My wife and I were walking around our suburban neighborhood and eyeing the stuff that people put out at the curb. That trash tells surprisingly intimate stories about peoples’ lives, and it struck me that a certain item might tell a story about death, too.

One of the things that makes this so readable is how relatable it is: I have a Mr. Byerly right up the street from me, and Big Trash Day is definitely a thing. Are you a conscious note-taker when it comes to people-watching and observing the seemingly mundane details that bring a story to life?

I’m not a note-taker, though I should be. So many ideas get lost in the jumble of my thoughts, when a one-sentence note would give me something to come back to. The direct observation is a bit easier, because I find that disparate images that I’ve noticed at different times in the past tend to cluster and compose themselves when I need them. I first saw that coffin, for instance, displayed outside a pompe funèbre in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

What was the most difficult part of writing this story? Did any part of it come easily?

The initial idea came easily. The most difficult part was figuring out Mr. Byerly’s personal history and the source of his shame.

This story is more horror-adjacent than we commonly run. Do you lean more toward horror as a writer in general? What is it about your favorite genre or genres that most appeal to you?

I tend to avoid horror because I’m somewhat repelled by my own ideas for horror stories. I think, to be a successful horror writer, you need to be pretty uninhibited about digging around in your own psyche. I prefer fantasy—not that it’s any gentler—but the otherness of fantasy gives me more freedom to express myself in the guise of another sort of creature. I also write literary fiction.

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

Having voiced my reservations about horror, I’m now working on a couple of stories that have to do with the properties of human skin. Also, some stories with animal-human and machine-human hybrids.

• • • •

So . . . you actually wrote Goliath even before your 2017 debut novel Beasts Made of Night. Now you have several books under your belt, plus notable short stories, plus some serious accolades, including your recent World Fantasy Award for novella Riot Baby. (BIG, BIG CONGRATS!!!) When you went back to look at Goliath, with more experience in both writing and publishing, what were the things that stood out to you as glorious, as wonderful? And what were the things that you felt needed fine-tuning?

First of all, thank you so much for the kind words. My career, from the earliest incarnation of Goliath to now, has been a wild journey in perhaps the best possible way. I feel exceedingly blessed. Throughout that time, I’d glanced back over my shoulder at Goliath, knowing that it was a thing I wanted to return to eventually. Even then, I knew it was too good to leave on a hard drive, too much of a finished thing, too much a representation of a massive skill jump. I knew I’d unlocked something when that book first came to life, and I wanted to return to that moment. I wanted to kind-of see what that was about. What kept me from diving back into it for so long—outside of general busy-ness—was that I knew what I wanted it to be, but I didn’t think I had the skills to make it that. (I still go back and forth on that.) I knew I wanted it to be bigger than it was—initially, it was about 57,000 words or so. I knew that I wanted it to be more polyphonic, more kaleidoscopic, more scopic, period. And I had models in mind—A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño—but those are such tremendous novels, and I didn’t think I could replicate in any meaningful way for another reader the sensation reading those books gave me. So, in a sense, the fine-tuning had to do with my own self and confidence in my own abilities.

Goliath is, at least partly, a post-apocalyptic story about a group of brick stackers, and came out of your short story “Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, & a Brick Stacker”, originally published in 2016’s Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Why brick stackers?

The idea came from a 1999 Chicago Reader piece by Tori Marlan called “Brickyard Blues” about brick stackers and the changing nature of the brickstacking industry in Chicago. I first read it back in 2012 and “Still Life” came out of me in a burst during the summer of 2013. I latched onto that particular activity (rather than, say, house cleaning or even farming) because immediately to me it seemed so tied to the notion of homes, their destruction and their building, and because the whole enterprise implicated labor and race and class in really interesting and knotty ways. The manual labor of brick stacking specifically gave me a new pinhole through which to explore the themes of the short story and, subsequently, the novel.

Just from getting to know you via interviews and the work I’ve read, I feel like your work often carries multiple layers and nuances, and the narratives reward thoughtful reading, not to mention looking beyond the obvious. What are the narrative elements or themes at play which may surprise people?

This book is a lot funnier than my previous work. Like, a lot funnier.

I read the Publishers Weekly profile on you, and they mentioned that Goliath is in conversation with a number of works, but it doesn’t say anything more. I would love for you to expand on this. At least, as far as the works which stand out most for you: the dialogues you are undertaking which excite you the most.

I was straight-up decapitated by the elliptical nature of Bolaño’s 2666. And I think it pulls off a narrative trick you sometimes see in mosaic novels like Gene Wolfe’s novella-triptych, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is to present these seemingly unconnected events and characters and not really articulate the linkages between them (except maybe thematic resonances). But the very fact of these things’ inclusion in the same book—between the same covers, in fact—means that there is a connection. And you as the reader must build that bridge yourself. “What does it mean that this is in here, and that this is in here too?”

I think, too, the use of symbolism in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano made a huge impression on me when I first read it. Everything meant something; it was like reading a novel full of hyperlinks. I was also captivated by Colson Whitehead’s use of a collage-style structure for John Henry Days, secretly my favorite book of his. There’s so much packed into it. It truly felt like a pregnant novel.

Arundhati Roy’s essays and books on environmental issues in India really opened my eyes to how government action, the lives of the underclass, and international institutions like the WTO and World Bank all mix with environmental concerns and energy in a way that often punishes the least among us. Goliath is, in many ways, me saying, “something like this happens here too, in our future.”

What was the most challenging thing about the structure of Goliath, and how did you make it work?

The most challenging thing about the structure of Goliath was restraint. I do a lot of really cool things narratively that I’d never done before, and I had to resist the impulse to just sort of spiral out of control and go completely wild with things, like Naruto going into four-tailed mode against Orochimaru and destroying everything around him. My editor Ruoxi Chen was very much a domesticating influence.

Many have described Riot Baby as “powerful” and Publishers Weekly describes Goliath as “urgent, gorgeous work.” What, for you, is the key to writing powerful fiction?

Write the thing that scares you, I think. My best work has emerged from that counterphobic impulse where, rather than run away from what hurts, I run towards it. It can be an incredibly destructive compulsion in real life, but, when applied to my storytelling, it has produced fiction I’m immensely proud of.

I think in some of your fiction you like to use technology which seems science fictional, but which is actually in use or in development; and sometimes you like to use science fictional ideas which seem to be right around the corner—taking things that exist, or things we are familiar with, to the next level in technological development. (I’m thinking of elements of your story “The Hurt Pattern” in anthology Made to Order.) Goliath takes us to 2050, and while there are some thematic echoes to War Girls, the science fictional focus is a bit different. What are some of your favorite science fictional world building tidbits from Goliath?

I like that these futuristic iron lungs aren’t made to make people superhuman but rather to give us the capability, quite simply, to survive in the conditions of this world we’ve broken. I sometimes call them Augments, but, really, it’s just us trying to get back to some sort of imagined baseline.

More broadly, 2050 has become a sort of catch-all recently for the Anthropocene meeting the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Fires and floods, real Biblical stuff if you read the latest IPCC report, or even just look out your window or listen to the conversation in the ether right now. Often, worldbuilding will spin out of the idea that Tomorrow is punishment for Today. Very consequence-driven stuff. So the barren land, the poisoned air, the “Cancer Allies” of the book, so to speak, are merely a continuation of our Today. A punishment for our Today.

I read a recent interview where you spoke briefly about the idea of Kev (from Riot Baby) as fearing and hating white supremacist structures, but also feeling a certain security within them. The familiar oppression, the known quantity; the things we learn to navigate and expect, even if we detest them. I feel like I see elements of this idea in War Girls as well, but I could perhaps argue that you disrupt this sense of security with the intersection of characters and the chaos each meeting brings, ultimately shifting the details of oppression, until a new sense of security develops. How do these ideas, of the sense of security within oppressive systems, come to life in Goliath?

