That said, such questions often give me pause. In responding, I must make the decision to provide what I perceive as the expected answer, or challenge the assumption that the major influence on my writing has been my consumption of narratives in a physical or visually recorded form.

For the most part, I play along and provide a list of icons and commercial properties that have been formative for me: Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Shirley Jackson, Ursula Le Guin, George Orwell, Angela Carter, The Addams Family, Poison Ivy, Gargoyles, and Alfred Hitchcock. I’ve found it easier to focus on Western texts that I think the mostly American interview readers can identify with, rather than delve into the complex history that has shaped my mindset. I conceptualize this as a list of “influence comps’’ that will make my creative process relatable and accessible, similar to when one is pitching a novel to an agent or editor.* But while these creators and works are very dear to me, a larger portion of what fuels my art springs from the value for unrecorded oral storytelling and creativity inherent in my heritage and Caribbean culture.

In a group interview with Caribbean Beat Magazine, “Stories of What-if,” Nalo Hopkinson, when discussing a panel (upcoming at the time) featuring Caribbean writers, wrote:

We might also talk about language. The multiple consciousness that Caribbean history gives us is reflected in our code-switching, code-sliding, code-tripping dancehall-rapso-dubwise approach to signifying simultaneously on multiple levels. Science fiction reaches for that in its use of neologisms. Caribbean people, like so many hybridized peoples the world over, live it. We are wordsmiths par excellence.

 Nalo’s description captures my relationship to language and storytelling perfectly. (I recommend reading the entire interview!) Caribbean people, from award-winning writers and academics to my grandmother who did not attend school and was married off at fourteen, have a way with words. My parents and extended family, who immigrated to Canada and who do not have more than elementary school educations, are phenomenal storytellers. They have a sense of rhythm and flourish when sharing an incident from work or relating the “bacchanal” at the grocery store that is full of spark and energy. Telling a well-timed joke, pun, or a compelling story when you are hanging out, or “liming” as Trinidadians say, is a skill I grew up revering. It was vital, not only as a source of joy in dire times but as a vehicle for maintaining our history and cultural identity in the face of a past filled with colonial violence and forced disconnection.

Just as the Indigenous natives of Trinidad and the enslaved and indentured people brought to work plantations defiantly held on to their cultures through stories and creativity, Trinidad’s rich oral folklore, with its Soucouyants, Douens, Churiles, Lagahoos, jumbies, and all manner of spirits, came to Canada with us. Along with those stories, my parents brought tales of Hindu gods and goddesses stretching back to South Asia, as well as a respect for Obeah and its rituals of West African origin. (There is a story on my mother’s side of the family that her great Aunt, who people called Drake Alice, was an Obeah woman.) This fusion of beliefs, practices, and narratives that has evolved through centuries of colonization, genocide, enslavement, indenture, and independence continues to evolve today in Trinidad, and with me when I write in Canada.

The inclination to fuse, combine, adapt, and then retell is part of a mode and mindset that many Caribbean people share. We are comfortable with speculative landscapes and grappling with the perennial question “what if” because our survival has been predicated on using the materials we have, combining them with what we find, and smashing them together to create something new.

Further, this speculative approach to life has touched every aspect of our culture: our food, music, writing, and visual arts. Trinidadian food is a delicious mashup of South Asian, West African, East Asian, and Indigenous-originated flavors, among others. As another very quick example, Soca music, a predominant genre in Trinidad’s Carnival, is a fusion of Calypso music developed by Afro-Trinidadians and East Indian beats derived from Indo-Trinidadian music. This type of fusion and creation, more so than any book or completed “work” produced by any one individual creator, is at the heart of my compulsion to make art. It is a continued lived state and a legacy I uphold. The speculative is not theoretical for me: a neat thought-experiment where I pursue a set of circumstances to their eventual conclusion. I am the result of such an experiment; I am at my core a speculative being.

I began this essay with a list of Western writers and works that have inspired me. As a counterweight, I will end with another brief example of Trinidadian speculative cultural perseverance and ingenuity that has motivated me my entire life.

Trinidad’s national instrument is the steelpan. As a teenager I was part of the steel band at my high school, which had a very large Caribbean immigrant student population. The pan is a melodic percussion instrument played with rubber-tipped mallets and made out of industrial steel drums. I first learned about pans as a young child from my parents. I remember them telling me that Trinidad, being rich in oil, had many discarded oil drums lying around. People took these drums and fashioned them into instruments and created an iconic sound that is identifiable across the world. The idea that people could take what was essentially refuse and make it sing in celebration blew my mind.

As part of the band at school, I learned that pans have an even longer history rooted in resistance. Briefly, they evolved from African stick fighting and percussion, a tradition that was brought to the island by enslaved West Africans. In the late eighteen hundreds stick fighting and percussion were banned by colonial authorities who wanted to restrict Carnival. The Canboulay riots ensued, which resulted in loss of life and the banning of other percussive instruments by the Colonial administration. The tradition hung on in spite of persecution and repression, and remerged in Lavantille in the late 1930s with the steel pan and other instruments. To this day, any informal party with my family at someone’s home features singing accompanied by uncles and aunts clapping, banging sticks, and playing percussion on beer bottles and cheese graters. It’s a sound of joyous resistance in the face of brutal oppression, and the spirit I want to embody when I sit down to write. It is this ongoing, undocumented work, that people of all cultures have, that often goes unaddressed in interviews. More so than any singular work, my peoples’ drive to keep their history and identity alive while cultivating joy will always have the biggest influence on my writing.

*Editor’s note: “comps” is an industry term meaning a comparison between a proposed (new) work and other well-known works. “Comps” are used as shorthand to describe the new work, so that potential buyers, agents, and readers can more easily imagine what the book is doing. Such as “a futuristic, Black Panther-inspired Nigeria” (comps for Tochi Onyebuchi’s War Girls) or “Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid’s Tale” (comps for Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow).

Thank you so much! This story has several influences that were percolating in my head before I began to write. This will be a long answer!

First, the emotional core of the story was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger brother. He asked me, “If we were in an anime showdown, and we had to fight each other to the death, who would win?” and I knew my answer immediately. I said, “You would win. I wouldn’t fight—I’d let you best me. I wouldn’t want to go on after besting you.” That conversation stuck with me, and I had that scenario in mind as the story’s climax since the very beginning.

Another core influence was Sofia Samatar’s short story “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” published in Strange Horizons. “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” is told from the point of view of a teenage girl, in fragmented sections. I was blown away by how the form, the distinct rhythm of the prose, and the voice all worked together to achieve this incredible emotional resonance. Since I hadn’t tried before, I really wanted to attempt telling a short story in fragmented sections.

The next core influence was Seth Dickinson’s craft advice about indirection. Seth Dickinson, author of the novel series beginning with The Traitor Baru Cormorant, has written about the value he finds in using indirection when writing emotion, as opposed to having characters be forthright with the audience. As I was reading that, it struck me that my characters usually divulged their emotions to the audience, and my plots usually had some baseline level of directness. I decided I wanted to try his advice, and I challenged myself to write not only an emotionally indirect story, but an extremely indirect story overall, to try and give nothing away directly and only nudge and weave and imply.

The fourth and last core influence before drafting was the title of Seth Dickinson’s short story in Clarkesworld, “Morrigan in the Sunglare.” I was reflecting on how much I liked that title, so I was like, let’s make up a title in a similar vein, and came up with “Potemora in the Triad.”

So, when I sat down to begin writing, I had these four things in mind. I didn’t have anything else—the characters, that there was going to be a giant snake god, the setting, the religiosity. The first draft was a progressive improvisation—planting details and dynamics in the first few paragraphs and seeing how they grew. It took shape pretty clearly, but the revising process was really where this story absorbed the most time and effort.

The use of fragments as a structuring device is very well done. Did your vision for the story include this structure from the start, or did one story come before the other?

My vision for the story indeed included this structure from the start! I wanted to specifically attempt telling a story in fragments.

The story includes many tactile aspects like scales, sponging, and lots of references to different parts of the body. Is there a particular intention behind delving into this sensory plane?

Part of it did have an intention—to orient readers who were unsure of what Potemora looks like as a half-snake-god/half-human being. But unintentionally, I believe another part of it is that I really enjoy writing the body, sensuality, sensation, and texture. I also keep writing about teeth? Even when I’m not trying to! In my poems and drafts and other published work and things. This is my third published piece that contains teeth.

At a particular point in the story you shift your voice to the second person. Could you elaborate on this aesthetic choice?

I feel like second person has a way of pressing toward the reader and shrinking the space between the reader and the story. Potemora was in this specific claustrophobic setting and headspace, so I thought it would be another fun, effective way to play around with form if I switched to second person in that moment.

And also, shortly before that point I had already switched the voice to third person, to heighten the sense of Potemora’s distressed out-of-mindedness and disorientation. Going into second felt like a good next possible step.

What was the most challenging part of writing this story? What was the easiest?

By far the most challenging part of writing this story was balancing the indirectness! My first draft was the most indirect one, and after my critique partner and I talked, it became clear that a lot of the plot, stakes, and motivational throughlines I thought the story was communicating just . . . weren’t coming across! It was like the details of the story were fumbling and failing a relay race, where their baton was the reader’s understanding.

This story eventually went through the attention of no less than six people, and each time I revised it to try and make it clearer. I am so grateful to them for their time and energy; without their feedback the story wouldn’t be half as legible as it is now.

I think the easiest part of writing this story was the emergence of the emotional arc, and the voice. Both the emotional arc and Potemora’s kind of ornate, youthful voice arose naturally through the first draft!

What are you working on now, and are there any other projects we can look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m working on a fantasy novel that is toothy and kaleidoscopic and monstrous, and also features gods! I’m also writing more short stories, and for my senior thesis to graduate college, I’m working on a mixed poetry and short fiction collection about computer and machine poetics.

