GlitterShip

Instar

by Carrow Narby

They just broke ground this week on a new high rise. When they cracked into the earth it flooded the neighborhood with the stench of sulfur. There’s a layer of ancient rot beneath the pavement. Centuries worth of life, ground into filth.

Or so I imagine. I had to look up the source of the smell and some local news site attributed it to “organic materials” in the soil. I was worried that it might be a gas leak.

For the past few mornings the wind has pushed the awful smell in through the screen above my bed. As bad as it is, it isn’t worth shutting the window. Even as late summer beats on, I can’t sleep without the weight and softness of ten thousand blankets. Without the breeze my nest would become unbearably hot, so I tolerate the smell of brimstone and corruption. It’s sort of fitting, I think, given the maggoty turn that my life has taken.

Full episode after the cut.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 67 for March 8, 2019. This is your host Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Our story today is "Instar" by Carrow Narby, which is part of the Summer 2018 issue of GlitterShip.

Carrow Narby lives on the north shore of Massachusetts. Their writing has been featured in Bitch, The Toast, The Establishment, and PodCastle. Follow them on Twitter @LocalCreature.

Instar

by Carrow Narby

They just broke ground this week on a new high rise. When they cracked into the earth it flooded the neighborhood with the stench of sulfur. There’s a layer of ancient rot beneath the pavement. Centuries worth of life, ground into filth.

Or so I imagine. I had to look up the source of the smell and some local news site attributed it to “organic materials” in the soil. I was worried that it might be a gas leak.

For the past few mornings the wind has pushed the awful smell in through the screen above my bed. As bad as it is, it isn’t worth shutting the window. Even as late summer beats on, I can’t sleep without the weight and softness of ten thousand blankets. Without the breeze my nest would become unbearably hot, so I tolerate the smell of brimstone and corruption. It’s sort of fitting, I think, given the maggoty turn that my life has taken.

There are these long, wonderful moments, in between waking and rising, when I am both sentient and senseless. The light doesn’t resolve yet into images. Sensation doesn’t crystallize into meaning. Best of all, I can’t feel my body or apprehend its shape.

You see an awful lot about monsters these days. Just everywhere you look, endless breathless chatter about fucking monsters, turning into monsters, giving birth to monsters. Beautiful and interesting people who just happen to be monsters: some sad grackle-winged boy, a girl with coral antlers. Everyone always looks so slender and sharp. Perfect rows of needle teeth, perfect iridescent scales, perfect gold stiletto claws. It seems downright glamorous, like it would all be neon witches’ sabbaths and subterranean raves or something.

For me, monsterhood is mostly just strangers demanding to know what I am. There wasn’t any kind of initiation waiting for me. No coven or cabal. No prophecy or secret past was revealed. It was on my own and by creeping increments that I realized I had become a thing.

Kris is a friend of a friend. I saw her around a few parties and we fumbled into each other’s orbits. She called out my name from across the room once, amid the din of disparate conversations. It was so charming, that little gesture of being summoned. I let her ask me out, to sit with her in that park at the edge of the North End.

When we meet, she wants to go down Hanover to Mike’s but I point just across the street to a tiny storefront with a blue and yellow sign. “It’s way better,” I insist, and I feel strangely proud as she acquiesces.

The leading edge of autumn has brought a welcome break from the suffocating heat, but it also means that the sunlight has shifted. As Kris and I sit together, the late afternoon light lances down at us. It’s relentless, prying. I wonder if she can tell how much I’m trying to hide from it.

Despite my anxiety, we talk easily and idly. When she was little, Kris recalls, she heard somewhere about the dangers of zebra mussels. They’re an invasive species around the Great Lakes, she explains. Her mother must have read a sign to her or something, warning boaters to inspect and clean their hulls. Except that Kris was maybe four at the time, and she had no concept yet of what a mussel is. She heard “zebra muscles.” What she pictured, she tells me, was downright nightmarish. Not a muscular zebra or something, but a boat encrusted with disembodied, pulsing zebra flesh. She says that the image came from nowhere except the most literal understanding of what she had heard, and that it became horrible only afterward, in retrospect.

“I didn’t understand but I just accepted it,” she laughs.

I grin too, and I tell her “I love that.” And I love sitting here, with a friend of a friend that I met at a party. Normality is too distant even to long for, but here is something so conventional, so pleasantly dull. I wonder if there are people who feel like this all the time and I almost ask that out loud.

But all at once I realize that she’s looking at me, and I can’t bear it. She can see me in the slanted orange light. The rays reveal the translucency around my edges, the ugly pulse of slime beneath the membrane of my skin. I can feel the buttons of my jacket straining. I can’t eat the pastry that I’ve bought, not in front of her. She must realize that my clothes are holding me into a human shape. She’s imagining the strange organs that shudder and twitch beneath the seams.

I can’t force myself to say much more before we part ways. She knows. I’m sure that I won’t hear from her again.

I slump back toward Haymarket. I huddle stingless on a crowded E train. My spines are sparse and transient: often I neglect to shave, sometimes my keys poke out through a hole that they’ve worn in the pocket of my coat.

It is the fate of monsters, no matter what, to attract would-be monster-slayers. For me, this has never been as straightforward as a jeering mob or as romantic as a lone man with a glittering sword. This time it’s kids. A small group of ninth or tenth graders, maybe, standing on the other side of the train car. They gesture toward me and consult each other in stage whispers, wondering aloud what I could possibly be.

There’s this image, a fragment of a story. I don’t remember where I picked it up or what first made me think of it, but it’s there in my brain and it’s this: Once upon a time a baby was found in a beehive.

By chance, a passing witch heard a newborn’s squall. Amid a hovering cloud of bees, she cracked apart a hollow log. And there was an infant nestled in the rot, slick with honey, as pale as a grub.

I don’t know what happens after that or why any of it happened at all. It had started with sacrificing some of the other larvae to widen her cell. And things just took off from there, I suppose. Things took a turn, as they will do.

At home I start to undress as soon as I’ve closed the door. When I finally peel the tight undermost layer away from my torso, my body sags out, shapeless. I slump onto the bed and burrow down into the tangle of blankets. As I curl up tight, I tuck a bit of sheet between every segment and fold, so that I don’t have to feel the awful touch of myself.

I can’t say when or how my metamorphosis began. Day by day I watched my face bloat outward, swallowing up my eyes, my jaw. My skin became a pallid casing. It strains to hold in my shuddering mass, as if my body wants to burst and dissolve.

I have always been drawn to hollows and nests and to the dirt. Spaces in the dark where a thing might press itself flush against the walls, unseen and safe. As a child I would build a cairn of pillows around myself before falling asleep. I used to turn over the rocks that edged my mother’s garden, to watch the millipedes and woodlice scatter. Eager to recoil from the sight of a grub writhing helplessly against the light.

In my tiny apartment there is an alcove that, I think, was meant for a writing desk. But I wedged my bed into it, and closed it off with a heavy curtain.

I guess that it has all been a sort of instinctive preparation. Like the bees widening the larval infant’s cell. The thing is, it’s not just shiny little flying things that start their lives as fat, fumbling worms. It isn’t all butterflies and bluebottles. There are things in the world that wriggle freely as larvae and then pupate into sessile blobs. I think about all those mornings when I stretch out shapeless and insensible. I wonder if I’ll turn out to be more of a sea sponge than a sphinx moth.

Kris calls. She wants to see me again.

We meet at my place. I don’t know what to say about the evening in the park but she doesn’t ask about it. She calls me by my name again. She wants to know if I’m alright.

I tell her about that unshakable image of the bee-child. “What must it be like,” I sigh. To wonder why, out of a sea of sisters, you were the one to swell into something wingless and terrible.

“What must

Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit

by Cynthia So

On the day Sunae turned nine years old, there was no joyful feast. A monster burst from the sea that night and ate five people. The Mirayans gathered upon the shore to watch this, as they did every Appeasement. Sunae’s mother covered Sunae’s eyes, but Sunae still heard the screams. The crunch of brittle bone between teeth. The wet gulp of gluttonous throats.

Sunae prayed to the Goddess that the warrior Yomue might rise from the dead and defeat the monster yet again. No warrior came, but a hand grasped Sunae’s and squeezed. A hand as small as her own.

When it was over, Sunae’s mother murmured, “Now we will be safe for another ten years.” She removed her hands from Sunae’s eyes, and Sunae flinched from the gore before her. The older children always said that this was why Miraya’s beaches were pink, but she hadn’t been convinced until she saw the sands now drenched with fresh blood. Dark red on dusk pink.

Full transcript after the cut:

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 66 for March 5, 2019. This is your host Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Tell the Phoenix Fox, Tell the Tortoise Fruit" by Cynthia So and a poem by Chanter, "The Lamentations of Old Money."