Life sucks on Earth in 2050. For these characters, at least. Like, it really, really sucks. But this is where their family lives. This is where they fall in love. This is where they play Spades and tell stories and get their hair braided. This is where their life happens in all its anguish and joy. That isn’t to say all those things can’t happen in a safer, healed environment; it’s only to recognize that our lives don’t stop in the cage. We still get dreams, and we still have our memories. We still have, somewhere nestled deep within us, the capacity to make a peace for ourselves or to try and climb the umbilical cord back to God or whatever Higher Power can grant us that peace we cannot make for ourselves. If we didn’t have that ability, we might not have gotten the Harlem Ballroom scene and vogueing.

What is the heart of Goliath for you? What do you want people to know about it, beyond reviews, beyond blurbs?

Magic is still possible after the apocalypse.

What else are you working on? What do you have coming up that readers should know about?

I’m at that blessed and simultaneously frustrating point in my career where I am working on things that I can’t yet talk about, haha. But I’ve been having a blast writing the Black Panther: Legends miniseries for Marvel Comics. It’s four issues retelling T’Challa’s origin story for younger readers, and it’s been such a wonderful, spiritually-regenerative endeavor. And the artists I’ve worked with are absolutely S-Tier. There are some short stories that might or should be out in the ether. But part of me delights in letting Goliath breathe for a little bit. I hope Goliath is a book readers can sit and be patient with.

The black finish of the box gleams under the streetlight. It’s a very old style of casket, an elongated hexagon, narrow at the head and foot, broader at the shoulders. Fine woodwork too, with mitered corners, a vaulted top, and three brass handles on each side. Mr. Byerly can imagine the thing borne on the shoulders of six pallbearers, their top hats hung with black crepe.

Normally, Mr. Byerly takes his walk in the afternoon—ten thousand steps. At 76, it keeps him reasonably fit and healthy, and it gets him out of the lonely confines of his house for an hour or two each day. On the last Thursday of every month, he delays his walk until after dusk. That’s because the next day is Big Trash Pickup, the time when townspeople get to discard larger items, such as furniture or appliances, that aren’t allowed in the regular trash. Most people place these items at the curb the evening before. It’s an opportunity for neighbors to help themselves to anything that might still be of use, such as a child’s dresser or an old croquet set. Mr. Byerly is past the age when he needs or wants much of anything, but he takes an anthropological interest in what his neighbors are throwing away.

It’s jarring to see a coffin here, lying exposed on a tree-lined residential street. A coffin is, after all, a furnishing that’s meant to accommodate only one person, a piece of craftsmanship intended to be viewed only briefly, then buried with its owner until the end of time. Who would throw one out, unused?

Mr. Byerly recognizes at once that this is something he can use, will need, sooner or not-very-much-later. It’s just a box, after all, and a rather elegant one, even if it’s been “pre-owned.” He walks home briskly to get his station wagon and pick the thing up before someone else claims it. (But who would do that? In the many years he’s lived here, this town has cycled through a generation of residents and, once again, become a community of young families).

The coffin is still there when he pulls his Volvo up to the curb. He folds down the rear seats and opens the back hatch. It’ll be a tight fit. He’ll have to leave the hatch open, but it’s only a half-dozen blocks to his house. He stoops to lift the head end of the box, reminding himself to use his legs, not his back. It’s heavy, probably solid ebony, and he’s struggling to lift even one end.

“Hey, Mister! What are you doing with my coffin?”

For an instant, the sparse hair on Mr. Byerly’s neck tingles at the notion that he’s about to meet the original occupant of the box, but the voice belongs to a boy, or rather a young teen. He steps from the shadows, pulling a red coaster wagon.

“What do you mean, your coffin?”

“It’s mine!” the kid says. “I saw it first. I got dibs! I just had to go home and get this wagon so I could take it.”

Mr. Byerly tightens his grip on one of the brass handles. “What on earth would you want with a coffin?”

“It’s almost Halloween,” the boy says. “This could be an awesome prank. Last year there was this kid up on Lockwood who made a cardboard coffin? It didn’t even look real, but he jumped out and scared the crap out of the trick-or-treaters. It’d be way cooler to jump out of the real thing.”

“Well, this is not a prank,” Mr. Byerly says. “It’s an expensive item, and it’s something that I’m going to need. I saw it first, and I’m sorry if you’re disappointed, but I’m taking it.”

“Need?” The kid gapes in disbelief. “You mean like, when you’re dead? You want to get buried in a coffin that somebody already used?” He backs away a step. Under the streetlight, Mr. Byerly can see that he’s a good-looking boy, or would be, if he didn’t have that stupid mop of hair combed over his forehead, probably to cover a crop of pimples. He’s maybe thirteen or fourteen, on the small side, with skinny arms sticking out of his tee shirt. The boy reaches out and grabs the brass handle on the opposite side of the box. “That’s just crazy. Come on, Mister; it was mine first.”

Mr. Byerly doesn’t relish the idea of an unseemly struggle with a boy on the side of this leafy street, but he’s not giving up. In his day, a kid would have surrendered by now, recognizing the authority of an elder man, but that’s not the way it works anymore. He gets a two-fisted grip on the coffin handle and jerks it toward his car. The kid staggers, goes down on one knee, but he won’t let go. Each of them yanks again, but Mr. Byerly pulls first, and harder. The box flips on its side. The lid swings open and slams the boy’s forearm. He cries out, a startled yelp.

Mr. Byerly fears the noise will draw the neighbors and require some embarrassing explanations, but no one comes. The boy stands up, rubbing his arm. He doesn’t seem seriously injured. Instead, he’s staring wide-eyed into the interior of the coffin. The lining is pale satin, with pleats along the sides. There’s a ruffled pillow sewn into the lining. Everything seems clean, but the pillow has been dented by the weight of a head, and there’s a faint shadow of a stain there. “Yuck,” the boy says. “What is that? Like, Dracula’s hair gel?”

Mr. Byerly doesn’t believe in vampires, but he is taken aback by the evidence that—at some point—this coffin really was occupied. Still, except for that stain, it’s like new. He wouldn’t be ashamed to be buried in it. What’s more, the kid’s squeamishness has offered him an opening, a way to strike a bargain. “Look,” he says. “You can see this is the real deal. It’s not a toy, and I’ll bet your folks wouldn’t be too happy if you brought it home, anyway.”

“My mom,” the kid says, now cradling his arm. “It’s just my mom. She probably won’t like it. She might not let me keep it.”

“Tell you what,” Mr. Byerly says. “Help me get this thing into the car, and help me unload it when we get to my house, and I’ll give you twenty dollars.” The boy looks dubious. “And maybe a tip,” the old man adds, “if you do good work.”

“I’ve got to take this wagon back,” the kid says, “or somebody might think it’s up for grabs, too.” He pulls the red wagon by its handle and disappears into the shadows. He’s back in just a couple of minutes, so he must live close by.

It’s a struggle for the two of them to lift the head of the coffin and prop it on the end of the station wagon. “Okay,” Mr. Byerly pants. “Now grab the handle on the end and we’ll tilt it up and slide it in.” The kid’s thin arms strain, but he’s stronger than he looks. Together they manage to shove the coffin securely into the vehicle.

Mr. Byerly gets behind the wheel, but the boy remains hesitant, outside the passenger-side door. The old man feels a flash of irritation at this. Kids today—you offer them good money to do a little work, and all they do is drag their feet. Then he realizes what the problem must be. He rolls down the window. “What’s your name, son?” The kid clears his throat, mumbles something. “What was that again?”

“Reggie,” the boy says.

