June 17 sees the release of Starstruck, the new novella from Aimee Ogden, an American Nebula- and Eugie Foster Award-nominated speculative fiction writer living in the Netherlands. What follows is a sneak peek for you, dear reader. You can preorder your very own trade paperback from us to arrive around release date until May 30th (after which all copies will be available for purchase through Ingram).
For now, read on.
Prish had always been the kind of radish who knew what she was about. Maybe that was why she hadn’t noticed sooner that Alsing had grown pensive and quiet in the evenings, that she took longer than usual washing up the dinner dishes or with the mending. Prish had never minded long silences; a thoughtful pause could cultivate all manner of interesting things. Plants like herself tended to have more patience than animals. Their lives-before, rooted to the ground and always waiting for a glimpse of sun, required such a temperament. So, out in the sprawling gardens behind their cabin, with the friendly pat of rhubarb leaves on her shoulders and the idle conversation of bumblebees in her ears, it was too easy to miss the things that didn’t get said, the hopes that got silently dashed, the neighborly visits that slowly dried up.
She’d noticed, of course, that no stars had fallen for a while. Hard to miss that their little cabin deep in the wood hadn’t welcomed any newly starstruck guests. The last such had been an elderly squirrel, his dark eyes suspicious of Alsing—a fox, herself—as she offered him clothes to fit his newly human-like form (she had long experience sewing trousers with a comfortable hole in the place where a tail should emerge). He’d stayed with them for two weeks, until his two-legged tottering grew steady and confident, until he had learned his way around cutlery and shirt-buttons and even (briefly and not entirely successfully) Alsing’s bicycle. Then they’d waved him off as he set out for the city, glancing back toward the cabin on every fourth or fifth step.
And not a soul since. They still sat out on the cabin’s little porch each evening, with cups of iced tea in the summer and steaming mugs of mulled wine in winter, and watched the skies. Sometimes a star would streak across the sky, but it always disappeared somewhere far behind the horizon, without the telltale flare of light to herald a new-made starstruck’s arrival in the world. “Looks like another quiet night,” Prish would say, when her eyes grew weary and her long leafy hair wilted for want of sleep. She and Alsing hadn’t yet lived in here the cabin long enough to have grown old together, but they weren’t young anymore, either. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Alsing always agreed, and it was easy enough not to worry about the extra time she took gathering herself up out of the rocking chair, the restless flick of her ears. She was forever flicking her ears, anyway, when she hadn’t yet had her morning cup of coffee or when Prish tracked dirt from the gardens into the kitchen or when she got too busy after that morning cup of coffee to take just one blasted minute to visit the outhouse, for goodness’ sake.
So one evening, in the early autumn, when Prish draped a faded quilt over her wife’s shoulders and kissed her cheek and invited her out to the porch, she was taken aback when Alsing said no, and burst into smothered, hiccupping sobs.
Prish maneuvered Alsing to the sofa, the same one that she’d found on the side of the street in the city twenty years ago, before they’d met. Alsing had sewn slipcovers for the arms of the sofa, to hide the worn spots and a worrying stain, and she picked at one of these now with the tip of one claw. Tea was made. Hugs were offered. A clean handkerchief was procured, and then, a second.
“It’s your starday,” she told Prish, with another damp honk into the much-abused handkerchief.
Prish filed this information away thoughtlessly in the coat pockets of her mind, where it would slip out again sooner or later when she rooted around there for the symptoms of grot-root in tomatoes or the last place she’d seen the farmer’s almanac. She marked Alsing’s starday yearly with alacrity, and with a massive bouquet of all their favorite flowers (it helped that Alsing’s starday fell at the end of May). Celebrating Prish’s own starday had never offered her much interest; to her it had always been a day like any other, and she’d long discouraged Alsing from making her desired fuss about it. And anyway, during the harvest season, there was plenty else to do, in the gardens and in the kitchen, besides nibble on cake; every other weekend she also hitched the cart to the back of a bicycle to take their extra provisions into the city of Eltomel, to deliver to the regular customers with whom they had arrangements.
