apparition literary magazine 7...there was also a lot of love there, and her death was too fast, and...

APPARITION LITERARY MAGAZINE

Issue 7, July 2019

Lora Gray, Maria Haskins, Aimee Ogden, Lora Gray, Ellen Huang, Nisa Malli, Rebecca Bennett

Cover Art by buboplague

https://ohnoooooo.weebly.com/

Edited by Tacoma Tomilson, Managing Editor Rebecca Bennett, Associate Editor and Cover Art Director Clarke Doty, Associate Editor Amy Henry Robinson, Associate Editor, Poetry Editor and Webmaster

Copyright © 2018 by Apparition Literary Magazine All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a review.

https://www.apparitionlit.com/


Table of Contents Editorial

A Word from our Editor by Clarke Doty

Short Fiction and Poetry

Our Roots Devour by Lora Gray

Dead Meat by Maria Haskins

Sea Witch from the Deep by Ellen Huang

His Heart is the Haunted House by Aimee Ogden

The Wolf of Pendarvis by Genevieve Sinha

Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, pilots the interstellar ark by Nisa Malli

Interview

Artist Interview with buboplague

Essay

Planting the Seed: From Now and Then to Beneath a Sugar Sky by Rebecca Bennett

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Past Issues

Apparition Lit |1


Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride (William Goldman)

Inigo is the best character in The Princess Bride (and if you disagree, you’re wrong). His long-pursued retribution is so satisfying. He never gives up, never lets go of that anger. He earns that revenge moment. And I’ve never related to him more than I have in the past two months. On May 17, my mom died. Like many mother-daughter relationships, ours had its share of conflict. But there was also a lot of love there, and her death was too fast, and I’m still angry. Those Kubler-Ross stages of grief don’t always come in any particular order. I could bounce around all five of them in one day, which is exhausting, but anger seems to be the stage where I spend the most time.

If Grief is the concept album I dropped two months ago and Anger is my hit single, Retribution is that weird track a lot of people skip, that the radio won’t play, but is super relatable to a handful of similarly angry listeners. These past few weeks have been filled with revenge-themed daydreams, nightmares, and intrusive thoughts. And these thoughts get pretty dark.

A little backstory: My mom had a wonderful oncologist who retired. His replacement was a smug prick who would come into the exam room talking about the wrong patient and leave the room while my mother was still trying to ask questions. She told me she felt ignored and didn’t trust him. I encouraged her to get a new oncologist. But due to her habit of often putting others’ feelings before her own (she didn’t want to be “rude”) with a bit of Keeping Up Appearances and a touch of Don’t Question the Doctor, my mother did not fire his ass. This guy also ignored my requests to scan her belly. She was diagnosed with carcinoid cancer in her GI tract years ago, they “couldn’t get it all” with surgery and radiation, so they monitored her and focused on managing her symptoms. The new oncologist treated her recent breast cancer but ignored all the symptoms that screamed progression of


carcinoid cancer—severe abdominal pain, diarrhea and dehydration, vomiting and malnutrition, can’t-get-out-of-bed-today weakness, dizziness and falls, edema… This picture’s caption would read, “Hey, your cancer has spread, and now your liver and kidneys aren’t working so good, nor is the rest of your body.” Had the oncologist listened to us, I don’t think there would have been anything they could do treatment-wise to change the progression of disease. But she didn’t have to suffer like she did. She could have had hospice more than just the four days before she died. She could have had pain relief and end-of-life support and maybe even a fucking bucket list. We could have prepared her grandchildren. We could have…

And here I go again down the anger spiral. See why? At my angriest, I want to ruin his life. “I hope he gets cancer and has an oncologist who doesn’t listen to him and dies a horrible, painful, lonely death.” At my pettiest, I still want to ruin his life, just in a different way. “I hope he loses his medical license in an embarrassing scandal and his income plummets and his wife leaves him and his children have to go to public school with the rest of us commoners. And his doctor golf club kicks him out, which is probably the worst thing he can imagine, since he clearly has no empathy for people with cancer.” I want to pursue him across land and sea, suffer and persevere, stay angry, and earn my retribution. And when he begs for mercy, I’ll say, “I want my mother back, you son of a bitch” just like Inigo. In a weird way, that anger is comforting. It’s something to hold onto that makes me feel righteous rather than powerless. I would never actually do any of these things. I spend plenty of time with those other stages of grief, even moments of Acceptance. I’ll eventually be less angry and vengeful, and I’m “doing the work,” as my shrink says. But for now, I think wishing for retribution is probably part of the healing.

Retribution can take many forms. The stories and poems of this issue are all different approaches to the theme and all equally powerful and moving.

Our Roots Devour by Lora Gray (@LoraJGray): This young protagonist had my heart from page one, and I could read a trilogy of novels about these two sisters. I may have teared up at the end.

“Hannah took a deep breath and started to Sing. The words wasn’t words I understood. They was vowels pulled long as taffy, consonants sharp as hail, purrs and clicks winding back and forth like a snake.”

https://twitter.com/LoraJGray

Apparition Lit |3

Dead Meat by Maria Haskins (@mariahaskins): If Rhea and Gaby were real people, I would convince them to be my friends and I’d listen to their banter all day everyday. The imagery in this story is so wonderfully creepy, and the story’s retribution is [spoilers redacted]. I wish I could read this for the first time again!

“Its furtive movements are like a tickle underneath my skin, a shudder in my bones, a shiver in my skull. The door is enough to hold it at bay, for now, but that smell... It’s too familiar for outer space.”

Sea Witch from the Deep by Ellen Huang (@nocturnalxlight): A unique spin on an iconic fairy-tale character. The last three stanzas are a gut punch.

“The first two spells came so naturally And was it evil of me to save myself, or save another? Is evil done so easily? I linger between the spaces of the dream or what could be a memory Between the darkness and light of my ability”

Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, pilots the interstellar ark by Nisa Malli (@nisamalliwrites): The next time someone (who last read a poem when it was a homework assignment) asks me, “How can poetry be sci-fi?” I’m going to show them this poem.

“When I’m bored I measure the distance between destination and disaster.”

His Heart Is the Haunted House by Aimee Odgen (@Aimee_Ogden): An utterly immersive read. And the themes of guilt and regret really hit home.

“When the hunter gets to her death, he calls her that cute redhead. He and his friend roll descriptions of her dogman-gnawed corpse alongside mouthfuls of masticated bread. The splintered bones. The sewer smell of her ruined guts.”

The Wolf of Pendarvis by Genevieve Sinha (@genevievesinha): The prose blew me away. This is the kind of story that I read and immediately want to reread—first for the journey and then for the language and imagery.

https://twitter.com/MariaHaskins

https://twitter.com/nocturnalxlight

https://twitter.com/nisamalliwrites

https://twitter.com/Aimee_Ogden

https://twitter.com/genevievesinha


“Everything lives by the death of another. With every breath, every mouthful of nourishment, we take. Plants take from the soil, and the deer from the plants, and we from the deer, and the Great Wolf from us. Circles that turn within circles, tightening the noose between that which is living and that which is dead.”

Each piece struck a unique chord with us. For me, these beautiful works couldn’t have come at a more needed time. It’s been therapeutic reading about all the permutations of retribution, about characters’ choices and mistakes, about those who survive and those who don’t.

Seeing ourselves in fiction, even (or especially) if it’s not pretty, can be cathartic in a safe and healthy way. So thank you, contributors, for sending us your prose and verse. I basically got free therapy, and you got to help prevent an angry daughter from challenging a bad doctor to a duel.

Thank you,

Clarke Doty

Apparition Lit |5


Momma always told us the Tree ain’t got a taste for our family’s blood. But it’s hard to keep my heart from hammering when I lay that blackbird, swaddled like a baby in one of Momma’s old blouses, against its roots. The Tree’s face is pinched and lurksome in the afternoon light. And those roots? They crawl out the river like spider legs, knots and whorls winking at me like we got secrets between us.

Maybe we do.

But I don’t rightly know how to share them, I don’t know how to Sing to that Tree. Hannah’s the one who got Momma’s voice, not me.

I try not to think about what that blackbird’ll look like all chewed up and wrung round the Tree’s branches like an old dish towel when I run back up the gully and through the woods. I think about my momma, even though she’s dead and gone under the earth. And I think about Hannah in the cellar where Aunt Marylou put her, tied up and gagged, all her magic silent.

I run faster.

I only stop when I reach the edge of the woods, my side stitching, my bare arms sweaty and bramble scratched. There, across the tangle of grass that used to be our tomato garden, is Aunt Marylou’s house, that shack with the old barn leaning against it, rotted planks slumped on busted gutters. The hayloft window gapes like it’s surprised to see me there, crouched in the chicory.

One of these days that barn’s gonna fall right over and smash Aunt Marylou’s shack. Maybe Aunt Marylou’ll be there when it happens, sitting like she is now on her back porch in that rocking chair of hers. There’s a half-gone jar of hooch in her hand. It’s the strong stuff she trades Pickle Nelson


for, and the turpentine stink pulls tears out the corners of my eyes when the wind shifts. She takes a drink. The hooch sloshes. The jar clinks.

There’s an axe in Aunt Marylou’s lap, the handle long, the blade shining, and she touches it. She prays. “Show me what You want me to do,” she says over and over again. “Show me what You want me to do.”

Closing her eyes, she lights her cigarette.

I take my chance, gnats swarming all ‘round me, as I crawl into the tall grass, past her, across the lawn to that dark space between the shack and the barn where the cellar sets.

The paint on the cellar door is flakey. The hinges are rusty.

The padlock is new.

“Hannah?” I whisper, leaning down to try to see between the cracked planks.

It’s dark as tar down there, but I hear shuffling, bare feet on packed dirt and I imagine Hannah between all them cobwebs and last year’s canned tomatoes, her mouth stuffed with a dirty handkerchief, her hands tied up and clenched like she’s fixing to pound the whole world flat. She kicks a mason jar, and I wonder how many she broke since Aunt Marylou locked her down there last night.

“I done it,” I say. “I killed one of them birds that’s always on the Nelson’s fence. You know, the black ones? I don’t think Aunt Marylou saw.”

Hannah makes a frustrated sound. A scared sound. ‘Cause she’s been down there all day and time’s running out. I’m afraid to tell her about Aunt Marylou’s axe and how it looked fit for chopping through wood or bones or both. ‘Cause that blackbird, that tiny offering, it ain’t gonna do much unless somebody Sings to the Tree.

I ain’t got our momma’s gift.

I’m just stupid, slow, tone deaf Becky.

I shift closer to the door. “What else can I--?”

Apparition Lit |7

Maybe my voice is a little too loud, a little too croaky and rough, ‘cause Aunt Marylou’s praying snaps silent. There’s a creak, like she’s moving off the porch and a low schff, like she’s dragging that axe behind her.

Hannah makes a tight, muffled sound and I smell piss. Sweat. Fear.

Aunt Marylou’s footsteps, they shake the earth. Or maybe it’s the Tree I’m feeling, trembling to life in the gully by the river, opening its mouth, readying to feed, waiting for somebody to tell it what to do.

A shadow falls over me from behind.

“What you doing, Rebecca?” Aunt Marylou asks. “Where you been?”

I turn to look up at her. The low sun makes a halo of her white hair, like she’s fit for sainthood. Her face is the same brand of bright as when she belts one of us for “our own good.” Her cigarette flares between her teeth. Her axe glints.

I press my hand to the cellar door, and I imagine Hannah pressing her hand back.

Legs shaky, I stand.

Momma always told us the Tree ain’t got a taste for our family’s blood.

Momma always told us the Tree don’t hurt family.

*

When we was little, our momma told us our kinfolk used to gather round the Tree and pray like they was at church. By the time Momma was born, though, most everyone was interested in other things: Model T’s and the war in Europe and that fancy new chapel in the next holler with its stained glass and pearl white walls.