“Okay, Reggie,” Mr. Byerly says. “I know you kids are taught never to get into a car with a stranger, right? That’s a good rule, too, but I’m not a stranger. My name is Mr. Byerly, and I just live a few blocks from here. I’ve lived here for 31 years, and everybody knows me.” To himself, he admits that’s no longer exactly true. So many people he knew have passed on or moved to assisted living. The new people in the neighborhood are a lot younger, and not much interested in talking to an old man. “Listen, Reggie. It’s okay. Come on and get in the car.”

The boy climbs in with an alacrity that Mr. Byerly hadn’t expected. He’s more talkative now. “Do you think this coffin is really old? Do you think it was buried in the ground somewhere, and the person who was in it just rotted away? Or maybe they were eaten by worms?”

Mr. Byerly drives with an indulgent smile. “I think it would have been pretty messy inside if someone had rotted away. And even if they were eaten by worms, the skeleton would still be there.” He’s always gotten along well with kids by taking them seriously, by not talking down to them. This Reggie seems like a smart boy. With no dad, he probably could use a man in his life, a grandfather figure and a mentor.

“You saw that squashed-down place on the pillow, right?” Reggie says. “That’s proof that somebody was lying in there. Why would you want to be in a box where there’s already been a body?”

“I’ll be dead myself by then,” Mr. Byerly says. “It won’t matter to me. I won’t know where I am.” This is the great thing about talking to a youngster. They’re so fresh and curious, not afraid to talk about the most basic things—life and death. It occurs to Mr. Byerly that there are worse things the box could have been used for, worse than storing a dead body, but they’re things that wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss with a young boy. What if the coffin were used in unholy rites, or as part of some perverse sexual practice?

“Do you have a job?” Reggie asks.

“I’m retired.”

“What was your job before?”

Mr. Byerly considers. How far back in his resume should he go? “Well, I was a guidance counselor, and then I worked for a company that leased construction equipment.” It seems to Mr. Byerly that neither job might be of interest to a kid Reggie’s age, but construction equipment would probably sound cooler.

“Are you poor?” Reggie asks. “I mean, like no money?”

“No, I’m . . . , moderately well off. Why?”

Reggie turns to face Mr. Byerly, and his eyes flash green in the glow from the dashboard lights. “Why don’t you just buy yourself a new coffin then, like everybody else?”

That, Mr. Byerly thinks, is a complicated question, but he should give an honest answer. “Well, Reggie. My wife passed away almost two years ago.” He pauses, as he always does when mentioning his wife’s death, to give people time to express some sort of condolence. Reggie doesn’t seem to have learned that particular courtesy. “When Alice died,” Mr. Byerly goes on, “I was pretty upset. I mean, heartbroken, really. We were together almost forty years. And so, when it came time to make the arrangements for her funeral, I wanted her to have the very best.”

Owed her the very best, he thinks, for all that she had to endure—his job loss, the shame that forced them to move to this new town so many years ago.

“When I was in the showroom at the funeral home, I let the salesman talk me into the most expensive casket in the place. Did you know that some caskets can cost as much as a car?” Reggie has been following Mr. Byerly’s words closely, but his eyes widen at that. “When I came to my senses—as they were lowering that mahogany monstrosity into the ground—I realized that Alice would have hated the thing. She would have been so mad at me for spending all that money on a useless wooden box.” She would have been downright scornful, he thinks, the way she always was when he gave in to his weaknesses or spent their money foolishly. He’s queasy, just remembering it. “She would rather have been buried in a cardboard box than see that money wasted.”

Reggie shifts in his seat. “So that’s why you want to get someone else’s coffin for free?”

“Well, yes,” Mr. Byerly says. “It would kind of balance things out. Besides, it’ll be right here and ready for when I need it.” He’s pulling up in front of his house now, backing into the driveway. As soon as the car stops, the boy opens the door and hops out. “No need to get out, Reggie. The garage door is automatic.” Still, the kid stays outside, skittish. He closes the passenger door, leaving a void where he’d been sitting, So lively, curious, companionable. Mr. Byerly realizes that this is what he’s been missing, simple companionship. He needs it, more than he’ll need the black coffin that looms behind him. He pushes the remote door opener and backs carefully, about halfway into the garage, leaving room to remove his new acquisition.

This space is his pride and joy. He keeps it as neat as Alice used to keep the living room. The living room and the kitchen are a horrible mess now. Alice would be furious. But the garage is as clean and orderly as ever. Mr. Byerly’s carpentry tools are arranged on the back wall behind his workbench. The lawnmower and gardening tools have their places on one side. There’s an idea! He could hire Reggie to cut the grass, to shovel the walk in the winter. And he could show the boy how to build things, bird houses maybe, little projects they could do together. He looks back and realizes that Reggie is still lingering outside. It must be that same fear—reluctance to enter a stranger’s house.

Mr. Byerly walks to the front of the garage. The boy is standing in the driveway, diffident, shifting from foot to foot in his sneakers. He looks small and vulnerable, almost a reflection of Mr. Byerly’s own loneliness. “Hey Reggie! It’s okay, son. I’m not a child molester.” A hot rush of color flares in the old man’s throat and cheeks. Why did he say that? Stupid! That’s the fear that today’s children are taught to have of strange adults, but we don’t speak of it out loud. Child molestation. Inappropriate touching. Sexual abuse. At his age, Mr. Byerly rarely even has sexual thoughts anymore. Still, it’s not proper for a stranger even to say those words to the child. He chuckles, an effort to make light of what he just said, to make it go away, so the boy will feel safe and come inside. “What I mean is, I won’t bite you.” That’s weird, too, given the coffin that sits in the back of the car, but Reggie laughs. An uneasy laugh, but still, the awkwardness is broken. “Come in,” Mr. Byerly says. “Give me a hand with this thing, and then I’ll give you a ride home, so you won’t have to walk in the dark.”

The boy hustles inside, seemingly reassured. Mr. Byerly takes a pair of folding sawhorses from their place by the workbench and shows Reggie how to set them up. “You have to lock the legs in place, so they don’t collapse on you.” He shows the boy how to work one locking lever, then hovers close by as Reggie completes the task. In the bright light over the workbench, the boy’s mop of hair is a gleaming chestnut color, and the old man can’t resist the urge to touch it, to ruffle it a little when the job is done. It’s just an old-fashioned, grandfatherly gesture, but the boy shies away. Reggie’s cheeks and lips are a little flushed, and he gives Mr. Byerly a look from under his tousled hair. The old man remembers that look from long ago, an expression of what—desire? A certain hunger, and what else, disgust?

They ease the coffin out of the car and onto the sawhorses. Before, under the streetlight, Mr. Byerly didn’t realize how truly beautiful it is. Sure, there are a few dings and scrapes, but the wood has a rich, dark sheen that seems to come from within. Side by side, they raise the lid. The satin lining is an uneven ivory color, white that’s been yellowed by time. How much time? The antique style of the coffin suggests it could date back a hundred years or more. The boy pats at the pillow, trying to fluff out that dip made by someone’s head. “It really is kind-of stained,” he says, “Maybe you can get a new one.”

“Or maybe we can just flip it over and sew it back in place,” the old man says. He wants to show the kid that there’s no need to be overly fastidious or fussy. Boys shouldn’t worry about a little mess.

The longer the coffin remains open, the more Mr. Byerly becomes aware of a smell. It’s . . . meaty. A faint carnal odor that he can taste on his tongue as well as in his nostrils. For a second, he imagines it must be coming from the boy beside him—one of those musky body odors exuded by adolescent males who are beginning to secrete sexual hormones. But those boy smells are warm, funky, tangy. This is cold, like uncooked meat. Mr. Byerly notices something else that’s disconcerting—lumps under the satin that covers the bottom of the box. A sign of hidden dry rot? Mold? Burrowing worms? He runs his hand over the shapes and feels a dry, granular shifting under the fabric. The boy, standing close, places his hand on the lining as well. The hand is lovely, smooth as a lady’s, paler than the satin. There’s something wrong about the fingernails, though. They’re mottled and gray, thickly grooved and gnarly. The boy’s hand strokes the lining in a familiar, almost affectionate way. “It’s just dirt.”