At the time of writing this I don’t have any pieces forthcoming in other magazines, but should that change, I’ll add them to my list of work at sarasmessenger.com. If you’re interested in reading more work right away, my diaspora magic story “Mochi, With Teeth” is available to read on the Diabolical Plots website!

I cup her warm, wobbly head. Her birth shook the earth, and the sand shakes under us still.

We have no milk, I say.

Hush, child, says Vriskiaab, his voice a thrumming coil under my heels. That infant is not ours. Your unfather left me a riddle, and now I must solve it.

I don’t care much for the balance of our triad, but the earth will crack open unless he solves it, so I hug my sister to my chest. Her cries are so shrill, and they ring like struck ceramic.

• • • •

Things I will say to my baby sister, come the end of the world: If you need to kill me, I don’t mind if you watch me kneel; and, vultures flock in odd dozens, and cactus fruit come in fours or seven, and you have two tiny moles under your left eye; and, I don’t care that you have a different father because we tread in the desert the same.

• • • •

Vriskiaab names my sister Baaiksirv. This quiets the rumbling under our feet, but not entirely; some of the canyons we pass have already collapsed, and there are no altar-men where instead exists rubble. Vriskiaab goes without his slain offerings and drinks from a nearby river, muddier than befitting him, and he filters it as he trickles it down the length of his back to the ridged hood under which I live.

The water is cool and silty, and my tears hot, my mind empty.

Father. Unfather. Child.

My unfather’s stories never depicted a triad with a hole inside.

My father cradles my sister in his mouth, in a birthing pocket behind his fang. His eyes are hooded in consternation. The ground shudders still, but we are not bereft, yet.

It will be two years before I see Baaiksirv again.

• • • •

Baaiksirv will smell like venom, a sharp, sour smell that rises from her soft cheeks and hair, but mostly her suckling mouth. Unlike me, she will have round pupils, and no scales anywhere, not even in a thin line down her spine. In that way, she is just like our unfather.

• • • •

When I turn twelve, I will sneak off my father’s back during that rare time he is deeply sleeping, after he fondly observes one of his festivals. It will be a relief to get away from the endless hazy sand and the distant chime of diamond sparring against bone. I wear a deep cloak because the cities are unfriendly to things that look almost-human, and I get moderately drunk for the first time, even though it tastes somewhat like my prodigious sister smells.

It will be the first time I encounter a double history. Slumped in the shadows of the beer-merchant’s iron tent, the constant tremor of the earth a gentle ring up the walls, I listen to an elderly orator quarrel with a young woman about how the festival story goes.

It is the same everywhere, with minor variations, the orator says. The world-serpent and the unfather and the child join hands and stay hands, and as long as the axiom remains fulfilled, so does our ground. Or do you come from an intriadic home? Do you contribute to the earth’s instability even now?

The woman does not flinch; her casual look of disdain frightens and intrigues me. She says: How sad to think it is destined, just because it is so. Where I come from, we believe in truths larger than yours.

Where do you come from? I want to ask. But it would bear no fruit; if that is what they think where the woman is from, then it is somewhere Vriskiaab never passes on his circumnavigation around the desert of the earth.

• • • •

Every night, my unfather would gaze at the constellations and curl around me like burning paper. I imagine my father’s previous wives did this, too. A long chain of mothers watching the stars, cradling their daughters to their chests so, so tightly.

• • • •

What Vriskiaab hums in the dead of his sleep, as shreds of his divinity escape from the anxious thrum of his bones, up the soft ribbed cave of his hood, and into my ear:

the father / the unfather / the unfather / the father but inverted / the end of the shaking / my daughters / the world for my daughters / my daughters for the world / our triad for the earth / the earth for my inscription . . .

Next to me, what Baaiksirv exhales in her easy sleep:

Yes . . . riposte, parry . . . dodge it! Kick fang too. No glyphic scroll . . . too much . . .

What our mother tells me in my dreams, after I finally do succumb to them:

A child sheds childhood when their last fangs arrive. But there can only be the three.

• • • •

There are thirty-two teeth in the human mouth, most grown by age sixteen, and hundreds in a serpent’s, shed and regrown all their life, and in the interstice is only anxiety and pain pain pain.

• • • •

I’m excited, says Baaiksirv. We are both squatted in the dark cavern of Vriskiaab’s mouth, behind his towering bottom row of fangs, watching the bright sand race past. The walls of this vaulted cavern, and even his fangs, are ornamented with games, scrolls, weapons; Vriskiaab does not confiscate Baaiksirv’s possessions as he does mine.

Baaiksirv’s small hands grip our father’s fangs, natural, unthinking. Mine clasp my knees, which are patchy with scales. Her frame is so similar to mine—our narrow shoulders, our land-awkward legs—but her knees are skin-smooth. Our textures are so different.

She turns to me, an enchanted scroll glinting, forgotten, under the muscle of Vriskiaab’s tongue. Potemora, what was your eighth-year-ceremony like?

I had no eighth-ceremony, I say. Short, slender Baaiksirv glances at me lengthwise; in her scabbard is a diamond blade, the kind that can kill gods.

What did you do for your eighth, then?

Vriskiaab gave me an infant’s rattle.

• • • •

How do I pass my time? Weaving molt into little dolls, or humming what little songs I have, or staring out at the desert. A hundred different ways that are all the same.

• • • •

Shedding scales is an itchier business when your sister is too busy to scratch them.

• • • •

I think I’ve inherited my mother’s mouth.

• • • •

On her tenth birthday, Baaiksirv kills Vriskiaab’s oldest friend, the tortoise-upon-the-deep Hiahmenam. Her diamond sword cuts deep across its giant, leathery throat. Vriskiaab cries large salty tears. I think they’re of grief, until I lie down that night, my tongue prodding a loose molar, and realize the desert’s tremors have lessened just a little more.

• • • •

As my sister loses her teeth, she asks me what she should do with them. Grind them up? Make them into beads?

Swallow them, I tell her. Nothing good comes out of growing older.

• • • •

That day, she comes home caked in unfamiliar blood and smelling like fear. I sponge it off her skin as she sits in my barren skin-cave, blinking slow, looking down at her blade. It’s coated in crimson, too, flaking off to reveal the white diamond underneath. She flinches the first few times I touch her, and I am filled with anger, choking on it.

Her lips barely move. Hiahmenam’s neck opened so easily. He had scales, but it was so easy. Her tears drip onto the flat diamond. Vriskiaab sent me. Or I went. I don’t know.

My sponge stills. Reptilian blood soaks into the lines of my palms.

Why? I ask, though I already know. My sister, the human to the immortal, the god-killer to the god, the rising star to oppose the sun.

Why? she whispers. Because it’s something he would never do.

Vriskiaab. Baaiksirv. Even her name subverts his.

• • • •

I cradle my sister that night, while she cries. Why must I be the unfather? she sobs. Why won’t the earth stop trembling? Am I not good enough?

• • • •

What is the final manifestation of an unfather? This must fall outside strict triadic interpretation.

• • • •

The legend my mother used to tell me: The world-serpent slithers across the world in a pattern, carving divine words across the ancient dunes, sustaining reality through the repetition of their inscription. The serpent cannot see what falls directly behind them.

I throw my twenty-fifth tooth off my father’s back.

• • • •

Baaiksirv hunts large game in the canyons, and each time she begs Vriskiaab to let me come along. On one occasion, Vriskiaab begrudgingly agrees. In the shadow of the rock face, we come across a dead horned viper, crimson oozing from its head. Baaiksirv crouches down and flips it gently with the edge of her diamond sword. Shrub mongoose got to it, she says.

My words feel careful, voice dampened against the limestone. Killed by its unviper, then. A final manifestation of the triadic.

Can’t be, she says. There’s no unviper if there isn’t a viper anymore.

I had been harboring a winged and fragile hope behind my ribs, and it cracks. So our triad cannot end so easily.

I watch Baaiksirv sheathe her god-killing sword.

• • • •

Under the cool hood, I hunch over the scroll I stole. It smells of venom and spit. I balance it on my knees, so my father doesn’t feel the shush of paper across his skin. Spidery illustrations unfurl and unfurl: arms, chest, intestines, skull. Here I stop, squint at the marginalia, and read.

A human has thirty-two adult teeth, of which I have twenty-eight, and the last four are called wisdom teeth. It indicates where they are. I stick my finger in my mouth, past my sharp molars, to the stretch of gum at the very back.

It’s wet and smooth still. I think of the calamity hidden under them. Like sharp spears poised to pierce up through my skin.

• • • •

Vriskiaab starts letting me go on canyon hunts more often. I fear this change of heart.

• • • •

I bring back pebbles of all shapes and sizes.

• • • •

The worst of Baaiksirv’s training is soon to end, Vriskiaab tells me. It’s hard to hear the hum of his voice through my sobs; I’m sprawled face-down beside his ear, my cheek pressed against his warm scales. Above us, the night sky is swathed brilliant with stars, and below, the sand rushes past. I feel as if I am in a dream, and if I make a wrong move, I’ll disrupt this. This is the closest I’ve felt to my father in years.

Don’t cry, Vriskiaab says, and the softness of his voice makes me cry harder. You know, I wish I had done things differently when raising you. I became all swept up in balancing us.

You left me behind, I want to say, and instead my mouth opens in a wordless wail. I am a bottomless river of sorrow, and it floods from me in wracking waves. I feel like I’ll never be wrung out, not ever.

Look at the stars, child, Vriskiaab says. Look at the constellations. Aren’t they so beautiful? Your sisters are up there.

My eyes are too blurry to see them properly, and my mouth tastes like gravel. I mash my fingers in my eyes and blink. Gravity tilts, and I realize he’s looking up, too.