This episode is part of the newest GlitterShip issue, which was just released and... is very late. The "Summer 2018" issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and now Gumroad! If you're one of our Patreon supporters, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. For everyone else, it's $2.99, and all of our back issues are $1.49.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible and a free audiobook to keep. If you'er looking for an excellent book of short queer stories to listen to, you should check out Bitter Waters by Chaz Brenchley. This book is full of speculative fiction featuring gay men and was awarded the Lambda Award for best LGBT speculative fiction.

To download Bitter Waters for free today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership -- or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else.

Up first, our poem:

Chanter is a proud Wisconsinite who took flight (alas, not literally) from her originating small town, headed for the big city’s more accepting climes and never looked back. She’s proudly asexual, demisensual, and some flavor of bi- or panromantic that’s as yet proving difficult to define. She’s also brand squeaky new (emphasis, occasionally, on squeaky) to official publication. Besides holding down a day job, she’s an active shortwave radio DXer and ham operator, as well as a crowdfunded author currently based mainly on Dreamwidth.

The Lamentations of Old Money

by Chanter

Jennifer doesn’t want a white dress.

She doesn’t want a church, an altar, a tangle of coast-grown flowers, sisters in matching silk, trained doves, stained glass, twenty overlaid colognes and splintering sunlight, rehearsed organ music and recorded pop shorthand warbling through weak speakers, biting April breezes, overthought hair and makeup, snow in hardwood aisles.

Jennifer doesn’t want a wild time.

She doesn’t want hips around shoulders, tools and toys, filthy supplications and hot breath ideas, hours between bedsheets, sticky aftermaths, bruises as tawdry mementos in hard to reach places, hands and mouths, teeth and tongues and fluids, too many entrances, the junctions of legs and legs and legs.

Jennifer doesn’t want hard edges.

Not for her, leashes, spike heels and bad girl pretense. not for her, the bite of too-demanding fingertips grinding at her biceps, cold and bruising at her cheeks, clamped into the flesh of her wrists. Not for her, orders with teeth both behind and in them, whipcracks in voice and deed. Not for her, daddy’s little anything, mommy’s little anything, a schoolgirl’s life, a paddle’s life, princess, flower, whore. Not for her, latex and custom-made chains, iron protocol and a child’s tear-stung punishments, revoked names and Halloween’s expected trappings.

Not for her, anonymity. Not for her, all of the spice and none of the wine to mull with it.

What Jennifer wants?

Fits on a two-sided coin.

One side:

Jennifer wants nights asleep in a hayloft, clothes on, with siblings in arms—and black coffee, and cotton-coarse humor, and blood— to her left and right.

Jennifer wants a uniform, wants honest lamplight with a wick beneath it, wants a hundred songs and a hand-tuned fiddle, a guitar played at a campfire, laces and burlap, branches and homespun wool, antique language, tactile camaraderie, respected rank and unresented ceremony, world-spanning care so personal it can’t be feigned, so simultaneously subtle and frank that it confuses, so elegant it’s genuine, so casual it’s ancient. “To be fair, that one does drive me utterly mad of an afternoon but God be good, dear fellow, why wouldn’t I?”

Jennifer wants a certain amount of ignored anachronism, wants a world where ‘dear fellow’ as affectionate genderless address is just fine, where ‘she’s a good man to have beside you in a fight’ is perfectly acceptable wording, but where the phrase ‘man up’ is both soundly off limits and considered decades or centuries distant, depending; a world where, at the end of the day, it’s quietly acknowledged and otherwise near-forgotten that oh yes, that one there, she’s a girl. As in woman. As in, see also, dame. Noun. Example I: To go to work for the war effort on the road under cover of darkness, on the air for the BBC, or on the battlefield firing decisive cannon blast volleys like a real dame.

Example II: I’m a girl, and mostly, I prefer other dames to fellas. Mostly. But when I don’t, I kinda have a type? Ahem!”

Somewhere, a coin is balancing on its edge.

And the flip side:

Jennifer wants to write a hundred stories and bind them in hard covers, wants modern skirts to her ankles, comfortable jeans and blue corduroy coat sleeves, wants city streets, steel toes and long hair, near-distant clocktower bells, silver jewelry bought by her own hand, in her own name, a rocking chair made to last for decades, a damn fine radio setup, the solid strength of a wooden door at her back after she and she - he and she - they and she after they’ve crashed through it and, fully clothed, battered it closed behind them.

Both sides:

Jennifer wants her wrists pressed flat against that wooden door, all benevolent force, all warmth, all welcome gravity, all burgeoning life in orbit, all the steady strength of a star in symbiosis with a planet. Jennifer wants voices and voices and voices, innocent details and muscle-melting, breath-stealing turns of phrase, sound serving as light serving as lodestone to the iron in every millimeter of her except, except, for a bare and unbared few.

One side:

Jennifer wants the wind at her back, a message, a mission, a reason and a warning, miles and miles and miles rolled out under a sky filled with leaden stars, a purpose and a signal, a gesture, an anticipation of command that tenses her like a bowstring before—wait, wait, wait for it—rush for it— “Fire!”

Both sides:

Jennifer wants to be eager, to be teeming under her skin with silver, wants a reason and a cause and a leader who’s fallible by self-description, near-matchless by others’ accounts, wants to thrill to rank, surname, simple designation, wants to know at exactly what she’s aimed, near-precisely what will happen when she hits and that yes, the trusted, entirely human hands of gravity to a planet are the only hands pulling or perhaps, perhaps, the only hands directing those pulling her string, wants to be entirely, mindfully, consensually willing to be fired like a longbow.

And the flip side:

Jennifer wants to bring a girlfriend home to her parents, wants to curl into accented words like they’re warm compresses and quilts, wants to make promises and keep them, find each others’ keys, play each others’ record collections, brush cat hair off each others’ sweaters, adore and be adored forever, not live together. Jennifer wants to never grow tired of hearing herself say “This is Elaine.” Or “This is Kim.” Or “This is...” “This is my better half.”

Both sides:

Jennifer wants orders that both delight her and fill her with clean purpose, stoking a fire that consumes every inch of her except, except, for the space between her thighs. Jennifer wants the intersection where bravery meets well-placed loyalty. Jennifer wants to know exactly what she’s doing, wants to be utterly sure of her cause, to make up her entire mind, on her own, and then raise her voice and throw herself into the thing with abandon because yes, this is right, this is reason, this is exuberance and happiness and righteous fury blazing, this is bright history, this is justice, this is--

One coin. With two sides.

Jennifer wants the rarity that is liking of, love for, acceptance and welcome of both the existence and the admission of her two sides.

Even when she’s difficult. E

Episode 65 is part of the Spring 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here:http://www.glittership.com/buy/

A Memory of Wind

Susan Jane Bigelow

Yeni looked up at the right time, just for a single moment, and she saw a girl fly past far overhead.

No one else in the wide dome of Center Garden, the bustling, cavernous heart of the greatship, noticed. Yeni had to run to catch up with her mother, who walked a few steps ahead.

“Did you see?” she demanded. “A flying girl!”

“Don’t lie,” her mother said tiredly.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 65. Today we have a reprint of "A Memory of Wind" by Susan Jane Bigelow to finish off the episodes from the Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip.

Susan Jane Bigelow is the author of the Extrahumans series, the LGBT YA novel The Demon Girl’s Song and numerous short stories. Her Grayline Sisters trilogy will be released by Book Smugglers Publishing in 2018. She lives in Connecticut, where she is a librarian and political columnist/commentator, with her wife and too many cats.

"A Memory of Wind" was narrated by A.J. Fitzwater.

A.J. Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press’s At The Edge anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater.

A Memory of Wind

Susan Jane Bigelow

Yeni looked up at the right time, just for a single moment, and she saw a girl fly past far overhead.

No one else in the wide dome of Center Garden, the bustling, cavernous heart of the greatship, noticed. Yeni had to run to catch up with her mother, who walked a few steps ahead.

“Did you see?” she demanded. “A flying girl!”

“Don’t lie,” her mother said tiredly.

Long after, her mother claimed she’d never even heard her say this, much less that she’d seen anything.

But Yeni had seen, and she remembered.

Yeni pulled the handle with all the strength of her twenty-two years. Sweat trickled into her eyes, and her muscles cried out in pain.

“Just a little more!” grunted Shan, and then the door gave way at last, opening out into the deserted corridor. They fell back, astonished.

“See?” Yeni said, puffing and wiping the smooth top of her head with the sleeve of her tunic. “It’s here. Just like the story said.”

A ladder.

Shan looked worried. “I don’t know. This is a bad idea. We’re going to get caught.”

“Don’t get scared on me now,” snapped Yeni. “Who’s gonna catch us? There’s nobody in this section.”

He looked up into the darkness, then back at her.

“This is our chance,” she insisted. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind.”

She followed Shan up, keeping a close ear out for anything or anyone coming up behind them. They’d both turned their implants down to the lowest level, so they only did things like regulate heartbeats, monitor vital signs, and give them better night vision. The parts that told the ship where they were and what they were doing were off, now; disabled through an old trick Shan had dug up. Anyone looking for them would think they were back in their shared quarters in Supardy Forward.