“What?”

“Just dirt,” Reggie says. There’s a sureness in his tone that wasn’t there before. “Soil. You have to have some native soil in the coffin, but you can’t just dump it in there. It would get all over your clothes. The best thing is to have it sewn into the lining.”

Mr. Byerly looks closely at the boy’s face, to see whether he’s joking or spinning some kind of fantasy. What he sees is a calm matter-of-factness, almost adult-like in its assurance. The boy’s green eyes gaze back at him knowingly. I know what you are. I know what you want. He’s so close now that Mr. Byerly can smell his breath. It’s oddly metallic, like rust. Reggie places his delicate hand over Mr. Byerly’s on the rim of the casket. “I know you like my coffin,” he says, “but this isn’t ‘finders, keepers.’ It’s mine. It’s always been mine.” The hand is cold where it touches the old man’s hand. Its grip is unnervingly firm. “But thanks for bringing it here, where it’ll be safe. And thanks for inviting me in. A lot of the stuff people say about us is just dumb, like saying we’re afraid of garlic and crosses? But some of it’s true. Like, we can’t come into your house unless you invite us, unless you want us here.” You know what I am. You know what I want. He smiles, and Mr. Byerly can see that the stories about the fangs are true, too.

• • • •

Halloween comes and goes, and trick-or-treaters get no answer at Mr. Byerly’s door. It’s not until weeks later, when the leaves lie thick and unraked in the old man’s yard, that any of the neighbors think to check on his welfare. A town policeman finds the body in the garage, too deteriorated to determine a cause of death. There’s nothing unusual at the scene, although the living areas of the house are dirty and cluttered, the sour-smelling abode of an aging widower. Because Mr. Byerly didn’t update his will after his wife’s death, it takes months before his affairs can be put in order so the house can be sold. On the last Thursday in April, the renovator’s crew hauls most of the furniture to the curb. Along with a curious thing, found in a corner of the basement. A coffin.

of snaking branches sprawled with waxy leaves

and bowed under the weight of fat red cherries.

From that moment

my heart knew no rest.

On the advice of ghosts

I devoured a bowl of ten thousand cherries

heaped blazing high

and still bleeding wet with rainwater

sucking flesh from each

as sweet and tart as vindication

until my fingers were jiggling grubs

too well-fed to make a fist.

I hated

these newly made limbs

their bright, twitching muscles

But I pressed foreign fingers through the snow

the dirt beneath

inserted these cherry pits

filled to the brim with poison

as small and hard as baby teeth

From the moment the first sprouts rose

brilliant

verdant

and hungry for what lay under the soil

they refused to be forgotten.

My saplings called to the monsters

who came to devour:

glowing-eyed rabbits and snaggle-fanged deer

nine-tailed foxes

and parliaments of magpies

until there was one sapling left.

I loved it, so I named it Mine.

Mine grew fast and always hungry

like the desperate buzz of dragonflies

until the bones deep within the earth

progenitors of this stolen land

had dissolved like frost under rain

And still, Mine’s need throbbed through its branches

begging to be slaked.

I am a good mother

And so I kneeled

and buried my flopping dinner—

a trout.

In the morning, I awoke to Mine’s first cherries

swelling between its limbs

And when I dug my fingers into the loam above this fresh grave

they were met by root-tendrils

that had expertly picked flesh from bone.

From then on, I cooked

but did not eat.

At Mine’s base, I set my meals

my pots of soup and stew and rice

my loaves of bread, my sweetmeats, my pickles

And bowl after bowl of fresh cherries.

After each night of digestion

Mine’s fruits grew

until they were fine, brilliant things

plump and shining like fresh blood.

One day, I descended from Mine’s boughs

And found myself face to face with three foxes.

They had sensed Mine’s hunger

And now they were hungry, too

For fruit or bark or flesh.

But I would not give up these cherries

For they were mine and Mine’s.

At the last knuckle of my pointer finger

I snipped with pruning shears.

I threw the end at their snapping jaws

sure that would be the end of it.

By morning, the foxes were legion

Smacking their lips

Unveiling their teeth

“We have tasted blood,” they said

“And you must share with us,” they said

And I cut for them the meat of my forearm

The backs of my knees

Segments of each of my deflated grub-fingers.

When the foxes were finally sated

I covered Mine’s crown with nets

To ward from bird and beast.

And before I slept

curled around Mine’s trunk like a serpent

I snapped off a branch

and sucked its moisture until it was as dry as goose down.

Like any good mother,

I grafted my own arm in its place.

When the foxes horded close

saying, “We have tasted blood,”

saying, “And you must share with us,”

I lit the branch and waved it ferociously.

The skulk backed up but did not leave.

“We have tasted blood,” they cried

and I did not answer.

“You must share with us,” they howled

and I did not answer.

They slunk away at nightfall’s first breath

as the searing flames reached my remaining hand.

In the morning, only one fox returned

eyes sparkling

tongue wagging

“You have tasted blood,” it said

“And I will share with you.”

I shook my head.

“I want nothing of what you have to give,” I said

“I am well provided for,” I said

and with a burned, crackling finger

I touched a cherry through the net

its flesh as firm and wet as gums

“Is that so?”

The fox sat

its russet fur gleaming gold.

“While you slept, I buried a thing in the night.”

It nosed aside the loam at Mine’s base

And there I found a fingernail.

From its jagged edge

I knew it to be mine

—now Mine’s.

“Look upon your cherries now,” said the fox

And so I did.

Once fat and plump and red

now shriveled like a fingerprint

They hung quietly

and yet still hungry

for now having tasted me

Mine could want nothing else

and I loved Mine more for it

would feed it all that was mine.

The fox grew restless.

“I will share with you,” it whined

even as I kneeled

to dig my grave with my remaining hand

even as my mouth filled with the taste

of cherries, sweet and tart.

I saw the signs when I was coming in; its lower jaw was lying unattached, and I could see the deep groove its upper jaw had left as it dragged it along the dirt, ripping wheat out from the ground, no doubt. Here, I have its jaw for your examination. Look at it well. A fine specimen, is it not?

No, it doesn’t seem to have been around for too long. Otherwise you would have undoubtedly noticed it for yourself, fisherman. How has your fishing been these last few months? They drive away the fish, you see, and rot the crops where they nest.

Yes, it was more than just bad luck these past months, fisherman. Are these not your fields? You don’t seem very concerned.

Your wife’s? I wish her well then.

. . . Ah. My condolences.

I see. Then do you wish that the fields be rid of it, anyhow?

My services are, of course, paid, but it’s a reasonable fee. I will perform the finding, the culling, and the cleaning. All of it is noted in my contract here, if you—yes, of course I kill it. What did you imagine I would do with it?

What would I capture it for? Do you have some sort of fetish for black-haired jawless female demons?

. . . you’re asking me some very strange questions, fisherman. I did not see it, because it slipped into the water as soon as I set foot on the land, but she undoubtedly was a corpse not very long ago. Ask in your village, see if there is any unaccounted-for mother, sister, daughter, wife—

[ . . . ]

My condolences again, fisherman.

I—look. This is not what I do. I’m a monster killer, not a trapper, and what you’re asking me for—

No, but yes. I—I understand but listen—

—No, listen. Listen to me, man! She’s not your wife anymore. You understand? Look at this. Look at what I’m holding. This jaw? See how it is longer than it is wide? See those canines? The upper jaw of the mermaid has blunt teeth; they dig into mud, into wood, into stone. They pull out insects and crops and dirt and they eat it. So what, fisherman, are these teeth for?