• • • •

Baaiksirv and I sit on the end of Vriskiaab’s tail, one hundred hands from where it tapers to a blunt point. We make this pilgrimage once a year. Our view of the desert swings slowly from the west to the east and back again, and our father’s indent, that endless inscription, coils across the hot dunes to the distant horizon. My tongue is wet with grit and blood.

I turn to Baaiksirv, sitting beside me, and with a jolt I realize she’s almost as tall as I am. The slopes of her cheeks aren’t as full, and her limbs are long and awkwardly birdy. And though it’s hard to remember our mother’s face, it feels easier when I look at hers.

She meets my glance, and her lips pull back into a sheepish mix between a frown and a smile. She says, what is it?

I shove her in response.

She exclaims and scrambles to her feet. We take turns chasing each other back up our father’s tail. The day is long and sunny and I feel like I could outrun anything.

• • • •

It becomes too painful to talk, but I don’t take out the pebbles, not ever, not even when I’m sleeping.

• • • •

I have a long, terrible dream about my mother, where I’m calling for help but I can’t open and close my mouth right, and my teeth snag against each other and rip from my gums and I wake with my chest burning and my throat heavy and my neck and stomach slick with sweat. I press my cheek back into my crinkled wad of Vriskiaab’s molt.

The earth is rumbling.

The earth always rumbles, so why has it caught my attention now?

A deep, sinking foreboding. I duck under the entrance of the hood and straighten in the desert wind. Dust stings my eyes. I reach out and rub my fingers together.

The particles are too irregular to be a sandstorm.

Thunder splits the air. The earth shakes, and I stumble and fall. The cracking and roaring rolls on and on, through my chest, my bones.

I twist to the left. Canyons in the distance, collapsing. I watch in horror as they fall.

Their sand-clouds thunder toward us.

• • • •

I am spitting out my stones into my palm, I am digging my finger into the crater-wound, there are shards of stone still embedded in my gums; no, those are teeth—

• • • •

A child sheds childhood when their last fangs arrive.

• • • •

But there can only be the three.

• • • •

The unchild grabs her cloak and sprints across her father. Every breath is a tremble. Her father’s massive head arcs toward her, fangs glinting, and she leaps.

• • • •

The ground’s trembling is too irregular, the roiling dust-storm too thick, for her father to track her footfalls. She braces her cloak against her nose and runs sideways into the wind. Every heartbeat is a wet slosh. My heart can be spilled so easily. It wouldn’t even take diamond.

• • • •

Refuge is a darkness; refuge is the echo of dripping water in a cave. Refuge is spitting clots of blood and dust onto the stones and hugging yourself with abraded arms and sobbing.

• • • •

You huddle at the far end of the cave, where the air is stale and dry and the roar of the desert is far enough that you can hear your rattling breaths. It has evolved into a sandstorm now, so thick at the entrance that you exist in complete darkness. Every sob sears your lungs, and the night stretches endless in front of you.

At some point, the flow of the air changes.

You realize you are not alone.

It is the loneliest realization you will ever make.

• • • •

Baaiksirv? you say.

• • • •

She does not light a torch, though you are sure she has one. You do not move as her footsteps approach; she’s revoked her silence, so you can feel their soft thud, track her with your sightless gaze.

Hi, Potemora, she says.

You cannot see anything, but you know she’s standing over you. You wait for the silvery unsheathing of her sword.

A rustle. She sits down next to you.

She leans her head on your shoulder. Her hair tickles your cheek.

You say: If you need to kill me, I don’t mind if you watch me kneel.

A heave, like she’s exhaling. How could I watch you in this darkness?

I don’t mind waiting until morning.

She makes a small sound in the back of her throat. A drop of moisture falls on my shoulder, then another. I realize she is crying.

• • • •

After I listened to the orator and the woman quarrel, I remember thinking: I wish I knew where my mother came from. What truths she believed in that were larger than ours.

• • • •

The trembling of the earth grows more violent, and I keep glancing up at the roof of the cave, and I hug Baaiksirv tighter to my side. We were on our way to a village, Baaiksirv whispers against my ear. There was a woman there who was soon to have his infant.

The news of this is a slow and dull pierce through my heart. It surprises me, though it shouldn’t. That was one of the most stable ways the triad could continue.

I think he wishes I were more rebellious, Baaiksirv says. That I was more un. Even killing Hiahmenam was at his direction.

He struck at me when I fled.

She nods. To fling me toward you. Because he can’t do it himself.

• • • •

Morning is coming, and my teeth are rattling in my skull, and the thunderclaps are tearing through the wind, and I’m struck with the urgency of saying all the things I’ll never get to say. Baaiksirv is nearly asleep in the crook of my arm. The triad, I say, is stupid. Vultures flock in odd dozens, and cactus fruit come in fours or seven, and you have two tiny moles under your left eye. Father’s inscription is wrong.

Baaiksirv makes a soft sound I nearly lose to the cacophony.

I hug her tighter.

• • • •

She’ll wake scared to death of the shaking. She’ll say: This is my fault. For being here. For being all wrong.

• • • •

Scant dawn starts lightening the whipping sandstorm at the entrance. A bone-deep jolt under our feet. The ground, cracking.

• • • •

I don’t care that you have a different father because we tread in the desert the same.

• • • •

Her head tight against my chest, my arms squeezing around her. The darkness is an all-consuming battering scream. Stone rushing toward us.

We fall.

• • • •

In my dream, my mother is reaching toward the sky.

• • • •

I wake to hands on my shoulders, shaking me.

Potemora, comes Baaiksirv’s voice. It’s hoarse, wrung out.

My eyes flutter open.

Beyond Baaiksirv’s worried face are streaks of clouds, a brilliant blue sky.

We are alive.

Everything aches. I sit up slowly. The landscape is sand and rubble, but the ground is intact.

We stumble as we stand. Baaiksirv leans against me.

I follow her gaze to the distance. The path in the sand our father always slithered has been swept away; the inscription broken, gone.

The bright sun beats down on my head.

I can find nothing to say.

Vriskiaab, Baaiksirv whispers.

I turn in a slow circle. In the distance are unfamiliar canyons, a blur beyond that suggests mountains. The horizon is a wavering smudge, and in the leagues and leagues around, there’s only the two of us.

The inscription. Broken. Gone.

I am made small by my awe, my searching sorrow, my disbelief.

So the world wasn’t to end. The truth was so much larger.

Wordlessly, I take Baaiksirv’s hand. Our palms are scratched and gritty. Her sheath is empty—her sword buried or flung away, I don’t know.

She squeezes my hand shakily, and I squeeze back.

We take one step, then another. And another.

The sand is rocky, pocked with stone, but it is perfectly still.

“Something’s wrong with Little Sister,” I whispered to the sow.

Her ears perked. “Tell me.”

I told her what happened when I saw my little sister, Biyu, at the market stalls.

She was wearing the pants I had hemmed and embroidered with butterflies at the ankles. But her gait, her silence as people greeted her, these were a stranger’s limp, a stranger’s hesitance. She had shadows under her eyes, long sleeves despite the warm afternoon sun. I had seen this for months since her wedding, thinking she was ill, overworked.

But now, when she smiled, she was missing a tooth.

“Marriage, it is hard, Second Sister.” She wiped her face.

Biyu married so quickly after turning eighteen that people asked me if I was jealous that she was marrying before me, the middle sister. Everyone could see why the constable wanted to marry her. She would chat with the customers while selling our farm’s produce, while I silently wrapped their purchases and made their change.

In the evening, she poured out her collected gossip like a bountiful harvest. She replayed the devastation of rice spoiling or chickens growing sick. Her eyes would brighten when recounting how the silk merchant widower had made unnecessary trips to the lonely tailor. I’d give extra eggs to one family, or charge another family more for their deliveries.

“Marriage shouldn’t break you.” I clasped her hand as if I could pull her home to safety. How long had it been since I heard her laugh?

“Didn’t Eldest Sister laugh louder?” I asked. “Weren’t her curses sharper?” Weeds were too frightened to grow in her garden.

“Please don’t tell her.” She stared at our hands. “It is so shameful.”

“I promise,” I lied.

• • • •

“Well, I never liked him,” the sow, Zhu, reminded me. “Get that stick. I got an itch.”

“How could I have missed it?” I started poking her across the back. “I thought he would take care of her.”

“Down, left.” She sighed. “Kid, are you ever going to learn the correct left and right?”

I was older than the pig by at least fifteen years. But Zhu had had six litters by this time and had decided, since I was unmarried and without children, that I was a child.

To the humans, I was an overly educated woman running a farm and market stall that were the envy of most farmers.

“Should have listened to me.” The sow grunted as I found the right spot. “When you were showing off the farm, he never once complimented you. He talked all about himself and his work. And he never smiled.”

“I couldn’t tell Biyu that the pig thinks he isn’t good enough because he didn’t smile at her.”

She squinted at me. “Everyone smiles at me. They admire my spots and ask for one of my piglets from the next litter. Could you get the mud out from that toe? There’s a rock. Thank you.”

I rinsed off my hands using the water meant for the chickens. I would never dirty Zhu’s water, and the chickens couldn’t talk back. At least, they weren’t the animal I could hear.

“Does it bother you that people raise and eat your piglets?”

She snorted. “Given the chance, I would eat a human child.”

Zhu is a fearsome pig.

The year before my father died, he saw her trotting out of the trees across the road. She was a small piglet, perhaps the runt of the litter. He called me and Biyu to help trap her. We corralled her into the pig sty. Or she decided to join our other pigs. We waited for someone to come looking for her. But no one did. She stayed and had her litters.

She didn’t start talking to me until after the first litter, after the fever took our parents. I was mucking out the pig sty when I heard her hiss, “Get off my teat!” She snapped at one of her piglets. “There is food right there.”