“I think we’re three decks up,” said Shan. He’d reached a ledge with a door, and was sitting on it. She climbed up next to him. “So this must be it.”

“The door has dents in it,” she said wonderingly. “And… are those scorch marks?”

Shan pointed at the shaft around them. It was riddled with holes and burn marks.

“We’re here,” she said, standing. “Bunda Forward.”

They walked slowly, reverently, into the destroyed section. Numbers fed into Yeni’s vision: sensor scans and her own vital signs.

“Fifty years,” whispered Shan into the heavy darkness. “I’m not getting any radiation.”

“No,” murmured Yeni. “Because it was all a lie. Look around.”

The Bunda Incident had happened when their parents were young, and the only stories they told were of some kind of terrible accident that had resulted in the section being sealed, the Lord Captain taking tighter control of the greatship, and the end of a thousand years of civilian rule.

Some people had written down different stories, though, and Yeni had hunted those stories down one after another. Those stories spoke of riots and rebellion, and ShipOps sweeping in to purge the greatship of the last of the Select Board and their supporters, sealing the section behind them.

But when they made subtle, discreet inquiries of the people who had written the stories, they blinked at them and shook their heads. It was an accident, they said with perfect sincerity. Why would you think otherwise?

Memory was a funny thing. Humans were so fallible and breakable, brains leaked information like sieves. Even Shan seemed to forget important things from time to time, and she had to remind him.

It was like that with the access door. She and Shan had found a story written on a singed sheet of plastic detailing where the access ladder from Supardy up to Bunda Forward that ShipOps had used was. He hadn’t wanted to come, he didn’t see the point. He didn’t even remember the door, or what was so important about Bunda Forward to begin with. She reminded him, patient as always.

Yeni was used to people forgetting.

She held fast to her own memories, sure that someday she, too, would forget. She left notes for herself everywhere, written down in plastic so they couldn’t be changed. She had yet to need them, but someday she knew she would.

She recorded everything with her implant, filing it all away to use later.

“See here,” she murmured. “Symbols of the old government. And this name? I think she was on the Select Board. It was true, Shan! The stories were true.” She pointed to the scorch marks on the wall, and the brown stains on the floor. “There was a battle here. It wasn’t an accident.”

She felt a little tickle at the back of her mind, an odd sense that she sometimes got. It usually didn’t mean anything, but here… it felt dangerous, somehow. She stood and looked around.

“Shan?”

He was a few meters away, looking blankly at a wall.

“Shan!” She snapped her fingers in front of his eyes.

He blinked. “Yeni? We should go home.”

“Not now,” she insisted. “You can’t do this now. We’re in Bunda Forward. We came here just now. Remember!”

He frowned. “I don’t know what you mean. I have to go home.”

He got up and started to run towards the end of the hall.

“Wait!” she cried, and sprinted after him.

There was an open door. A lift tube, filled with an anti-gravity field that would gently bring you up or down, depending on where you wanted to go.

But this section was sealed off. There was no power, and no field. And if Shan didn’t remember that—

Yeni shrieked in horror as he plunged over the edge.

And then she scrambled back as a woman rose smoothly up the tube, carrying a limp Shan in her arms.

She said nothing, but smiled at Yeni. The words hello again formed distinctly in her mind.

The woman had already carried Shan down, and now she waited for Yeni, her arms wide. She was beautiful, Yeni thought longingly. Her body was rounded but muscular, her cheeks were high-set, and her eyes deep and expressive. Yeni thought she had a tattoo of some kind on her head until she realized with a shock that the woman had grown hair.

She watched Yeni with a touch of bemusement.

“How can I trust you?” Yeni whispered into the pregnant stillness of Bunda Forward.

The woman made no sound in reply. She only waited, her arms spread, for Yeni to come to her. A sense of welcome and safe drifted across the empty space.

Hesitantly, Yeni stepped out to her, her arms grabbing hold of the flying woman’s narrow waist and shoulders. She felt her arms twine around her back.

They began to slowly descend.

Her skin smelled like the plants in Center Garden. Yeni lay her head against the woman’s shoulder as they drifted down into darkness.

“Who are you?” she wondered. “What’s your name?”

In response there was a wild, almost chaotic sense of brightness, greenness, and of a stiff, constant breeze—the kind Yeni had rarely ever felt here on the greatship.

There was a word for that, she thought, from long ago when the greatship had still docked at planets to trade.

Wind.

When they reached the bottom of the tube, Wind gently released Yeni.

“I saw you,” she said, voice trembling. “Years ago. Everyone forgot. I didn’t, though. It was you, wasn’t it?”

In response, Wind’s serene face lit up into a grin.

“It was you! You… you taught me to look for things everyone else was ignoring,” said Yeni, the words pouring out of her. “That things aren’t what they seem to be. I remembered you.”

Wind clapped her hands, then leaned in to give Yeni a quick, electric kiss before rocketing back up into the darkness of the lift shaft.

Yeni watched her go, heart pounding. She could still feel Wind’s lips on hers long after.

Shan fell away from Yeni after that. He denied ever being anywhere near Bunda Forward, he didn’t remembe

Episode 64 is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL and is part of the Spring 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here:http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Sabuyashi Flies by Sebastian Strange

Sofie Faucher advertised her solution to the age-old magic problem well. I can still remember the first night I stepped out of Ellen’s dorm building, late, and looked up to see one of Faucher’s billboards; a crisp square of white and silver against the darkest, featuring Faucher’s trim torso and winning smile. Her large dark eyes were fixed on the future, somewhere behind me and much higher up, and her hands clasped a glass pitcher full of shimmering silver.

NOBODY HAS TO DIE was written across the bottom. FAUCHER’S SPARK.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 64. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a piece of original fiction, "Sabuyashi Flies" by Sebastian Strange, and a poem, "how to exist in between" by Danny McLaren.

Danny McLaren is a queer and non binary writer who uses they/them pronouns. They have been writing short fiction and poetry for as long as they can remember, but only entered the world of publishing this year. They are currently an undergraduate student majoring in gender studies. They often explore themes associated with mental health, gender, identity, and social justice in their work. They are an editor and co-founder of Alien Pub, an arts and culture magazine.

How to exist in between

find a crack in the floorboards where you can hide. this will be your home. don’t worry if you can’t fit now; their words will make you feel small enough to fall through the slats eventually. listen to the footsteps and laughter above, hear how they stomp around with violent intent. know they’d crush you if they knew you were here.

teach yourself to be quiet enough that no one pays you any attention. it’s better to go unseen than draw the eye of someone unkind, someone with a word or two for people like you. feel their eyes on you either way, and know that the questions about your hair, your clothes, your voice, are already on their lips. walk faster, so that you’re gone before they can speak.

take note of what they say when they think you can’t hear. scribble them all down in the back of your notebook, everything overheard in the back of a lecture hall, or on the bus, or to your mother, save them for a time when you will need to be reminded why you exist, why you continue to exist.

ask them to call you by your name. when they don’t, hold your tongue. when they ask if you are a boy or a girl, say no. you do not owe them an answer, least of all to a question for which you have none. remember how they seem to take offence to your pronouns, as if your existence has anything to do with them. know that these people are not worth your time. know that one day you will find ones who are.

Sebastian Strange writes from Ohio but still feels like a New Englander. His fiction has been published in Mythic Delirium and Crossed Genres. Find him trying to figure out Twitter at @MonstrousMor.

"Sabuyashi Flies" was narrated by Maria Rose.

Maria Rose is a graphic designer, writer, astrologer, classicist. Sometimes saturnine, mostly eccentric. You can hear her audiobook narration work in “Messengers of the Right” from University of Press Audiobooks or at Gallery of Curiosities Podcast. Sabuyashi Flies by Sebastian Strange

Sofie Faucher advertised her solution to the age-old magic problem well. I can still remember the first night I stepped out of Ellen’s dorm building, late, and looked up to see one of Faucher’s billboards; a crisp square of white and silver against the darkest, featuring Faucher’s trim torso and winning smile. Her large dark eyes were fixed on the future, somewhere behind me and much higher up, and her hands clasped a glass pitcher full of shimmering silver.

NOBODY HAS TO DIE was written across the bottom. FAUCHER’S SPARK.

Some of the early adverts, I heard, had the outline of a raven by the product name, or sketched on the glass container. The papers went briefly wild over it—she was said to be catering to Galenites, who were a fringe element and shouldn’t be catered to; then everyone printed letters from Galenites who supported Faucher and thought she was bringing in the future, and Galenites who thought she was perverting everything Galen Guntram had stood for and ought to be stopped. How, they didn’t specify; there was no law against taking Galen Guntram’s name in vain.

I just thought if you were really a Galenite, you would have to be pretty stupid to write in to a paper, because your letters would probably get seized by the police and used to track you. It wasn’t against the law to be a Galenite (yet) but it was considered unpatriotic and in bad taste. And in these days, those things could get you shot. L’Amérique la belle—that’s what my mother always muttered when she saw another death on the news.