No, no dogs. She—damn you—it will rip them to shreds. You can be foolhardy if you like, but I draw the line at dogs—no, I don’t care how much she loved them!

I see you’re not going to listen to me. Very well. She’ll come out to feed later in the night again. Go rip your fool head off if you like. I’m not coming with you. Keep your dogs locked up and listen for the sound of digging. I’ll keep her lower jaw with me, though it does little to improve your chances. I hope, for your sake, that your wife was not a strong woman.

. . . Cut wood and ploughed the fields, did she? I wish you, very sincerely, the best of luck, fisherman.

[ . . . ]

[ . . . ]

[ . . . ]

Good morning, landlady. May I ask whose fields those are?

Ah, I congratulate you on a fine field of healthy and well-kept wheat; one that would make any man—or woman!—proud.

Your fool son-in-law keeps them, does he? After the death of your daughter? That is unfortunate. My condolences for your loss.

Ah, you’ve noticed my interest is not completely benign. The thing is, landlady, that there are a mermaid and a merman in your fields. A pair. It would be terrible for your wheat. Would you like to get rid of them?

Thank you, I’m delighted to be here!

“Markets” happened because I had a hungry tree on my mind. And then there was Lavanya and her group of friends lurking around, too—they showed up as a set. It took me a while to put it properly together.

The title is a bit of a joke—my spouse trades on the stock market and every new thing I learn about it convinces me that it too exists entirely in the realm of fantasy.

The structure of this story is among my favorites, alternating two different stories that each informs the other. Did your vision for the story include this structure from the start, or did one story come before the other?

Yes and no. I had this image of Lavanya marching into the banyan market from the beginning, and I knew it was a story that needed the presences of both Lavanya and the tree to be palpable. Working out how to give them both voice was harder—I had drafts that ended up more about Lavanya and drafts that were weighed down by the tree’s presence, and they all left me a bit dissatisfied. I like to think this one gives them more-or-less equal protagonist rights.

There are several evolutions taking place in parallel for Lavanya: the dissolution of her friendships, the progression of her mother’s illness, and her own physical maturity. Did these parallels emerge in the story by chance or by design?

To my mind, these are enmeshed, rather than separate or parallel evolutions for Lavanya—they’re influencing and exacerbating and interfering with each other. Caregiving and sorrow make it harder for Lavanya to maintain her friendships, and the doubled emotional losses makes it harder for her to imagine her own growth. Lavanya’s experiencing an all-at-once onslaught of adult burdens—and that was important to build into the narrative’s momentum.

Banyan trees have a rich lore associated with them, and are considered symbolic of things ranging from motherhood, to the fulfillment of wishes, to death. What inspired your own addition to this lore, the Banyan Market?

I tend to enjoy folklore-ish stories, and the kind of narrative that’s bound to a particular place or landscape.

Banyans are great because you can think of them as individuals, but they’re also landscapes in themselves. If you step under an old banyan, the sort that has acquired buttresses and put down root-pillars and started shading tracts of land under its canopy, it can feel like you’ve stepped out of the mundane world, into somewhere else with entirely different rules. There’s a reason, I think, that so many temples and shrines and snake-stones, but also bus stops and gathering places (and yes, human markets) in my part of the world are found in this shade. As you said, it seems inevitable that banyan trees should be teeming with all kinds of lore and stories.

Plus, there was this constant awareness as I wrote, of how old trees like banyans get—they’re experiencing time and space on an entirely different scale from us.

What other kinds of markets might one learn of in Revathi Kumar’s guide?

Aaah, I do have some ideas. But I’m hanging on to this one for when I want to return to this world and write!

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

I have a light-hearted science fiction story forthcoming in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge one of these days.

More long term, I’m working on a couple of short stories and a YA novel—this last is also very tree-ish, it must be confessed.

The sun has set and turned her back, weeping

for a cave where she could be safe once more.

All the hair on our necks rose stiff, like pig bristles.

Our heads capped, ringed with cold – some winds should never mix,

some winds will never mix. The fishermen said their mouths

tasted blood; the women on land said their mouths tasted of fish,

fish too old to eat, fish no one would dare eat.

The very air shimmers because it knows it’s not supposed to, now.

Mountain spring witches will comb their long black hair

in this wind, and smile in recognition of the time.

Graves struggle to hold their people back, so eager they are

to touch the living.  The forest is empty but

we hear the sounds of chopping. The children

thought lost in the forest, return changed

and we do not trust them.

– Revathi Kumar, ‘Markets: A Beginner’s Guide’

• • • •

“Can I speak to your mother, please?”

The man at the door was the colour of dead roses. Dark red fading to ash at the pointy bits. Lavanya got the impression he had a lot of pointy bits, snaking out and seeking around.

Lavanya glared. She tried, rather. It was hard to look at him. Something drifted across her cheek, a cobweb maybe—one of the increasing number of things she and Appa were leaving undone around the house.

The man was saying something.

“No,” Lavanya told him, unhearing.

She shook her head for emphasis, and slammed the door for clarity. Just in case, she made sure to bolt all three bolts—even the top one that she could only reach if she dragged a dining table chair to the door and stood on it.

Lavanya scrubbed her face hard to get rid of the cobwebs. She didn’t talk about the man. Not when Amma woke up and asked what she’d missed. Not when Appa came back, rattled his keys in the keyhole, and found them inadequate. He panicked at once. He banged on the door and yelled for Lavanya and Amma. He rang the bell. Five times, six times, eighteen times. Then he went back to yelling and banging.

Lavanya said nothing, since she was busy dragging the dining chair back and standing on it and unlocking the top bolt. And since—unlike Appa—she wasn’t trying to wake her mother up.

When he was finally in, Appa bustled around putting Amma’s marigolds in vases. He gave Lavanya a long lecture on responsibility, furious and acerbic at being left to lurk on his own doorstep for a whole three minutes and forty-two point three seconds.

The dead-rose man seemed unimportant.

Lavanya didn’t mention the man later that month at Megha’s birthday party, when they turned the lights off and whispered spooky stories in the dark. Everyone had a story or two: coincidences, deaths, creepy friends-and-relations (it was Lavanya’s opinion that Swathi’s gross neighbour uncle ought to be in jail), rotting places, electronics that seemed to have personalities. When it was Lavanya’s turn, the man hovered in the front of her mind.

The words that came out of her mouth were different: “I threw the organic waste in the pit at the end of our road, yesterday morning. You know, next to the dead-end banyan? And I swear, it twitched at me.”

Technically, it was a T-junction banyan, but no one corrected Lavanya. They nodded, eyes alight. Everyone loved the dead-end banyan. This was a story so old, so often-told, it was practically the fifth member of their little gang.

“Banyan, huh? You should be worried,” Megha said. “Remember in the second standard? When it flicked a root at my nose? That tree is hungry all the time!”

“The hungriest!” Revathi agreed. She was their grossness specialist, the person who could turn nebulous fears and momentary misgivings into long, revolting stories that gave them all nightmares.

“Banyans have a special taste for human bodies. They like to savour people for months. They will marinate you in your own digestive juices. And then slowly, slowly, they’ll inch over you. A nibble here, a cut there, some slurping, some licking. A dash of your mind, pinch of your toes. Bit by decomposed bit. Sometimes a tree will eat a person for a full year.”

“Ew!” Lavanya said. She knew her lines.

“We’ll look out for you on the way to school.” Swathi patted Lavanya kindly. “It might eat you, but your spirit can’t be digested so fast. You’ll be hanging off the tree while the rest of us are worrying about portions.”

“Lucky bum!” Megha said.

Megha’s sniggers were always contagious. They curled inwards and licked up the last of the cake.