She saw me staring and cursed. “Well, since you can hear me, could you scratch an itch I’ve got? It’s behind the right ear. My right. The one I’m twitching.”

I had dragged Biyu outside to see if she could understand the pig. My little sister laughed, “Heng heng. Go to bed, Second Sister.” Then she’d returned to the warmth of the kitchen.

The pig huffed, “I think it’s just you.”

“Can other animals talk?” I asked.

She took a long time to reply, “No.”

“Are you lying?”

“Look, if I told you they could, you would put them to work. I’m not going to betray them.”

• • • •

“What are we going to do?” I rubbed my damp hands against my pant leg.

“I propose murder.” She stood and shook herself off.

“Shouldn’t we start with talking to him?”

“Pfft. You couldn’t scare the constable.”

I rubbed my temples. “The town would look for the constable’s murderer.”

“Not if he just goes missing.”

“Where would we put his body?”

“I volunteer.” She licked her snout.

“Are you suggesting we should kill him because you want to eat his corpse?”

She trotted around her pen. “There are plenty of other good reasons to kill him. I can’t think of them all right now.”

“We don’t need to do all that.” I paced the perimeter of her pen with her. “I can just get Biyu out of there. Eldest Sister has two children and another on the way.”

Zhu snapped her teeth. “Perfect. When he comes looking, I can eat him.”

“Are you just looking for a reason to eat him?”

If a pig could grin with menace, Zhu could. “This is a good reason.”

Convincing Biyu took more time. Every afternoon at my stall, I snuck in a few more words. She smuggled out small bundles of her best clothes. I packed them into the cart under the turnips.

“He promises—”

“Biyu, do you remember when you stopped eating oranges?”

She wrung her hands. “Yes.”

“And no matter how much Mom and I showed you that this one had no maggots, you still wouldn’t touch it? Even after we took the peel off and ate a slice?”

She nodded.

“Your husband is made of maggots.”

It was months later when Elder Sister drove her cart onto the farm in the early morning. The fog seemed to part for her.

Biyu wore one of my coats and a hat pulled down low over her eyes. She had a healing split lip as we hugged goodbye. It was only certain death that stopped Elder Sister from taking a shovel to the constable that morning.

“If I wasn’t pregnant.” Elder Sister rubbed her swollen belly.

“And I can’t drive your horses.” I stayed out of biting range. They were wild ones that Elder Sister had tamed.

My sisters departed before the morning sun had overpowered the fog.

I was alone when the constable came looking that night.

“What do you mean my sister is missing? How could a husband misplace his wife?” I asked, wielding my best knife. There were still green onions clinging to it, for plausible deniability.

“Is she here?” her husband asked, his eyes hard. I hadn’t realized how mean they looked, flashing dark.

I pointed at the dinner of one fish and rice with the knife. “Does this look like a meal for company?”

My home only had two rooms so the search was at least quick.

“What about the barn?” he asked.

He followed me as I started toward the pig sty. It was dark, and I hoped Zhu could hear the sloshing of our shoes in the mud. Could she smell his scent mingling with my sweat?

As soon as I stepped aside, Zhu and the other pigs came running out, squealing and snapping at him. He startled backwards. When Zhu put her front legs on the fence, she unleashed a roar that seemed to shake the hills. Her teeth gleamed in the moonlight.

When I saw the fear in his eyes, I realized he was a coward.

“My sister is gone. You and your family will have nothing to do with mine.”

He took a step and I heard Zhu yell, “On your right!”

I ducked just as she reared up behind me and his fist collided with her mouth.

He shrieked in pain as Zhu bit. Hard. I could hear her teeth grind against his bones. The air filled with the metallic smell of blood.

He pulled out his hand, blood dripping down his forearm.

“Screw you, dirty pig farmers,” he screamed as he stumbled away.

I leaned against the fence, my ears still ringing.

“If he comes back,” Zhu said, panting, “Tell him that if he treats another woman the way he treated our Biyu, I’d know.” Her snout twitched.

“You think he’ll believe there’s a network of murderous sows?”

“There ought to be.”

I slumped down, panting. “That punch, it came from my left.”

“I knew you wouldn’t go the correct way.”

I laughed for three breaths before the tears came and I began to sob. Zhu pressed her snout to my shoulder as I shook.

I patted her head. “Good pig.”

Zhu preened. “I know.”

those fields

in Georgia

Found where my family was

tortured

Vultures with scripture for claws

circled

above me

Wild boars with Confederate uniforms for tusks

stomped

around me

I stuffed my pious fingers in Georgia clay

and fed it my rage

acknowledged

their agony – their grief

my agony – my grief

Georgia soil

Georgia mud

water so sludgy

dense

with misery

Georgia clay

so crimson, wicked, bloody

and that blood

soaked

oh yes–it soaked

seeped

steeped

into my pores

into the spongy marrow of my bones

But it was like coming home

because

I was born with Georgia clay blood

Peaches growing here are

sweet

with the amniotic remnants of my

forebears

Mine

You cannot harm me

I was born inside the sharp licks of fire

I have waking nightmares, memories

of torment that isn’t mine

You cannot harm me

Because there have been times in my life

when I can

feel

the slits in my skin after the whistle of the whip

I can

feel

the wretched Georgia sun

maul

my face

collapse

across my back

I feel the sun

even when I’m inside, especially when I’m inside

There have been times when I

wake, screaming

the name of a child I’ve never met

We’ve never met

and yet

I am here, existing, with them

I stuffed my pious fingers in Georgia clay

and I fed it my sorrow

acknowledged

their agony – their grief

my agony – my grief

I poured libations (whiskey that burned, charred the soles of my feet)

Their blood/my blood

Their blood/my blood

Blood so red no one notices it’s black

Skin so Black no one notices it’s divine

Thank you! I’m so happy to be published in Fantasy Magazine!

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, is a natural harbinger of fresh starts. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wistful for holidays that embodied that kind of connection to the earth and her rhythms, particularly around the 1st of January, which can be incredibly cold, dark and uninspiring to me (especially in the UK), while Nowruz, which I look forward to, takes place on the Spring Equinox with all the warmth and promise that should welcome a new beginning. It makes complete sense to me that the ancient Persian world would position itself around it, and also that the cultures historically influenced by Iran should even today have incredible stories and rituals marking the day. Growing up we commemorated Nowruz, as many Shia Muslims in Pakistan do. I think about Nowruz at the end of winter every year and I often marvel at how, even in countries closer to the culture celebrating it, it’s not always marked. Pakistan, where I’m from, is a neighbor of Iran, and historically Nowruz has been celebrated by Muslims in the Indian subcontinent harking back to Mughal times. But I feel like for various reasons even the people around me who marked it have to struggle to keep it alive now, as our lives contort to accommodate increasingly frenzied urban function. Happily, it is still alive and flourishing in Iran, Azerbaijan, and other Central Asian countries. I imagine festivals similar to Nowruz anywhere in the world contribute significantly to mental wellness. We could use a lot more community, wholesome ritual, and connection to intergenerational traditions that go back centuries. These are things I think about more and more.

As far as the story’s premise goes, I was inspired by my family. My child is three, and I found myself discussing a folktale with her. I had just finished reading it as it was in the book, and I asked her what she would have done had she been in the character’s shoes. And she gave a very different answer than both the one I was thinking of and the one in the book. I recall my own mother discussing fairy tales with me that were problematic. It is key to traditions of oral storytellers that the story responds to the audience, and each generation is a little different, leading to a different encounter between the storyteller and the audience.

I was warmed by what the protagonist’s mother said early on about the kinds of rules in stories, and the worlds they aspire to. So many stories exist to reinforce only one particular truth. What kind of stories do you think are especially necessary now to tell other truths and aspirations?

Thank you! I very much concur with the mother in that there are ideas built into the story that don’t necessarily do much to challenge a flawed narrative. You can have stories about how hatred and othering is bad, and have them demonstrate it in action to make a point, but it doesn’t necessarily shift things if the starting point is always hateful by default.

I feel stories with blueprints that don’t rely on the othering of anyone are sorely needed. I also personally feel I’d love to see more climate change stories. I would also say stories where there is less emphasis on a single Chosen One figure who changes things could open the way to stories exploring community in action and the ways real change can occur.

I don’t know what kind of stories, exactly, are especially necessary, but I would say all authors and storytellers are essential to this craft, and that we must work to remove obstacles that prevent us from hearing as many of them as possible. There are as many of these essential stories existing as there are people, so I wouldn’t be able to say which ones out of them are more necessary without marginalising someone.

Not long ago there was discourse about whether stories have to have conflict. Nane’s belief that they need “the betrayal, the enemy, the danger” strongly reminded me of that. Is that a theme you were aiming for in this story, or did you have other things in mind here?

Yes, that is what I was drawing on! I’ve never been to any big writerly workshop, and all my learning on these issues comes from reading opinions much more experienced and well-read writers hold forth on. I think a lot of us (myself included) do love a story with betrayal, enemy, danger, but it’s not the only way.

I’m also interested in how automated storytelling has revealed the dangers of an over-reliance on a single pattern. In automated learning, a large amount of data is used by AI to make content based on templates provided by humans. These templates to some extent govern the structure the AI will give to the story. The AI will not come up with much outside the limitations of the template.

If a template explores violence and hatred to grapple with these traumas, that can be empowering, cathartic, necessary. But when all available templates feed our human storytelling with some manifestation of trauma, will a hopeful futurism ever be generated?

I think about this, and how in my opinion early creations and interpretations of myths and religions were useful tools to make sense of the self and the world. But what happens when the traumas that metaphor and myth evolved to teach us to flee instead become permanent templates we never escape from? If the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood crosses over to become a default in-built element of reality? If a conquering hero of myth never escapes the template and manifests in us ourselves never being able to put down our weapons?