Besides, her original starday hadn’t been that much of an event to begin with. Certainly nothing as traumatic or dramatic as Alsing’s. There had been a flash of light, accompanied by a flash of existence, and she’d pulled herself the rest of the way out of the soil of a small farm in the Lowland Downs. Starstruck ages didn’t match up exactly to those of their human counterparts, but she would have been a young woman, built stout and sturdy in a human-like shape with knotted, twisted stems and roots in place of flesh, with clumps of dirt still clinging to the tiny hairs on her arms and legs and feet. She’d gone up to the farmhouse and knocked on the door, where a human farmer had emerged in a nightshirt and a pair of muddy boots. He’d studied her for a moment and then yawned enormously. “Martha Ann!” he’d called over his shoulder, without quite waiting for the yawn to wrap up. “One of the watermelon radishes went and got starstruck. Fetch me down a pair of your old overalls, will you?”
And so Prish had been dressed, been cooked a midnight dinner of scrambled eggs and uncured bacon, and then been shooed off to sleep on a pile of old quilts by the old man and his daughter. When Prish woke up in the morning, the farmer handed her a basket and asked how she felt about chickens. She hadn’t been sure, just then, but she’d been willing to find out. (Chickens were perfectly fine, it turned out. She would have liked to keep a henhouse at the cabin, too, but Alsing said the temptation was too great.)
Waiting for Alsing to elaborate on the importance of her starday proved fruitless. Prish stroked the back of her hand, careful to follow the grain of the fur. “I’m not sure I understand, Whiskers. I don’t think you’re upset that I was starstruck in the first place?”
“Well, of course not!” Annoyance displaced some of the sadness in Alsing’s voice. She sat up a little straighter on the sofa and kicked Prish lightly in the shin. “Don’t be ridiculous, you mean old thing.” She delivered one last final-sounding blow into the handkerchief and set it aside. “It’s just that it marks a different anniversary, too. Haven’t you been counting? It’s been eighteen months. A year and a half.” Her head turned toward the little window that let out onto the porch. “Since the last star fell.”
Prish snorted. “It can’t have been that long already! Why, old Vendiero was just here in the spring, and…” She trailed off, doing the mental accounting. Not this spring, was it? This spring they’d used the little guest room as a storage space after an April storm took the roof off the shed. She felt her mouth open and close a few times, but nothing came out and nothing went in, not agreement or apologies or air. “Someone would have mentioned,” she insisted stubbornly. But who? They hardly ever saw their neighbors here, as far apart as they were all spread in the Craftwood, and when she went into the city, she kept her head down and made her deliveries and came swiftly back home.
“I know. I know. You do lose track of the time, dear heart.” Now it was Alsing’s turn to turn their hands over, so that hers lay on top of Prish’s, giving back some of the comfort she’d so recently taken. “But it has been a long, long time.”
“But surely somewhere else—” Prish cut herself off again. Even in Eltomel, she couldn’t remember the last time someone had ushered forward a hesitant new starstruck to meet her. Someone would have said something to her, wouldn’t they? But maybe it was too strange a subject to broach. Or maybe there had been gossip that Prish had missed: half-heard conversations, idle chatter.
She couldn’t make it make sense. They’d seen lights in the sky, over the last year and more. Just because none of the starstruck had arrived on their doorstep didn’t mean they hadn’t arrived anywhere at all. “They must be falling somewhere,” she insisted stubbornly.
They both sat with that hollow insistence for a moment, waiting for a fresh idea to breathe new life into it. Waiting for it to swell with real hope. But nothing came. Like the stars, it seemed, hope had somewhere better to be. If the stars were falling, they were falling too far away for them to know about it. Too far away for lonely starstruck to find their way into Eltomel to meet her.
It was too much to contemplate what might have stoppered up the stars; what it meant that the world would be deprived of any more beings as wonderful as Alsing ever again. Prish had always been the kind of radish who knew what she was about, and what she was about fell comfortably within the fences of her garden and the walls of her house and the confines of her heart. What she had always been about, really, was Alsing.
Alsing held out the quilt to one side, and Prish squeezed in alongside her, her chin resting on Alsing’s shoulder, Alsing’s ear flicking restlessly against the top of her head.
There was nothing else to do then but to ask it, the only question she could think of, the one whose answer she already knew and had to hear anyway.
“What do you want to do now?” she said.
“I…” Alsing’s ears stilled, flattening along the back of her head. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Prish marshaled arguments she knew would never see combat: the garden bed she’d just tucked in for a winter slumber under a thick blanket of compost, and the stalks still waiting for the first frost before they offered up one last harvest of sweet, plump sprouts. The raspberry jungle she’d coaxed out of a few recalcitrant canes, and the bench built for two on the back porch, and the three apple trees she’d planted last year that she would never see bear fruit. The last pumpkins, still green and unfulfilled on the vine.
