, you’re bleeding.”

We walk to the nurse’s office in silence.

The nurse is out, so I sit Lisa on a stool while I grab a fresh roll of gauze. I hide the needle in my palm, ready.

Unwrapping Lisa’s old bandages reveals a gash on her knee. There’s a messy row of handmade stitches, and the wound is seeping. I take a clean pad and dab the wound twice before pressing hard on it, digging in with the needle.

“Ow!” Lisa jerks away from me. “Don’t use your nails.” She snatches the roll of gauze from my hand and wraps the wound herself.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I’m still mad at you for saying I shouldn’t believe in fairy tales.”

“So you’re taking it out on my stitches? Grow up!” She huffs and sweeps out of the room.

As soon as she leaves, I take out the vial and dump the needle inside. Red blooms into a thin layer at the bottom. I stash the vial in a pocket.

Lisa shuffles back in, her eyes on the floor, and grabs her things. She leans on the door frame. “I’m sorry, Muka. I know how much the Light Market means to you.” She sighs. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

I’m past disappointment. I will enter the Light Market.

• • • •

I gaze at the rising moon as it shines over Cael. No matter how intently I stare, its smooth white surface doesn’t reveal the dancing fins of the Guardian, doesn’t show his blue-lined scales racing across the moon’s pool. I’ve stared at this same view on this same chair through this same window for over a decade.

The first time I heard the Legend of the Light Market, I was eight and my mother had set aside an uninspiring picture book about the constellations that guide Cael. She told me about the Guardian in a deep, tide-ruling voice, how he slapped the ocean floor and made Cael out of the dirt that flicked up into a tumbling coastline, a rolling hill-face that met the sea at the deep harbour.

“And the Guardian’s favourites can enter the Light Market,” my mother said.

The Light Market, fulfiller of dreams, where all your wishes are yours for the taking. Those who wish fervently enough, who have a desire so deep that it lights the moon, can be granted access.

“But you don’t need to wish for a way in,” my mother assured me, tucking a stray coil behind my ear. “I named you Mukamwezi because you are a daughter of the moonlight, favoured by the Guardian,” she kissed my forehead. “You are special. And I don’t want you to ever forget that.”

That was the last time my mother ever spoke to me that way. They argued that night, my father growling about making sure she didn’t spoil me, that not everything could be just handed to me. I kept her story that much closer to my chest. Only those who are not chosen for the Light Market can doubt its existence. I strove to be different.

When my classmates treated me like a disease, when my marks weren’t high enough, I remembered her words. When everyone ignored me unless I did well in school, I prayed to the Guardian. All I had to do was enter the Light Market, and everyone would know. I am special. I am more.

The moon is halfway up the sky. I squint at its smooth mask, searching for a fin, a scale, anything.

Did I not wish enough? Did I not cry hard enough? Did I not suffer long enough?

I raise the vial to the light. Lisa’s blood is a black stain on the bottom. It’s a small price to pay. The Guardian should have known. I need the Light Market more than his approval.

• • • •

Rwego’s Reach is an hour’s trek from my house. The streets are deserted save for the occasional patrol zipping on swift-bikes. I deftly pick my hiding spots. This high up, the houses are half-obscured by foliage and the tiled streets weave in and out of forest. A tall pine marks the boundary of the reserve.

Squeezing past a hole in the park’s fence, I pick my way up the shrubby path, familiar with the bends in the dirt, where to avoid jutting rocks and roots. I know every shrine, every temple, every mural of the Guardian. Rwego’s Reach is where I direct my wishes to the Guardian from time to time. By the time I reach the top, the moon faces me. The statue of the Guardian gleams, his curved body whipping water in a circle that reflects the cycle of the moon and tides. I sit on the statue’s base and catch my breath.

“Took you long enough.” Tarek chuckles at my surprised yelp, rounding the statue as if he’s been circling for hours. He holds out his hand. “The blood.”

I hand him the vial.

Tarek produces an array of powders from his satchel, then spreads them in a circle around the Guardian’s statue. He mixes them on the ground, and a cloud of particles rises in a white glimmer. Tarek scoops up a bit of the white circle and dumps it in the vial. Then he fishes out another vial full of a cloudy liquid. “Saltwater from the bay,” he smirks. He tips some of it into the first vial and swirls the bloody mixture until it glows impossibly white.

Tarek drinks some of it, grimaces and hands it over.

I stare at the vial, willing my fingers to stop trembling. I empty the vial into my mouth. It tastes strangely like honey. Then a deep bitterness claws its way down my throat.