When the protagonist’s mother goes against the patterns of the stories commonly told around her, she does so to create templates of love and hope and connection for the next generation. As a mother myself, I can’t argue with that, and that’s what I had the characters draw out and talk about for me in the story.

Resistance is a timeless subject, and there’s a lot of resistance here—from the protagonist pushing back against the idea that there’s only one way for a story to go, to the notion that stories need pain and harshness to be “true.” But the world is made of stories. How have you used, or plan to use, stories to resist that idea of truth?

I don’t think I’ve really used stories to resist this idea yet. The first story I wrote that got published, called “Secrets of the Kath,” contains a lot of violence. I considered it important to not “invisibilise” the darkness of the issues I was writing about. I feel it was the right choice for that story.

When I use storytelling, I don’t want to shy away from the harshness. To some extent, it is an unfortunate inheritance I have to deal with. The person I am, I will have to bring to life stories containing pain. At the same time I also want to explore the logical end of a world that has grown tired of cruelty and builds itself anew in unexpected, interesting ways, with more imaginative and hopeful hearts. The best of stories for me is a person connecting with their whole self and knowing who they are. I feel like this is the most high of stakes. Currently I plan to use stories to depict the use of stories in this direction.

Is there anything you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

My Future Worlds Prize shortlisted novel is a work in progress right now. It has a lot in common with this short story in that it explores in many different ways what stories can give us. It follows a magic box that opens up to tell any story from the corpus of folktale and tradition that the audience needs to hear. I say “needs” because this is what I believe—there are stories we just need to hear that direct us to solutions, platitudes, thought patterns, that the oral storytellers of all our ancient cultures were so skilled at putting together and delivering. I have some other stuff on the way, and the best way to stay in the loop is through my Twitter @FatimaTaqvi.

I also host a podcast called “Saying the Unsayable” where I talk to authors and editors about the facets of reality they depict through the means of speculative fiction. It has a Twitter account @Say_the_Unsay.

Thank you so much for having me.

In our hut beneath the cypress trees, my mother opens up at story time. She steps away from her apron and her broom, her heaps of marjoram and pennyroyal, her pestle and her mortar, and her ingredients for medicinal soups. She throws off her scarf, and oils our hair with fragrant sedr oil. We keep company with her stories as the wolves outside howl their song to the moon. Just as their ancestors have and as their descendants always will.

But my mother isn’t bound by what has gone before. And once she has decided this, there are no rules she cannot break. She tells me of how Zal is never abandoned by his father, and of tales where brothers are never betrayed. Lovers do not die with their love unconfessed, and in her romances passions are always requited.

I absorb these tales, not knowing any better, and she sits with her back against where the tulip tree wood of our hut has become so warped it bends with her weight. It moves with her as she rocks me to sleep (even when I am too big to be rocked), and the walls creak a lullaby to which my mother says, see, the house is magic, it’s helping you to sleep too.

Outside our hut the cypresses lean close. Above us the small animals chitter in the warmth of the grasses we have stuffed into our roof.

My mother reaches to snuff out the linseed oil lamp, and her voice goes on and on until perhaps even our washing bucket and knives and eating mat all nod off as well, and meanwhile the stream of her words carries us to stories I am certain no one ever heard before. And no one ever will.

For have you ever heard a tale about how the stepmother becomes best friends with her stepdaughter and they go on adventures together? Where the children are never abandoned in the woods? Where the dragon helps the princess escape to a place where she can break the chains and start a throneless dynasty of love?

But my forever favorite was the one I listened to as if it contained the key to the language of a lost homeland in it. It was the reason I looked forward to winter while all others who lived in huts such as ours dreaded it. For it is in winter that every night my mother tells me of how Baba Nowruz and Nane Sarma live happily ever after. No matter how cold, no matter how hungry, no matter how my fingers burned from the spices I helped my mother prepare for her stall, my mind would sing in delight as she gave me snippets of these winter tales that looked forward to spring. She speaks of Baba Nowruz, who brings children presents and is always so cheerful with his long, white beard. And of Nane Sarma, his beloved wife with whom he spends every day. Whose hands he kisses, and for whom he selects the best of presents before he leaves to herald the new year—a single flower, born on the cusp of spring.

• • • •

When they jeered at me in the schoolhouse and told me how the story goes—how it really goes—I cried and said they were lying. It’s not true, I sobbed, that they can only meet once a year, and that, too, only when Nane is asleep. No, it was not to be believed.

My mother left off her soup making that evening to wrap me in my bright-colored rug we had woven together while she had told me the story of the rugmaker and the mice. (Was that also wrong, I wondered. Were any of her stories true?) She made me qehwa, put hazelnuts for the squirrels at our window where we lured them to play, and ran her thin fingers through my hair.

“Does it matter?” she asked, and even the walls were silent as they listened. “This is our story. We choose what kind of rules the people in them live by. What world they aspire to make. Theirs is another kind of storytelling, to make the characters suffer and suffer, and for what? What truth is it saying? Pain is real, and so is happiness, yes.”

A squirrel crawled even closer. Nobody could tempt squirrels like my mother. They were considered pests by all others, but she would laugh and say, we’re not farmers, a few droppings were easily cleaned, and that true pestilence is an unfeeling heart.

“Their way of storytelling is valid, of course. It isn’t wrong, my little dukhtar. But not to the exclusion of our way. Our stories give us a map. Do not think it is lesser just because they lead you to a happy place.”

And then one day she died, and Who was choosing the rules we were living by? I sat at the waiting bottle of sedr oil and asked, and is it not bad storytelling to make people suffer and suffer, and for what?

For my mother and I had suffered, perhaps all my life. But if she were alive and telling you the story, she would have gotten it all wrong again. We had fields of roses and the nargis, the hyacinths and the sweet grasses, all to ourselves, she might say. And laughter at the festivals, and songs at the river. The walls of the nobles were better seen from this vantage point than from on the inside, I know she would say, and how could I argue when I had never been inside them? Nor was I familiar with Naqsh-e-Jahan Square, which is what she knew from her time as a nobleman’s daughter and as my father’s wife before he took all she owned and divorced her three times. Then of course society turned its face from her, penniless and with a baby in her arms.

All the stories she had told me promised a journey with an end that was fitting. Yet I had not found any here.

I considered this, wiping my tears with her rumaal and putting the last of our hazelnuts out for the squirrels in her name to bring light to her grave. Perhaps the journey wasn’t over.

And off I went.

The Naqqalis were traveling storytellers who could reach into vast, hidden libraries of the heart and tell any chronicle, declaim any poem, sing any song that suited the moment best. But I did not frequent the coffeehouses from whose doors the melody of stringed instruments drifted and where Naqqalis stood on raised surfaces to delight and speak wisdom to audiences—indeed, as a woman, I am sure they would have expelled me from the premises. But I went to the rivers and fountains, the walls of the hammam and the mouths of the market arcades where children were to be found busy in their work of laughter and tears and play.

The children asked for stories, as they always do. And I had so many, though they were all wrong. But they liked them. They listened. And their mothers, poor though they were, would pay, when they could, in food and shelter. Happy someone was keeping an eye on their children’s safety and their hearts.

One day a traveling soldier home from the wars against Solaiman the Lawgiver slouched by a fountain after having been expelled from the coffeehouse. He watched me with crimson threaded eyes and spat at my endings, scratching the ground with the handle of his rusted sword in repressed fury with every step my story took in departing from the grooves of familiar pathways. Why, I asked him when the children went home. Why should they not be allowed this? Or must people such as we always suffer?

He tossed his head, and rolled his eyes, and he didn’t see at all that I was asking as much for myself as anyone.

Autumn came, and with it a strange realization. Something was wrong in my memory. As the skies that had previously been hospitable sunlit canopies became my foe, hostile winds driving cold sharp teeth into my face and hands, I had also turned to what I did best in the cold seasons—remembering my favorite winter tale: the one of Nane Sarma and Baba Nowruz.

I could recall my mother telling the story, but in my rememberings her voice glides too quickly over the flower.

“He leaves her a flower,” she says. And tells me its name.

But which flower? I wondered as I roamed the lands, failing to remember.

• • • •

At the foot of a mountain, some fruit sat in a basket. When I looked up at the nearby alchemist’s stall inquiringly, they told me an old woman had been shopping at the market and had forgotten it.

“A pity,” the apprentice said. “She lives a great way up high.”

“I can give it to her,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

And I picked up the basket and followed the winding path up the mountain.

Though I had volunteered gladly, I was relieved to see the house finally appear. But as I grew closer, I saw a man crouching at the window, picking up a heavy stone. He intended to break in, I thought in shock. Why must women who lived alone be considered easy targets? It is not as though this poor woman would have anything worth stealing.

I dropped the basket. In a pouch at my side I kept freshly burned white rue seeds. While not as powerful as seeds in the moment they are fed to the flame, they could still do magic if the right formula was said.

But as I took out my pouch, a cry left his lips, which was cut off as if by a knife.

What followed was the loudest silence I have ever heard. The silence you hear when snow blankets the world, and everything is waiting for something, and the light itself is a blade slicing through the world, suggesting in its brightness silhouettes of the unseen realms.

I crept closer.

The thief turned blue where he stood. A strangled cry left his throat, and something came out of his mouth.

Pouring, dripping to his feet, a translucent layer of water gushed forth. Ice crystals danced within the growing stream, scattering light. He fell back, his gargled cries cut off by the ice crystals growing larger, joining together, until in no time at all he was engulfed in a solid, frozen block.

And then the silence flowed away, down into the valley to pour into the depths of the streams for the villagers to drink.

I ran towards him. One of his arms was untouched by ice, sticking out as if beseeching me for help. When I got closer I saw it still held the stone aloft with which he had meant to break into the old woman’s house.

The chill disappeared, leaving me, the dead man, and the chirping, squirrely sounds of mild autumn all around.