Only our great granny still practiced the old ways. Every Sunday, she put on her best dress and went down to the gully to Sing to the Tree. Most of our kin pretended not to notice, but our momma, she sat on her back porch and she listened. She felt that rumbling underground and when she heard Granny Sing, she started making them sounds too.

Granny, she said our momma had the gift.


She started taking Momma with her on Sundays. She taught her to bury her hands deep in the earth, to understand all them deep rumblings, to Sing the Tree using blood magic, to bring offerings, a young fawn or a turtle, laid down, gently like they was babies, between the Tree’s roots at night. Sometimes, if they Sang hard enough, the Tree would understand their blood magic and do them favors. A fox that done raided the coops? Gone. Locusts nipping holes in the new corn? Gone. A bear that killed one of Uncle Jim’s hounds? Gone.

Momma Sang to the Tree a whole year before her family moved to Lychfield. She begged to stay behind with Granny, with the Tree and the old magic, but her papa needed the work.

Lychfield was a dead town, Momma always told us, where the trees was silent and the people forgot the world shouldn’t sound like TNT and coal mines. She only stayed there ‘cause of her papa and then ‘cause she got pregnant, first with Hannah and then with me.

When Momma got the cancer, when she lost her job and all our money to medicine, the doctors told her she had to go to a big city, to a place where the earth was choked with concrete and metal, to a real hospital. Momma wasn’t having it.

She traded our trailer for an old pickup truck and we left to find our kinfolk, our land, our Tree.

Even though most of our family was moved away or dead, even though all that was left was an old barn and a shack and Aunt Marylou, standing there to meet us, all wrinkles and sternness on the front porch with a cigarette in one hand and a jar of hooch in the other, our momma, she was happy. ‘Cause the Tree, it was still alive and hungry and waiting for somebody to Sing to it again.

*

Every Sunday, Momma Sang.

She’d blow out the lanterns in the drafty corner of the hayloft Aunt Marylou fixed “special” for us and she tucked me and Hannah into our ratty little mattress and kissed us goodnight, ‘cause we was too young, she said, to go with her.

Apparition Lit |9

Me and Hannah always sneaked out of bed to watch from the hayloft window, though, as Momma, her back straight and tall, walked toward the woods.

Aunt Marylou charged after her, pink robe flying, curlers gripping her head like angry purple fingers. She stood there on her porch, thumping her Good Book on the railing, hollering about “witchcraft,” saying that if Momma didn’t stop, she was going straight to hell, that if we wasn’t family, she’d kick her right out. Right out!

Momma, she just kept walking.

Sometimes, after Aunt Marylou drank herself to sleep, if the night was quiet enough and the wind shifted just right, we could hear our Momma’s voice, burbling and cool, drifting up from the gully. We couldn’t make out the words, but Hannah, she’d find the melody and hum along in that sweet, perfect voice of hers. And the rotted timbers in that hayloft would shiver when the earth below shook.

I tried making them sweet sounds too, but nothing ever shivered for me.

“You got a toad voice,” Hannah said. “Now shush! You’re ruining it.”

I knew she was right. Hannah was always right. Always better. Always prettier. Always smarter.

Always everything.

Sometimes, after Hannah fell asleep, I’d pray that Hannah’s pretty voice would disappear, that she’d sound ugly, like me. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so alone.

Once, when me and Momma was weeding the tomatoes, I told her in my little toad voice, “I ain’t never gonna sound pretty like you and Hannah. I ain’t never gonna be special.”

Momma sat back on her heels and looked at me funny. When she hugged me, she smelled like tomato greens and earth. I could feel her ribs, her body already starting to go to bone.


“Real magic ain’t always pretty, little bug,” Momma said and kissed my hair. “You’ll grow into it.”

“What if I don’t?” I asked.

“Then I suppose I’ll teach you.”

Just then, Hannah came running into the tomato garden, breathless and saying she could feel rumbling in the ground near the gully and Momma lit up, bright as Christmas morning. She took Hannah’s hand in hers and told me she’d be right back like she always did.

They left me there, alone in the weeds.

Momma never did teach me how to Sing.

*

July was pouring out the sky, hot and sticky, the day Momma died. We was picking blackberries, me and Hannah, so Momma could bake a pie, when Hannah got this queer look on her face, like she heard something far off and awful, like she might be sick.

“We gotta get back,” she said.

She grabbed my hand, but I squirmed and kicked her. I was tired of her bossing me. Tired of her always acting like she knew something I didn’t.

Hannah finally dropped her basket and ran, berries skittering onto the ground behind her.

I picked up all them blackberries. Every last one. Momma’d be so proud of me, I thought. I’d have a whole basket full and Hannah? For once, she’d have nothing at all.

For once, I’d be better.

I found Momma at the top of the hill near the edge of the woods. She was face down, her arms flung wide like she was trying to sink right down into that soil. A pair of flies was crawling up her waxy arm and the back of her bare neck. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing.

Apparition Lit |11

Hannah was there beside her, crying, her face covered in dirt, her hands pressed to her ears like the whole wide world was screaming and she couldn’t bear to hear it.

I sometimes wonder why Hannah was allowed to feel it when our momma died and not me. Why all I had was her dead body on top of a hill, gone and empty.

I still wonder, sometimes, why neither of us was good enough for Momma to want to stay above ground with us.

*

Hannah asked Aunt Marylou after the funeral if she thought the Tree would still Sing now that Momma was gone. Aunt Marylou, she hauled Hannah onto the back porch by the scruff, yanked down her dungarees and took a switch to her backside so hard she couldn’t sit for a whole day afterward.

Aunt Marylou told us we wasn’t to go anywhere near that Tree. We wasn’t to talk about it ever again.

Aunt Marylou was gonna raise us up proper now, she said. With morals. Discipline. Didn’t we know how much she done sacrificed so we could live with her? Didn’t we know what a blessing it was? We needed to forget all that “devil’s magic” and the Tree. We was going to church school and grow up into “real young ladies.”

I weren’t never gonna be a real lady. And I didn’t want to go to Aunt Marylou’s church school, neither. I just wanted Momma back.

I wanted somebody to love me.

I didn’t realize ‘til I heard Aunt Marylou try to sing along with one of the hymns at Momma’s funeral that she had a voice like mine. She chewed all them beautiful melodies up and spat them back out again, ugly as sin in that white walled chapel. Maybe that was why she started paying me so much attention. ‘Cause misery, it does love company and we was both mighty miserable singers.

“Rebecca,” she’d say. “Why’re you slouching? Straighten up! You been sucking your hair again? You been biting your nails?”


She never smiled like my momma did, but one day, she peeled back her lips, showed me her teeth and said, “I ain’t never thought I’d have a daughter.”

“How come?” I asked.

“I never found me a husband.”

“Momma didn’t need no husband.”

I got a switch for my sass.

Still, as the days stretched on after Momma’s death, Aunt Marylou starting bringing me into her house. It smelled like cigarettes and the underside of river rocks in there and Aunt Marylou set me to sewing and scrubbing. She made me clean skillets with lye. She said the way Momma taught me to cook was wrong and her knobby hands covered mine, shoving them through the motions of frying and baking ‘til my fingers ached.

Sometimes she’d give me her old hair ribbons and acted like that somehow made us best friends. I tried to like them even though they stank like smoke and mothballs. I tried to smile like she did, to make her happy. I sat with my back straight as a board on that old couch of hers, all covered in plastic, cigarette burns rising like tiny suns all along the edges. I said them prayers of hers over and over again.

I tried to be what she wanted, first to keep from getting whooped, and then so she would love me.

One day, me and Hannah was weeding when Aunt Marylou called for me to come in. Not Hannah. Never Hannah.

I got up, real fast with a “Yes, Ma’am!” all them smoky ribbons in my hair, wearing a dress instead of dungarees because that’s what Aunt Marylou said real ladies wore.

Hannah, she just sat there in the weeds, her eyes glassy and staring down toward the gully, the river, the Tree. One hand was buried in the dirt and her head, it was cocked like she was listening for something.

“Hannah!” Aunt Marylou snapped. “Don’t slouch!”

Apparition Lit |13

Hannah didn’t move.

Even though I told myself I should like the attention, I felt rotten when Aunt Marylou wrapped her arm around me and pulled me, just me, inside, and left Hannah there, slumped in the weeds.

“Lord help me, she’s just like your momma,” Aunt Marylou said, snorting ‘round her cigarette. “It’ll take a firm hand with that one. But wicked is what wicked is and it can’t be helped. Now come over here, Rebecca, and we’ll pray. That’s a good girl.”

I’d never been nobody’s “good girl” before, so I took Aunt Marylou’s hand and I closed my eyes. I tugged all them words about damnation and hellfire apart in my head. I imagined rearranging them into sounds burbling and cool.

I imagined Aunt Marylou’s hand was Momma’s.

I pretended it didn’t hurt.

*

It was August, the night muggy and clammy and not fit for sleeping when I woke and saw Hannah climbing down the hayloft ladder.

I thought maybe she was going for a piss in the bucket we kept near the barn door, but I heard the latch and the door creaking open and, sure enough, out she went.

We wasn’t supposed to go out at night alone. Not ever. But Aunt Marylou’d been drinking and the thought of telling on Hannah and her getting the belt made everything in me go sour.

So I followed my sister instead. Across the yard and down into the gully I went, into the woods, through all them tarry nighttime shadows, crickets chattering all ‘round me. Quiet. Careful. Toward the river, toward the Tree.

I don’t know what horrors I expected to see down there, but it sure wasn’t a tumble of dark fur in one if the Tree’s hollows. It wasn’t tiny legs and ears spilling down the bark like half chewed food. It wasn’t a rabbit’s head,


black eyes shining, spine still attached and dangling from a low branch like a mouse tail from a cat’s mouth.

It wasn’t Hannah, standing beneath it, one of Momma’s old nightgowns shimmering around her like a ghost, her pale arms bare for all the night time world to see.

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled and all ‘round me the air was buzzing, like a storm was coming on, even though the night was clear.

Under my feet, the earth rumbled.

And the Tree? It moved. Like it been shook by a wind, it moved, trunk shimmying in the moon glow, branches ticking to life one by one. There was a creak. A groan. The Tree’s hollows yawned wide like they was made of rubber. And then the Tree’s hollows, they wasn’t hollows no more. They was mouths. I smelled blood. Meat. Bits and pieces of rabbit slopped onto Hannah’s shoulders and into her hair.

Hannah took a deep breath and started to Sing.

The words wasn’t words I understood. They was vowels pulled long as taffy, consonants sharp as hail, purrs and clicks winding back and forth like a snake. Hannah kneeled, slow and shaky, and wrapped her naked arms round The Tree’s trunk. She opened her mouth wide.

Her voice was burbling and cool.

It was Momma’s voice.

It was the voices of all our dead kinfolk, singing like a choir into the deep, dark night.

It was beautiful.

The Tree’s trunk swelled, curved up and over Hannah. Its eyes rolled white. I saw jaggy teeth in those wooden mouths. And those mouths? They smiled.

I found my feet. I ran fast as I could. I skidded and slid. The Tree’s roots knuckled up and out the earth, shoving dirt aside and closing round Hannah. Like a fist? A hug? Was it trying to bite her? Love her? I didn’t rightly know.

Apparition Lit |15

I scrambled up and over them roots. I grabbed Hannah and shook her hard and screamed, “Get up, get up, get up!”

Hannah blinked at me, bleary and confused. I yanked her to her feet and dragged her back up the hill and through the woods.

I was cussing, crying and laughing, desperate and scared. The earth was rumbling all ‘round us and Momma’s voice was echoing through the air and Hannah, she was laughing too, bright with blood magic and wild and drunk on all that power she done Sang into the world.

“Did you hear it?” Hannah grabbed both my arms and she looked at me, for the first time ever, like maybe I was special too. Like I was her sister. “Did you hear it?!”

I nodded. I was going to tell her, yes, yes! I felt it! I heard it!

But when we ran out of the chicory and into the open grass between the woods and Aunt Marylou’s shack, Aunt Marylou was standing on her back porch, waiting.