Light explodes from the circle, knocking me back. My ears ring. Blinking, I realise I’m lying on the floor. I push myself up and wince. Glass shards glitter on my bloody hands, the vial shattered. I pick them out, absently thinking that the Guardian won’t like glass-encrusted hands. A shadow eclipses me. I turn to the sky and scream.

Shadowy creatures swim above my head, gargantuan monsters with teeth and jagged fins, bodies the length of several cable transports.

I freeze like a fish out of breath. Slowly I realise that the creatures are aimlessly drifting across the sky, like catfish in a fountain. Constellations stud their inky bodies, reminding me of my father’s words during a rare astronomy lesson he gave me. He explained that objects in the sky are called celestial bodies because a long time ago Tail dwellers thought they were actual creatures.

“Those Tail dwellers thought too small,” he told me. “True, they didn’t have the resources that those in the Head have, but they were also lazy. They didn’t work hard to find the truth and elevate themselves.” He smacked his desk. The sudden clap made me jump. “Elevate yourself, Mukamwezi!”

I felt just as helpless as I do now. I’m trying, I wanted to say. Don’t you see that I’m trying?

Exhaling, I allow myself to relax. None of the creatures seem to care about my presence. The moon stares placidly, its surface smooth, no Guardian in sight.

I whirl on Tarek. “You tricked me!”

He laughs. “Oh, silly girl.” Both his eyes gleam silver now. “Can’t you see? This is the Light Market!”

He wraps an arm around my shoulder and sweeps a hand at the awful sight before us. “Look closely! The Guardian’s Court is feeding.”

Some of the creatures swim to the bottom of the hill, towards the Tail. I see them dive and disappear in a flash. A few reappear with a gleam on their scales. Others don’t.

I shiver. “What is this?”

“We are looking at the Light Market from the outside,” Tarek says.

“You promised to get me in!”

“No,” Tarek shakes his head. “I promised to show you the way. If you are not chosen, you can never get inside.”

Never get inside? A terrible dread fills me. “If you can never get inside the Light Market, how do you know so much about it?”

Tarek sighs. “I spent years trying to learn its secrets. Once tried to force my way in.”

The rumours never mentioned this. The days I spent poring over volumes of Tail lore as recorded by Head dwellers. The times I pushed Lisa to pry stories from her grand-aunt. None of them revealed why Tarek knows what he does or how far he has gone to know it.

“Then you should know how to get in by now,” I blurt, desperate. “If you can’t, what was the point of showing me the way?”

He squeezes my shoulder. “To show you why it’s a bad idea. The Market is for fish food.”

“What…” I widen my eyes. I stare at the sky. More creatures disappear and reappear, some with dark spots on their fangs. I bring my hands to my mouth and immediately regret it. My stomach flips at the warm tang of blood. I swallow. “No. The Market is where all your dreams come true.”

“Yes, if you survive. Even then, it’s nearly impossible to get what you truly want: freedom from the Market. Those who are chosen must enter it every full moon, no matter the horrors. It’s a curse.” Tarek glances at my bleeding hands and passes me a handkerchief. “But with you, perhaps anything is possible.” He considers me a moment. “You know someone in the Market. You found me. You helped me reach this point. Do you know what that means?”

I shake my head.

“It means you can do much more. You could save them, Mukamwezi.”

Save them. I could save Lisa? How many times has she stuck up for me? How many times has Claudia called me a spineless eel for letting her protect me?

“The Chosen can’t break free from the inside,” Tarek explains. “But with our help, now that we can see it . . . ”

My only hope had been getting inside the Light Market. I could start over there. I could be everything everyone wanted me to be and more. Exceed all expectations. I could belong.

“We can destroy this prison.”

He’s asking me to destroy my only hope.

“What do you say?”

I search the moon’s surface, the moon where the Guardian dwells, where he’s been ignoring me for the past ten years, where he watches his Court feed on human sacrifices, where he continues to hide from me. Even as I try to force my way to him, he refuses to look at me. Am I not good enough? Am I not special? Am I not Mukamwezi, daughter of the moonlight?

“Why won’t he look at me?” The moon stays mute.

“He won’t look at any of us,” Tarek says. “We’re just food to him.”

I wipe my eyes. “I’ll make him look. I’ll make him regret he didn’t choose me.” I glare at the moon. “I’ll destroy his precious Market.”

“And save everyone?” Tarek extends a hand, teeth gleaming.

I return the handkerchief, bloody like the fangs on those celestial beasts. They remind me of the rip in Lisa’s skirt, the gash on her knee.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll show him I can.”

Hundreds of them, glittering, like stars broken free

Spiraling down,

Where we met them.

It was Girl Scout cookie day. The girls taught them sustainable agriculture,

then sent them home with a box of Thin Mints.

But you didn’t see this because

On the same day the saucers landed, the graves opened up.