She was Japanese, not French, but she learned a little French from my father; said she liked the sarcastic, slippery sound of it. My father came from France, but was Roma by birth; I don’t mention that part to most people; I’m tired of being asked about ‘living on the road’. I don’t know much about how my father lived, but I was born in America, in a slender apartment; number five in building number four in the housing for the magicians America had imported from other countries. Mama told me the walls were so thin everyone heard me crying, and before long the doctor opened the door to a handful of women bearing gifts. They were all from different countries, and only one of them spoke broken French and another knew a few textbook phrases in Japanese, but Mama said they managed to understand each other. Food and smiles and helping hand when it was needed—that was the language of people far from home. The crying child says, there is need, and in return you silently say I will help you, and an equally silent promise is made in return. Mama told me what all the women looked like, so if I ever met them again I could pay them back.

I never quite knew what she expected me to do. These days, I could offer them a spell, but back then I had my chubby fingers dipped in ink and four-fifths of my soul signed over to the Massachusetts Department of Magicians before I could write my name. The price for the housing, and the monthly allowance; my father had already used two of his spells when he’d heard about the program, and they’d wanted magicians with more to spare. So he’d thrown in his firstborn child and, amazingly, America shrugged and accepted.

L’Amérique la belle!

Faucher’s Spark appeared in my first year of college, and I tried it at the end of my second. My father was dying, of a sickness nobody could quite explain or pinpoint, so I’d started drinking a little to see if it dulled the pain. It didn’t do much, but at the third party I got into, the boy presiding over it all (Jack, English, stupidly rich) produced a bottle of Faucher’s and announced he’d be mixing drinks with it for anyone brave enough to try. Ellen, ignoring my horrified whispers, was the first to swagger forward and offer herself as a test subject. I watched as she swirled the silver liquid into her half-depleted drink, swigged the rest, and grimaced.

“It tastes nasty,” she declared, then shuddered. Put her hand out in the air with a look of wonder, more as if she were high than drunk, and snapped her fingers. Feathers materialized, tiny and glittery and perfect. Snap, and they became bubbles before they touched the floor.

She snapped again, but nothing happened. Turning around, she thrust her glass out at Jack. “I don’t care how horrible it tastes,” she said. “Fill it up.”

I went up somewhere in the second wave, the people who weren’t brave enough to leap forward immediately but didn’t want to feel left out. Jack dripped a tiny amount into my glance, giving me a half-smile. I couldn’t tell if it was cruel or flirtatious; either was equally unwelcome.

Faucher’s goes down smooth but sick-tasting, like meat and polluted earth. But in your belly, it sings. It warms you from the inside out, and makes you feel invincible. And when I held out my hands, a rain of jewel-like beetles pattered down into them. They clung tight to me, friendly but not invasive, crawling over my shoulders and tickling inside my shirt collar. They scared away a boy or two who got too near, and I whispered thanks to them.

I got drunk enough in the early morning to walk home, wanting to show my father, but by the time I got there they’d dissolved into nothing; leaving a thin, dry layer on my skin, like the aftermath of a soap bubble. My father believed me anyway, listened to my babbled descriptions of their beauty with his hand on my hand. “They sound wonderful, Sabuyashi,” he told me. “I’m sure your mother would have been proud.”

My mother was a beetle enthusiast. Her great-great-grandmother had discovered the sabuyashi beetle, and my mother lived joyously in the shadow of that glory. She died when I was twelve, but almost died before I was born; she stowed away on a ship out of Japan when she was eighteen (having presumably exhausted the store of interesting beetles in Japan) and was found mid-voyage. It was between wars but women have rarely been treated kindly on the sea, especially when they don’t speak the language the sailors know. My mother spoke only a few words of English, the language they tried to address her in, and lost them all in her fright. She only survived because one

GRAVEDIGGING

by Sarah Goldman

When I woke up, I noticed first that Clarissa was there, because she was always the first thing I noticed.

I noticed three things immediately after that: it was dark, I could feel dirt under my fingers, and my mouth tasted disgusting, like charcoal and rubbing alcohol and cotton.

"What the fuck?" is what I tried to say, except I don't think the words came out quite right. I started coughing and I couldn't stop.

"Just give it a second," Clarissa said, rubbing my back. I got a good look at her once the coughing subsided and my eyes stopped watering, and she looked like she'd been run over by a truck a few times: dark circles, greasy hair, unwashed skin. Clarissa always tried to look as put together as people expected her to be. I'd seen her look this messed up once or twice before, and it never meant anything good.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 63! This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a reprint of “Gravedigging" by Sarah Goldman.

This story is part of the (late) Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase atglittership.com/buyand on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you’re a Patreon supporter, you should have access to this issue waiting for you when you log in. We also have GlitterShip Year Two available in both ebook and paperback formats to add to your queer science fiction collection.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program.This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep.

If you’re looking for an excellent queer book to listen to, check outAutonomousby Annalee Newitz. This book has a ton of cool concepts and really intriguing characters. If you're a fan of patent-fighting drug pirates or AI characters working out their identities, this is the book for you.

To downloadAutonomousfor free today, go towww.audibletrial.com/glittership— or choose another book if you’re in the mood for something else.

Sarah Goldman grew up near Kansas City and studied sociology at Bryn Mawr College. She is a First Reader at Strange Horizons, and her short fiction has appeared in Cicada and Escape Pod. You can find her online atsarahmgoldman.com, or on Twitter @sarahwhowrites.

"Gravedigging" is narrated by A.J. Fitzwater.

A.J. Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press’s At The Edge anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater.

GRAVEDIGGING

by Sarah Goldman

When I woke up, I noticed first that Clarissa was there, because she was always the first thing I noticed.

I noticed three things immediately after that: it was dark, I could feel dirt under my fingers, and my mouth tasted disgusting, like charcoal and rubbing alcohol and cotton.

"What the fuck?" is what I tried to say, except I don't think the words came out quite right. I started coughing and I couldn't stop.

"Just give it a second," Clarissa said, rubbing my back. I got a good look at her once the coughing subsided and my eyes stopped watering, and she looked like she'd been run over by a truck a few times: dark circles, greasy hair, unwashed skin. Clarissa always tried to look as put together as people expected her to be. I'd seen her look this messed up once or twice before, and it never meant anything good.

"Are you okay?" I asked. I had a little more luck with pronunciation this time. "You look kind of like death warmed over. No offense."

Clarissa started to laugh, loud and wild enough that it was more scary than comforting. When she stopped, I only had time to open my mouth to ask a question before her eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped over next to me in the dirt.

We were lying on dirt. It was dark. I looked up, and up, and up, and when I saw the edges of the hole we were in, I understood what Clarissa had done.

I clambered up the sides of the grave to get a good look at the headstone. I knew what it would say, but I had to see it.

It told me that May Tenenbaum had died at nineteen years old. If I'd lived another three weeks, I would have been twenty.

I sat back down next to Clarissa, passed out in my grave in the wedge of space she'd carved out next to my coffin. A crowbar lay beside us, where she'd used it to pry off the lid, next to the pile of small stones she'd brought for the spell.

I looked down at my fingernails, which were neat and manicured like they'd never been while I was alive, and I wondered if I should try to wake Clarissa up.

I'd seen her do this before, after she overexerted herself on a spell, and she'd always been all right afterwards. Her pulse, when I checked, was steady, so I stole her phone out of her pocket instead. The last day I remembered had been the fifth of June. My tombstone told me I'd died on the sixth. Today was the seventeenth. I must have been buried for at least a week or so, then. I know my father would've wanted me buried quickly, a Jewish funeral.

A good thing, too. No embalming fluid for Clarissa to deal with.

Performing necromancy on humans was a felony, and it was horrendously, skin-crawlingly terrifying besides. The idea had made me queasy when it happened in books or movies, when TV pundits went on rants. But from this side of things, it wasn't so bad. My hands were distressingly pale when I looked at them, and my head was in bad shape, but when I checked my face in Clarissa's phone camera, I honestly looked okay. Like I'd been at a fancy party, had too much champagne, fell down in the dirt outside. Messed up, but not a zombie.

I didn't feel dead at all.

What I should feel was furious. I should be demanding that Clarissa take it back. But I wasn't betrayed that someone I loved would do such an awful thing, like the girl in that modern day Frankenstein blockbuster we'd seen last month. I wasn't thinking about the greater good. I was selfishly and vainly glad, because the girl I would do anything for had done this for me. I'd seen the faces Clarissa made during that stupid movie, and yet: here we both were. Her passed out in a grave she must have spent all night digging up, and me alive when I should be dead.

I ran my fingers through her hair, and after fourteen minutes by the clock on her phone, Clarissa woke up.

She stared at me, and then she sat up too fast and almost fell right back down afterwards. I grabbed her shoulders to steady her.

"It worked," she said, watching me with wide eyes.

"It did," I said. "You still look terrible."

"Shut up," she said automatically, with no heat behind it. She put her hands against the sides of my face. I wondered, distantly, if my cheeks felt cold, or if my blood had already started to warm them up again.