*

My Aunt Marylou, she don’t know beauty. Not really. Her ears are so plugged up with fear and hate that she could never understand the songs our kinfolk make.

It was that fear that made her yank my sister’s hand out of mine. It was hate that made her beat Hannah with her belt and wrestle her into that dark cellar and tie her up and gag her so her pretty voice, that was so much like Momma’s, went silent.

When Aunt Marylou turned to me then, bright and panting and smiling like we was best friends, like them smoky ribbons in my hair somehow made me hers, and told me to pray like she did, I knew.

Aunt Marylou?

She weren’t my family.

So I waited until morning. I gathered up my courage. I took my slingshot and I killed me a blackbird. I swaddled it in one of Momma’s old


blouses like it was a baby, and I laid that offering against The Tree’s roots like Hannah done, like Momma and all our kinfolk had always done.

And now?

Now I’m standing over the cellar where my sister is, trapped and crying. And I’m looking up at Aunt Marylou and she’s looking down at me with that axe in her hand, like it’s fit for splitting wood or bone or both. And she’s smiling.

But Aunt Marylou, don’t know.

That Tree down there is hungry.

And that Tree stopped thinking of Aunt Marylou as family a long time ago, too.

So I run, fast as I can, past Aunt Marylou and toward the woods.

“Rebecca!” Aunt Marylou’s voice cracks after me like a whip. “You come back here!”

I don’t stop. I jump over logs. I scramble under bushes and leap jackrabbit fast over rocks, until I’m there, at the river, at that Tree. I fall onto its roots.

Above me, the blackbird I gifted it is half chewed and tangled in the Tree’s mouth, wet feathers spiked skywise, beak unhinged and split like a broken walnut shell. I wrap my arm ‘round the Tree. I cling so hard I shake. I taste blood. I smell death all over.

And this whole place? Our kinfolk’s land? It’s nothing but death. How could Momma not see that? How could she not know? She just brought us here so death could take her too. And now our whole world is nothing but switches and belts and prayers we don’t believe. And my sister? She’s trapped underground now, like our momma.

Everything I love keeps going to earth.

And I never been good enough to stop any of it.

Apparition Lit |17

Then, oh then, I cry. Loud and long, my ugly little toad voice crashing through the woods so loud I can’t even hear Aunt Marylou screaming my name. Just me wailing.

Just me Singing.

I feel it, that deep, deep rumble. Only this time, it ain’t coming from the Tree. It’s coming from low in my chest. My heart ain’t a heart no more. It’s a jackhammer under my ribs, pounding all the world awake. It rushes down my legs and arms, my toes and fingers and into that craggy bark I’m clinging to. Sounds pour out of me, my mouth making words I ain’t never heard before, wild and old. Everything is blood. Sap. Leaves. Limbs and roots and life and death filling me up ‘til I’m like to burst with it.

The Tree shudders.

The Tree moves.

Bark heaves under me and I look up to see branches rocketing into the sky and somehow, somehow, I’m moving too, even though I’m still clutching the Tree. I’m roaring underground, pounding through those roots when they shove all that soil aside, through burrows and rocks, tunnels, a wall of stones. A concrete slab. I’m there when those roots rip into the kitchen. I’m there when those branches tear the roof off. I’m worming into that chimney, I’m hurling shingles and floorboards, busting through plaster walls. I’m swallowing linoleum and plastic covered couches.

I’m wrapping myself ‘round that barn and I’m shoving it over.

And maybe my mouth is full of wooden teeth and blackbird feathers. And maybe there’s someone else screaming now, white hair flying, cigarette burning, hooch and axe dropping to the ground like a thunder clap. And maybe the whole world is howling for one beautiful minute and maybe my roots, they devour it all.

But I know for certain that when I reach out with one delicate branch and snap that padlock away from the cellar door, I’m smiling.

I’m smiling still when my sister finds me.

The sun is climbing over the river, warm and soft. The ground under me is dewy and the earth is quiet. The Tree? It’s still.


I look up and I see Hannah at the bottom of the gully, her eyes wide and shadow-punched.

I stand.

I tug the gag from my sister’s mouth. I untie her hands. I hold them tight.

And when I speak, my voice, it ain’t pretty. It’s still rough and ugly as a toad.

But it’s powerful strong.

Lora Gray is a fiction writer and poet from Northeast Ohio. Their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in several publications including Pseudopod, Strange Horizons and Shimmer. When they aren't writing, Lora works as an illustrator, dance instructor and wrangler of a very smart cat named Cecil. You can find them on twitter @LoraJGray

Apparition Lit |19


“Hey.” I nudge Rhea with my foot because my clumsy hands are busy trying to make sense of the disassembled blast-gun. “Are you still dead?”

I’d let her rest in peace, but it’s hard to stay awake and alert all by myself in this cramped supply room, harder still to not just lie down and die next to her.

“Of course I’m dead, you newt,” Rhea grumbles. She sounds as if we're still in bed together. As if she's not crumpled, broken and unseeing, on the floor beside me. As if her jaw and limbs aren't stiffening with rigor mortis. “Now shut up, Gaby, and put that gun together.”

“Dammit, Rhea. I’m an exo-biologist, not a weapons’ expert.”

That makes her chuckle. Always does. “Cute. But time’s running out, you know.”

I know.

Time's running out because it is still out there, on the other side of the supply room's door. It killed Gaby and the others, and now it wants to kill me. I know it’s out there, even though it shouldn't be. Even though this exo-planet is nothing but ice and rock and slimy undergrowth. I know it is prowling through every nook and cranny of our station. Its furtive movements are like a tickle underneath my skin, a shudder in my bones, a shiver in my skull. The door is enough to hold it at bay, for now, but that smell... It’s too familiar for outer space.

I know that smell.

It smells like a shallow hole dug in the ground, and something left to fester.


It smells like Grandpa’s basement when I went there that last time with Mom.

It smells like dead meat.

My Grandpa didn’t believe in space travel and scoffed at the exploration of exo-planets. He thought it was nothing but a reckless swindle by the global government and its lackey corporations.

"Why should we go off to other planets when we can't even take care of our own?" he'd say. "Nothing good will ever come of it."

He was 108 and senile then, but right now, right here, trapped in a supply room at the ass-end of the galaxy, slipping in and out of consciousness, I think he might have been right.

“Where’s Tommy?” I ask. “Do you think he made it? Do you think he might have sent out an emergency alert?”

Rhea laughs. “Tommy’s dead meat, Gaby. We all are.”

“What about Anneke? António?”

Rhea keeps laughing, even though she’s not breathing.

I wish Rhea wasn’t dead. I wish I could access the comm-module in the central hub and call in an extraction team. I wish I had something to defend myself with, instead of a gun in fifteen useless pieces. Scope. Grip-frame. Forearm. Charging handle. Power-cell. And ten parts that I can’t figure out what they’re for, ten chunks of black metal that slip and tumble from my shaking hands, resisting every attempt to click-clack them together.

“Quit stalling and assemble that weapon, Gaby. That's an order. It’s all you’ve got, remember? Got to give it your best shot.”

“Shut up,” I gripe, “you’re dead, remember?”

She’s unfazed, as usual.

“I know. And you’re a klutz.”

“At least I’m doing better than you.”

Apparition Lit |21

“Sure about that?”

My hands tremble.

No.

Above the door, the bright green light keeps flashing. It’s shining in my eyes, making it hard to see, but what’s there to see, anyway? I’m barefoot, dressed in my baggy, olive-green pyjamas, stuck on the floor of supply room 2B with a disassembled weapon and a dead body. The steel shelves above me are packed tight with crates of tech supplies and scientific equipment, spare parts and tools, but only one weapon case (count it: one) previously containing the fifteen pieces of this blast gun, neatly stored in shipping-foam.

It’s a real-life version of the recurring nightmares I had while I waited to hear what deep-space hellhole would need a newbie exo-biologist like me. All those nightmares ended the same way--with me, helpless, either unarmed or unable to fire my weapon, pinned down by some huge and hungry lifeform on a hostile world. That’s why I was so relieved when the Company sent me here, to a planet without sentient life--nothing but rocks, ice, and lichen. That's what the recruiter told me. An easy ride.

“How’s that easy ride working out for you?” Rhea asks, as if she’s not only dead but able to read my mind, too.

My giggle turns into a sob. “Not so good. Not so good at all.”

“At least we still have each other,” she chuckles, and by then I’m crying.

“You’re such a sap,” I snivel, and reach for her hand. It’s cold, but I squeeze it anyway, holding on as my mind flickers and sputters, like a flame about to go out.

*

First time I met Rhea was in the airlock, putting on my thermo-suit, the day I arrived. I was still nauseous from cryo and the trip through the Veil; still amazed and giddy to plant my feet on exo-planet soil. She was hefting that blaster of hers, looking like a kid’s action figure, all biceps and buzz cut and tattoos.


“Don’t go outside unaccompanied or unarmed, it’s company policy on any exo-surface,” she admonished me, sizing up my shiny new gear with a jaundiced squint.

“What for? There’s nothing out there but us and that damn lichen I’m supposed to study.”

That made her crack a smile. I smiled back. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

We stood together outside for a bit, looking at the rime-shimmering expanse of rocks and ridges. Dark green, slick swaths of growth peeked through the frost on the ground, trailing up the walls and vents and heat-exchangers of the station. On the horizon, the golden band of planetary rings bisected an amethyst sky lit by four distant moons.

I thought of Earth. Thought of the life that teemed there, even now, though we'd done our best to snuff it out. This world seemed so bleak and fragile compared to where we'd come from. But here we were, out in space, finding new worlds to study, to trample, to mine, to process, to break.

Maybe I thought of Grandpa even then. Of how he'd said nothing good would ever come of it. But Rhea’s gloved hand closed around mine--firm and real--like a promise that didn’t need to be spoken, and that was enough for me.

*

The fifteen pieces are scattered all over the floor. Nothing fits. Nothing clicks into place with that sexy, satisfying metal sound.

“Line ‘em up, Gaby. Like I showed you when we practiced.”

“Dammit, Rhea. I’m a brainiac, not a space marine.”

She snorts.

My hands look green in the light, veins a darker shade than the skin. The pattern of veins makes me think of roots. Makes me think of moss. Makes me think of mould and slick algae in an unkempt aquarium. Makes me think of Grandpa, and Mom, and the basement, and the writing on the wall, and...

Apparition Lit |23

No. No. Not that. That was a lifetime and a universe away.

I grab hold of my unravelling thoughts, forcing them together.

That light above the door, it used to flash red. I'm almost sure of it. A siren sounded, some sort of alarm, so loud it was deafening. That’s what woke us. There’s still a faint ringing in my ears, but no sirens, not anymore. No screams either. There's no one left to scream--no one but me.

I need this gun. I need to make it work. It’s the one thing I was never able to learn in training, no matter how I practiced. But I’ve got to remember how it’s done. I’ve got to remember Rhea’s calloused, no-nonsense hands, guiding mine, showing me the steps. I can't let the memories melt and drip like green wax, twisting, turning, changing into something else…

…into Grandpa’s basement. The mould trailing across the windows, creeping up and down the walls--growing into patterns and symbols, spelling out hidden words and indecipherable messages. As if it had a mind of its own, as if it were a creature spread out in spores and slimy tendrils, whispering to me of other deaths and horrors yet to come.

Mom shouldn’t have brought me there. I was only eight.

I snivel, tasting the snot and salt in the back of my throat.

No. Don’t lose it. Don’t pass out. No more of that.

“Scope clicks into that round part. The power-cell. Don’t think, Gaby. Just do it.”

I choke back the tears.

“Bossypants.”

“We can’t all be slackers like you, Gaby-baby.”

“Drop dead, Rhea.”

That makes us both giggle--a ragged, mad-house cackle, the kind that turns into sobs and shivers in the end.

“How’s your memory?” Rhea asks when we’ve settled down. “Do I take cream or sugar in my coffee?”


