The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  He flitted out his tongue, licked the tip of his finger, tasted my blood.

  “I shouldn’t go any further,” he said. “Hurry. You may still be able to catch up to them.”

  I stumbled up the mountain. What did I want? My son to live forever? For all I knew he would. What truly lurked beneath his skin I did not know, except that there was a half of it that was me. Did I wish to keep him from ever feeling pain, to never be hurt? In my own life it had taken being hurt to grow up, to become who I was now. Perhaps that was it, then.

  I didn’t want my son to grow up. I wanted him to be my little boy forever. I wanted him to be a little boy forever.

  I didn’t want him to change.

  I wanted him to need me there, breathing with him, breathing with him.

  I called to Lina but she could not hear me. The further up we went the louder it became. Things moved in the spaces between the stones, calling out. Great engines roared and bellowed from the bridge’s heights, casting smoke and sparks into the sky, lighting the bellies of the clouds the color of dried blood. The sparks flew about my head. The sparks laughed at me. Boulders shaped into molten-faced statues of men dotted my path, fine designs etched in wandering lines upon them. Something like insects swarmed at my feet, chittering. When I looked back, I could still see the dark silhouette of the beast-faced man, the birds perched on his shoulders, whispering in his ears as they flapped their white wings about his head as though to urge him on.

  Then there were no more lights from above or below, and the sound washed away, as if I had breached some border beyond which it could not pass. I could not tell where the mountain ended and the darkness began. All was night. Only the sound of my feet upon the strange earth told me that I had not walked right off the mountain and into nothingness. The beast-faced man was no longer behind me. Far ahead of me Lina and Alexander walked hand in hand in a void. My son, walking. His first steps. He was stretched out now, leaner, taller. His hair moved to unfelt winds.

  “Wait,” I called, and summoned what energy I had left to hurry after them. I could feel the blisters starting on my feet. How many hours had we been walking? Why would they not stop? Clouds descended, swallowed me, and I found myself in a hazed white nothingness.

  “Wait,” I heard another voice call. I turned, but could not see who had spoken. If anything moved, I could not see it. I plunged forward, hoping I had not lost sense of the direction Lina had gone.

  “Wait for me,” I called. “Please wait.”

  I ran. I fell. I fell again. I left a trail of blood on the mountain. The clouds wrapped themselves around me. Slivers of light slashed down like rain. Above my head I heard the flapping wings of the birds, the barest hint of their unknown tongue. Stones shifted beneath my feet. Something grasped at my legs and I stumbled. I fell out of the cloud and into cold water.

  A lake atop the mountain.

  I stood shivering, the water up to my waist. Mist rose from the surface. Small waves pushed and pulled at me. My feet sunk down into mud. Along the shore clung weeds as fine as the hair of a child. The bone birds perched upon a moss-covered stone, still as statues, watching me. My hand pulsed blood into the water. I called out for Alexander, for Lina, and my voice slid away across the surface of the lake as if it were frozen.

  The birds slipped off the stone and into the water. They dove down, and when they surfaced they were no longer birds. They sang to me then, and though I did not know the words I understood what they were saying.

  This was as far as I could go.

  I still carried the beast-faced man’s box. I let it drop into the lake.

  Something beneath the water brushed against my leg. Something took my hand. Something pressed the box back into my hand.

  On my nightstand sits a plain wooden box. It is polished in such a way that you feel you can see a great distance within it. That if you held it up to your eye you would see things long hidden, long wished for, nightly dreamed of, never forgotten.

  There is a mountain that lives in the night. There is a lake in the clouds where my love swims. There is a place in the darkness where my son is safe.

  Just over there.

  Look out the window. Do you see it?

  A Partial Beginner’s Guide to The Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters

  Kuzhali Manickavel

  1. Avoid any corridor infested with thunderstorms. ‘Corridor infested with thunderstorms’ does not mean a couple of thunderstorms above your head and the opportunity to be in the rain while also being in a corridor. It means a corridor that is rightly or wrongly, bristling with thunderstorms that are piled on top of thunderstorms. Some of them are extremely old, some of them are twisted together either because they are fighting or making love, and at least four of them are not thunderstorms at all but no one knows what else to call them. Do not try to find these thunderstorms for the purpose of documentation. Do not form ‘stormwatch’ groups. The thunderstorms are not there for scientific/humanitarian/aesthetic/research purposes. They are there because no one knows how to get rid of them. If, for whatever reason, you feel invincible, heartbroken or just young and full of life, do not seek out any corridor infested with thunderstorms because it will not turn out the way you think it will. If however you encounter one of these corridors by accident, then that’s too bad.

  2. Cultivate a garden. You can buy seeds or steal them from plants. Cordon off a part of your floor or your windowsill and say, ‘this is my garden’ to anyone who will listen. Do not cordon off a part of your floor or your windowsill, say ‘this is my garden’ and not cultivate a garden. Don’t be like that. Plant things which are useful but are not vegetables. You can make rows if you are into that sort of thing. If your entire garden dies, remember that it is simply the circle of life, the wheel of fortune, the leap of faith and the band of hope. Do not plant teeth, childhood mementos or dead pets.