Very suddenly, Clarissa yanked me into a hug, almost overbalancing the both of us. I hugged her back, and politely ignored the fact that she was crying into the shoulder of my nice dress.

"I'm okay," I said, because Clarissa probably needed to hear it. "If anyone isn't okay, I think it's probably you. Were you supposed to pass out?"

Clarissa snorted, and then shrugged without removing her face from the crook of my neck. "Occupational hazard," she said, muffled into my shoulder. After a moment, she raised her face, eyes puffy and red. "It happens sometimes, with larger—with anything more substantial." She'd probably been about to say ‘animals.’ I guess she didn't think I'd find the comparison flattering. I felt a little sick.

Clarissa wiped her face on her sleeve and shook out her hair, visibly trying to pull herself together. "We need to get out of here. The sun is supposed to rise in—" she fumbled for her phone before I handed it back to her, "—about ten minutes."

I immediately felt better. Following Clarissa's plans was something I was used to. Together, we gathered up her things and climbed out of my grave, using her shovel to push the soil back as best we could, and we walked out of the cemetery together, the sun rising at our backs.

Clarissa had always known how to make loud and spectacular mistakes.

Even as a kid, she made spellwork look easy. When we were ten, I watched her bring back our class's pet guinea pig. We all huddled around Clarissa, crouched in the dirt. She held a chunk of gravel in her hands and closed her eyes for a moment, and we were all sure that she was faking, that nothing would happen.

Then the guinea pig got up, and we had to race to catch it.

Afterwards, the other kids ran to show our teacher. I stayed behind with Clarissa. She was on her back, staring up at the sky, tossing the piece of playground gravel that tethered the guinea pig's life up and down in her hand.

"That was amazing," I told her.

She shrugged, and coughed. "I missed him. What else was I supposed to do?" Then she looked at me and grinned, smile so bright I could feel it in my own stomach. "It was cool, wasn't it?"

Clarissa wore that little piece of playground gravel she'd used for the spell on a chain around her wr

Stories My Body Can Tell

by Alina Sichevaya

My mama used to tell me I was born screaming, sticky, and uglier than every sin she’d ever known, which was all of them. I still like to remember that. Gives me a warm feeling in my stomach. Especially when it looks like I’m about to die the same way.

I’m remembering it now. My throat feels skinned, but on the inside, and my lips stick to each other, the blood from my nose drying over them. It’s definitely broken, and one of my lips might be split. One of my eyes is swelling shut. I’ve had worse—I’m not exactly dying—but it hurts to breathe, and my ribs feel like they’re falling to pieces inside of me. They probably are.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 62! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Stories My Body Can Tell" by Alina Sichevaya and a poem, "Daddy Death" by Jeana Jorgensen.

This episode is part of the newest GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you're a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program.This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep.

If you're looking for an excellent book to listen to, check outHildby Nicola Griffith which is a historical fantasy about the youth of St. Hilda in 7th century Britain. The book is full of lush historical descriptions and the sometimes brutal life of a young woman with extraordinary gifts.

To download Hild for free today, go towww.audibletrial.com/glittership— or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else.

Jeana Jorgensen is a folklorist, writer, dance, and sex educator. Her poetry has appeared at Strange Horizons, Liminality, Stone Telling, Enchanted Conversation, and Mirror Dance. She blogs at Patheos (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/foxyfolklorist/) and is constantly on Twitter (@foxyfolklorist).

Daddy Death

by Jeana Jorgensen

Death is just. Death is fair. Death was ours first and still he loves us best.

I only had one father that mattered: Daddy Death, godfather to lost boys like me who arrived alone and quaking, newborns at the gates of the club, too new to know our language, our customs.

I was Daddy Death’s favorite, strong and young, a pup lapping up rules and adoration and learning so quickly to spot our kind in the waking world: the closeted businessman, father of four; the baker, the lawyer, the burly school bus driver; and more politicians than I could count. I eyed them all, a specter of Daddy Death in my vision nodding, as if to say, he is one of ours, he belongs to our underworld, if only he’d let himself.

Daddy Death is fair and even-handed with all (even me; especially me) bears and pups and dykes and more meting out punishment when deserved but oh so tender, so gentle with aftercare.

That was before the rumors, the slow illness preying on us; whispering grid, gay, go away and the clubs closed as the body count rose.

Aging monarch on shadowy throne: Daddy Death lasted longest but stopped going out (except for the appointments) and I was his messenger boy. I, who passed well enough in the straight world; I, who charmed all the pharmacists; I, who could still see unerringly when I meet a man that he is one of ours; he may yet escape the plague though Daddy Death looms over his bed each night, an invitation, a warning, a man whose heart can hold us all.

Love is a door, love is a dungeon where a tender man presses pain into your skin and shows you to yourself.

Daddy Death waits for me in the next world while I do his work in this one, shepherding boys so young to be in so much pain, but so was I at that age and now we know so much more, and the medicine takes root in our bodies and though decimated, we grow strong again.

Alina Sichevaya is a writer and student based in North Carolina. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop, was a finalist for the 2017 Dell Magazines Award, and her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons. In her spare time, Alina plays a lot of Overwatch and waves a string around for her very large orange cat. She can be found on Twitter at @alina_sichevaya and you can visit her website at https://sichevaya.wordpress.com.

Our narrator is Kirby Marshall-Collins.Kirby is a Los Angeles-based writer and director with a hunger for authentic, hopeful storytelling. She got her start writing Disney spec scripts as a child before going on to gain a BA in Theater, Film, and Digital Production. She'd like to thank her high school English teacher for always volunteering her to read in class--if she can do "The Odyssey" solo, she can do anything.

Stories My Body Can Tell

by Alina Sichevaya

My mama used to tell me I was born screaming, sticky, and uglier than every sin she’d ever known, which was all of them. I still like to remember that. Gives me a warm feeling in my stomach. Especially when it looks like I’m about to die the same way.

I’m remembering it now. My throat feels skinned, but on the inside, and my lips stick to each other, the blood from my nose drying over them. It’s definitely broken, and one of my lips might be split. One of my eyes is swelling shut. I’ve had worse—I’m not exactly dying—but it hurts to breathe, and my ribs feel like they’re falling to pieces inside of me. They probably are.

The girl doesn’t punch me again. She doesn’t have to. I feel like my insides are turning into soup as she hauls me upright by my hair. Somewhere in the parts of my head that aren’t full of feeling-like-shit, I think that I need a haircut. “Tell Craiden where she can shove her cheap fists next time,” she hisses in my ear. Then, she bites it. Just for good measure. It could be hot, if she doesn’t then pull away and take part of it with her. I don’t scream. Or, I do, but I don’t have the air in me to do it right and it comes out in a low, embarrassing wail.

“I don’t think she can fit an entire grown woman up her ass, but I’m sure she’ll appreciate the message,” I hiss. Flecks of pink spittle land on the carpet in front of me. It’s satisfying to watch them soak into the plush surface, especially when they’re next to the bright red stains that got there when the kid shoved my face into the floor and held it there.

“She can leave now,” says the man at the window, some official from bumfuck-nowhere with six lifetimes’ worth of gambling debts. How he can afford this kind of muscle is beyond me. How he can stand there, not even glancing over as I get the shit beaten out of me—that, I can understand.

The kid hauls me back to my feet, meaty hand still fisted in my hair. Some of it comes out in her fingers as she pulls me out of the study, and she readjusts her grip.

“Y’know, s’not,” I start, but forget my words. “S’not polite,” I say. “Beating your elders to a pulp, ‘s a dick move.”

“I’ll remember that the next time a crusty hag like you shows up at the door,” she says before letting go of my hair. I turn around, raising my fist for a last punch. Before I can even get close, she plants a hand squarely between my tits and shoves me backwards out the door.

I skip all three of the steps leading down to street and land on my ass, hard.

I get up. I rub at the ache in my assbone. That makes it worse, so I stop. I want to fall down again, on something else, maybe something that doesn’t already hurt, but I walk. If I don’t tell Craiden that she’s not getting her money back anytime soon, I never will, and that will end badly for me. Even worse than it’s already turning out.

All the way to Craiden’s building, the skin on my back aches, the same way it always does when I miss the woman who used to drag her nails down the name burned into it and curl up against me after. It’s a nagging, touch-hungry kind of ache, the kind that wants comforting. I do my best to ignore it.

My best is pretty shit.

Craiden runs a hand over her stubbly scalp, scowling down at me like I’m a stray dog she can’t afford to feed. “Give me one good reason to keep you, Jansse.”

I don’t have one. I can’t tell if that’s because there isn’t one, or because my head has stopped working.

“Well?”

I shrug. “Can I…” I have to think for a minute or two. “Can I get back to you after I get my face fixed?”

Craiden laughs. The stamps burned into her face, scars from her own extremely brief career as a fist-for-hire, wrinkle with it. “Honey, if you want your face fixed, you gotta go back to whenever it was you were young and decide to do something else with your life.”