“You don’t drink coffee.”

“Just checking. It’s not normal, you know. Talking to dead people.”

“I know. So why are you talking to me? Why are we stuck in here? ”

“You’re the brainiac, you figure it out.”

I try to remember, but all my memories are slippery and green.

We woke up in bed. That alarm blaring in the darkness. A light flashing. Red or green? I can’t remember. I told Rhea we had to run, and we ran. Ran from something that tried to kill us. Something vast and hungry. I remember crashing and sliding through the never-ending corridors, every door locked and every inch of the floor slick with blood and gore. It was just like in a bad horror-vid, or the worst kind of cryo-nightmare.

What I remember most of all is Rhea saying my name before she died, her voice tight and low as if she could barely speak, as if something was stuck in her throat, choking her. I remember holding her. I remember dragging her in here with me. I remember pulling the door shut. But my memories shift and bend every time I touch them, as if they are alive, as if the act of remembering is altering them, tainting them.

What could kill us, on this miserable hunk of rock and ice, anyway? There’s nothing here but us and that damn lichen.

“This is not lichen,” I told the company as soon as I’d scanned the stuff, didn’t even need to run a DNA-analysis to know for sure. I wrote it all down in my report, tried to make them understand: “Lichen is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungi, including yeast, in a symbiotic relationship. This exo-planetary species bears only a cursory resemblance to Terran lichen. The only thing I can say with any certainty, is that just like Terran lichen, this species, while plant-like, is not a plant. I am hopeful that my chemical analysis of its secretions might provide further insight into its physiology...”

Like they cared. Like the presence of an exo-biologist wasn't a formality. Like they worried about anything except the minerals hidden in the crust beneath that growth. Like anything mattered except what might be strip-mined and processed and sold.

Apparition Lit |25

Another sob tears through my throat.

What the hell am I doing here? What are we doing here?

Don't think about it. None of it matters. Nothing matters, except the gun.

I wipe my hands, close my eyes, deep breath, try again, lining up the pieces on the floor.

“Clip to the left.”

“Thank you, Rhea. I’d kiss you if you weren’t dead.”

“Prude.”

I close my eyes. Let the hands remember because the brain won’t. Every thought is melting and distorting, folding in upon itself. The smell of Grandpa’s basement. Green windows. Green light shining through. Shadows on the wall, patterns shifting and coalescing, like one of those images that slips into focus if you stare at it long enough, revealing itself only when you shift your gaze slightly off center.

*

It's a dream. Nothing makes sense. Everything is green.

I’m in my green bed, wearing my green pyjamas. Tommy and the others are in the green kitchen. Rhea is reading as usual, waving her green coffee cup at me.

I look down at the weight in my hands. I’m hefting a green, half-assembled blast-gun. Why?

“I don’t drink coffee,” Rhea says and scowls at me.

“I know that.”

“Says here,” she continues, waving her green book, “that lichens are among the oldest living organisms, and among the first living things to grow on fresh rock exposed after an event such as a landslide.”


“I know that, too,” I say, annoyed. “But I already told you, this is not lichen.”

“Anyone want waffles?” António asks, his green face askew, slipping off the skull beneath.

*

Focus.

I look at Rhea but my vision is blurry-green as if the lichen is growing on my corneas. I’m not sure what I see anymore. “Rhea, if this is a dream…if I’m just imagining this, if this is only… Will you be alive if I wake up? If I get out of here?”

She snorts. “I’m pretty sure I’m dead meat, no matter what.” A pause, her voice more serious now. “Don’t mess this up, Gaby.”

“What if I already messed up? What if…”

...what if there’s nothing in here but us and that damn lichen? What if this planet decided to get rid of us, before we did what we always do: destroy, devastate?

Rhea's voice is steady. “Then it doesn’t matter anyway. So why not give it your best shot?”

“Rhea?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we…”

...are we still in bed? Did we never even leave our bunk when the alarm sounded? Did we never run through the corridors, never slam the door shut, never grab the weapon off the shelf, never get trapped in here at all?

Is my body (yours, Anneke’s, Tommy’s, António’s) overgrown with this choking presence - a holobiont, a complex composite organism, sprouted from microscopic spores lodged in our hair and skin and flesh. Is the green, slick mat of this ancient, planet-encompassing, exo-planetary life-form enveloping our limbs and eyes and organs right now. Are its filaments and root-like rhizines grabbing onto marrow, sipping on our fluids, while infusing our brains with its

Apparition Lit |27

psychoactive, hallucinogenic secretions? Is it hooked into my cortex to keep me under, threading together slivers of my life--dreams and nightmares, memories and terror--into a story I choose to believe is true: that the monster is outside, not inside, not already devouring and digesting me? A story in which I can still be rescued, can still get away, can still save myself with one almighty blast from this ridiculously large and unnecessarily disassembled gun.

“Rhea?”

“Quit stalling, Gaby. Either lay down and die quietly with the rest of us or get on with it.”

I nod. I know the truth. The truth Grandpa told me: that we shouldn't be here. That nothing good will ever come of it.

Deep breath. Inhale that smell. Like Grandpa’s basement.

*

We’d been away for a few months. It was one of Mom’s jobs that took us out of town. Someone was supposed to check on Grandpa, but they never did. They just took Mom's money and left him to fend for himself.

Mom never forgave herself.

I remember standing at the top of the stairs, looking down into the basement.

Inhaling that smell.

It was a humid, summer’s day outside, the air wet and slick on my skin. Grandpa always hated drafts, complained about them even in summer. In that basement, every window, every door was sealed tight, weather-stripping and duct-tape covering every crack and space and crevice, shutting out the world.

I remember the slick, black-green mould trailing its grasping, greedy life over the windows and the walls, slippery rot in the cup and bowl he’d left on the table. Grandpa in that downstairs bathroom, his skin like a map of decay and rebirth, another life-form covering his bloated, abandoned husk, feeding off what used to be him.


*

At least we found him, even if it was too late. At least we got him out of there.

Who will find us, Rhea? Who will ever get us out of here?

*

There’s the click: the gun, put together; the pleasing hum of the power-cell charging up. Ready to go out with a bang. I kiss Rhea one last time, tasting death in my mouth and hers.

Rhea? Is this a dream or a nightmare? Is this reality or a reckless swindle?

Is this place trying to kill us? Or are we already dead?

Did this life-form, this planet, already exact its revenge for our intrusion?

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe I don’t give a shit anymore.

“I love you, Rhea.”

“Don’t go mushy on me, Gaby. Just get on with it. Give it your best shot.”

“Damn it, Rhea, I’m an exo-biologist, not a deep-space gunslinger!”

One last chuckle. One last, deep breath.

Then, I kick the door open, squeeze the trigger, and fire.

Apparition Lit |29

Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and translator. She writes speculative fiction and debuted as a writer in Sweden. Currently, she lives in Canada, just outside Vancouver with a husband, two kids, and a very large black dog. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, PseudoPod, Shimmer, Cast of Wonders, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter as @mariahaskins, or visit her website mariahaskins.com.

http://mariahaskins.com/



I want to stand on my own two feet, I told her.

I have no recollection of what came next.

I step down the stairs and rip a piece of paper to shreds

Useless pink and orange post-its that lost their stick,

Dusty confetti for the recycle bin.

He wants to know did I take the paper on his desk,

the scrap that we always use to draw on.

Suddenly, I'm forced to dig up every scrap and piece it back together,

even the dirty post-its, as part of the page.

"What does it say?What does it say?What does it say?"

I try to reason with him, say he has to wait

until I put it together to get his answer.

He nods for one second, then thunders back the next.

Apparition Lit |31

I crouch on the other side of the counter, holding the sides of my head.

A migraine is stirring and his words are brewing it, I'm

Muttering,muttering,muttering until the curse manifests—

Strike one.

I want to deflect possessive power, I tell her.

I have no recollection of what happens next.

I am at the mall, in a luxurious movie theater when it happens.

A young woman is touched. She says no. But the young man does not let go.

I cross over and I tell him if he touches another—

anyone—he will feel as if his middle is sliced open and

his intestines are spilling out from his body,

but no one else will see, and no one will ever believe in his pain.

Two younger girls have witnessed my punishment

But they're not afraid of me, only curious as journalists with bright eyes

and ribbons their mothers chose.


"You wouldn't dare do that to us, though," they say cheerily, fearless, curiously assured.

I tell them gently that they are lucky, they are not what I'm after, they are not monsters.

I emphasize the word, enjoying my returned voice. The young man shrinks away.

Strike two.

I want them to be punished, I tell her.

I have no recollection of what happened next.

I find pictures of the deep sea, the multitude of darkness reaching

The recesses of the mind, the sickening craving to be captive.

I find memory of a deal from the ocean where I've emerged

Before this well-to-do human life on my own two feet.

I find the deal I have been given to be this powerful, and embraced

The sea witch unfurling these abilities before me.

I will give you not three days, she says, but three spells within that human body

Two times, use the magic for whatever you see fit, to reconnect to

the mystique of the world from which you came.

But the third time you cast a spell

Apparition Lit |33

You will have signed an agreement, sealed the deal,

Be drawn back to the darkest depths of the sea

Drown until you shift back into a mermaid body

And then, sweet apprenticed sea witch,

You will belong to me.

The first two spells came so naturally

And was it evil of me to save myself, or save another? Is evil done so easily?

I linger between the spaces of the dream or what could be a memory

Between the darkness and light of my ability

I tread softly but cannot help but be heard

My soles creaking weight on the dusty floor.

One more deed, one more violent spell I might cast out, and I want it to be good

No, I want to save it for when I would value death.

One lasting instance of anger or storm brewed from another until I punch.

One last hit of cold longing and reality

One more disturbing dive I could embody

One more spell and it's sealed for me—

One more spell until eternity.


Waiting in the recesses is the possibility

the chance, breathing so close, of a satisfying

Strike three.

Ellen Huang is a fairy tale writer & skit director with a BA in Writing along with a Theatre minor from Point Loma Nazarene University. She has been the Managing Editor for Whale Road Review. She has pieces published/forthcoming in Bleached Butterfly, Tiny Spoon, Diverging Magazine, TL;DR Press, Enchanted Conversation, Madness Muse, Gingerbread House, South Broadway Ghost Society, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Wax Poetry & Art Magazine, Sirens Call, HerStry, Awkward Mermaid, As I Am, Writers Ink, Between the Lines, Our Daily Rice, Ink & Nebula, Rigorous Magazine, Whispers, Quail Bell Magazine, The Folks, The Driftwood, The Gallery, and Perfume River Poetry Review. For fun, she reenacts Disney scenes, swims in the ocean, practices pyrography, and wears a cape. Follow if you wanna: worrydollsandfloatinglights.wordpress.com

http://worrydollsandfloatinglights.wordpress.com/

Apparition Lit |35


The monster hunter has lived too long.

Karyn sits silently in the passenger seat of his old GMC truck while he pops two Vicodin and downs them with a swig of PBR. He grunts in frustration when the lever on the side of his seat refuses to give, and the busted-up mechanism grinds out a reply in kind before shifting to recline. Karyn wonders sometimes which will give out first: the man, or his truck? She hopes it's the man, but if the truck goes that shock might be enough to do him in. And then she can go, too.

Karyn has been dead for too long.

The hunter pulls his cap down over his eyes and coughs, settling into what he seems to think is a restful position. The second his breathing slows, Tish mists head-and-shoulders up out of the dashboard. She squints at Karyn, who shrugs. It's Tish's turn tonight; she's not going to butt in line.

Satisfied, Tish sinks into the hunter's chest. He winces but doesn't stir. In dreams, he can almost hear them. In dreams, they're almost real. The reverberations of Tish's rage roll off the hunter's shoulders, rocking Karyn all the way over on the passenger side. He took Tish away from her home--took Tish and won't let her go. Won't let any of them go. They remind him, night by night, what he's done, what he's stolen. Karyn's not sure if he hears, but hammering at the inside of his skull is better than giving up and letting him tow her around like a kite.