• • • •

Not every banyan hosts a market. The clean-up itself is daunting.

Then there is size. The denizens of the other worlds will not step into just any tree—only the largest and sturdiest banyans can accommodate the sheer number of dimensions required to host a group of makaras out for a drink, or an apsaras’ night out. Personality counts, too. A really good market feels mellow, welcoming. Celebratory but not riotous: forest folk and rivers and cloud-yakshas and aurochs all eating and drinking and hobnobbing and bargaining.

These things take a while to coalesce, settle. One century, two. You need to be a real people tree.

Banyans are famously sociable. All kinds of birds and animals and insects hang out on them, under them, in the hollows and nooks of their trunks. Wasps are possibly the banyan’s most-trusted associates, for their entire lives are lived within its figs—hatching, eating, sex, death. (Kumar 34)

It was exactly a year later when the knock came again.

“Can I speak to your mother, please?”

“No!” Lavanya said. The dead-rose man went deader and rosier, and his ear hair curled into long dry-blood tendrils. Roots, maybe, ends tender and pink. They twisted in and around and replaced his eyes in a way that made Lavanya feel dizzy.

Lavanya slammed the door. Her mother was rarely conscious these days, and if Lavanya and Appa’s marathon bouts of Lavanya’s-Career-Options yelling didn’t wake her, then the brief door-bang was unlikely to.

This time she texted the group: Some creep at the door. . . wanted to talk to my amma.

Her phone pinged at once. Twice.

UGH!

This was Swathi, and even if her name hadn’t been there, her default word would have made her presence clear.

tell ur appa!

Revathi, of course. Who hadn’t, in four years, told her parents about Swathi’s gross neighbour uncle, even though they were friends with him. She said they wouldn’t believe her.

No, Lavanya replied, jabbing hard at the keypad. She left out the “hypocrite” and hoped Revathi could tell.

It was a while before the last text arrived.

Was he hot?

Lavanya laughed and texted back: Gross @Megha. He was OLD.

• • • •

An accurate and deeply offensive term for a banyan tree is this: strangler fig. Banyans are—and there is no polite word for this—clingy. They like to find a nice solid tree and sprout in a soft elbow somewhere. Then they grow and grow and grow. Each new root and leaf and branch yearns outwards.

Banyan trees have a lot of time, and they like to spend it holding on. Their roots lean down and clutch the ground, until slowly, over a hundred years, they become marvellously buttressed and folded in on themselves.

Worlds sprout inside their hollows, places where the most delicate of things—firefly-lamps, wasp-dreams, mammoth-ice, the memories of the dead—can be stored, stacked, displayed, sold.

The original tree, of course, that first limb the banyan clung on to, is dead by then. Few beings can hope to outlive a banyan.

Once a banyan is a market, all kinds of petty details must be dealt with—invitations to the right people, striking dread into the hearts of the wrong ones; peeling the air just so to allow everyone to see and be seen; making sure that everyone has a chance to meet their dreams. (Kumar 76)

That year, Lavanya’s mother was herself only rarely. Appa plied her with her favourite flowers every day—roses and marigolds as bright and vivid as he could find occupied every non-medicinal space on her bedside table. Lavanya made her socks, stripes of all the most lurid shades of wool she could find: bloodred and emergency-light orange, paddy-green and Gelusil-pink, pus-yellow and bruise-purple. When the disease permitted it, Amma loved them.

“Beautiful! My favourites,” she’d say in her stranger’s voice before closing her eyes again.

Most of that year she was either asleep or fled: her body was there, but the real Amma was away, on the run.

In the mornings, Lavanya would arrange the table while Amma was still asleep: pills and a flask of hot water. Fresh socks and hankies in the drawer next to the endless Vick’s jars. Flowers that showed even the slightest sign of withering would be removed and tied together. Lavanya dropped them under the dead-end banyan on her way to school, along with the rest of the organic waste. She always felt lighter after. It was the same feeling she got after her period, as if she’d emptied out her body a little.

Rains brought with them the recurring cobweb feeling—of being touched, learnt, wrapped up—but these days it felt comforting. Lavanya stopped attacking the door-frame with the long-handled broom.

In the yellow hour between her evening curfew and dinner, Lavanya daydreamed about tying a balloon to Amma’s spirit and watching it rise out of her when she fell asleep. Then she’d follow the balloon and see where Amma really spent her time.

Sometimes this daydream was so vivid and consuming that she could actually see it—Amma floating gaily out of the window and across the city smells, until at sunset she drifted inevitably down into the spirit market that, Revathi said, took place by the dead-end banyan.

The spirit market, to hear Revathi tell it, was non-humans only. Humans couldn’t see it, hear it, smell it or even feel it. To Lavanya, the dead-end banyan only presided over a pile of garbage waiting for the municipal lorry to pick it up the next morning. To her amma, slipping further and further away from her body every day, maybe it was better?

Wherever Amma went when she left her body, it was a place that Lavanya could not follow into, not even in her daydreams. The spirit markets, so Lavanya had heard, didn’t deal in anything mortals could grasp.

• • • •

What does a banyan earn from a market? It’s hard to say. Stall rents are paid in dream slivers sliced off with sharp words. Things are bought and sold for fancies. A story could cost you years of your life, or your first-born daughter.

Tigers roam in human skin, claws retracted for disguise. A frenzied energy clings to them—beware! Yakshas buy and sell masks that will sink into your skin and shape you anew—lake guardian and knife-sharpener, rock-stillness and a gender unused.

The person sitting next to you might well be a djinn in disguise, waiting for a wish to claim you for their own. Here dewdrops could buy you a good large banana leaf meal—rice and tender vanara meat, curd and fried golden sampige flowers, and tiny lotus buds filled with soma. (Kumar 2)

You could only see the market if you were invited, Revathi claimed, and Lavanya wasn’t even on the potential guest-list because she was a boring human. Mortality kept Lavanya tethered to the mud: house, road, school, road, repeat. Only death could open that door. Amma was the only human Lavanya knew who qualified.

She told Appa once and he snapped: “If you ever read the newspaper you’d know that your amma is, statistically, one of a million people dying at any given time. What is this nonsense!”

Lavanya didn’t believe in prayer, but she left Amma’s dying flowers under the banyan tree every morning anyway. Just in case her spirit was visiting.

Revathi sometimes came with her, concocting elaborate stories of death and decomposition to distract Lavanya from schoolwork.

Once, just once, she asked Lavanya to stop.

“It’s enough, Lavvy. Why don’t you ever let things go? Just try,” she told Lavanya.

That was not Revathi’s job description. Lavanya felt furious. Swathi, yes. Swathi was the cautious friend. She got to tell people to be careful, not to do things, not to go too far.

“Shut up!” Lavanya yelled.

Revathi walked away.

They hung out in the group, still. Revathi still told stories, embroidering off-hand things Megha or Swathi said until they were all horrified or laughing or both.

Lavanya could feel that something had been cut. Some mental phone line was gone—cut, uncallable, uninstalled?—and Revathi was not going to fix it.

Lavanya? All of Lavanya’s mental phone lines were fraying that year.

• • • •

Despite the plenitude of roots, banyans are actually very simple creatures. They like life. They yearn for the stuff of it. Even the last bitter dregs of life are delicious to a banyan. Vetalas, for instance, are the stringiest and least digestible of spirit-forms. No one in their right mind would want what passes for life in a vetala. Banyans keep them around anyway.

Sometimes, rarely (once in two centuries or so), a banyan yearns for proper life. It remembers its original host tree and a deep hunger strikes it.

Who are we to judge? Which of us has not yearned for a meal we haven’t had to cook? (Kumar 24)

When the third knock came, a little less than exactly a year later, Lavanya was impatient for it. She had been feeling distant from her appa, distant from her friends. Apart. Megha and Swathi were drifting away like balloons.