The village was far away but I could see it here from the side of the mountain. Smoke twirled contentedly on the breeze from busy hearths. The market would be full of the chatter of ordinary people, voices rising and falling in excitement and frustration, happiness and grief, buying oils for their lamps and nuts for their gatherings. Perhaps a pomegranate to tuck under their arm and ink to write proud but misspelled letters to wealthy relatives in the city.

Normal people doing everyday things.

I felt someone behind me and turned.

A woman older than my mother stood on the step of her house, weary eyes scanning the horizon as though unaware of the man frozen to the ground between us. Her unadorned hand trembled on her walking stick as she shuffled towards us.

“He will melt away,” she said dreamily, a frail but deft hand retrieving the stone. As she tossed it aside, that limb too became covered in frost. “Away, quite away. And rain down as tears in time.”

Down in the village people were using a similar tone of voice to discuss fated things like the tides and the Shah’s policies, and to give each other platitudes over the children whose marriages weren’t working and the toomans their business partners swindled them of. She has not even looked at me.

But then she did, and the story had ended, because another one had very much begun.

I could not see. Everything turned to shadow, pressing upon me, shush, shush, go to sleep, like the time when I was a child, and my mother and I were snowed into our hut, snow coating the windows to make everything gray. My heart gave an inexplicable hitch. I thought of the gleam of forlorn heaps of rabbit bones left by famished foxes. Of the nighttime clatter of horse hooves on icy roads, growing loud and then fading away, carrying messages to places I would not ever see. Perhaps to my own father, the nobleman. Pomegranate trees laden with snow, bending over as hungry animals searched for food—waiting. Waiting.

And the death of all the flowers my mother had ever loved. Dead nargis and nilofer, dead roses and hyacinths. Dead and dried and desiccated.

Perhaps it was being reminded of the past, or perhaps it was the sadness emanating from the woman herself that made my heart heavy as well. But then I felt most distinctly, as if into this fabric of grief, a golden thread of sunlit fascination was weaving something I had never known before, something I had been waiting all my life to know. A word woven into all the sadness I had ever felt. I peered at it, and wondered if it would tell me my true name.

“Thank you, Khanom,” I said. She made no reply but made an impatient motion of her head as if I was incredibly daft as she climbed the steps to her little house and disappeared inside. I stood looking at the open door, my muscles burning from the weight of the basket and the long climb. I tried to tell myself I was making a mistake, but another, foolishly rational voice coaxed me.

Look, you, I said to myself. Is she not like any of a hundred old women?

Her hair, escaping in wisps around her stiff, square scarf, still holding on to its inky black. Her lips, creased in a thin line. Her skin, delicate as if she could readily bruise, and her strawberry pink cheeks. She gave the effect many elders did of being innocent and unable to see more than one aspect of an issue at a time.

Yet that deftness. That murderous silence, the victim of which was still a solid block outside.

It was her, you fool. Who else did that which was done not two moments ago? Yet I was determined not to think on that.

Meanwhile she had gone inside, and she hadn’t said anything, but she did leave that door open, is what I always think. She must have known.

I stepped inside and placed the basket down.

“Look,” she said, “I need help. If you can make the fires, sweep well, and help me make my Haft Seen spread ready at the beginning of spring, I will feed you.”

“I know stories,” I said.

“I know all of them,” she retorted.

“I have questions,” I said.

She pretended not to hear.

• • • •

Indoors was a fire that had me untie my scarf in an instant, though the warmth never reached the walls of the house, the furnishings.

She moved about adding fruits to a cupboard, her thoughtful eyes flecked with russet; her hair as she let it down was inky as if she had put on a hint of henna. Not so old, I thought. Yet her thin form was heavy with an absence. She would do well to have a companion, I thought.

“Khanom, do you not have a husband or children?”

“I have no children. And better call me Nane, as I am old enough to be your grandmother.”

“As you say, Nane, but what do you do in this house all alone? Beautiful though it be, it is far away from all who may wish you well.”

“And who would those be,” she snarled, “who wish me well? The summertime chicks? The young gentleman dead outside? You?”

She regarded me as if she hadn’t had the opportunity to yet.

“Who are you? It is better for a young woman to ask herself where her husband and children are, instead of a grandmother like me.”

“I have none,” I replied lightly. “I travel and tell stories.”

“You, a Naqqali?” She said in some surprise.

And then the matter rested as I got used to the house. And to Nane.

Her cabinets were neat, though sparse. On the shelf of one cupboard lay nothing but a single forgotten seed. There were no signs of any other person having ever lived here, though there were plenty of blankets and rugs.

I missed my hut, but I found a restful peace with Nane. The walls of her house did not creak lullabies, but they still comforted me like my mother’s hut did. Nane’s house had a way of absorbing sound, the way snow in the wilderness does the scream of the grouse before the fox’s jaws crunch through its feathers. And it was more than sound they absorbed. The unsettled feeling I’d had since my mother had died less than a year ago was taken gently by the walls into their stable selves. I saw that the flowers I thought were dead were only asleep. The poppies of heartbreak, the lilies of grief, all rested as they slept in the shadow of Nane’s house, and all cries of grief were subsumed by her walls, like the blue amulet takes away the evil eye.

One evening we sipped tea.

“So you think you know stories. Tell us some.”

So I told her of the children who were not left in the wood, but who slipped into the hut where the village headman’s registers were kept. They found out how matters were being mishandled, and it was the headman who had to leave. Nobody in the village ever starved again.

I told her of the Simurgh, who blessed Zal’s father for loving his son, and how ever since then wisdom ruled the lands, and so must all fathers cherish their sons.

I told her of the three princes whose father turned into a dragon to test them for the kingdom, but instead of fleeing or fighting amongst themselves, they stood together, never thinking to be rivals.

I told her of the lion who didn’t need the mouse to help him to realize everyone deserves help when they need it.

She spat. A bitter gust blew the curtains up before vanishing as if it was never there.

“These are empty tales. You need the betrayal. The enemy. The danger.”

“Danger, yes,” I said. “But there is enough danger without us turning on each other. Without evil stepmothers and murderous brothers.”

“Fool,” she said. “If the tale has a truth, it endures. It may be for fun, for sorrow, for a ruler’s fickle pleasure or a man’s last minutes before execution. But if it holds truth it will become a well of wisdom for the thirsty, and will outlast you and me.”

“I agree. But there are stages of wisdom, are there not? What do we do if we wish to build a world without betrayal and enemies and danger? Can we not try and make a . . . a map? Hopeful stories for hopeful futures?”

“Hope.” She said. It was only later I realized, she hadn’t said it as someone with a disdain for it. But like somebody who had been burned.

As time went on she slowed down. Lines appeared on her face. Her hands shook and she grew forgetful. Her voice became hoarse. She is dying, I thought, remembering how my mother had gotten frail before her end. I will not leave her. I will bury her, here just by the hut. Who else does she have, poor lady.

I kept her company on Yalda, the longest night of the year, pretending to divine from poetry books we did not have. I mimed opening a book.

“Ah, yes.” I told her. “We will both live very long. So it is written.”

“Too long.” She smiled. I passed her the cut watermelon I had saved by burying it beneath leaves in the cold ground, and wondered how many lonely Yaldas she must have spent on her own with nobody to think of these things.

Then close to spring, she woke me in the early morning.

“We must prepare the Haft Seen spread,” she said. “I have laid down the mat. It is time to collect the things.”

“Of course,” I said, happy to indulge her. My mother and I always set a little table for Nowruz, no matter how much or little we had.

“I have to go to the village.” I saw she had already tied her ribbon around her square headscarf and was wearing a pair of sturdy shoes.

“I will do everything, Nane,” I held her hands and bade her sit. “You sit and instruct me.”

Though truly, I didn’t need any instruction. Every child knows the mat for Nowruz must carry seven things:

Sprouting vegetation. Wheat, we had always used. Representing new life for the new year.

Dried lotus fruit for love.

Vinegar for patience and wisdom.

Garlic for medicine.

Apples for beauty and rosy health.

Sumac for the red sunset of the new year.

And Nane made the pudding herself, which was for happiness, refusing any help.

“It must be made by my hands, you see. It cannot be any other way.”

She also added more fruit. Where she got them from, I do not know, for even the village market would not have had these. But a second mat next to the Haft Seen was brought out and laden with cherries and plums and peaches and pomegranates.

She also placed a mirror on it.

“For reflection,” she said, “though I have never done so before.”

And as we both stood before it looking in, she shrugged and moved away, as though she did not wish to think on it too long.

The night before Nowruz I set out two new sets of clothes to welcome the new year.

“We will look a smart pair, Nane,” I called out to her as she stood looking out the window. “The time of the year demands it.”

She did not respond but remained with her back to me, twisting her hands.

“The lime pickle is ready. And I will make the fish with herbed rice,” I continued, joining her. “And the noodle soup, of course.”

Something about her silence troubled me.

“Shall I sit up with you?” I asked, placing a hand on her arm.

“No,” she turned in alarm. “Not at all. To bed.”

“I haven’t—”

“No. To bed. Now! This is the part you must not witness.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lie down. And no matter what you hear, you must not do anything.” she said, agitated. “No matter what you see. I’ve been a fool,” she sighed. “I am losing track of time, of all things. Everyone knows if you take your eyes off the seconds, the hours will trip you. I should have sent you away.”

“I can go right away,” I said, nettled. “I might just go right now.”

She stared at me, lips working, but not able to speak.

She didn’t mean it, I told myself. These are times of the year when memories gone rancid with time rise to the front of our minds. She has a right to solitude.

“I won’t go, Nane.” I patted her hands. “And tomorrow will be a lot better. First day of the new year, after all. First day of spring!”