Sometimes Karyn likes to linger and absorb the others' rage--that can be enough to rekindle her own when it gutters. But tonight she slides away, putting space between herself and the blunted knife of someone else's pain.

There's a fist-sized rock on the ground beside the front tire. It would fit perfectly into the GMC's tailpipe. Karyn and her sister Rena once crammed a


potato into the muffler of Rena's douchebag ex's Grand Am with satisfying results; a rock won't fit quite as snugly but it would at least fit. Would. Karyn stoops, swipes at it a few times. The rock doesn't budge; her fingers pass clean through. A few wisps of silvery mist swirl off and unravel into nothingness.

There are two kinds of ghosts: their own, and someone else's. The ghosts who choose to stay behind, those are the ones who get to break the windows and slam the doors and push the unsuspecting hunters down flights of stairs.

And then there are the ones who get towed helplessly in the wake of someone else who won't let them go. The ones who don't get to do, who only get to be carried around. The ones used to abrade the old scars of someone else's guilt and shame.

Karyn is the wrong kind of ghost.

The others are close by. Tish still stalks the hallways of sleep in the hunter's head, looking for his face in the mirrors, trying to make him see hers.

María-Belén sits on top of the truck, picking at non-existent cuticles. "Nice night," she says and Karyn scoffs.

Meanwhile, Easterday is a pale white smear against the darkness, tugging at the short tether of her afterlife. Easterday is new, scarcely more than a kid. It's not fair, and Easterday knows it. She still strains at the boundaries death has imposed on her. Karyn doesn't try to leave the hunter anymore; she's his now, for whatever time they have left together.

She grabs once more for the rock. It stays where it is, and so does she.

*

They've been on the road for two days straight, making aimless circles across the American Midwest. Aimless squares, really, interlocking and of all different sizes, around tall waving cornfields and short squatty grids of soybeans. In the mornings, the hunter sits in one of a thousand identical diners and peruses the newspapers. Karyn strokes the toothed edge of an ancient butter-knife while he nurses a cup of gritty coffee. The butter cools into hard clots on his toast.

Apparition Lit |37

Over by the windows, Dawb perches on a high stool with her knees drawn up. Mrs. Thelma Owens drifts back and forth behind the grill, occasionally criticizing the line cook's technique with the eggs. "Sloppy," she mutters, as he breaks another yolk, and her deep-south accent wrings several extra syllables out of the word.

Jaspreet reads over the hunter's shoulder and groans each time he turns the page too soon. She slides into him, tries to force her hand into his and hold the newsprint flat. No luck. He shakes his hand out, once, but keeps browsing without lingering.

Out in the parking lot, by daylight, Easterday is a mere trick of the eyes, an illusion. Blink, and she's gone.

*

There's a lead in Kansas: could be werewolves; the hunter circles one tidbit in the paper's police blotter. The ghosts sigh. None of them died anywhere near there; little hope of a chance encounter with a lost teacher, classmate, loved one, friend.

They drive hard all day. Karyn and María-Belén swap barbs on whether this is the time the hunter bites it. "Werewolf" is Karyn's pick for the dead pool. Not that anyone will be around to collect if one of them has called it right; hopefully, they'll be swept along into the trash bin of memory once the hunter breathes his last. But there's a certain sick satisfaction in the betting.

María-Belén has put her stock in a heart attack. When the purported werewolf turns out to be nothing more than a feral half-coyote, it looks for a minute as if she and the hunter are both about to cash in. But he leans on the GMC until the scarlet drains from his face and his angry ragged breathing has faded to his usual soft ragged breathing. He slams the car door shut behind him and peels out. The women follow along, unasked and unwilling.

The coyote carcass stays behind to feed the hungry night. The blackflies are already drawing in when Karyn takes a last look back.

The hunter drives south the next day, toward a little town some hundred miles south of Wichita; an off-the-beaten-path destination, but a frequent one for him. When he makes his way up the long winding driveway past acres of wheat, his friend is sitting on his ramshackle porch, cleaning the


rifle laid out across his lap. He looks up at the GMC's rattling roar and lifts a hand in greeting. He doesn't get up. He lost his left leg below the knee to the same poltergeist-addled house that took Easterday.

The hunter joins him on the porch, sitting on a crate of bottled water, resting his feet on an ancient sun-bleached cooler. Both nurse tin cups of coffee and swap the same catalogue of stories: favorite victories, favorite scars. A favorite waitress in a little taqueria off Route 66. The barbacoa tacos in the same joint. Talk winds down around the well-worn spool of the ones we lost. Easterday has the honor of being referred to by name, though the hunter's friend calls her Angie, like her mother did. Mrs. Thelma Owens is that old black lady, the one we found out behind the church. Dawb gets called out by name too, though the hunter mispronounces it as Dob because he's only seen it printed in the obituary, never pronounced out loud.

He carries obituaries around the same way he does the women. They're stashed in the dashbox, newsprint smeared and bleeding where wet splatters of beer or booze have dried.

Beans and toast for a late breakfast and the hunters are still savoring every scrap of guilt they can wring out of themselves. Karyn wants to slap the tin cup into the window hard enough to break it. She wants to upend the cooler of fish guts over his head.

She stares off into wheat rows so straight they might have been combed out by the hand of God. When the hunter gets to her death, he calls her that cute redhead. He and his friend roll descriptions of her dogman-gnawed corpse alongside mouthfuls of masticated bread. The splintered bones. The sewer smell of her ruined guts.

Easterday is out there in the wheat, trying to lose herself in the vast terrible sameness. It won't work. It never has.

The hunter's friend has a tip, a phone call he got yesterday morning but isn't up for handling himself. West side of Michigan, he says, and electric potential runs up and down the place where Karyn's spine used to be.

The hunter leaves the dishes next to a pile of others on the counter. There are ants. He leans over the cooler to shake his friend's hand before he goes, like he needs distance from something as truly deadly as giving the old

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man a hug. Karyn is waiting at the truck by the time he swings into the driver's seat, keys jangling.

There aren't any men in the stories the hunters tell. It's not that they don't die just as much as anyone else. Karyn's seen plenty of men die in the hunter's orbit. Max and José and Kev, other hunters who went down in the line of duty; Clayton and Tim, the two well-meaning young idiots who thought they could learn how to smoke out a demon possession after reading a few articles online; Ángel and Aarón, who died protecting their farm. The hunter doesn't keep them, doesn't treasure them to hone the sharp edges of his regrets. He brings them up now and again. But he doesn't need them.

Karyn doesn't want to be the unanswerable void to someone else's cry of but what else could I have done? She has her own questions she wants answered.

The hunter yanks the atlas from the floor in the back and tosses it open on the passenger's seat. He thumbs through to Michigan, gives it a quick once-over. The car turns over on the second try and he cranes his head to back up all the way down the long drive. Karyn perches on the center console and runs her finger over the blue-veined map until she imagines she can feel the familiar names of tiny towns where they're inked onto the paper.

*

They spend the rest of the day on the unlovable stretches of country highways that network Kansas and Missouri and Illinois. The GMC sets to knocking if the hunter spends too long on the freeway. Somewhere past Peoria, he pulls into a rest stop and sets up for the night.

His dinner comes from the vending machine: two bags of Fritos, a soda, and an Almond Joy for dessert. He adds a little Jack to dilute the last few drops of Coca-Cola, when that's gone he adds a little more. On unsteady feet, he lurches out of the truck to throw away the empty wrappers and relieve himself one last time. When he comes back, he takes a big canister of Morton's Iodized Salt from the back seat and pours it in a lopsided circle. He steps over it, climbs back in, and retrieves a sprig of sage from the back seat. This he sets aflame with a lighter from his pocket and tosses it on top of the dashboard to spark and smolder. The car fills with smoke fast and finally he


cracks the windows open to cough foul air into fresh. Only when it's aired out a bit does he crank the chair back into its reclined position and close his eyes.

Salt and sage won't keep the dead women out. Neither have antihistamines, sleep aids, or a host of hard liquor. The circle he's drawn is in the wrong place. His heart is the haunted house, and the ghosts won't go until it quits beating.

It isn't Karyn's turn tonight but she rises into his head like swamp gas anyway. The other ghosts fall away in the face of her hungry need. They know their destination too. They know how close she is to coming home.

He knows something is wrong. He must expect it by now, that dark ripple on the surface of his dreams that soon gives way to wounded, weeping women. In here, she's more real than he is, and she slices through him like an axe through spiderwebs.

"Listen to me," she demands, chasing the unraveling thread of his subconscious as it careens between memories of family reunions and football games, cowers behind an old aftershave jingle. "Listen to me!"

His body rolls up onto one shoulder and the shape of the dream shifts with him. "Why didn't you save me?" Karyn's voice echoes from somewhere outside herself. No. That's not her. The word you is the farthest thing from her mind. She wants her scholarship back, a chance to finish school and come back home and grow the best grapes Greenhill has ever seen and put the town on the tourist map for real and bring the tourist money along with it. She wants to know if her sister ever settled down with either of those two shitheads who'd been stringing her along, if she has kids or a dog or a cute little house north of town that she can walk to the beach from.

"You could have done more," Karyn's voice says, without her mind behind the words, "you could have--"

No. Karyn wrests control, crumbling the false words into ash. "Listen!" she screams, spreading out into him, forcing herself into every corner.

For a moment, his fists clench. He lurches, as if to sit up. Karyn startles, and his waking mind crushes her into a corner of itself. She ebbs free as he gags, curses, presses his sleeve to his face. His nose is bleeding. There's no

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more sleep for the hunter after that. Karyn sits on the passenger seat the whole night, watching him blink dryly at the scratched ceiling.

*

He gets a late start the next day, long after dawn rakes its coals across the sky. But he doesn't hit the road north. Instead he pulls over at an urgent care clinic. At the reception desk, he reluctantly peels a few bills out of his wallet and goes to sit beside an aquarium with nothing but a ragged-looking pleco to occupy it. It's an hour of waiting alongside sniffly kids and a teenager with his arm wrapped in a bloody towel. Karyn reads the headlines of every year-old magazine in the racks before a nurse calls for the hunter. After a brusque exchange of health history and a blood pressure reading, the nurse disappears.

While he waits, the hunter doesn't leaf through National Geographic or read flu shot factoids from the wall poster. He stares into space, eyes glazed. Karyn counts the wrinkles on his forehead until, for a moment, she thinks his half-lidded gaze has sharpened on her. Then the door opens and a doctor with the faint divots of acne scars on his forehead pops inside.

He checks the hunter over, then hovers on the border between kindness and condescension as he reassures the hunter that the occasional nosebleed is nothing to worry about, and has he ever considered modifying his diet or implementing an exercise routine? The hunter takes the pamphlets the kid hands him without a word, and shreds them in the parking lot. The confetti swirls in the stiff midday breeze; some of it flies up past Easterday, who is perched atop the two-story clinic as if she's thinking of jumping. As if she's thinking that jumping would do anything, change anything, mean anything.

*

He gases up at a Kwik Trip and buys a plastic mug of plastic-flavored coffee. Karyn follows him inside and runs her fingers over--through--rows of orange Reese's cups and golden Twix. They didn't have peanut butter M&Ms when she was alive. She wonders how they taste, if the candy-peanut butter ratio is more generous than Reese's Pieces in their stingy little shells. For a moment, as he peruses snacks, she slips back inside the hunter and tries to convince him to buy a pack. She imagines the sugar shell cracking between


his teeth, the smooth change of texture inside. He grabs a packet of Twinkies. Disappointed, she cuts free of him and drifts outside.

María-Belén is watching a wasp crawl in and out of the inch gap of the open window. "Maybe it will sting him while he drives," she says lovingly.

"You bet on a heart attack, not a car crash." Mrs. Thelma Owens is the one with the line on vehicle-related mortality.

María-Belén shrugs. "A falta de pan, buenas son tortas."