  3. Endeavour to inculcate change in various facets of your life. For instance, try to change your clothes regularly, especially your underwear. Change your toothbrush and bedsheets. Sometimes it can be nice to rearrange the furniture in your room or wear colourful, fun accessories on your clothes. Cutting your hair is another fun change you can try.

  4. Don’t wake anything that is sleeping. The 7th floor in particular is notorious for harbouring a plethora of sleeping things. You may say how will I know if something is sleeping? This place is fucking bananas. How will I know if something is sleeping or killing itself or being a chair? This is a good question.

  5. Do not allow other people to create metaphors for your life. For instance, if a motherfucker tries to take your hand and say you are like a circle, you are like a prayer that is never answered, you are like my friend in rehab who never gets better, you are like a wave, an agoraphobic, you are just like me. If a motherfucker has the audacity to say all this and try to touch you, tell them they have to take you home now because it’s finally finally happening oh my god. Tell them you are a vegetarian but you eat eggs, chicken and fish on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and on weekends. Tell them this is not going to be easy but it is going to be amazing.

  6. During your first year, you will hear many different stories about SheetalJain, who didn’t even go here but anyway. Please remember the following facts when encountering any of these aforementioned stories. SheetalJain went into the bathroom on a Sunday afternoon, presumably to wash her hair. She flushed the toilet and turned on the tap. When they broke the door down later that night, they found

  —one pile of her clothes thrown over the shower rod

  —one pile of clothes on the floor

  —fingernails, presumably hers, scattered beside the sink

  —2 teeth, also presumably hers, in the drain

  —a scrap of paper beside the toilet with the words “What to say about me???? I’m just ME!!!! Sheetal. Simple cool girl who loves to just enjoy life.”

  It is perfectly acceptable to write fan fiction, poetry and dramatic monologues about SheetalJ
ain. It is also acceptable to describe yourself as a simple cool girl who loves to just enjoy life. Do not try to find SheetalJain. She didn’t even go here.

  7. Visit the Tropicool IcyLand Urban Indian Slum, even though the board of administrators will not encourage this because the board of administrators are a bunch of classist fucks. Do not visit the slum like, bai everyone I’m going to visit the slum now. Do not wear a hat, do not carry your own water and when you are there, do not distribute promises of jobs or social media coverage in exchange for souvenirs of that sweet, sweet slum life. Visit quietly and honestly. Wear sensible shoes. Take the bus. Don’t be an asshole.

  (By the tub was a basket of old bones. She’d had it explained to her and the sight was not disturbing. She made sure only to glance into it, though the minister seemed uninterested in her reactions. The bones were of all sizes and kinds and came—she was sure of it—from various animals, and from people too. (There was no human skull that would have cast that beyond any doubt.) She saw the jawbone of a horse or donkey, the snapped-off ribs of something cat-sized, perhaps. Nub-like vertebrae. Little rags of flesh still adorned a few. That surprised her and she wanted to ask if it didn’t affect the process.

  The minister fussed over the big container where the viscous fluid slopped with his steps. Not for the first time she detected in his motions an enjoyment of the whole process; that annoyed her.

  ‘This is what this is for,’ he said as if she didn’t know.

  She thought, How is it that I’m here?

  The minister upended the bucket of bones into the bath. That did surprise her, and she jumped back, because he did so without any apparent thought and certainly without warning, and the swilling stuff spattered. It landed on his arm—she moved too quickly for any to hit her—and she was anxious at the sight of its glistening opalescent blobs, of what they might do, but the minister wiped it all off without any concern and kept staring into the tub. She stepped forward again to look herself.

  The bones did not lie all at the base. Some were already suspended a few centimetres up. She watched more began to lift gently, tugged insistently, against their own density. They drifted through the thick liquid.

  Around each bone, slowly, the solution began to coagulate and grow more opaque, like cooling candlewax. It thickened into threads, coagulated in lines and cocoons, cauling the bones, connecting one to the other in cords spun out of nothing, tendons that spasmed and yanked the bones in whatever directions.

  Some big leg-bone was at the centre of the shifting mass. A variety of smaller bones slipped and slid in imperfect radial symmetry around it, and those tiny ribs spread into what she thought would be feelers. The vertebrae knotted into tails or tentacles. New limbs. The bathwater-stuff built itself a chaotic new body on these collected bones, threadlike capillaries opening invisible through which thinner bloodlike liquid might rush. Clots of stuff shielded by the bones would become organs. Perhaps eyes.

  The next night, when all this was done, whatever this would be would self-birth out of the urgent slop, stand, or as close to that as it could, step or crawl, a random animal on uneven limbs. It would cry out if it had a voice.)