The dead came forth, shuffling, unsteady, those still having eyes blinking.

I finally learned Grandmother’s secret recipe for dark chocolate pie,

and thousands with PhDs in archaic languages earned their keep.

Heloise and Abelard wept quiet sobs, arms tight around their son,

but Antony’s exultant shout at his sight of Cleopatra echoed off the skyscrapers.

Cerberus came last, his tail wagging, a bone in each mouth.

But you didn’t meet them because

On the saucer day when the graves opened,

the gates to Fairyland flew wide.

Barrows split open to gift enchantment and wishes.

The Entwives creaked forth, gravel in their voices, to show off their gardens,

and our Jamie’s first word, spoken with power,

caused Schrodinger’s cat to both live and die.

Pat donned seven league boots and strode through Elfland and back,

clutching lucky charms for us all, in sticky hands.

The kindergarten class grew butterfly wings

and Mrs. Byrne’s quilting class turned purple and smelled of lavender.

Everyone danced.

But you couldn’t join us, because

On the saucer day and the undead day and the magic day

the invaders burst in. All of them. From the stories. From nightmares.

Whirling blades and stomping boots and clashing swords on shields.

Mongol hordes and Roman legions and raiders gone a ’Viking,

coming for plunder. For us.

Suicide terrorists from that other religion. Serial killers who look just like us.

Attacking our homes. Our castles.

Juanita the pharmacist mixed poisons for arrow tips,

Sheriff Barbara shared round her supply of silver bullets,

and Mrs. Patel from the AI startup grabbed her ray gun.

The Rabbi and the Imam and the Bishop joined in prayer.

All the traps had long been set. All the plans long laid.

We’re still here.

You didn’t notice any of this because

You’d gone over the rainbow, to find yourself.

You’d gone to slay that dragon.

You’d gone out to get milk.

But that was OK, really. It was OK, because

You said you’d call.

—For Neil Gaiman, with apologies. But not many.

CY: Everyone I know has struggled so much over the past two years. One of the things that has kept a lot of us going is the fact that we have each other—a community of readers, a community of creators, a community of fans. Ray Bradbury used to talk about how, when he would get lonely, he would go to the library to “visit his friends.” When I was growing up, I thought he meant the books; he probably did, but I think he may also have been talking about the people who wrote them. When we’ve all been forced by circumstance to be apart for so long, I take real joy in reading stories by the names I know, and in discovering exciting new work by names I don’t know.

AS: Fiction can serve so many purposes; it can be so many things. It can be an escape, a reprieve, or a means to release the pressures of life. It can be a conversation; it can help transform ideas and theories and even cultures. Reading fiction can be an emotional experience, catharsis; it can be intellectually stimulating and challenging. If something in our pages speaks to you, whether it’s fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, I hope you will share your favorite finds with friends, with peers, with whoever might be interested, and let them experience what you’ve experienced.

CY: That’s what it’s all about, right? It’s the difference between being into something and being a snob about it by keeping it to yourself and “knowing more” than the people around you, and being a fan who desperately wants to share that joy and get even more people into it. At my day job, it seems like once a month someone will say something like, “Have you met Jane? She’s into science fiction and fantasy, too! You’ll love each other.” Most of the time, they’re right; every conversation will revolve around what we’re read recently, what we liked or didn’t like about it, and what we hope to read next.

AS: Looking back at the pieces we’ve published over 2021, including this issue, I feel so proud of what we’ve put together. There’s so much for people to experience in our pages, and so many ways to engage with the work of these creators. We’ve been able to publish truly fantastic writing. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2022!

CY: We’re so fortunate to be able to bring these stories to our readers. Thank you all for sticking with us throughout 2021. We look forward to bringing you more stories to delight you, move you, make you think, and spark once again that sense of wonder that genre fiction does best.

• • • •

In this issue’s short fiction, we get a different kind of hero’s journey in a really cool world with Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga’s “Saviour of the Light Market”, and “The Rainmakers” by Megan M. Davies-Ostrom glitters and glows in a climate-based post-apocalypse. In flash fiction, Dominica Phetteplace haunts us with “24 Reasons You’re Dreaming About Your Ex / 24 Razones Por Las Que Sueñas Con Tú Ex”, and C.L. Holland’s “What the River Remembers” takes a much closer look at change through a unique perspective. For poetry, we have “Forest Maths” by Nnadi Samuel and “The Other Day The Saucers Came” by Karen Brenchley. Plus a kind of “Part 2” essay, or companion piece to our December 2020 essay, this one called “All the King’s Women: the Fats” by the author of Big Girl, Find Layla, and series The Road to Nowhere, Meg Elison. Enjoy!

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