Lavanya’s phone interrupted, tinny and pathetic. Revathi. Revathi, who had always lived in her own head, had, oddly, grown more solid. She sometimes met Lavanya at the dead-end tree, in the mornings, seemingly by accident. They rarely talked, except to complain about school stuff, chores, stuffed noses. When texts showed up in Lavanya’s phone, it was usually Revathi. She seemed unmoved by Lavanya’s furious silences, and a slow drip of meaningless things kept trickling from her phone to Lavanya’s: hearts, emojis, pictures of maggots and fungi and Revathi’s cat.

This was not one of those messages. It said: CALL ME. LIFE OR DEATH.

The knock came again.

It was almost time for Lavanya to leave for school. She was going to have to open the door anyway.

Her phone chimed in with another message from Revathi: NOW

More messages arrived, ping-pinging out:

NOT A JOKE

JUST CALL

LAVANYA, NO

And a last one: PLEASE. LAVVVVVYYYY!!!!

Six whole messages. Three months’ worth, more or less. Entirely too many. Lavanya opened the door with some relief.

“My mother’s dead!” she told the dead-rose man. “If anyone gets to speak to her, it should be me!”

“Come with me then,” he said.

Lavanya’s phone buzzed again. Revathi: I’LL TELL UR APPA

Some old spark of the Lavanya from last year wanted to text Revathi and crow at the truly weird man she was going off with. Just like that, screw school.

A long-ago child-Lavanya wanted to wait ’til Revathi called her father, and he called her back to panic and yell. Old times.

Lavanya put her phone away. She turned to the dead-rose man. He seemed tense, petal-edges vibrating with some plantly emotion she couldn’t place.

“All right,” Lavanya said. “Let’s go.”

Something sparked in the man’s eyes, a little streak of lightning, and Lavanya thought that perhaps he wasn’t so old after all, that perhaps he was a youngish person but somehow growing differently from her.

He held out his hand. There was a balloon in it, light and airy, green and pink blended and speckled. Lavanya took its string and felt the little tug upon her hand. She held tighter.

They walked out silently. Lavanya left the house door open out of spite.

The dead rose man matched his pace to hers, and their feet left no marks. Before Lavanya, the air seemed thicker than usual, a curtain to be parted at every step. The balloon bobbed, up and up and up. More splotches appeared on it, red and yellow and velvety-looking. The dead rose man seemed unaffected.

They took Lavanya’s usual school route. At the dead-end banyan, the man walked straight into the garbage pile. The balloon in Lavanya’s hand bobbed and yearned after him, and she was helpless to refuse it. The garbage pile had not—hitherto—been a tall pile, but now, as Lavanya climbed, the town she had spent her entire life in shrank and receded into nothing. Only a long highway stretched out before her.

It seemed obvious to step onto it and walk.

“What’s your name?” Lavanya asked after a while.

“What’s yours?” he asked back.

Lavanya didn’t reply.

The highway was curiously blank—endless fields of marigolds-and-parthenium below, endless clouds above. It dipped sometimes and rose other times, but that didn’t seem to make a difference to how dull it was. No sun moved behind the clouds. Lavanya tested her bladder and found it—unusually—numb. She tested her throat, her nose, her heart, her stomach. Nothing needed her attention.

How long had it been?

“No trees,” she noted.

“Onward,” the dead-rose man suggested gently.

Onward, Lavanya figured. They might as well.

• • • •

Humans can’t enter the market banyan the way everyone else can. First, they smell terrible and will chase away other customers. Some amount of de-humanifying must occur if their visit is to be successful.

Second, human minds will not see or understand the banyan’s space without proper preparation. They tend to lurk outside it and drop flowers. Some of them like to kneel or weep, or tie hopeful bits of cloth onto branches, as if the beaten down remnants of dead cotton are of any nutritional or aesthetic value.

Humans need to be trained into seeing the door into the banyan. This is a slow and painstaking process. Your perfect market human has to be a very specific emotional temperature, treeified enough to enter the banyan’s maw, and just human enough to feed upon. Few banyans—even the really hungry ones—are willing to take the trouble.

Most times, it’s easier to live on fig wasps. Figs are plentiful and easy to produce, and wasps tend to dive straight in without asking any questions. Wasps have few dreams, though. And their minds are acidic, short-lived.

A human mind is, once primed and ready, a much more rich and nutritious thing. Fresh, it will dance and dream and inundate both banyan and market with its fancies, a fresh rain to make everything glisten. After, even the sludge of it can feed a banyan for a whole year. Many a banyan market has failed from an inadequately-prepared human. (Kumar 28)

The marigold fields were now sometimes rose-fields, dark red and velvety even from a distance. Sulky.

Onward they went, and Lavanya started to peer accusingly at flowers to check if they were the same ones, circulating like a giant conveyor belt. She couldn’t tell. She swallowed and found she was still not thirsty. It was as if her body had been suspended with the sun, moving no farther than that morning.

What did that mean? Lavanya was three days from her period. Would she forever be there, pickled in hormones? Breasts swollen, back achy, and temper fraying?

Lavanya counted. She counted seconds, thousands and thousands of them.

She leapt off the road and struck across the fields, counting steps. Between 83 and 84, the road was back, unfurling under her feet. And beside her, the man, serene as the fields.

Another 180 degrees.

Still there: the road, the man.

• • • •

Over the centuries, the most successful market banyans come to understand humans. They learn to appreciate their delicate variations. Locally-produced and fresh humans are highly prized, of course, as are those young enough for their minds to be pleasantly springy. Some banyans like their humans raw and struggling, while others prefer them docile. It is said the banyans of the Western ghats will only eat those seared by lightning. Ultimately, though, a human needs only to be willing.

Humans live so much in their own heads, and sneaking in is where the virtuosity of a market banyan really shines. A skilled banyan will try to meet the human halfway. As with wasps, special fruit are grown and deployed to tempt in a human, juicy and sweet to their hearts and minds. There is an art to getting a properly luscious human, science and craft and that ineffable sense of connection needed to truly domesticate and cultivate a human, to coax them into the banyan’s folds.

And then, it is said—whispered and rustled, really, in the rarefied world of the ficus aristocracy—their tender human dreams will power a market of unparalleled exquisiteness. (Kumar 3)

Lavanya turned and examined the dead-rose man. It was clear he didn’t like to be looked at—there was something about him that sent her eyes sliding away when she tried to catalogue details. Lavanya squinted at his face. One nose: ash. Two eyes: raisin. Long mouth: charcoalish. . . something sharp shot behind her eyes. Her head ached and the bile lurking in her gullet perked up.

Lavanya turned away, eyes swimming. She tried again.

It was impossible. He would not be looked at.

Lavanya felt a stab of envy. Here was a career to aspire to. Appa would hate it.

“How did you do it?” she asked the man. “Was there an entrance exam? Interviews?”

He shook his head. Gestured to the fields.

“Oh, all right,” said Lavanya. It was probably lunch time in school. Or even dinner.

She chewed morosely on a marigold.

It was many marigolds later that she noticed something moving at the corner of her eye. It was the dead-rose man, and he was growing into a tree. His tendrils burgeoned and burst into delicate pink leaves. As they grew, they sped up, and huge branches of tougher greens and browns began to arch across the sky. Already, it was clear that he was going to be massive: lots of glossy leaves and many trunks made of melded buttress roots.

The hollows of the roots were familiar shapes, needing only the usual garbage to make them homely.

The marigolds shrank away from the tree. So did the highway. Lavanya felt no such compunctions. Three years of marigolds and roses had passed, and now there was only her and a growing yawn in the tree-trunk, darkness spilling out onto her toes.