“Know it didn’ go well,” I say, breathing in that shallow way I know helps get air past my ribs. I shift from foot to foot in the alley. Her doorway opens onto the hidden refuse of the city, piled up in stinking heaps of wasted food and waste itself against the walls of bui

To Touch the Sun Before it Fades

by Aimee Ogden

Mariam watches a week of night roll toward her.

On Pluto, the Sun is only a spectacularly bright star. It’s easy to pick out, hanging low in the sky—only just visible in the domed window in the hub of Sagacity Station. If Mariam could reach up and hold back the Sun, if she could slow its progress down the sky, she would. She can’t, of course. Just another bead to add to the strand of impossibilities hung around her neck.

A scuff on the floor behind her breaks her gaze from the starfield overhead. Captain Valencia stands there, waiting. The pale fluorescent light from the station walls disappears into the hard, dark planes of his face. His forehead is Tombaugh Regio, the deep valleys of his cheeks are the shadows at the foot of Wright Mons. All the contrast of Pluto’s surface, but not nearly so cold. His eyes are molten puddles in the shadow of his brow and Mariam realizes he’s talking to her: “You don’t have to go out today. You can stay by the radio, if you like.”

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 61! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a reprint of "To Touch the Sun Before it Fades" by Aimee Ogden

This story is part of the new GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you're a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program.This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep.

If you're looking for an excellent queer book to listen to, check outAnger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro, which is a YA novel about Oakland teens who decide to fight back against the oppressive system forced on them both in school and out.

To download Anger is a Gift for free today, go towww.audibletrial.com/glittership— or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work can also be found in Shimmer, Apex, and Escape Pod.

"To Touch the Sun Before it Fades" is narrated by Rae White.

Rae White is a non-binary poet, writer, and zinester living in Brisbane. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Queensland Press. Rae’s poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Rabbit, and others.

To Touch the Sun Before it Fades

by Aimee Ogden

Mariam watches a week of night roll toward her.

On Pluto, the Sun is only a spectacularly bright star. It’s easy to pick out, hanging low in the sky—only just visible in the domed window in the hub of Sagacity Station. If Mariam could reach up and hold back the Sun, if she could slow its progress down the sky, she would. She can’t, of course. Just another bead to add to the strand of impossibilities hung around her neck.

A scuff on the floor behind her breaks her gaze from the starfield overhead. Captain Valencia stands there, waiting. The pale fluorescent light from the station walls disappears into the hard, dark planes of his face. His forehead is Tombaugh Regio, the deep valleys of his cheeks are the shadows at the foot of Wright Mons. All the contrast of Pluto’s surface, but not nearly so cold. His eyes are molten puddles in the shadow of his brow and Mariam realizes he’s talking to her: “You don’t have to go out today. You can stay by the radio, if you like.”

She could. But she’s not sure what would be worse: to miss the call, out on the ice. Or to sit there with folded hands while the hours unwind, waiting for a message that never comes.

She’s not sure either that she even wants them to call right now. What could she possibly say to Jef and Baily? Her own husband and wife are very nearly strangers to her now. And what could she tell Annika: to buck up, be strong, stiff upper lip? Mariam doesn’t know how to talk to two-year-olds at all, let alone under such circumstances. There are no words that would help them right now anyway. Four billion miles between her and earth mean that she’s useless to them no matter what she does, no matter where she goes. They have each other, and that will have to be enough. Isn’t it? Sometimes Mariam thinks it’s too easy out here to let the distance and the silence speak for her. She is no better of a wife out here than she was back home.

But at least Mariam can help the rest of her crew today. That would be something of worth. “I’ll go out,” she says. Her voice is steady, and her gaze too. Valencia’s head jerks, a quick nod. For a moment she thinks he’s going to say something else, and she braces for impact. But then he turns his head and walks away, and air hisses from the seals in his helmet hisses as he snaps it into place.

Today is Char’s turn to stay behind at Sagacity, and they promise to patch any calls through if they do come in. Inside her helmet, Mariam nods, then realizes the gesture is invisible to Char. She thanks them for the gesture, but Char only shrugs her off. “It’s nothing,” they say, but that’s not true. Char’s good at knowing the right words, and reaches out to others when Mariam would stay quiet. Mariam has poured out enough silence over the years. She wonders how Char always just knows, but she has never found the words to ask.

Cool starlight rains down on the crew as they drift through the airlock and out into a Plutonian twilight. Cool starlight, and one frozen chip of sunlight mixed in with the rest as it slides down toward Pluto. Six days of day, then six of night; not that there’s much difference between night and day out here. The crew keeps Sagacity’s clocks set to the same time as what they left behind in Cape Canaveral, where it should currently be a hazy eighty-five degrees. Here, it’s two hundred and seventy-five below. Sometimes Mariam imagines what would happen if her suit ruptured. She pictures herself as a pillar of ice, tipping forward. When she shatters inside her suit, Pluto’s empty atmosphere does not carry the sound.

Mariam helps Captain Valencia and Yance pack the Pilgrim’s engines with frozen methane, and then buckles in for the rough ride over the frozen surface of Sputnik Planum. Where are Baily and Jef right now? What are they feeling? What were they doing four and a half hours ago? Mariam can’t imagine they would take the time to sit down by a microphone on the Cape. Not right now. She stares into the bright diamond of sunlight that hovers over the horizon and wonders if they’re thinking of her at all in those interstitial moments. She knows she’s thinking of them. But do they know that?

Captain Valencia and Yance want to check the cameras while they’re way out here on the plain anyway; Camera 7 has begun to tilt on its axis and needs to be stabilized if they’re going to capture the glacier flow that Mission Command is so keen on. They find the entire apparatus listing pitifully. One of the joints in a tripod leg refuses to latch. Yance blames the cold, the shoddy manufacturing, the quality of the materials, the long transit from Earth. Anything could have caused it—a simple accident, a stupid trick of fate. But Yance fixes it ably enough. Mariam stands off to the side and looks up at the stars while Valencia helps Yance align the camera to get the desired view across the face of the glacier. The ice flows too slowly for Mariam’s eyes too see, but the camera’s patience is infinite.

They climb back into the Pilgrim and set off. Mariam’s teeth rattle together with the motion. The teeth lining the Pilgrim’s treads dig into the ice beneath, grinding away with the forward movement. The treads cling to Pluto’s implacable face, lest a bad bounce send the rover and its cargo flying astray in the microgravity. Mariam focuses on the off-kilter rhythm of the Pilgrim beneath her, and not on the pervasive cold.

And not on Baily and Jef, their soft warm arms, the press of hot bodies in a bed only just big enough for the three of them. The too-small Orlando apartment that was never in all their time together too cold. Far too small a world to bring a child into, she thinks, then flinches away from that thought before it has a chance to burn. It takes four and a half hours for radio signals to travel all the way from Earth, but pain jolts along those billions of miles in half a second.

Unloading the equipment at the designated drill site on the plain relieves the ache in Mariam’s belly. Distracts her from it, at least. Mariam sucks water out of the straw inside her helmet once the drill is in place; her stomach refuses an attempt to suck down the apricot-flavored paste from the food tube. She checks the sun’s position before turning on the drill to take her first sample. Then the vibration of the drill, buzzing through the ice under Mariam’s feet and up into the hollow space under her ribcage, drums out the thoughts in her head.

Unstrap Your Feet

by Emma Osborne

The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles.

I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door.

You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage.

“Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?”

You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 60! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Unstrap Your Feet" by Emma Osborne and a poem, "The Librarian" by Rae White.

Both pieces are part of the new GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you're a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program.This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep.

If you're looking for an excellent book with queer characters, Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghostsis an amazing listen. The story features a colony ship having power problems and some internal unrest. Our protagonist, Aster, is a brilliant scientist and doctor trapped in an extremely socially and racially segregated society. The book also deals with non-neurotypicality, intersex, and fluid/questioning gender identity.An Unkindness of Ghosts is part mystery, part colony ship drama, and part coming of age story (though it is not YA). Rivers has amazing prose, and the narration in this audio book sets it off wonderfully.

To download An Unkindness of Ghosts for free today, go towww.audibletrial.com/glittership— or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else.

There are content warnings on this episode for a very, very sexy poem and descriptions of domestic emotional abuse in "Unstrap Your Feet."

Rae White is a non-binary poet, writer, and zinester living in Brisbane. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Queensland Press. Rae’s poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Rabbit, and others.

The Librarian

by Rae White

locked in ∞ nostalgia after dark ∞ thumb through favourites: nin-like erotica ∞ with storms simulating hunger, flirting & fireworks, cruise ship kisses ∞ here, every heel

click is echo-church, like the ruckus I make at funerals ∞ every movement casts my shadow: spells spilling over bookshelves ∞ I’m not trapped, I have a key ∞ but I stay curled in the wicker chair ∞ waiting

for echo-click of ribs and what remains ∞ the flossed fragments of my midnight ghost with her yawn-wide kiss & skinless skull ∞ her cartilage grip & gasp & pelvic bone clasped tight to my thigh ∞ her shiver-glitches, each more grating & copper-tasting than the last ∞ her brittle pushes as she groans ∞ against my knuckled hand ∞ I taste soot & swordfish

later ∞ I press her between folds of wildflower books & sing timidly of the moon as she sleeps

Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Shock Totem, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction and the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and has fiction forthcoming at Nightmare Magazine.