“I hope so,” she said, and there was a sudden flush of pink to her pale cheeks. An astounding surge of hope, so fierce even the walls couldn’t swallow it.

As I retired, I thought on it. Such a wild and fabulous yearning she had been hiding for something she had not once mentioned to me. Perhaps she wished to stay up in prayer. The elderly harbor untold stories that have no escape except for in prayer and song.

Nane came to check on me. She waited, seeing if I would move.

After a while she went away.

• • • •

I hid behind the tapestry. Of course I did. I knew, really, what was happening. You always know magic wrapped in waiting, no matter how it masquerades as grief.

Nane sat on one chair, opposite the empty one. All the lamps were on, and the fire was well lit. She sat up straight and smiled. She folded her hands in her lap, and turned her gaze to the crackling flames.

Such a long time passed. Too long.

The figure was so large, he had to bend to enter through the doorway. His white beard reached his belly. His pink cheeks were still visible, though a white mustache curved cheerily under his nose. The smell of clover and growing grass filled the room in his wake, and a cloak trailed behind him like the color of a sunny sky. There were no wrinkles on his face, and everything about him was of newness and magic.

First he smiled in pleasure at the fire, removing his round hat. He nodded appreciatively at the fruit laid out. And finally, he took in the tired old woman sitting on a chair, who had fallen fast asleep.

He sat himself in silence and ate his food. He is a monster, I thought. A deity. He is an elderly uncle. A kindly saint. He is a man, and a man’s stomach is its own animal, and he ate and ate the whole mountain of fresh fruit. He stood up and brushed the crumbs from his blue cloak. Cleaned his hands in a basin. He rumbled his approval.

Now he got to work. He stoked the fire so that it might last until morning. He made himself a small cup of tea. He drank this and looked straight at the tapestry behind which I hid.

When done, he stood up and considered Nane. My heart wrung itself out at the sight. Finally he opened the bag I had thought was empty at his side.

From the bag, he removed a flower. Which one? I have often asked myself. And I can never recollect.

He placed the flower in her lap. Kissed her with a tired reverence. And left with an abrupt twist of the head, stumbling at the threshold as if his vision had gone blurry.

For a moment I stayed still. Then my feet were unglued and I raced behind him.

“Come back!” I screamed. “Come back!”

In vain the walls tried to swallow my shrieks. I flew after the man, but he had already mounted his horse, and was off.

I should have been careful not to trip on the rocky terrain as I pulled my long chemise up and ran, but I didn’t have to. The way was smooth.

“Come back!”

A deer raised its head and looked in sorrow. A dev crept past. A cloud of peris flew overhead. This was not the mountain, and yet it was. I knew the sky above me, yet it was new.

Here I was, and ahead he rode, and I bolted, willing my feet to adopt the swiftness of the deer I had passed. And strangely, it worked.

I caught up to him, to Baba Nowruz, and I grabbed onto the reins of the horse he rode.

“Let me ride,” he said. “Else I will not be able to bring spring to the cities. Or do you wish to see the world in endless winter?”

I stood there, shoulders shaking. Crying tears with all the hopelessness I should have had when my mother died, when children played with their fathers and I realized I had none, when I figured out that stories did have sad endings, and I didn’t want to accept they had their share of truth as well.

“But this is truth,” his voice reverberated like the humming of a beehive, or the rumbling of a distant earthquake. His hand reached forward to cup my chin.

“The bud is destined to rot even from the moment it swells to life. The butcher’s knife winks at his side while the new lambs take their first, shaky steps. This is what Nane teaches, but you have not learned, child.” He lets go of my chin. “This is mercy, or else the result is death. Do not rush truth. She and I are already together in destiny.”

I stood heaving like the child he considered me to be, wondering at where I was and who I was speaking to. It occurred to me that someone like my mother would have fit here quite well, in the shade of this mountain that was surely Mount Qaf. In fact, now that I recalled it, how would she snuff out the lamp at the other end of the room while she sat with me on her lap? How did she anticipate her customers’ needs before they even knew? Why did she make enough food for a journey before lying down to sleep, me curled against her for one last time?

I measured my next words for they could be my last.

“Coward.”

He reared at me. Baba Nowruz, has anyone spoken to him such before? What happens when you challenge the harbinger of the year? He is an enraged stag made up of constellations. He is an oak tree with roots piercing into the earth’s heart.

He is a trapped bear beaten by its trainers and forced to perform tricks. And now I had shown him the mirror.

“Do not challenge my love for her. She is for me, and I am for her. We would be under one roof and one coverlet. Spending the Yalda night eating seeds and nuts and whispering. Were there a way to do it, I would have done it centuries before you were born. Fool! Go and do what your kind does best. Yearn. Rut. Rot. While I,” his voice trembled, “am rotting to let others live. She and I were one. Before the sun, before the seasons, before the earth was a thought. But no more. For should I do as you suggest, then surely the world will end and she will die—yes, die—along with all my love.”

• • • •

Back at the hut the old woman was gone. A young woman paced dreamily, smelling a rose? A poppy? A tulip? A pomegranate blossom? She sang a song and springtime sang back.

“He loves me so much, he never wakes me,” she says. She laughs and there are tears in her eyes. She blushes. She sings. She brushes her hair with sweet smelling oils.

“What is love but this?” she demands. “I am content.”

• • • •

No. I tell a lie. I tell too many lies.

“She will sleep,” he had said, as I left. “She will sleep for half a year. More. Be good to her. The way you think I’m not.”

But she was not asleep when I had returned. Tears streamed down her face as she curled up on the ground. Then, slowly, her eyes fell shut.

As she slept I wrote. I swept and I cooked. Outside the sun blazed. Spring was here. The walls of the house were no longer cold, but it had nothing to do with the sun, I knew.

The sky was a turquoise curtain. Life came in through the window in roars and coos and bleats and whinnies. The sound of music rose from the village. I visited and sometimes sat with the villagers. Getting to know them.

I found pounded goat hair so I set to embroidering it using combinations of patterns my mother had taught me. I embroidered a flower, one I had never seen before and whose name I would have to make up myself.

Patterns. If you want something to stop repeating itself, you have to break the pattern. I remembered Nane putting a mirror on the Haft Seen table, and her wondering out loud how she had never done such a thing before.

So maybe how it all ended was due to her all along. Willing something with her hope.

In the latter part of the year Nane started to sigh. The walls of the house started to feel cool to the touch again. A chill filled the air. She talked in her sleep.

“I knew he would not stay,” she once said, her eyes closed. “He never does. He never will.”

The seasons turned. The leaves turned red. And finally, she woke.

I greeted her.

“And how are you, Nane Sarma?”

She snorted and threw me the same look as she had the first time I’d met her, as if I was entirely daft.

“It is too early for such audacity.”

I waited for her to eat and to have a day of peace. And then I told her the plan.

“Oh, yes?” She retorted. “And who will do it?”

“I will.”

“You? And what of the springtime. He will not come for you.” She said with a young—and might I say, prideful—toss of her auburn shadow hair.

I bowed my head and said things like yes, Nane, you are right. No, Nane, I won’t speak of it again.

Time flowed on.

• • • •

The night before Nowruz, and it all happens again. I watch. He feasts. She sleeps. So similar to last year, embroidered to a faultless pattern.

Then I step smartly out from behind the curtain and he leaps to his feet.

“Shh,” he puts a finger to his lips.

I go to Nane and he watches in horror as I take her mantle off from where she’s tucked herself in. Her eyes fly open.

He sees her. She sees him.

They stare at each other, and Baba Nowruz, he stammers something unintelligible. But of course. He has not spoken to the woman in an eternity. He blushes.

Outside his horse whinnies and he’s off like a spring breeze.

Nane jumps to her feet.

He stops at the door. Reaches for his bag.

“I forgot—I have to give—”

“Here are seven things,” I interrupt him. I wrap myself in her mantle, almost absentmindedly, for I have stepped briskly outside as they stare at me. I want the sky to witness what I do next. “I give you seven gifts. A Storyteller’s Haft Seen.”

I pause, looking at them.

“The first—a tale of autumn. Nane Sarma and Baba Nowruz spend all autumn planning the gifts for springtime. Baba collects the blessings and returns them to the people. And Nane is at his side helping him.

The second—a tale of water. Nane bends and whispers into the rivulets. Be patient, my dears. Springtime will come.”

Nane steps forward. Almost outside the house. A squirrel lured to a window with hazelnuts from my mother’s hand.

“The third—a tale of winter. In winter they work harder. They roam the earth and note what gifts they must bring for the children who are good. Which means they must plan for all of them, because there are no bad children.

The fourth—a tale of Yalda. On the night of Yalda, they cuddle by the fire, and roast nuts and read poems. Baba Nowruz declaims them in his loudest voice, and Nane laughs and makes up her own poems to see her beloved chuckle at her wit. On Yalda she reigns supreme.

The fifth—a tale of bonfires. They hold hands like children and jump over the fire with the children as people bang spoons and break pots on Scarlet Wednesday.

The sixth—a tale of spring. And away Baba Nowruz goes. He must be quick—there are so many presents to give to all the children. Nane would come too, but spring time makes her sleepy. And she has been working all winter, after all. So she brushes Baba’s blue cloak, kisses him on the nose, and tells him he will be successful, for she’d wished for his happiness on the night of Yalda. And he kisses her on the forehead and tells her, not more successful than she, for her happiness was what he’d wished for himself. And then he is gone to spread joy and happiness, and to bring back stories to his wife, and then spring time and summer are theirs to dream together in the grass.

And as for the seventh—” I pause.

They both peer at me through childlike eyes. Eternity is stripped away by hope and want, fear and helplessness. By now Nane is outside with us, without her mantle, shivering in the cold. Baba has tears in his eyes or he would have noticed.

“The seventh? A tale of destruction.”