Figs lay trampled on the ground, red fading to ash. A pleasant wet-earth smell lingered. As Lavanya’s sight sharpened, the air solidified and resolved into shapes, thin and fragile and only tenuously human. Spirits, probably, vivid and gossipy and stripey as Amma’s socks. Their bodies swayed and bent differently from Lavanya’s. No joints or ligaments to tell them where to angle and how. Tails and whiskers lashed; heavenly anklets jingled; leaves whispered and rattled.

For a moment, Lavanya thought she heard a voice, faint and human. It was yelling. Of course it was—everyone Lavanya knew was always yelling. The word rattling around might have been no.

She shrank closer to the tree, so solid and immovable. A companionable root put itself on her hand, pink-edged and eager. A savoury roasting smell wafted through the door. More spirits arrived and drifted through the doorway, muslin-fine puffs swanning through on invisible hangers.

It was everything Lavanya had dreamt of.

“Amma! Are you here? Amma!” Lavanya shouted, and marched in.

• • • •

Banyans don’t like being called strangler figs. They find the name lacks nuance and poetry. It mocks their hopes and dreams, they say. And it hurts their feelings in a sharp waspy way.

It is, however, entirely accurate. True maturity, for trees, as for prophets, comes from accepting oneself. (Kumar 1)

• • • •

All quotes are excerpted with permission from ‘Markets: A Beginner’s Guide’ by Revathi Kumar. First published in The Branchings of Fate: 27 Prophets on Prophecy, ed. Sri Sri Sunayana Amma, FourC Press, 2103.

AS: When you are just trying to get by, or in a state of crisis, it’s harder to create as well as achieve goals. I feel like the last couple of years have been difficult for many people. But I also feel like fiction has been such a great place to express those difficulties, as well as a great place to get a reprieve from them. Our mag has embraced a range of moods, from fun escapism to thoughtful to emotionally raw, and I love that.

CY: My “resolutions” this year aren’t much different from any other year: read more, write more, create more in general.

AS: I love those! What are some of the things you have in mind for reading, beyond Fantasy?

CY: I have a few books on craft I want to get through: Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern, Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form by Madison Smartt Bell, and Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses; I’ve accumulated a number of poetry collections that I want to read; and my book club will keep me reading novels all year long, starting with Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. As for writing, it’s probably time to start generating some new material; I think I got stuck spinning my wheels revising old stories that maybe just aren’t as interesting to me anymore as they once were. (If anyone else out there is looking for a way to track their word count this year, they can make a copy of my Tools for Writers workbook, which I update annually.)

AS: I’m grateful to be a reviewer for Lightspeed, because it drives me to keep reading beyond just my role at Fantasy, which I think is really important. If you’re just picking up our mag for the first time, or if you’ve been reading us for a while, we’re so glad that you are taking these journeys with us. We hope 2022 treats you very well, and that you find some truly wonderful stories, both in our pages and elsewhere.

– Wikipedia

• • • •

This morning, I finally recognized myself.

I was in the living room when it happened, licking my testicles. The whole month had been an amnesic stupor, sniffing around the house and neighborhood, searching for my identity. Then, on my third lick, it suddenly became clear.

I can’t wait to show her.

She’s almost home. I can smell her car, coming around the corner house with the grey forget-me-nots. I can smell the lunchtime coffee on her breath, staining the seams of her cow-skin seats, a small pool on the passenger side floor. I can smell the approaching heat off the front grille, hear it rattle like the teeth of a tasty yet frightened squirrel. I smell it all come to a stop on the driveway.

My chest quivers. This anticipation—this is what love feels like: paws up on the couch, tail swishing in fevered applause, looking out through the living room window as she steps out of her car.

And what heartbreak feels like: How could she have left me?

Once she finally sees me, the question evaporates. She bares her teeth—that’s how you know a human is happy—and explodes with loving scents. As she traverses the driveway, my heart swells; as she turns the door’s lock, my spine shivers; as she steps across the threshold, I lose all restraint.

I throw myself at her like a floofy fetch stick. She catches me against her chest, her hands working me over. She ruffles my cheeks, rubs and pats my spine. Our faces touch; if I may be a bit lewd, moisture is exchanged. Two become one; I become her becomes me becomes she, scents intermingled, realities melded.

In this moment, we recognize each other. She is the smell of coffee and avocado; yoga sweat and gym spandex; sharp brie cheese atop a lunchtime salad; tangy lemon car deodorizer; bedsheets and cologne. And I am—once again, finally—me.

Then we part: the one becomes two again. I shimmer with pride, ready for us to celebrate my rediscovered sense of self.

But she just sniffs me and pulls away. She speaks, but her words are too fast, too garbled. I never understand. Her bared teeth contort into a closed and downturned mouth, a wrinkled nose and brow. I’m confused.

So I sniff. She smells equal parts hesitant and perturbed. Why, my love? What is it?

Her frisbee eyes rove my body, then she rises and disappears down the long hall. There’s a quiet whine, like a strangled squirrel. Twice, then thrice, then water rushing through the walls.

Huh.

From the far side of the house, I hear her call to me. It’s all gibberish until a familiar word emerges. “Huuuuuwauncetagophiruh WALK”

Walk? I like walks. But even as she calls me toward her, I hesitate. Something is wrong.

“WALK,” she repeats.

I take shaky steps forward. As I lurch toward her sweet song, I recognize a scent from the rooms to my left and right, emanating from my scatter of old toys, my tin food bowls, my bed.

“WALK.”

It’s me. The house smells like me. I smell like me. For the first time in a month, everything is in alignment. So why am I afraid?

“WALK.”

At the hallway’s end, the water is loudest, gushing grey from the bathtub faucet just ahead of me. I can’t see her, but I know she’s there—she smells like herself. And like victory.

Then the door closes behind me and I realize, all at once, what has happened.

There will be no walk.

She grabs my collar, yanks me up into the tub. I thrash, but my paws can’t find purchase on the slick ceramic, and the tub is filling. Her grip—the clamp of toothless jaws—is tight on my neck. Her teeth are bared in joy. Laughter ripples her throat. Her rapid, meaningless words flow like the water, both of them splashing over me, leaving me drenched and confused and betrayed.

Love, I’ve learned, is like a squirrel.

Titillating.

Delicious.

Fickle. I’d thought she loved me, but she only loved the me she could control. The real me, she found unbearable. In need of change. In need of erasure. It wasn’t the first time, but love—again, like a squirrel—is so often blind. I should have known.

I howl. It rips painfully from my gut, as cold and raw as good meat. I’d thought pain was a universal language, but in the way that I don’t understand her, she doesn’t understand me. My plea goes unheeded.

She pours a substance into her hand that smells like lavender and rosemary—nothing like me. She lathers it into my hair, her fingers kneading deep. Piece by piece, from head and back to legs and tail, she scrubs me off, lets me float in foam. I watch me swirl down the drain, and as the last of me spirals away, I sniff.

I was the odor of backyard rocks and teddy bear belly. The decaying musk of old lasagna torn from the side of the kitchen trash bag. The aroma of upturned soil and earthworms from the hole near the neighbor’s fence. The fragrance of uncut hair, squirrel bits stuck between teeth, wet tongue against meaty testes.

That was me. She washed me away.

When the deed is finished, she dries with a towel some dog I don’t know. She holds it up to the mirror above the sink, where another dog—grey and confused—dangles from her grip. She bares her teeth again, gazes at her reflection.

That’s how she recognizes herself—with sight.

When she speaks, I don’t understand her words. Except for one.

“Seeeethasnautsobadizzit Cooper!”

Cooper. That’s how she recognizes me—with sounds.

But I sniff and I sniff and I don’t recognize myself. The dog in the mirror sniffs too, and the longing in his expression fills me with pity.

He looks like he’s lost something he loved.