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Celeste Rita Baker is a Virgin Islander who currently resides in Harlem. She has published short stories in The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, Margin’s Magical Realism, Scarab and most recently Moko Magazine as well as Abyss & Apex Magazine.

  William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Gravesend, Death Don’t Have No Mercy, Everything is Broken, The Lonely Witness, and A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

  Jesse Bullington is the author of three weird historical novels: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, The Enterprise of Death, and The Folly of the World. Under the pen name Alex Marshall he recently completed the Crimson Empire trilogy; the first book, A Crown for Cold Silver, was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. He’s also the editor of the Shirley Jackson Award nominated Letters to Lovecraft, and co-editor (with Molly Tanzer) of Swords v. Cthulhu. His short fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in such diverse publications as the LA Review of Books, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 13, and VICE.

  Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer and editor from Kolkata, India. He is a Lambda Literary Award-winner for his debut novel The Devourers, and has been a finalist for the Crawford, Tiptree and Shirley Jackson Awards. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Tor.com, Clarkesworld and Asimov’s, and has been widely anthologized. He is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012. He has lived in India, the United States, and Canada, where he completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia.

  Cecilia Ekbäck was born in Sweden in a northern fishing town. Her parents come from Lapland. After university she specialised in marketing and worked for a multinational for twenty years with postings in the UK, Russia, Germany, France, Portugal and the Middle East. In 2010, she finished Royal Holloway’s Master in Creative Writing. She now lives in Canmore, ‘returning home’ to the landscape and the characters of her childhood in her writing. Her first novel, Wolf Winter, was published in 2015. In the Month of the Midnight Sun, her second novel, was published in 2016. She is currently at work on her third.

  S. L. Grey is a collaboration between Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg, responsible for five novels so far, including The Mall and The Apartment. Based in the Welsh borderlands, Sarah is a novelist and screenwriter and die-hard zombie fanatic. Louis is a Johannesburg-bred author and editor currently living in England.

  Dale, Sam, and Lauren occasionally combine forces, like a giant transforming super robot or mutating multi-limbed horror, to write things weirder than any of them could have come up with on their own. In their own separate lives, Dale Halvorsen is an award-winning illustrator, cover designer and co-writer of horror comic, Survivors’ Club, Sam Beckbessinger is co-founder of a Cape Town fintech company and author of the essential How To Manage Your Money Like a F*cking Grownup, and Lauren Beukes is the award-winning author of The Shining Girls, Zoo City and Broken Monsters and also a co-writer on Survivors’ Club.

  Omar Robert Hamilton is a filmmaker and writer. His debut novel, The City Always Wins chronicles the rise and fall of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

  Frances Hardinge was brought up in a sequence of small, sinister English villages, and spent a number of formative years living in a Gothic-looking, mouse-infested hilltop house in Kent. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford, fell in love with the city’s crazed archaic beauty, and lived there for many years.

  Will Hill is an author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, After The Fire, won the YA Book Prize in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. He lives in London.

  Jeffrey Alan Love is an artist and writer. Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, he is the author of Notes from the Shadowed City and The Thousand Demon Tree.

  Kuzhali Manickavel’s collections Things We Found During the Autopsy, Insects Are Just like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings and echapbook Eating Sugar, Telling Lies are available from Blaft Publications, Chennai. Her work has also appeared in Granta, Strange Horizons, Agni, Subtropics, Michigan Quarterly Review and DIAGRAM.

  China Miéville is the author of various works of fiction and non-fiction, including The City & the City, October, The Census Taker, and London’s Overthrow.

  Leah Moore is an author, columnist, and digital comics evangelist. Leah’s comic writing career began in 2002 with stories for America’s Best Comics. More recently she has written scripts for Dynamite Entertainment (Gail Simone’s Swords of Sorrow, Red Sonja), Heavy Metal Magazine, and Shelly Bond’s Black Crown Publishing (Femme Magnifique, Black Crown Quarterly). She has also written columns and articles for The Big Issue, Lifetime TV online, and Comic Heroes Magazine.

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Signal to Noise was named a best book of 2015 by BookRiot, Tor.com, Barnes & Noble, Buzzfee
d, io9, and more. Her Mexican vampire novel, Certain Dark Things, was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2016, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 for 2016, a VOYA “Perfect Ten,” and a finalist for multiple awards. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a Cthulhu’s Daughters).

  Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her stories can be found in such places as Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

  Karen Onojaife is a novelist and short story writer. Her writing has featured in publications such as Mslexia, Buzzfeed, Callaloo, Sable Literary Magazine and most recently, Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories. Her work has previously been listed for the Bridport Short Story, Fish Short Story, and Mslexia Short Story competitions. Her novel, Borrowed Light, won the Reader’s Choice award in the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize 2012. She is a VONA/Voices fellow, recipient of a place on the Hedgebrook Writers in Residence program and currently is a fiction reader for the Callaloo journal.