A proud member of Team Arsenic, Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Emma is a former first reader at Clarkesworld Magazine, and current first reader at Arsenika.

Emma currently lives in Melbourne, drinking all of the coffee and eating all of the food, but has a giant crush on Seattle and turns up under the shadow of the mountain at every opportunity. You can find Emma on Twitter at @redscribe.

Unstrap Your Feet

by Emma Osborne

The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles.

I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door.

You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage.

“Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?”

You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.

“I want to eat something warm-blooded,” you say, as you divest yourself of your coat, your scarf. “Ribs. A steak. Liver.”

You smell of honey and rosemary; honey for sweetness and rosemary for fidelity, remembrance and luck. I wonder how long it’ll take to re-make dinner.

Too long.

My fingers tangle in my pocket, deep down where you shouldn’t be able to see. Maybe I can talk you around. Your eyes sketch over my shoulder, my elbow. You can see the tension in my muscles, can map my posture and my heart rate and you know that my nails are digging into my palms nearly before I feel the skin split.

“We’ll order something,” I say, but it’s risky to have something delivered to the door when you’ve taken off your feet. Once, somebody saw, and then they didn’t ever see anything again. There’s still a stain in the laundry that I can’t scrub away.

You pause for a moment, just for the pulse of a few seconds, but it’s enough for my stomach to plunge and my mind to spin out infinite possibilities. The end of each thread is a broken finger or a pair of shattered wine glasses or just a cool, detached look that I’ll turn over and over in my head at night, knowing that despite our vows, sealed with blood and smoke and iron, you’ve decided that you’re going to have to kill me after all.

“Fine,” you say, “anything but pizza.”

These are the kinds of conversations that normal people have, every night, every month, with wrinkled brows and hunched shoulders and with a creased blazer hung up for another weary tomorrow.

You take your time in the shower while I call for dinner. With any luck you’ll stay there, or in the bedroom, until the delivery comes.

I’ve decided on BBQ from the place three streets away. They don’t ask questions if we order mostly meat, although I add a couple of sides—mac and cheese and some fries—for show. When the food arrives, I take care to open the door only a few inches, to take the bags and construct a “Thanks!” and to give a reassuring smile. I can hear you clattering around in the kitchen. I can nearly hear you scowling at the unwanted fish, scraped into a bowl for me to eat tomorrow.

I plate up dinner and you join me at the table with your canines glinting. I would have thought you’d have dull herbivore teeth, what with the hooves, but you have your father’s jawline, his bite. Sometimes I run my tongue over my own teeth, fearful that they’re sharpening and wondering what it would mean if they did. The food smells glorious, though I’m the only one who eats the sides. The mac and cheese is chewy and rich and creamy and I savor every bite after a diet so heavy in meat.

“Tell me about your day,” I say, nibbling on a forkful of pulled pork. I don’t care, not really, but it’s one of the only ways I can get news of the outside world on an ordinary, everyday level. The news is good for broad strokes, but I don’t get to hear about the lavender blooming in Mrs. Dancy’s yard or the color of the sky in midwinter dusk.

You’re in a good mood from the food so you appease me with small stories whilst you tear rich, fatty meat from a rib-bone. You’ve got a smear of sauce on your chin. The scent of hickory smoke has soaked into your skin. When I remember the days I had dared to drag my fingers through your hair, I tamp down a shudder and wonder if your budding horns rasp more like bones or fingernails.

Our wedding feast was nothing like this, but I suppose I’d always known you had secrets. Still, the feast was glorious and fine, a celebration for the ages. Oh, that night. We’d hoisted my mother’s crystal and downed the finest champagne after the ceremony under the oak tree.

My father was in charge of speeches and keeping cups full. Your mother roasted us a pair of swans. We ate

Never Alone, Never Unarmed

by Bobby Sun

The fighting spider sat heavily in Kian Boon’s left palm, where he’d knocked it from its leafy abode. It was maybe a centimeter and a half from the tip of its pedipalps to the silky spinnerets of its abdomen, black and silver like one of the sleek Chinese centipedals that increasingly frequented the roads below his building. He could feel the weight of the thing as he cupped his hand around it and it jumped, smacking against the roof of his fingers.

Oh hi, Rey. Hi. What are you doing? Oh, are you coming over here to smell. I know, Rey. I know. You're a good dog. But, I gotta do this recording. Yeah.

[Intro music plays]

Hello, welcome to GlitterShip Episode 59 for August 27th, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today, we have a GlitterShip original, "Never Alone, Never Unarmed" by Bobby Sun, and a poem, "Feminine Endlings" by Alison Rumfitt.

Before we get started, I want to let you know that GlitterShip is part of of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep. One book that I listened to recently is They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera. I will warn you, this young adult book is full of feelings. That said, I thought it was a great example of queer tragedy rather than tragic queers. In a near future world, everyone gets a phone call between midnight and 3am of the day that they're going to die. They Both Die at the End follows two teen boys who got that call on the same day. I loved how tender the book was, but here's your warning: have tissues on hand.

To download a free audiobook today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership and choose an excellent book to listen to. Whether that's They Both Die at the End or maybe even something that's a little less emotionally strenuous.

Alison Rumfitt is a transgender writer who studies in Brighton, UK. She loves, amongst other things: forest, folklore, gothic romance, and wild theories about her favorite authors being trans. Her poetry has previously been published inLiminality,Strange Horizons, andEternal Haunted Summer. Two of her poems were nominated for the Rhysling award in 2018. You can find her on Twitter @gothicgarfield.

Feminine Endlings

by Alison Rumfitt

I’m the last one with a mouth I think the last one who still has a tongue that can dance the last to dance or move the last to use her lungs like lungs were used like they used to be like a soft ball of feathers being blown by a gale I am the full stop I think the forest is different for me now, I can’t see the others, and I cannot think of them, all the trees have changed shape they now carry new sub-meanings deep in their bark new grubs are born screaming from pods to chew at my place this city which I knew so well which I knew automatically could navigate as an automaton turning left and right the moment I sensed it it’s gone, somewhere, when I had my back turned drinking away in a clearing now the people have different colored eyes it’s far less bursting and different than my old days tell me the sun left along with all of the people I was in love with the city the forest the cave-system the desert the habitat adapts to the things that dwell in it the things inside it evolve to be more like their future selves and I hate the way it makes me feel because I like knowing where I am—

the last Tasmanian Tiger died in a zoo from neglect as a storm ripped at her cage she lay in the corner head tucked under her arm the last Stephens Island wren was clawed to death by the first cat she fell to the grass feeling the teeth around her shallow head the last Passenger Pigeon was stuffed she sits in a glass box telling everyone who visits that everything will change and you will die eventually and nothing really matters if you don’t want it to and there’s so many of us who died somewhere alone the last of a kind without a name or a grave-marker or ashes to be put upon a fireplace or mantel and I hate that I could end up the same forgotten under piles of new babies with new ways of thinking new streets built over my house as a lightning strike burns down the tree I hid in the end of a line marks the place where you know what the line is the end of a species or a group or a life marks the definition of said species or group or life so the end of me matters and the end of me will live on past the rest of me so if I end the same way all the others do I become the same as all the others I am not me I am them but I am me if I end never or if I end when it becomes thematically meaningful which is why nothing matters now but then it will it will really matter everything will matter the last trans woman on earth standing on a pile of trans women the only thing that tells you she is ‘she’ is she rhymes unstressed which is arbitrary maybe we won then if the last woman is her if the last trans woman in a new world where everyone is nothing she is this wonderful thing happy in a house built on the dead made of the dead maybe eating the dead on her own making her own fun reading coding tattooing herself with notes and appendixes if it's her then perhaps the perfect final note of Us is—

This, old Death slowly walking opening the door to meet her and he nods and she nods and the world becomes a little darker.

Bobby Sun is a Chinese-Malaysian author and spoken-word poet who grew up in Singapore and is studying in London. His work has previously been published on Tor.com as well as in the inaugural Singapore Poetry Writing Month ("SingPoWriMo") anthology (as Robert Bivouac), and in Rosarium Publishing's anthology of Southeast Asian steampunk, The SEA is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia as Robert Liow.

Never Alone, Never Unarmed

by Bobby Sun

The fighting spider sat heavily in Kian Boon’s left palm, where he’d knocked it from its leafy abode. It was maybe a centimeter and a half from the tip of its pedipalps to the silky spinnerets of its abdomen, black and silver like one of the sleek Chinese centipedals that increasingly frequented the roads below his building. He could feel the weight of the thing as he cupped his hand around it and it jumped, smacking against the roof of his fingers.