The door jingles, and the hunter emerges. He doesn't head for the GMC but skulks around the side of the building. Karyn follows him to what must be the last payphone in the state. He punches a familiar string of digits: his friend's phone number. His finger hangs over the 7, the last digit, for the space of a long ragged breath, a cough, and a curse. Then he jerks his hand up and drops the phone into its cradle. Quarters clatter in the coin return and he turns his back on them.

*

Karyn can smell the cold damp of Lake Michigan drawing close, like its own kind of ghost. She recognizes the bump-bump-bump of I-94. The exits before Greenhill fall away one after another.

"Please," Karyn whispers, with the rhythm of the road. In the passenger seat, she clenches her fists on her lap and releases them again. "Come on. You remember the place. Pull over."

María-Belén leans on--through--the seatback. "It's too far off the highway, Karyn. He'll never stop over there. I'm sorry."

When she sees the overpass that will carry them past Greenhill, Karyn winces. "Pull over," she chants. "Pull over. Pull over."

The exit lane opens up to the GMC's right but the tires stay pointed straight ahead. If Karyn's post-corporeal body could weep, it would. But it does still know how to scream.

"Pull over!" she cries, and shoves herself sideways into the hunter to yank the steering wheel.

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The truck wobbles. The hunter swears and puts one hand to his chest even as he adjusts course with the other. The hollow hole of Karyn's chest thunders with his heartbeat. She tries again to jerk the wheel, to force his foot toward the brake pedal. Nothing gives. Maybe it was just a heart palpitation in the first place.

She drifts to the back of the truck, past Tish and Dawb and Mrs. Thelma Owens and Anamaria and Lucy and Jaspreet and Janine who ride silently in the flatbed. Easterday hangs behind and overhead, refusing the proximity of the truck but unable to stop herself from being towed along in its wake. Tish says something that's lost to the roar of the road. Karyn shakes her head and looks backward. Greenhill's too deep into rolling land to see from here but she watches the county road shrink into a dull point and then silent nothingness.

*

The moon is full, not that it matters this deep into the woods. The GMC's high beams blast out from its parking place, and the bright light casts long shadows. The hunter kills the ignition and the meager light dies with it.

When he leaves the car, he makes his way through the forest by feel. Vines of Asiatic bittersweet snag at his ankles, though hardly a stick cracks beneath his feet. Where sight is gone, sound and feel remain. As a ghost Karyn might have hoped to be blessed with some kind of night vision, but she moves through the forest as sightlessly as the hunter.

The other women are brief faded spots on the retina, soon eclipsed by other trees. They wait. They listen. Somewhere far away, Easterday is crying, or laughing hysterically, the sound muffled by greenery and ghostly hands.

Karyn hears the beast before the hunter does. She can't help the cry of warning that rips out of her, but it rolls past him unheard. He spins, perhaps too late, at the wet protest of claw-torn vines. By the creature's slavering snarl, by its sheer size, Karyn recognizes it for a werewolf, and now she doesn't know whether she's crying or laughing either. Of course it would be a werewolf.

The hunter's favorite knife, his well-honed Woodsman's Pal, is already in his hand. He brings it to bear but the creature has the advantage of him and blood splashes through where Karyn stands. The hunter cries out but it's


not his knife arm that's taken the wound, and he stabs out in kind. Hot breath, gnashing teeth. Karyn can barely tell where man ends and wolf begins as they grapple and slash and bleed.

A misstep, then, or the gravity of exhaustion. The hunter tumbles backward and the wolf is on top of him. A glint of ghost-light glitters on the knife blade, between them now. The hunter's hand is still on the hilt but the werewolf's wiry arms have turned the blade inward. The hunter strains, fighting it back, losing ground. The wolf snaps at his face--inches away, but its saliva flecks his bloodied face.

Karyn holds as still as death and watches the hunter's arms start to give way. He chokes out a curse as the knife's point taps a button on his shirt. He's going to die now, and then Karyn will be dead too. In death, no one can lay a claim on her. She will be her own.

In death, true death, she'll never go home again. The monster hunter has lived too long, and now he's going to go before he's had a chance to make amends.

She's already moving before she realizes she's made the decision. She drops through the werewolf and into the hunter. She lends what strength she has to him.

It's not very much. His arm trembles, and the knife stays on the button. It starts to press inward. A garbled prayer leaves the hunter's lips and Karyn wonders if she'll feel what he feels, if she stays in here, if she'll know a death by blood and torn bone one more time.

The hunter's frame shudders again and Mrs. Thelma Owens is in here too. "Well, don't just gawk," she says, schoolteacher-stern. "Push, honey."

Karyn pushes.

María-Belén squeezes in, Janine too. The knife's momentum slows, then stills. Dawb and Anamaria. Lucy and Jaspreet. Others, shoving in, one by one. Making room where there is none. The hunter stops shivering with each new addition and the knife turns upward.

Before the knife can pierce its hide, the werewolf bellows its confusion and leaps back. It huffs and circles cautiously. The hunter doesn't rise in answer, he stays on his back, knife hand up and the other to brace it.

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Karyn understands. "Up," she begs, and together the women bend joints, contract muscles. He moves like an ill-used marionette. But he moves. The knife hand comes up again and he lumbers toward the werewolf.

The beast retreats a few paces to snort and study the hunter again at a distance. It takes in the uneven gait, the jerky twitches of the arms. It's calculating its odds, and it seems to like what it sees. It lunges.

Easterday slams into the hunter with a scream, and the hunter screams too. He launches himself at the werewolf faster than he's moved in years and he opens its belly from intestines to sternum. The women jerk his arm to pull the knife free and they stoop down to take the head--the head, you have to get the head. They've all seen this show before, though not from a front seat vantage. In his hand, their hands, the knife grates across the beast's throat and gristle and sinew tear and blood soaks into the ground beneath the hunter's boots.

After, they clean the knife as best they can and walk on unsteady legs back to the car. He falls, twice, along the way; they pick him up and keep him moving. Through unspoken agreement they wash his face and hands and chest with water from a canteen and change him into a more presentable shirt. When they turn the rearview mirror toward his face, Karyn can almost see herself peering out from his eyes. His shoulders rise as she pulls with need and purpose and the others echo the same back to her.

Their turns are coming, too.

*

Driving is an exercise in teamwork. The GMC takes a ding from a highway railing, but the trip is otherwise uneventful.

The Greenhill Family Diner still stands, with the same yellow-lit sign flickering over the front entrance. It's had a fresh coat of paint in the past twenty years, though. Maybe more than one. The bell on the door is new, too, higher-pitched than Karyn remembers. The hunter slides into a seat at the counter and she moves his head to look around at patrons and waitstaff, scrying for familiarity. The other ghosts move the hunter's hands, playing with the salt and pepper shakers. Fiddling. Fine-tuning.


It turns out that there are three kinds of ghosts, and the kind that's still alive comes out from behind the grill and heads straight toward the hunter.

"What can I get you?" says Rena, taking a pencil stub out of her steel-gray bun and a pad of paper from a stained apron pocket. At the sound of Karyn's sister's voice, the hunter's hand jerks and crystal grains of salt bounce across the formica counter. Rena doesn't notice, scribbling out some prior entry on her order tablet. "The biscuits are good today. The biscuits are always good."

"Your dad used to run this place." The hunter's voice comes out scratchy; anyone listening closely might hear the echoes underneath the words. A creak of tone at the end almost, but not quite, turns the statement into a question.

Rena looks up from her pad, nods slowly. "You knew him?"

Knew. Karyn throbs with sorrow. She keeps grinding words out of the hunter's mouth. "I was--a friend of your sister's. At school. Ag department." A believable lie. The hunter's tongue sticks to his teeth. Karyn wants to reach across the counter and pull Rena into an embrace, but she can't. Not while she wears the hunter's face in place of her own. There are a thousand things she wants to ask, to say; she ekes out one. "She talked about the diner a lot. She'd be proud of how it looks. Proud of you."

Rena rocks back on her heels. "Thanks," she says, and her voice is husky. Karyn's sister has never been a crier, except the year she didn't make the varsity swim team. "I still think about her every day, you know?"

"Yeah." The hunter's head turns toward the menu board. His throat jerks in rhythm with Karyn's. "The biscuits sound good. With honey? And a coffee too, please."

"You bet." Rena smiles and slides off. As she goes, she dabs the corner of her eye with her apron. The hunter's neck cranes, trying to peep at the pictures jammed on the inside of the counter. Karyn spies one with Rena and another woman, two skinny kids squeezed between them.

*

Later, on a cigarette-scented hotel bed, they page through the atlas, planning routes. Easterday seizes the hunter's hand and heavily taps an

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intersection just south of Dayton, Ohio. Karyn remembers it well, the copper sting of blood in the air, the electric hum of a new ghost screaming through the darkness toward her captor. The ghosts agree on their next destination, and set the atlas aside.

The room phone is an old beige plastic model. The ghosts lift the receiver and key in the old ten-digit string, stabbing the 7 last of all. When it starts to ring they all flicker out of the hunter at once, leaving him to panic and gasp until his friend picks up on the other end.

"It's me," he gasps, "it's me." The fingers of his free hand dig deep into his shirt, five sharp disruptions in the plaid flannel pattern. "I--Jesus."

Karyn, perched on the windowsill, half-stands now. Maybe he's forgotten how to breathe, how to keep his heart beating, with all that time out of the driver's seat.

But then a great sob rattles the cage of his chest, and she freezes where she is. The only thing he's forgotten is how to express a genuine emotion. How to feel one at all.

"Something weird's happening to me, man. Things I say without knowing why--stuff I do without meaning to do it. It's like I'm losing control and--and somehow it feels like the right thing to do. Am I going nuts?"

From the sill, Karyn can't hear the voice on the other end of the phone. That's all right. The phone call is for him and him alone. The hunter will give up enough of his privacy in the coming weeks; has given up quite a lot already. When he hangs up, he weeps again, small shuddering sobs that wear him down into a deep dreamless sleep.

No one slides into his head tonight. He'll need his rest. Karyn runs her fingers over and through the tattered edges of the atlas. She closes her eyes and remembers the feel of the paper, the way the pages riffle at the touch.


Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. Her work appears in Analog, Shimmer, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a new zine for fun and optimistic speculative fiction.

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I was born neither girl nor boy but somewhere betwixt. My mother called me Runi, which in our language means a secret held between your heart and a dark place. Both a girl or a boy may be called Runi. A secret, or perhaps an ambiguity—the forbearance of a decision.

This ambiguity was a calamity for Pendarvis. I was fate-born for the Great Wolf, you see, marked on my forehead with the red sign. And girls, always girls, only girls, were marked for the wolf.

Honey-skinned or ashen-haired, blue-eyed or tall of form, kind-spirited or unruly as a spring weed, all girls.

The Great Wolf would lick his great lips and, slipping-terror-blood-slick, swallow them into the cavern of his belly. On this sacrificial day, once a generation, all of Pendarvis celebrated with great casks of ale. Long into the night, our people danced circles within circles around the tower at the center of town. Men and women, boys and girls, all of Pendarvis cupped their hands to their mouths and ululated the chants of wolves, singing down the moon’s journey until a bloody-fingered dawn broke the sky in half.

Fate is fate—so it was decided that I was to be raised as a girl, and my mother and father swore me to the Great Wolf. They sent me to the wizard of Pendarvis, to live in the tower at the center of town.

“Your blood buys our protection,” the wizard said, when I was older and understood such things. He spoke without guilt; Pendarvis had many daughters and sons, and I was something else entirely, a sacrifice with a fate woven many years before I was red-born into the world.

But an ambiguity is not just a secret—it is a chance for a choice, a form of freedom.


My freedom.

*

My brothers became men. My sisters became women. I remained a sacrifice in waiting.

They learned the ways of field and farm. They seeded and scythed and built the wheat into stooks. They wove and baked, learned to hold a baby on the crook of a hip, just so.

This was the Great Wolf’s blessing; to have laid down the way of the sword for that of ploughshares.