“Well then,” Prish said briskly, sending her disappointment and disagreement to an unearned early retirement. “It only makes sense for us to go.”
It took a few days to sort through all their things, choosing what could go with them to Eltomel, what must stay, what they were in fact relieved to unburden themselves of. In the end, they had their two little suitcases stuffed with clothes, a steamer trunk of dubious quality full of household goods too beloved to part with, a basket of Alsing’s finished mending-work that would need to be returned to its city-folk owners, and a few apple boxes they packed with jars of jam and the last of the carrots and apples from the trees that had so long sheltered Prish’s gardens. It was an unbearably small collection to represent all the years they’d spent together here, but it was what would fit on the cart behind the bicycle, so that was that.
As apple trees themselves were not so readily packed up into boxes, Prish spent one quiet hour sitting beneath her favorite of the little orchard, a friendly stooped old thing. If a little sap escaped her eyes, she made sure it was dry before she went back inside.
They made love one last time in the old creaky bed, the intertwined roots between Prish’s legs softening, separating, to admit gentle fingers and carefully trimmed claws. Starstruck bodies were in many ways like human bodies—Alsing’s more than Prish’s—so that they could talk and eat and screw and sing. It was simply that they did so more or less differently than a human body would have done. Prish had no blood and no lungs and no proper guts and no bones. There was no reason she should have been able to experience sensations of the sexual variety, let alone whisper her wife’s name against her ear, or see the tip of her perfect black nose out of the corner of her eye. The only answer any doctor or scientist could give for how it all worked was “magic.” And it certainly felt like magic, didn’t it, to be held like this, and to love like that?
Once the heights of ecstasy had fallen away beneath her, Prish found herself breathing hard and fast, waiting for sweet reason to return to her thick radish head. The pale green loops of stem around her torso had gone somewhat slack, and between them, glimmers of gold light could be seen: her star, locked away inside her chest—no bigger than a marble, yet filled, somehow, with everything that made her Prish, a radish with a name and a favorite person and any number of bad habits.
“Put that away,” said Alsing teasingly, and pretended to cover the star with the palm of her paw. “Positively indecent.” Somewhere behind her own fur and flesh and bone, beside her own beating heart, the same sort of star shone with hidden light. She said, turning the page of her mood to a more serious chapter: “You’ll hold me, won’t you, until I fall asleep?”
“I’ll hold you to the end of the world,” Prish promised, “and farther. If you’re willing to stay married to me after a trip like that.”
They curled up together, heads and shoulders and hips turning this way and that until a comfortable compromise of position could be achieved. Though she never succeeded, Prish tried as she always did to stay awake until Alsing fell asleep. This time, as ever, her whirling thoughts weren’t enough to keep her eyes open—they only spun her around and around into a quick, dizzy slumber.
When she dreamed, she dreamed of the old farmer’s fields and the patchwork night sky over Eltomel, where the streetlamps held back the full weight of the dark. It was she who woke first, as was also usually her custom, with Alsing’s warm breath on her shoulder. She moved away from its whiskery tickle against her flesh but couldn’t go far with Alsing’s head on her arm. She sighed.
It had been a long time since she’d really studied the beams of the ceiling over the bed; the way the dawnlight broke in through the dusty window. She understood why Alsing couldn’t bear to be here any longer—but she also didn’t want to go. Eltomel was somewhere else, and it was, at least, familiar; or it had been once. But right now, she felt that there wasn’t any place that would ever be fully theirs, fully right, for them. This had been that place, here in between the lumpy mattress and the dust-fogged window; but this place had stopped existing to Alsing, now that the skies had dried up.
Perhaps distance would make it stop existing for Prish, too.
Her arm had started to tingle; she adjusted it minutely beneath Alsing’s neck without disturbing her. You couldn’t belong somewhere, she thought, not really and not forever. But you could belong to someone, and she should count herself fortunate to have found just such a person. She would do anything for that person, if she asked it. Or if she didn’t ask. There were worse things to lose than a place, however dear.
Eltomel wasn’t so far, all things considered. And Prish always did her best to consider every last thing.
STARSTRUCK, the new novella from Aimee Ogden.