He kept his left hand closed and extracted a jar from a raggedy, home-made satchel. The jar was double-layered; between the inner and outer layers of chitinous plastic shrilk was water, kept reasonably below the ambient temperature with a simple synthorg heat sink he’d Shaped himself. The spring-sealed jar flicked open as Kian Boon visualized and nudged a couple of its Shape-threads. He dropped the spider in, snapped the jar shut and let the cooling take effect. This little thing, all of approximately two grams, was worth about a dollar; iced Coklat for two at the kopitiam near his school. The jar, of course, wasn’t part of the deal. His buyers would need a container of their own.

Kian Boon swatted at a mosquito, then pushed his way deeper into the vegetation. He winced as a twig scratched his cheek. There were still four jars left to fill, though, and it was only nine on a Saturday morning.

The air was thick with mist, and the leaves still hung with dew. White-headed birds hopped through the trees, leaping from branch to branch and snatching red berries off their stems. Somewhere above him a male koel sounded off. The sun filtered through the canopy, dappling the ground in pixel-patterns; Kian Boon made a game of dancing through them. This area was new to him. He’d heard of it only because Aidil, a rival spider-hunter from the neighbouring class, had let it slip to his sister. She’d told her best friend, and it had eventually ended up with Ravi Pillai (who’d, naturally, told Kian Boon).

Ravi was the bright-eyed Indian boy in his class he’d noticed during orientation, on their first day of Form One. He’d been assigned to Kian Boon’s group, and was the very first to get picked for “Whacko”. Kian Boon hadn’t recalled his classmates’ names in time, so Ravi had hit him hard enough with the rolled-up newspaper that he’d sustained a paper cut on his forehead. The horrified facilitator had excluded Ravi from the rest of that game, though Kian Boon hadn’t really minded. The only name Ravi really remembered at the end of that day was his.

It was, well, best friends at first sight. They hung out at recess almost every day, sometimes joined in a game of soccer and occasionally went to the kopitiam or spider-fighting rings after school with their friends. Not alone, though, he thought. Not yet. He’d get there later. There was a plan, and he needed the spiders for it.

Kian Boon exhaled. He picked through the thickest bush he could find, searching for the tell-tale bivouac of a fighting spider. They preferred the densest vegetation, making their home in glued-together leaves. Finding a nest, he gently unzipped it, dissolving the silk into its constituent proteins. The spider hung onto the upper leaf, but with a quick motion of the wrist it was resting in his cupped left palm. He felt its silken trail as it darted about, and he closed his hands to gauge its weight.

A good spider, if a little sluggish. It was well-fed. He peeked through a gap in his fingers. Its silver-banded abdomen iridesced a bottle-green; a rare and valuable variety. Kian Boon slipped it into another jar, watching as the critter paced, then slowed, then eventually fell asleep.

In the City of Kites and Crows

By Megan Arkenberg

1.

When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering.

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 58 for August 25, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our episode today is a reprint "In the City of Kites and Crows" by Megan Arkenberg, read by A.J. Fitzwater.

Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com.

A.J. Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press’s At The Edge anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater

Content warning for descriptions of police violence and suicide.

In the City of Kites and Crows

By Megan Arkenberg

1.

When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering.

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

I tell this to Lisse, and she rubs at the burn scar on the back of her knee, at the tattoo that crawls up her thigh in a hatch of green and golden lines, like a map of a city, or a circuit board in fragments. Lisse just got out of Federal prison for smashing the rearview mirrors off a police car. She has new scars now, the white tracks of some riot officer’s baton, one of which slices across her left nipple and makes her breast look punctured, deflated. She sits in her flannel bathrobe at the table in her living room, in the apartment that was a hotel room and still smells like the arsonist’s match, and she shakes her head with a slow, sad smile. “Hythloday,” she says, as though my name were a dirge. “How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?”

Outside the bay window behind her, three stories below us, a crush of posterboard and sweatshirted bodies is churning and chanting its way up 9th street, towards the West Gate of the Senate. Lisse snaps photos on her phone. She edits an antigovernment webzine, contributes information to two antisenatorial projects that I know of—both documenting police brutality and violations of prisoners’ rights—and surely several others that I don’t. Her thick hair is unoiled and still damp from the shower, smelling of grass and wood dust, smelling of her.

“Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government,” I tell her. I’m spread out on her couch like the jammy sediment in the bottom of a wine glass, and I know that this observation, this trenchant précis of the last thirty-six months, is the closest that I will ever come to political analysis. Or to self-reflection. Lisse, who will not let me back into her bed until I’m sober, who still fucks me on the couch, does not look up from the photos of the protestors on her phone.

“Well, Hythloday,” she says, half word and half sigh. “Why do you think that is?”

2.

Some evenings, when I’m sober enough to pull on a pair of trousers and an old suit coat, tie my hair back and wash the traces of eyeliner from my cheeks, I take the train down to the university. It’s quiet and damp so close to the river, the trees whispering to themselves in the fog, and all the public spaces roped off with yellow lines of caution tape. If anyone were to ask me what I’m doing here tonight—anyone except for Lisse, who won’t ask me, who never asks—I’d say I came for the lecture on the Mnemosyne project, an answer both innocuous and vaguely suspect. Really, I’m here to see Jesse.

They check IDs at the door of the auditorium. I don’t know if “they” are the Mnemosyne developers looking for allies or a Senatorial commission tallying enemies, or just the university, looking to cover its ass either way. Inside, the dim room flickers with tablet and laptop screens as people pull up the app. Mnemosyne, Jesse explained to me once as we lay on the floor of his bedroom, sipping coffee from wine glasses, is an augmented reality application. It checks your location with your device’s GPS and overlays your screen with location-sensitive news. Censored news, he meant, censored images, photographs you shouldn’t see, stories no one should be reporting. I know Lisse is providing data for the project, and Jesse helped with the programming.

Everyone I’m fucking wants to overthrow the government.

(Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?)

A small gray woman in a gray suit reads off her PowerPoint slides at the front of the room, and I lean against the wall in back, scanning the crowd for Jesse. He’s sitting in the second-to-last row, the strands of silver in his dark brown hair showing dramatically in the liquid-crystal glow of his laptop. His face and lips look as blue as a drowning man’s. I like to watch him like this, when he doesn’t know I’m looking. When he knows he’s being watched, when he’s teaching or lecturing, he becomes brilliant, sparkling, animated. His dark eyes and his smile widen, light up, his gentle laugh drags parentheses around the corners of his mouth. But when he’s alone, when he thinks no one is watching, he shrinks into himself. The laugh lines settle. He looks lost, like a book that someone has misplaced.

At the end of the lecture, he snaps his laptop shut, slings his bag over his shoulder. He catches sight of me on his way to the exit. He smiles too widely, looking exhausted.

“You weren’t expecting me,” I say. “I know.”

“No, it’s fine.” He licks his lips, which still look dry and blue. “Did you like the talk?”

“Sure,” I lie.

He turns abruptly and strides out of the lecture hall. I follow down the glossy corridor, out into the parking lot, where the mist rolls in from the river, smelling of rot. Jesse stops, leans against the wall of the auditorium, and his hair catches on the rough brick. He grabs me around the waist and drags me in for a kiss.

(Nine people contributed material to the Mnemosyne project, he told me, leaning against the pillows. The marks of my teeth were pale and raised along his shoulders. Four of them are anonymous. Five of them are missing.)

He clings to me like a drowning man, fingers digging into my back, bruising, his mouth opening beneath mine as though I could give him breath. He tastes like mint chewing gum and cigarette smoke. He winces when my tongue brushes against his teeth, but when I start to pull back, he whispers, “Don’t.”

(He kicked a stack of books off the side of the bed, yanking off his jacket and tie, and he told me to fuck him. I took the harness and the strap-on from the nightstand. He spread out on the bed, watching impatiently over his shoulder as I adjusted the buckles and straps around my thighs. The headlights from a car across the street slipped through the slats in the window blinds, caught his eyes, flattened them to smooth disks of gold.)

I weave my fingers through his, and he grunts in pain.

“Jesse.” I pull back. His sleeve cuffs gap above the buttons, and I can see the shining red marks on his wrists, marks my hands could never have left. The neck of his undershirt has slipped down, damp with mist and sweat, and bruises show under his skin, black and yellow and blue.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Please. Just stay with me.”

(We fucked, and even though I was sober, it was the disjointed, disappointing sex of people who are drunk, and angry, and afraid.)

We take the train to his townhouse on the east side of the city. The streetlights around us glare like a hangover. Alone in the second-to-last compartment, he leans against my back, his cheek against my shoulder blade, his arms tight around my waist. “The dean wants to see me tomorrow,” he murmurs. I turn my head, looking for our reflection in the train window, but it’s too dark inside, too bright out.

(Afterward, he asked me to hold him. He curled around me, his head resting in the crook between my bicep and my breast, his arms around my hips. He didn’t say my name ag