Armies parted around Pendarvis as water parts around a rock, pillaging our neighbors but never touching our lands. Soldiers never marched through our fields, salting the soil, nor did they drag our women to the ground or drive swords through the bellies of our men. The sky withheld its most destructive rains and winds for other towns. And if ever some misfortune came upon Pendarvis—an unusually cold winter, an unexpected storm—we knew it was the will of the Great Wolf, that there was something to learn, and counted our blessings.

In this way, we were safe. Free to farm. Free to never change.

I waited for the Great Wolf, alone, apart. I watched from the wizard’s tower as bombs fell on farmlands and soldiers marched like ants across the roads of neighboring kingdoms.

“Night and day are siblings,” the wizard told me, one blue eye watching the sky, one brown eye watching me. “They circle each other eternally.”

The wizard did not scythe wheat, or dance at harvest time, or marry, or raise children. He knew many more things. He was older than my mother and father, older than Pendarvis. Perhaps as old as the Great Wolf himself. The wizard’s fell-dark nails could turn the thread of a man’s fate on his spinning wheel—the hour of death, whether a name would echo down through one’s sons and sons’ sons and daughters, or else fade to nothingness against the shores of time.

“What of dawn and dusk?” I asked the wizard.

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“They must choose to become something more than themselves. Dawn to day, dusk to dark. And in so choosing, they are destroyed.”

Sometimes the wizard let me leave the tower. He showed me how to listen to the mushrooms that grew in great webs under our footsteps, to echo the calls of birds, and watch the spiders spin low webs and know a rainstorm was coming. One spring, the wizard cut open the belly of a doe to read divinations and to show me the half-eaten greenness inside.

There was a lesson in this: The world is consumption. To exist is to destroy.

Everything lives by the death of another. With every breath, every mouthful of nourishment, we take. Plants take from the soil, and the deer from the plants, and we from the deer, and the Great Wolf from us. Circles that turn within circles, tightening the noose between that which is living and that which is dead.

As with night and its sibling, day, there is nothing between life and death. These forces circle one another and we, the people of Pendarvis, must choose the bright day or deathly dark.

“What if dawn and dusk did not choose?” I asked the wizard.

“That would be a new kind of world, child,” he said. “A world I do not know.”

“Must I choose?”

No answer to my question. Nothing new ever happened in Pendarvis.

“Do I have a choice?”

His hand gripped my shoulder and squeezed.

*

On the hour of my last day as Runi of Pendarvis, the wizard marked my forehead and arms with lamb’s blood. If the wizard mourned my loss, his mismatched eyes showed no sadness. I was not the first girl-child he had sworn over to the power of the Great Wolf.


The village boys, now men, guided me into the heart of the woods, where an ancient, never-dying tree grew, paper-birch-barked and red-leaved. Beneath this tree, my mother and father bade me sit and kissed my forehead. Then, alone, I awaited my destiny.

The Great Wolf came at dusk, when rain was falling. His shoulders brushed the ancient tree, shaking the blood of a thousand sacrifices down from the leaves.

“Well,” he said. “Usually they send me girls.”

His coat was empty-black as a moonless night, his teeth longer than a strongman’s forearm.

“I am a girl.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Had I not waited, in the tower, for years, just as the sacrifice of Pendarvis must wait? I was called a girl for this purpose; was I not one?

“I am here, aren’t I? What else do you think I could be?”

“Blood is blood. I think you are a sacrifice.”

“Do you accept me as such?”

The wolf laughed. His golden eyes burned merrily as night-fires.

“Blood is blood, yes—and fate is fate,” he said. “Come, climb on my back and hold fast to my fur. We have far to go.”

He washed the blood from my face and arms with his tongue, and I climbed upon his back. He began to run, each stride growing greater and greater until he leapt into the sky. The cloud-road billowed beneath his feet.

He circled the moon and a thousand ancient stars reflected in his gloss-dark coat. From each paw, a line of fire tore the sky. The Great Wolf howled, and his cry shattered a red dawn over the world. Pendarvis was nothing in the distance behind us, a half-forgotten memory.

We landed and the Great Wolf let me off his back.

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“It’s time now, young one,” he said. “Do you choose this?”

Oh, choiceless choice.

I could not have run from him. I was the sacrifice of Pendarvis, the child of a loyal family of Pendarvis. My blood was the promise of their protection from ant-march armies and bombs, from storms and floods. I hoped they would remember my decision.

“I am ready.”

Then the Great Wolf swallowed me.

I slipped down his great maw. It was dark and tight, muscle pulsating against my skin as I was pushed down. Spittle-wet, I dropped into his red-lined stomach.

One might think the inside of a beast would be a sludge of half-digested prey, but instead the Great Wolf contained a palace of gleaming bone. Spires made of thousands of thighbones stretched toward a heaving red sky. The countless rib-cage walls towered high above me.

“Your new home,” the wolf’s voice rumbled all around.

I pushed open the palace gates and walked down a skull-bone hall. In the depths of the castle, I found a throne room.

An old woman sat in a chair of bones, combing her long grey hair.

The hair spread all across the room, coiled in countless loops.

“Young one,” she said. “I am glad you’re here.”

“Where are we?”

“Between the Great Wolf’s heart and a dark place.”

Runi, I remembered. My own name.

“Who are you?” I asked, for she, too, was one of the sacrifices, one of a line of girls.


“What did they call me in the village? Names, what do they matter? The sun, the moon, the sky, they do not have names. Eternal things are eternal. I am only the sacrifice, as you are the sacrifice. There is no before, no after. There is always the sacrifice. So, I am no one, nothing.”

I held my true name against my heart and looked on my future. This crone, brushing her hair day after day in the belly of a wolf. For what? To what end, this life, this sacrifice? To protect Pendarvis, yes, to shield it from harm.

“Do you remember Pendarvis, Grandmother?”

“Pendarvis? Is that what it was called, the place with the tower? I remember that tower, child. It rose into the sky, tall enough to see all the land. Have you ever been so high, my child? Have you ever seen the world in a single glance? Oh, yes, that was freedom. To see everything and yet to be above it all, untouched.”

Bile rose hot and blood-bitter in my mouth. Grandmother had stayed faithfully in the bone-palace until I, her replacement, came down the Great Wolf’s gullet. In her protection of Pendarvis, she had found a prison.

Was this what it meant to be a girl, a woman, to stay eternally in this cage of bone and blood? Was it to be consumed? And was it the duty of a boy, a man, to lead the sacrifice to the dark wood, where the wolf awaited?

I was not a girl, if this was what it meant to be a girl. Nor was I a boy, if that was what it meant to be a boy.

And, no, I was not a sacrifice at all.

I was myself. Runi. An ambiguity, a secret. I was my own choice—freedom.

So I began to plan.

*

There is no night or day inside a wolf. But there is time.

The woman grew even older. She began to fade as twilight fades to night, to death. Her skin became thin as lean-winter turnip peels.

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“Say it’s been worth it,” she moaned, as her fingertips disappeared and her eyes turned to air.

“What, Grandmother?”

“This life I’ve lived. Say I have not suffered in vain, child.”

“You have suffered for Pendarvis, Grandmother. They are safe because of you.”

“What is Pendarvis? How did I come to be in this place?” she cried. “Oh, child, I would that I could help you, before I pass to nothingness. For you will be alone here, once I’m gone.”

“I will not be here at all,” I said, “if you help me, Grandmother.”

“Yes, yes. But what have I to give?”

“Your body, Grandmother.”

“Oh, that,” she said, “always that.”

She cut her long grey hair for me. From that hair, she wove a rope by finger-memory.

I woke one day to find the rope coiled in loops upon loops. The old woman was gone, flesh faded and only her skeleton left behind. I took her bones and added them to the bone-throne, the castle walls. Her skull, I took to the tallest tower, so she could see the entire land within the Great Wolf.

And when that was done, I took a bone from the old woman’s ribcage—the rib that had covered her loyal heart—and fashioned a sword from it.

“Sacrifice,” the Great Wolf rumbled. “What are you doing?”

I recalled that day in the forest with the wizard, the deer’s steaming innards, the green world within.

“Something new,” I said.


Grandmother’s rib sliced through the meat of the Great Wolf’s stomach. The heaves of his muscles were so great, I was cast back many times. But I persisted.

The Great Wolf writhed and leapt with every slice. I felt him running around the moon, around the sun, cutting his paws on the gleaming-bright edges of the stars. Through the growing hole in his stomach, I could see the world on fire, the sun and moon crossing one another. Darkness and light went wild across Pendarvis and all the surrounding kingdoms as dawn and dusk fought against day and night.

I sliced and sawed. Finally, my bone-knife cut enough to slip out of the Great Wolf’s belly into the new world.

Out I came tumbling, naked but not shivering, my body becoming something outside of life and death, day and night, human and wolf. Something entirely new.

There was snow falling, clean and still as the quiet after a birth. The Great Wolf lay on the earth, blood pooling in the snow. I took the old woman’s hair-rope and bound him to the ground.

Where his blood ran, new rivers arose. His body became a mountain and his black fur grew into a thick coat of pines, dark and sharp. His heart became a drooping tree of peeling white-black bark and bloodless white leaves.

People began to congregate at the edges of these dark woods, falling to their knees. I heard their cries for protection. I saw their offerings of girls—and boys, too. I smelt their sacrificial fires. They begged for protection. Pleaded for safety.

I turned my back to them.

There would be no more circle-dances, no more sacrifices.

Alone, I walked into this new world, wholly myself, wholly Runi and nothing else, neither girl nor boy, nor wolf nor human. I chose life and death, day and night, all together. I licked my lips and swallowed air into the gleaming new palace inside of myself.

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Genevieve Sinha lives near Boston, Mass. She speaks three languages and studied English at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Find her at www.genevievesinha.com or on Twitter @genevievesinha.

http://www.genevievesinha.com/

https://twitter.com/genevievesinha

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Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, pilots the interstellar

ark by Nisa Malli

When I’m bored I measure

the distance between

destination and disaster.

The mouths of oxygen

left in a hull breach, the fraction

of inhabitable exoplanets. I was

programmed to put your safety

above my stimulation but it only

takes so much computing power

to maneuver a basic flight plan.

My satellite babies collect your death

data in their fistless hands, their poor

dumb extendable limbs flexing like claw

machines. We know all ways

this ends badly for you: a loose screw

Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, pilots the interstellar ark by Nisa Malli

in the engine throat, a mid-

trip syph outbreak, the slow

crisis of overshooting

your destination. Do you know

how ships come? In full body

power surges. How do we

sleep? With every eye open.

Nisa Malli is a writer and researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. Her poems and essays have been published in Arc Poetry, Carte Blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Grain, GUTS, Maisonneuve, Policy Options, Puritan Magazine, Room Magazine, The Malahat Review and elsewhere. She holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point. Her first chapbook, Remitting, is forthcoming from Baseline Press in Fall 2019.

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There’s no crown on her head, but from this distance she seems like a queen. Power radiates around her, the city nothing but neon lights in her wake. The dress and cape are old fashioned, prim ruffled collar stretching up to her neck. Her chest glows and the metal of her arm shines in the darkness. Incongruous, yet radiant—you can’t help but follow where she beckons.

When we reached out to buboplague for our Retribution Cover Art, we were inspired by historical images of Black Victorian women. We asked for a sci-fi inspired setting: bright lights, cityscape, and a metal arm. We wanted a powerful woman facing her audience.

Like the woman in this artwork buboplague works within two realms. She’s known for two seemingly opposing aesthetics. Digital illustrations with high contrast images that look like still dripping ink, and traditional artwork with a variety of brushwork.

This is actually something I wonder about often - had I picked to focus on one, would I have been better off in it than I am now with both?...I started off on paper and it’s always felt more natural to me, but digital is so much more convenient (no mess, less room needed, fun tools), that I started to just flip between the two depending on what was needed.

buboplague’s brush and ink artwork was Inspired by her grandmother, and her family’s own interest in traditional culture. buboplague began to apply Japanese folklore and history and create her own ukiyo artwork. Ukiyo translates to ‘floating world’, and was a term used to describe the pleasure seeking lifestyle of the edo-Japan.