Baba winces and puts his arm to his face. Nane goes to him and he covers her in his blue cloak. Wraps her all up.

“I hereby destroy you. You are no longer part of the story. No more will winter need to sleep, and spring need to race away in loving heedlessness. You may go—anywhere you like.”

“But how,” Nane whispers.

“I’m very sorry about this,” I feel an unexpected embarrassment. “But . . . I own the house. This building, here.” I point.

And I did. I had sold spices and soups all winter until I had made enough to pay the village council the price of the house. They were glad to give me a deed to it, seeing as how nobody had ever thought to make money from something in such an inhospitable location before.

“So you are not tied to it. In fact, you do not have a right over it.”

You don’t need to know all that was said between us. But it didn’t take very long.

And as I settled into myself, they sat together on the horse and galloped away to who knows where.

• • • •

If it were that easy, Baba Nowruz had said, they would have done this centuries ago.

• • • •

It is still winter.

I find the seed that lay lonely and forgotten in the cupboard.

“I am only winter,” I tell it. “But listen to me. For it is only when the first frost licks the berries that they gain their sweetness. And until the orchards are tended to by the cold, the apples lack in flavor. Little seed, it is only under winter’s blanket that the flocks of sheep and goats mate with each other, making their bargain for new life in spring. And when the foxes burrow under the snow, they grow warm, not cold.”

While talking so, I walk with it to the edge of the village.

And as I bury the seed at the border, I tell it the story of the pumpkin child and how much love she was worth. And I tell how when the horse of the hero Rustam destroyed the farmer’s crops, and the farmer complained, Rustam never fought against him and the farmer never had to raise an army, but they worked together, hero and farmer, and the land was cultivated anew. And maybe I forget myself and tell it the story of Nane Sarma and Baba Nowruz.

I lie down next to it and sing songs and tell stories out loud, until I go to sleep.

When I awaken, spring has happened all at once. And I myself have changed.

My hair is thick and black as a raven’s feathers. There is a strength at my core that allows me to leap and bound like a bear that has never been trapped. My mantle has turned green and buttercup yellow. I can sing like a lark and laugh like a babbling brook. And I do, frequently. Tending to wild lambs and picking cherries to give to the villagers I know and love.

And when the day of Nowruz comes around, the children all get presents. There is never any sign of who is the giver besides horse hooves in the dust, a flash of blue, and a woman’s contented laugh.

• • • •

Outside my door, all the way from the border of the village, someone with a head full of pollen-stained lust lingers. With green flecked eyes, I know, and a near-magic song that could have called forth the springtime. Something is placed at my door. Something I can tell has been plucked from the branches of the very first seed I had called forth into spring.

And I sigh despite myself, because the ancient stories move hard. They want to have their way.

But I am wise and I am cunning and I will not trap that beautiful young person into becoming a godling. I am sufficient, I tell myself. I will never open the door to a living soul.

Yet, as I hear the figure slipping away, I cannot stop myself from this one pleasure.

I wait a bit, then ready myself to open the door in delicious anticipation.

Because I know what I will find on the other side—a flower that can be anything.

but you were now for someone else too

i found dry sweat in every sheet and skin crease

i died with the daylight

dreamt wild

reincarnated myself

it was all building/rising/threatening

a memorial of the moment when the sadness turned to anger

my taste buds pure

lips moist and patient

searching

for specs of sugar left behind

from the woman i had been when you combed my scalp with grease

and the sun was spilling over

my wrists like blood on the 29th day

the tasting

started in the front of my mouth

my pallet diluted it

as it drifted back

into my esophagus

desperate for crumbs to take with me

into tomorrow.

this time cellos played/i gasped

my silk dress streamed rivers/lakes/ocean currents

i caressed/licked and/attended to

grandma was there crying

What I love most about conventions is the way they bring readers and writers together. My favorite conventions have always been the smaller ones for that reason: World Fantasy, the Nebula Awards Weekend, ReaderCon, WisCon, etc. are small enough to feel intimate and not overwhelming. I met some of my dearest friends—and my husband!—in a hotel bar at my very first convention.

AS: Smaller conventions are the best! I’m so glad I met you at a convention, as well as John, and Wendy, too! I’ve met so many cool people at conventions in general, but smaller cons are almost always where I have the best hangouts. And let’s get this right: the hangouts are what I go for. (Yes, I’m an introvert . . . but still.) People just tend to have more time for each other at smaller events. I’ve enjoyed Can*Con, ReaderCon, WisCon, the Locus Awards Weekend, the Nebula Awards Weekend . . . BayCon was my first ever convention, here in the SF Bay Area, and I usually go to FOGCon as well!

CY: And then there are WorldCon and DragonCon, which are very different from the others, due to their sheer size. There’s so much to do! DragonCon in particular has programming tracks for so many different interests; it’s more of a genre entertainment convention than a literature convention. The comic conventions have evolved in that direction, too; I know novelists who say their most successful events have been at comic cons! It seems like no matter which one you choose, there’s going to be crossover between media and interests.

AS: As a person of color and as a gay person . . . well. Nearly every convention I’ve attended (and I’ve been going since 2013) has come with some degree of racism, microaggressions, homophobia, transphobia, and even misogyny. In particular, people of color often have terrible experiences at conventions. I witnessed an act of racism at the recent DisCon (Worldcon) and heard directly about others, for example; and unfortunately, this isn’t unusual at conventions. I’m glad to see many are trying to change the way they are run, from programming to bylaws, and I hope more conventions look to Fiyahcon and take notes. Fiyahcon leaders have told me that they welcome other conventions reaching out to ask questions and seek advice.

CY: Thank you for sharing that. It’s appalling that anyone has to endure that anywhere, more so in a space that is supposed to be about sharing our enthusiasm for genre fiction, which has its roots in breaking down barriers and imagining a better future. There are a handful of conventions that have been actively combating -isms of all kinds for many years, with varying degrees of success—and the larger cons are going to have to work to keep up. WisCon was explicitly established on that basis, though every con seems to have its own growing pains. I’m so glad that Fiyahcon is now an established part of the convention landscape! I think it’s a sign that we’re headed in the right direction as a community.

Accessibility has been another pain-point for so many convention-goers. One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic was convention programming being made available online. That made conventions accessible to so many people who otherwise couldn’t enjoy a convention, due to failures by concoms and venues to accommodate their physical limitations, or because they could not afford the expense. I hope that we’ll see parallel tracks coming out of the conventions in the future, so that we don’t lose that access. Flights of Foundry is an entirely online convention that has really impressed me with their level of organization and thoughtful programming.

AS: I was on panels for Flights of Foundry in a previous year and I really enjoyed it! Augurcon (run by Augur Magazine—in many ways spiritual kin to Fantasy Magazine) was also great! I agree—I hope the online component continues to be available. It also creates potential for better international focus and attendance. I’m going to WisCon this year, and probably WorldCon and World Fantasy. Going to cons, for me, means a lot of extra costs, stress, time lost that I could be working on something . . . but I’m looking forward to meeting new friends and spending time with established friends. Maybe I’ll see some of our authors and readers there!

***

In this issue’s short fiction, Fatima Taqvi gives us happy endings where none are expected in “Baba Nowruz Gives His Wife a Flower Only Once a Year,” and Sara S. Messenger’s “Potemora in the Triad” is an earth-shaking kind of coming-of-age story; in flash fiction, Victor Forna explores cosmic consequences in “rat/god,” and revenge could be quite tasty in “The Magical Sow” by Wen Wen Yang; for poetry, we have “Georgia Clay Blood” by Beatrice Winifred Iker and “noonday reflections” by Doriana Diaz. Plus we have essay “Oral Storytelling and Culture as Personal Canon” by 2022 Nebula finalist Suzan Palumbo. Enjoy!

but you had no idea.

You found it snapped in half on the trap you set, dead.

A whole universe oozed from the puncture at the centre of the rat/god, out with its guts and its shit. Stars swirled on your bedroom floor,

planets and their satellites, gas, and dust particles.

“What have I done?” you said to your husband, holding back your hair. “I just didn’t want a rat infestation in our home.”

“How can it be this easy to kill a god?” Your husband sipped coffee from a mug as he toed the creature.

The rat/god lay with its mouth agape, bluish nebula within.

“What’s gonna happen now?”

“Who cares about a dead rat, anyway? Let’s throw away the thing. Clean up the mess.”

You nodded.

You swept up the galaxies and the stars.

But before you could throw away the rodent/celestial, the first god came, knocking like thunder on your door. It was Odin, a raven on each shoulder. “I’m here to pay last respects to the great god who perished here.”

You let him in, and he paid his last respects.

Yemoja came after. She dripped strange black water, messing up your carpet. She wailed on seeing the rat/god and gave the carcass a spirit stone: “Bury it with him, you hear me?” she said, and left for her river again.

Ra, a sun god. He asked you for wine, while he wept tears of lava. The molten fire fell and damaged your new, white leather chairs.

And Isis, and Mimir, and Osun, and Ngewo.

And Zhinu. “Do you even know who you’ve killed?” she grunted.

“We didn’t mean to kill a god,” your husband said.

“Yeah, right,” Zhinu replied.

The deities wouldn’t stop coming.

How many gods roamed the world?

Vishnu. Krishna.

Aphrodite.

Ngai, who shouted:

“You made me leave Mount Kenya!”

“We’re actually so sorry.”

Thor also came.

And on

and

On. And.

A thousand gods and goddesses later, breathless, “They’re gonna keep coming,” you said to your husband.

“I think this is our curse, for killing a rat.”

“To open doors to gods forever? Look at what Ra did to the chairs, how much did they cost? Was it Thor’s lightning that took out the WiFi? I just didn’t want a rat problem, for fuck’s sake. We just got married, got a new home, and a rat problem?”

“Well, babe, now we’ve got a goddamn god problem on our hands!”