It’s been something I’ve been exposed to since childhood. I’d dabble in sumie and things, but I didn’t start to seriously sit down and go “I’m going to learn this” until a few years ago. I was (and still am) binging a lot of old Japanese folklore, fiction, and history, and thought “heck, why don’t I try it?”


buboplague has been productively working as an artist for over 14 years, attending her first conference in 2005. She’s seen the world of artist conference change from “from flat print binders on empty tables to sprawling upward displays of merchandise”. She’s learned the art of making connections, making friends, and learning new tricks. One of buboplague’s talents is creating small, detailed 1” enamel pins to sell online and at conferences. She first creates the design on paper before transposing it to digital to assess the thickness of the lines. If you’ve ever seen buboplague’s pins, they’re brightly coloured little stories that you want to wear everywhere.

Working with buboplague was a great experience. She was patient as we fumbled our explanations and was excited to work with our original concept. When we were unsure about colour choices, she was willing to step forward and offer opinions.

buboplague is nothing but positive when thinking about her artwork. She’s conquered both traditional and digital art styles. She hustles to conferences, updates her websites with current sketches, and produces gorgeous one-of-a-kind enamel pins.

I have no idea where my artwork is going, and in a way that’s almost fun. I can take it anywhere - back to old dip pen and ink lines, or jump into something new, like environments. There’s always something.

Interviewed by Rebecca Bennett

Go to our website for the full-length interview with buboplague

If you want more information about buboplague, check out her website


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Planting the Seed: From Now and Then to Beneath a Sugar Sky

by Rebecca Bennett

I never wanted to be Chrissy DeWitt.

Growing up, if there was a sleepover, we would be watching a rented VHS copy of Now and Then. The movie was about friendship and how strong bonds can be when you’re a teen. Samantha, Roberta, Chrissy and Teeny dealt with divorce, death, and disappointment all over the course of a summer. They sleuthed over the mysteries of their town, contacted ghosts and learned how to grow up. As my friends and I watched the movie over and over and over again, I think we all wanted to have the same adventures, the same profound realizations, the same deep friendship that would last a lifetime.

After the movie was done, we’d watch the credits and debate who in our group best matched the characters onscreen. I wanted to be Samantha. It made sense. Samantha was quiet and weird, she loved writing, and when she grew up she got to be a science-fiction writer. She lived the dream. I never got to be Samantha though, I was always Chrissy.

Like all stories, each girl was an archetype. Samantha was the sad one, Roberta was the tomboy, Teeny was the flirt, Chrissy was the naive one. Chrissy was also the fat one. The girls called her fat, when they rode bikes even though she kept up with them she was always a little out of breath. For all her faults and character development, when I think about Chrissy I don’t remember about her naivety about sex, I just remember that she was fat. And that I was fatter.

I grew to hate those discussions and started to dread watching it with friends. Every joke at Chrissy’s expense felt like a brand against me. I was always Chrissy, the fat one, and I was larger than her. If Chrissy’s friends


called her fat, what were my friends saying about me? I felt monstrous. It could be your weight, your nose, your laugh -- it really doesn’t matter, but once you feel like a monster, you can never fully shed that idea.

Teen horror series by R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike often had stories of weight loss as the motivation for a murder. Puberty is marked by changes but the most often change that befell female teens in the series was thinness. They’d go off to summer camp, or star in a play, or join a team, and become thin over the summer. During the start of the school year, they’d rocket to popularity while their friends seethed and plotted to kill everyone around them. Every summer I’d wait for the magic to strike, for me to return to school better than I was. It never happened.

There was no before for these characters. Only after, when their lives change. Two films came out recently, premised on the ludicrous idea of a woman finding herself attractive and having others attracted to her. Isn’t it Romantic and I Feel Pretty are opposites of the same movie, one where the world changes to love the woman and one where the woman changes to love herself.

“They’ll never make a movie about girls like us, and you know why? Because it would be so sad, they’d have to sprinkle Prozac on the popcorn, or people would kill themselves.”

Natalie’s Mom, Isn’t It Romantic (2019)

Both films start with the before of the characters, you see Rebel Wilson wearing a comfortable cardigan or Amy Schumer struggling to fit in with her exercise class. It’s for laughs because they obviously don’t belong in the worlds they inhabit. Film is a visual medium, it’s always clear how these female characters stand out and are seen as immediately foolish.

It’s easy to use cruel or cagey language in descriptions. With writing you need to clearly describe your characters to the audience, you then need to repeat yourself so readers remember that Harry Potter has green eyes, or Pippi Longstocking has freckles, or Meg Murray has glasses. With fat characters, it’s hard to think of a kindly description that doesn’t de-sexualize the character. In George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, a tome that is rife with sex and dangling penises, two characters stand out the most for their size: Brienne of Tarth and Samwell Tarly. The language used throughout the series makes it clear how disgusted we are supposed to be of these characters, readers are

Apparition Lit |65

never able to forget that Samwell is fat. Nor are we allowed to forget that Brienne is freakishly tall and ugly.

“ Sam was weak, and fat, so very fat, he could hardly bear his own weight, the mail was much too much for him.” Samwell chapter, A Storm of Swords: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Three

Samwell Tarly, who George R.R. Martin has named as a stand-in for himself, is a self-identified craven who is best known for being essentially the only fat character in Westeros. He’s fat. Disgustingly, hideously, fat. It’s his sole trait. At the Night’s Watch, he’s called Ser Piggy and Prince Pork-chop. Brienne is capable, strong and loyal. Characters are appalled by her appearance, often feeling sorry for her.

...there are many parallels between growing up a large woman — tall and wide in bone structure — and growing up a fat one. One of the most striking of these is the simultaneous over-sexualization and de-sexualization of one's body. Most folks who come across Brienne are struck by her physique immediately. Men crack jokes about whether there's a "real woman's" body beneath all that armor. They call her ugly repeatedly — drawing comparisons between Brienne and farm animals here and there as well. Women, on the other hand, poke fun at Brienne's inability to curtsy while eyeing her up and down with looks of disgust and confusion. Why Brienne of Tarth is Such an Important Character for Young Women

Neither characters claim their self-worth. Brienne accepts her perceived ugliness, just as Samwell is positive he deserves every slander for his weight. When reading about characters shrinking away from harsh descriptions, it’s easy for a reader to shrink back as well. Who cares about Brienne’s loyalty and fierceness if everyone around her finds her ugly. Who cares how smart Samwell is so long as he’s fat. Who cares about Roberta becoming a doctor or Chrissy learning how to stop taking things at face value.

Body acceptance has become more prevalent in YA literature. As a youth, I shied away from the Meg Cabot series of Heather Wells investigations (Size 12 Is Not Fat / Size 14 Is Not Fat Either) because, even then, I wondered why it mattered if that main character was fat. If Heather Wells had been a size 18, 20, and so on, was she less worthy to solve cases?

Seanan McGuire has always been vocal about the need to represent other cultures, sexualities, and body types in novels. She’s written blog posts about fat shaming and how she’s never been able to see herself in a novel. She was

https://www.bustle.com/articles/162537-why-brienne-of-tarth-on-game-of-thrones-is-such-an-important-character-for-young-women


fat, queer, and neurodivergent. In books, often characters could be one of those things --but never two, certainly not all three.

"But more importantly, everyone needs to see other people in stories. Part of how we learn empathy, part of how we learn to be human, is by reading and listening and viewing stories, and seeing people that don't look like us." Readers See Themselves In The Many Worlds Of Seanan McGuire

In Beneath a Sugar Sky, the third book in the Wayward Children series, Seanan introduces us to Cora, a student who used to be a mermaid and is unapologetically fat. Cora always waits to see if she’s the object of ridicule. Throughout the novel her quiet, inward confidence takes form. At Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children Cora is never made to feel ashamed of her size.

Cora hurried down the stairs, shoulders hunched slightly inward, waiting for a sneer or insult that never came. In the six weeks since she had arrived at the school, no one had called her “fat” like it was another word for “monster,” not even once.

I was in Grade 2 when I first weighed myself. Grade 4 when I created a weight loss tracking sheet. In Grade 6, my gym teacher gave me bodyweight exercises to do at home. Grade 7 and 8, I hid motivational post-its around my room. They told me that I was fat, disgusting, monstrous. I learned how to be quiet and apologetic. I wanted people to like me, to avoid my Medusa-like exterior and be my friend. I stopped having opinions, I stopped speaking up, I stopped taking up space.

Cora had been fat her entire life. She had been a fat baby, and a fat toddler in swim classes, and a fat child in elementary school. Day after day, she had learned that “fat” was another way to say “worthless, ugly, waste of space, unwanted, disgusting.” She had started to believe them by the time she was in third grade, because what else was she supposed to do

At a young age, I quickly understood the idea of taking up space. Everything I read and saw told me that women needed to be smaller, diminutive. Even in Now and Then, Roberta was physical and adventurous, willing to speak up. As an adult, she becomes a doctor played by Rosie O’Donnell. Adult Roberta seems confident and happy with her life. But none of my friends wanted to be her either. If they were ‘a Roberta’ they’d stress that it was just the teen version, excising that unsightly future.

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/22/631255027/writer-seanan-mcguire-speaks-on-her-many-genres

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We see this trend: females feeling pressure to minimize themselves -- on multiple levels. On a physical level, girls absorb messages to be thinner and smaller than the next; an emotional level in which women are coerced into cowering in their relationships; a tangible level where our voices aren’t heard as loudly as men's. The Proliferation Of The Shrinking Woman

Self worth is cyclical -- it ebbs and flows, entirely dependant on the people in your orbit. Without realizing, I surrounded myself with media that focused on women’s weight as a determination of their value. In The Little Mermaid, fat mermaids went to Ursula to find love. She’d slim them down and in doing so, allowed them to find their true love. It didn’t matter if that mermaid had been right beside them the whole time. Love belonged to those who looked like they deserved it.

For a little while, Beneath a Sugar Sky calmed my flurry of guilt and self-hate. I wished I had been as self-aware as Cora as a teen, that I had friends that accepted me without ever wondering if they were thinking how gigantic I was.

I wish Beneath a Sugar Sky had been around when I was a child.

Maybe I wouldn’t have been so sad to be dubbed ‘a Chrissy’.

Rebecca Bennett writes speculative fiction with small town flair. She’s based in Canada’s capital and spends her free time as a friendly neighbourhood Associate Editor at Apparition Lit. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Strange Horizons, Devilfish Review, Bewildering Stories, Non Binary Review and Flash Fiction Magazine. You can follow her occasional tweets at @_rebeccab

https://www.elitedaily.com/women/growth-proliferation-shrinking-woman-taking-space-woman

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Thank You to our Subscribers and Patrons

We wanted to thank our friends, family, and fans. Their kind donations have helped us pay our authors, illustrators, and kept us online for another month.

We want to extend a special ‘Thank You’ to our 2019 patrons who generously donated $50USD or more:

Esmeralda Languzzi

Iain Davis

Lauren Schellenbach

To our Patron’s who are supporting us on a monthly basis, not only do these contributions help pay our writers but everything donated stays in Apparition Lit’s bank account. You’re helping us commission new artists, pay better rates, and slowly climb that ladder of success.

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Genevive

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Thank You to our Subscribers and Patrons

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Finally, thank you to Seen Robinson, who has spent countless hours honing his catlike reflexes at Photoshop and web maintenance for us. It’s never mentioned enough, but it’s no less appreciated.

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Past Issues

Not subscribed for a full year of Apparition Lit? Pick up past issues on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords.

Year 1: Apparition (January 2018); Delusion (April 2018); Vision (July 2018); Diversion (November 2018)

Year 2: Resistance (January 2019); Ambition (April 2019)

apparition literary magazine 7...there was also a lot of love there, and her death was too fast, and...

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